You’re tough enough to go out in it. But is your bike?

We’re heading into just about the most damaging time of year for your bike. Grit and salt can clog up the chain and gears, worn tyres can cause trouble on greasy roads, and with dark mornings and evenings it’s the time of year when you need good lights and better brakes.

With every service this winter we’re giving away a free pair of LED lights, to help you stay visible on the roads. They’re worth £26 and they’re 0.5W each, which is bright!

Contact us for more details or to arrange a service.

Nina had flat bars and bar ends on her hybrid road bike, with integrated brake levers and gear shifters, and she was a bit fed up with them. She liked riding with her hands on the bar ends but couldn’t reach the brakes or gears easily from there. When one shifter packed up, she asked our advice: she wanted a neater alternative that allowed her to ride with her hands in a forward position, but she didn’t want drop bars and combined road levers.

I came up with this solution, and I’m rather pleased with how tidy and effective it is. Nitto bullhorn bars are superb and put her hands in just the position she wanted. Cane Creek “cross-top” levers allowed clamping around the bar (instead of clamping in the ends of the bar like many TT brake levers) and Shimano 9-speed thumb shifters slotted neatly into the bar ends. All the cables are neatly concealed under the bar tape and not only does it look tidy, it works very smoothly and feels very natural to ride.

Nina promptly took her bike on a several hundred mile journey across Italy, and was very happy with how it felt and handled.

However, we’ll always try and help you. There are a lot of bike shops scattered around London and most of them are on the big map on the wall of the Rat Race Cycles workshop. We’ll try and let you know where your nearest bike shop is, it’s almost always going to work out cheaper (for us and you) and more convenient for you to get to the nearest bike shop; most decent shops will try and find a way to fix your puncture while you wait.

If you’re out on the road and can’t get through to us, we recommend the excellent BikeHub iPhone app – and their website – as a swift and handy way of finding your nearest bike shop. It’s also got a great cycle journey planner, allowing you to choose between quieter, safer or faster routes.

Paul asked us to build him a fast, strong singlespeed to commute around 18km each way every day. A singlespeed seemed ideal for a London commute: no gears means fewer components, so there’s less to maintain and less weight on the bike.

A Marin Stinson was a great donor bike to start from, a second-hand bike with the frame and forks in superb condition but mostly worn-out wheels and components. These bikes are well-built from lightweight chromoly steel, and built to last. The paint and lacquer was in superb condition and I like its simple, clean lines.

32-hole high-flange track hubs laced with Sapim Race spokes to Rigida deep V rims made for strong wheels with good aerodynamics, and Schwalbe Marathon Plus tyres are our long-standing favourites for near-indestructible puncture-proof reliability.

A Sturmey chainset pulls a Shimano freewheel in a classic 48:16 ratio and a Surly Singleator keeps the chain tension right. This was the first time I’d fitted SRAM 500 brake levers, and I’ll certainly be speccing them again. They’re great quality, light, comfortable and inexpensive. A short stem brought the reach on the drop bars into just the right position for Paul – look out for him flying around North London on this one!

We know what the pace of life is like for many people who live and work in London. The bicycle is one of the quickest ways to get around our city and the sense of freedom and control this provides is one reason people love cycling. So we also appreciate what a contrast it is to be without that bike and have to sit (or probably stand) squashed nose-to-armpit onto public transport, or expensively watching the meter in a cab, crawling in the traffic you usually sail through.

So it’s much more convenient to get your bicycle serviced while you’re at work. And it’s even more convenient if you don’t have to leave your place of work for this to happen. Which is where we come in: we’ll arrange with you to come to your work place, during your working hours. We’ll set up a mobile workshop and carry out the sort of servicing your bike needs to keep it going season after season.

This often works best with groups of cyclists. Arranging one visit to service several bikes works out more economical for us, so we can pass those savings on to you, meaning a significant discount on every service if we carry out more than two full services in one visit.

Before we visit we’ll discuss, by phone or email, each cyclist’s requirements and the possible parts needed for the bikes. This is an important stage because it means we can properly prepare for our visit to you, and you know what to expect from us. It also means we can be quicker servicing the bikes while we’re with you, which can mean fitting more bikes in one visit.

All we need is a floor area the size of a parked car* to set up a mobile workshop area. We’ve set up in underground car parks, spare offices, back yards, the corners of kitchens, training rooms and plenty of bike storage areas. We’re always careful to clean up after ourselves and we even cover the floor before we start.

Please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us for more information or to arrange a visit!

* and an actual space to park a car, if possible.

We offer bicycle repairs and servicing in your work place, during your working hours; alternatively we can collect bikes and service them in our fully-equipped workshop in south-east London, or possibly visit your home and service them there. We also specialise in wheel building, custom bike builds and bike fitting, tailoring each and every aspect of the bike to you from the ground up, whatever your cycling discipline.

Find out more about who we are, take a look at what we do, have a look at our price list, and be sure to check back here for updates on what’s going on in the world of cycling and the world of Rat Race Cycles.

The brake pads are fairly self-explanatory, and you’ll certainly notice if they’re not replaced in time. But it’s not always clear why the bike’s chain, and sometimes the cassette, need replacing.

As a bike chain is used, something called ‘chain stretch’ occurs. This isn’t a great term for it, because the chain parts don’t actually stretch. At each point where the chain pivots, the constant rub of metal on metal starts to wear the parts away. Although this happens very gradually, this wear means that that pivot point starts to become a little looser. As it wears down, the distance between two consecutive chain rivets becomes very slightly further apart.

The image above shows a very worn chain link and a brand new link. You can see the wear on the rivet, the inside of the roller and the inner edges of the inner plates.

The chain and the cassette (the set of sprockets on the rear wheel) are designed to align perfectly with each other. When both are new, this is what happens; the teeth on the sprockets all mesh equally with the links on the chain, and the force you put in when pedalling gets spread evenly to each tooth in contact with the chain.

But as the chain wears, the length of each link gets very slightly longer. Only by a tiny amount, but this can mean that the pedalling force gets transferred unequally to the sprocket on the back wheel. Because of the way the chain transfers force to the sprocket’s teeth, the teeth at the ‘bottom’ of the sprocket will have more force on them than those at the ‘top’ at any time in the sprocket’s rotation. In turn, this wears down those teeth very slightly. As the teeth wear down, they match the wear of the chain, the chain’s load is spread more evenly across the teeth and the wear lessens.

This isn’t a huge dramatic process (unless your components are made of very cheap metal, or you run your chain dry), but it is a gradual process that occurs steadily all the time you use the bike. In time the chain, and also the cassette, become slightly worn.

I use a very handy tool to measure this ‘chain stretch’. When new, all bicycle chains will measure exactly 1″, 25.4mm, across one link. (“one link” is the repeating unit – one inner pair of links, one roller, one outer pair of links, another roller). As the chain wears, the very slight lengthening of each link is hard to measure but because it usually happens evenly over the whole chain, one can measure the lengthening over several links.

The chain tool pictured above is inexpensive and fairly foolproof and I’ll often refer to it as the tool that determines whether the service is going to be a little more costly or not! One end hooks into the chain and the other end will fit into the chain further along if the chain has ‘stretched’. It has two carefully measured sides, one that will drop into the chain if it’s 0.75% longer than when new and one that drops in at 1% total elongation. Those are important measurements.

Most chain manufacturers recommend that their chains are replaced when they have elongated by 0.75%. Because the chain wears slightly faster than the cassette, this is the point where you can usually just replace the chain (and not the cassette) if both were new to start with. As an aside, if you’re fairly meticulous about swapping chains regularly, you can usually get through two or three chains for every cassette.

Once the chain wear is approaching 1% ‘stretch’, it’s usually time to replace the cassette as well. Because the teeth on the cassette will have worn down to more or less match the chain wear, if a new chain is fitted to a worn cassette, it won’t mesh properly and may jump or skip, especially when changing gear. Conversely, if a new cassette is used with a worn chain it will also mesh and change gear badly and the cassette will wear much faster than usual. As chains are less expensive than cassettes of equal quality, it’s much more economical to replace them before you need to replace both.

The next logical question, of course, is “if my chain and cassette are worn but working well together, why do I need to replace them at all?”

There are two answers to this. One is, in turn, to reduce wear on your chainrings, the big cogs that the pedals directly drive. The teeth on these won’t usually wear as fast as the teeth on the cassette, because the pedalling forces are spread over more teeth on the chainring. A worn chain will still lead to unequal distribution of force on the teeth on the chainring and will wear the teeth down in the same way the cassette wears. But usually if the chain is kept below 1% ‘stretch’ the chainrings will outlast several chains and cassettes.

The second answer is simply that eventually the teeth on the cogs will wear out. I was asked to “have a look at” the bicycle pictured above because “the gears are slipping”. When people tell me this, they usually mean that the gears aren’t properly indexed and the chain is jumping between sprockets, but this chap’s chain had actually begun to slip straight over the cogs whenever he put any pressure on the pedals! There simply wasn’t enough material left on the cogs for the chain to grip on to, so it was jumping over the teeth. Unfortunately for this bike it needed a new chain, new cassette and a new set of chainrings, which worked out more expensive than the bike itself and he chose to scrap it.

The moral of his story? Replace your chain regularly, keep your bike running for longer…