Additional to yesterday’s publish, right here’s what’s happening with that cassette:

To assessment, it’s a 7-speed hub, and an 8-speed Hyperglide cassette, but it lacks a lockring.

As a few of you identified, there was a short time the place Shimano hubs had each the outer threads portion for Uniglide and the internal threads for Hyperglide, like these bizarre prehistoric fish that might breathe out of the water:

[Via Sheldon Brown, where else?]

So it might be tempting to assume that the cassette is just held on with a Uniglide small cog, and at first that’s the place my thoughts went too. However should you’re aware of Uniglide you understand that’s not what it seems to be like. The small cog is flat and you’ll form of see the splines below it:

[Via here.]

That is the place I obtained caught. So I requested Paul of Basic Cycle what was happening, and right here’s the reply:

That’s some part chicanery from the ’80’s. 

So it’s a Shimano 7-speed cassette hub with most of a later era XT 8-speed cassette on there.  The 8-speed cassette would naturally take up an excessive amount of house, so rather than the final cog and the lockring you’ve the final two cogs from a Suntour winner Professional cassette (or freewheel, I don’t bear in mind which) threaded onto the tip of the Shimano freehub physique holding the whole lot in place!

Right here’s a Suntour Winner Professional freewheel:

[Via eBay, the world’s greatest photo repository for vintage cycling components]

And right here’s how the cogs affix to the freewheel, by way of (the place else?) Sheldon Brown:

I can’t calm down on a bicycle if I don’t understand how the whole lot works, and the suspension parts on the AMP have been already inflicting me sufficient anxiousness, so not realizing how the cassette was arrange on high of all that was retaining me up at evening. So now that I perceive it I can lastly sleep once more. The Suntour thumbies shifting a Shimano derailleur throughout a hybrid Solar-mano cassette additionally additional endears me to the bike.

Shifting on, do you know that in Japan forcing somebody to journey a bicycle is a violation of their human rights?

Simply ask the “Unnamed Postman,” who dropped his motorbike and was compelled to finish his rounds on a bicycle in oppressive August warmth:

In an interview with nationwide broadcaster NHK, the unnamed postman recounted how his work motorbike had fallen over whereas parked in August, inflicting minor injury to Japan Publish property. Following the incident, his supervisor ordered him to finish the identical supply route on a bicycle.

Right here’s a photograph of a Japanese postal employee delivering mail by bicycle, which is hard to think about as a human rights violation because it seems to be just like the type of factor you’d be more likely to discover should you have been scrolling by means of the Rivendell Instagram:

I have to say I’m doubly disillusioned. Not solely is my favourite spare time activity thought of so terrible that it’s a human rights violation proper up there with intercourse trafficking and torture, however like everybody else I discovered the whole lot I learn about Japanese tradition from watching Nineteen Eighties movies like “Gung Ho,” so to be taught that self-flagellation, collective shaming, and ritual abuse are now not acceptable there has fully undermined my total worldview.

Subsequent you’ll inform me the phrase “Gung Ho” isn’t even Japanese!

Lastly, talking of being tender, winter bikes are now not a factor as a result of no one rides bikes in winter anymore:

Mainly, the individuals who say you want disc brakes in your street bike due to the superior foul-weather efficiency are the exact same ones who retreat to the coach on the first signal of any type of precipitation:

Maybe the principle cause folks now not personal winter bikes is just that they don’t want them anymore. The recognition of Zwift and different indoor coaching platforms, mixed with the lowering worth of sensible trainers, implies that increasingly folks merely journey of their houses, in a digital world as a substitute, and in all chance get fitter and run a decrease danger of crashing and basic distress because of this.

It is a disgrace, as a result of you may get an outdated street bike for concerning the worth of a crabon handlebar and journey all of it winter lengthy. Think about this Trek, for instance, which got here inventory with Biopace Wheel Expertise:™

I actually thought somebody had slipped me a hallucinogen and it had began to kick in after I walked by that one.