FrankenSturmey

This was a project I built for the winter of 2005-2006 to keep my precious Miyata 210 away from the salt and grime. It was a bit of a crazy Frankenbike project with an odd concept: a 27" 3-speed rear wheel with a double front crank. This gave 6, but two of those were exact duplicates of gears I already had (the jump between a 39 and 52 chainring is mathematically the same as the gear spacing in an AW hub), so I had 4 unique gears. It was fun to put together and it worked reasonably well. It even looked somewhat elegant, in an ugly sort of way. Unfortunately, though it handled reasonably well and made sense as a campus bike, it rode harshly, wasn't very comfortable and was incredibly heavy. It was an amusing diversion and did a good job of getting me around my campus, but when spring rolled around I didn't have much interest in keeping it around. Over spring break, I salvaged the brakes, wheels, handlebar and hub shifter for future projects and ended up throwing the rest in a dumpster. No regrets - it was a fun concept, but a really awful frame. The parts eventually ended up on a Schwinn Le Tour III, a nicer frame (see my bike "Who's is this firebolt!?" for a later, singlespeed version of that bike), and still later got traded away.