Singlespeed Mountain Biking: Is this Some Kind of a Cult?
Singletracks Mountain Bike Podcast
Singletracks.com
4.7 • 574 Ratings
🗓️ 21 March 2016
⏱️ 27 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this episode of the Singletracks podcast we talk about the pros and cons of singlespeed mountain bikes and try to answer the question: Is this some kind of a cult? If you’re looking to give singlespeed mountain biking a try, listen in for tips and bike recommendations.
--Keep up with the latest in mountain biking at Singletracks.com and on Instagram @singletracks
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Something unexpected has arrived in Happy Meal. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Hello Kitty and friends are teaming up for the ultimate collab. |
| 0:08.0 | Joining your little ones on a fun-fueled adventure. Some fun, some food, it's all inside this Happy Meal. |
| 0:16.0 | Until the 2nd of February from 11am includes one pre-selected book or toy whilst it's last. |
| 0:20.9 | Hey everybody, welcome to the single tracks podcast. Today it's me, Jeff, and I'm here with Aaron and Greg, |
| 0:26.9 | and today we're taking a reader's suggestion and talking about single-speed mountain bikes. |
| 0:32.5 | So to start it off, I want to ask maybe an obvious question, but what is a single speed mountain bike? Well, it's kind of |
| 0:39.8 | self-explanatory. It's a mountain bike with just a single gear. So there's just typically one chain |
| 0:46.9 | ring in the front, one cog in the rear, no derailers, no shifters, nothing like that. So it's |
| 0:52.6 | pretty much the simplest form of a mountain bike. |
| 0:55.8 | So what are the advantages of a single speed? |
| 0:57.8 | Why would someone want to make their bike that simple and sort of basic? |
| 1:02.9 | One advantage is a lower cost. |
| 1:06.3 | One main thing that adds cost to mountain bikes are the components that you put on it. |
| 1:11.1 | So if you don't have to put on a full-blown drive train, you're going to save money. |
| 1:15.6 | And we'll probably talk about this later, but basically all single speeds are hard tails or rigid. |
| 1:21.6 | So you're saving cost on rear suspension and other components that aren't required, |
| 1:29.0 | and you're just removing them from your bike. When you remove those components, you also say weight. So not having a full drive |
| 1:35.0 | means your bike is lighter. So lots of times when you see like the Uber low weight quotes for |
| 1:42.3 | some of these hard tails, it's like the weight with a tubeless setup |
| 1:46.4 | and like skinny tires and a single speed drive train you know which may or may not reflect real |
| 1:52.7 | life but for single speeders it could third benefit is lower maintenance fewer moving parts in |
| 1:57.8 | your drive train means fewer things are going to break fewer things that you need to maintain, which makes it easier over the long haul. |
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