bombadero
Active Member
My wife and I have a 2017 R&M Homage, originally the GT Nuvinci variant, and I recently built a new wheel and replaced the drivetrain and have also upgraded a number of other components over recent years and added a tuning chip, so I thought I would post about it in case anyone is interested in doing something similar with a used or older R&M bike, or any other older e-bike with a Bosch Gen 2 CX Performance Line motor and/or an Enviolo Nuvinci N360 IGH. Photos of the finished build are at the end of this post.
So first a little background. We have had this bike for 5 years and collectively we (although mostly it's down to me) have put it through hell. I have definitely pushed it to its limits and beyond on many, many cargo runs on the extremely hilly streets of San Francisco. The most egregious were probably trying to haul 300 pounds of lumber, including a couple of heavy 4x8' sheets of plywood, and on another occasion 245 pounds of plate steel, on a Surly Ted trailer up the hill to our house. On those particular trips, the Bosch motor wasn't quite powerful enough for the task and I had to engage in some pretty strenuous pushing, on foot, in certain sections. However, I always made it home on the bike, and impressively, while I find the Bosch system a little underpowered these days, it never complained or broke down. As I have written elsewhere, we also have a 2007 HP Velotechnik Scorpion FS 20 that my spouse uses sometimes owing to disability and also for running our dog, which I had retrofitted around the same time. And about two years ago I also built a DIY e-bike from Grin components as a more powerful bike tractor for my particular hauling needs while still keeping it on an e-bike.
The R&M was pretty expensive when we got it, as R&M's are. However, after starting to work from home around 2018, and especially after the pandemic, my spouse rode it less and less, and as of early 2020, I had my bike tractor, Bruce the Moose, for running errands. Practical biking is most of the biking I do, so I just didn't have a need to ride the R&M very often. As a dual hub motor, AWD bike that produces something like 162 Nm maximum torque, Bruce is much better at any given hauling task.
This year has been a luckless year for me with Bruce, however. In December of 2021, I had an accident in which I tacoed the rear wheel and had to perform a rim swap. One of my XT90 connectors took mechanical damage in the crash, unbeknownst to me, leading to an arc fault a few rides later that fried my Cycle Analyst and torque sensor. I ordered new ones, and had the additional bad luck of receiving both a lemon torque sensor and a lemon Cycle Analyst. I actually haven't replaced the latter yet, which is still producing really bizarre regenerative braking numbers. Then more recently I braked suddenly on a ride to Sausalito from about 25 MPH, and apparently I had not threadlocked my front disc rotor bolts. As a result, 4 bolts had backed out, meaning all of the braking force in this stop was being held by two bolts, and two or three of the mounting shoulders on the motor casing broke. I RMA'ed it to Grin to replace the cover plate, got it back and starting building the wheel back up, only to find that the technician had misaligned the plate, introducing a 15 degree or so twist to all of my spokes, so I RMA'ed it again, this time free of charge, in order for them to do it correctly. Then I had a skid stop recently (a pattern seems to be developing), in which my rear wheel locked up, which is a common way to stop suddenly on a bicycle. Well apparently that isn't a good idea on a geared hub motor with regenerative braking, because after that stop, now my other motor, the GMAC 10T on the rear of that bike, makes a horrible noise while spinning. I'm currently in the process of trying to troubleshoot that.
So I've found myself needing to rely on the Homage a lot in between all of these repairs as a back-up bike (perhaps one of the fanciest of back-up e-bikes one could own). However, that bike had come to annoy not just myself, but also my spouse for a couple of reasons. In a nutshell, the first was the Bosch CX motor, and the second was the Nuvinci drivetrain.
I have found the Bosch system to be bomb-proof, as I previously stated. However, it is also self-repair-proof as a closed, proprietary system only available on OEM bikes. I had previously looked into re-celling the two 500 Wh Bosch batteries we own, and was annoyed to find that to avoid bricking the BMS on those batteries, you need to wire it in parallel with a benchtop power supply. I am skilled enough now that I will probably do that in the future, but it's still unnecessarily complicated and irksome. I've also just become accustomed to the power, acceleration and torque dual hub motors afford, and going back to a 250W system, however nominal that may be, feels a little lackluster. And lastly, and related to the previous point, I have become habituated to faster than 20 MPH speeds on an e-bike. It used to seem quite fast, but with 5 years of riding experience, it now seems quite sedate. I've found that the 30-35 MPH top-speed range of Bruce is the ideal speed to get sh*t done in an efficient manner and provide more than sufficient ability to manuever around all kinds of traffic. When you are limited to 20, I've found one often finds oneself 'stuck' behind other kinds of traffic because you don't have the speed or acceleration to pass safely, like a motorcycle for instance, would be able to do. There is nothing worse than suddently being stuck between two vehicles at speed.
Then there is the Nuvinci. The Nuvinci N360, in theory, has a range of gear ratios ranging from a factor of 0.5 to 1.8 multiplied times the rear cog. 1.8 divided by 0.5 is 3.6, or 360%, hence the name of the hub, N360. So with, for instance, a 16T rear cog, which we had, that gives you the equivalent of an 8T high gear, and roughly a 29T low gear. About two years ago though, the bike mysteriously got slower and slower, by which I mean the pedals would spin out at lower and lower speeds. At first it wasn't too bad, just a single MPH, but eventually it got so bad it was spinning out at 14 MPH. After a lot of research--watching numerous videos, reading technical manuals from Enviolo--I discovered the culprit. It turns out that there are two rings just outside the hub, but covered by the carrier assembly for the cables, that need to be perfectly aligned in order to calibrate the overdrive on the hub. If they are out of sync, you will shift the entire gear range of the hub down. The overdrive point is the maximum gear ratio, so any other position will only result in lower ratios. So I fixed that, which put the bike back at its usual 20 MPH, but even that maximum speed of a class I e-bike still seemed lackluster. Even my spouse felt this way. They are disabled, so they aren't a particularly strong rider and don't ride the bike as hard as I do, but they too had simply become habituated to that speed.
There is one other very annoying issue with the Nuvinci that breaks the illusion of being low-maintenance. I have had to replace the overdrive cable 3 or 4 times, because it has a tendency to fall out of its guide track. This invariably causes the cable to fray in short order, even when I used tougher Yokozuna cables, liberally greased, and it's impossible to fish the cable out once this happens, so it has to be replaced. This isn't particularly hard, but it is fidgety and a little time consuming, as the cable has to be cut to a precise length, otherwise the gear ratios will again be negatively affected by a too-slack cable, and it also necessitates removing the rear wheel and re-calibrating the overdrive again.
So the first thing I did was to install a Speedbox tuning chip after watching countless videos, mostly by Brits, of Speedbox-tuned bikes, many of them R&M's, hitting or breaking 30 MPH. I took into account the N360's gear ratios, now that I had confirmed restoration of its previous top speed of 20 MPH, and also the conversion factor of the Bosch motor, which is 2.5, and entered these values into a bike calculator online, which predicted similar speeds. Unfortunately, after installing the Speedbox, I was only able to increase the speed by a measly single MPH to 21, 22 if I really cranked. So it seems that N360's advertised ratios are overstated, at least in a 5-year-old hub. I suspect that they are not as maintenance free as advertised and there is some sort of gear wear or something internal causing their reliability to degrade over time. Entering these speeds into a bike calculator again, it seems as if that hub is now producing a range of ratios that is much narrower.
So my next trick was to upgrade the cog on the Bosch to a 22T. Because of the ratio of 2.5 on the Bosch, that is equivalent to a 55T chainring, which is fairly insane. This did increase the top speed to about 24 MPH, 26 at a really hard crank. It also made it very, very difficult to climb anything over an 8% grade while carrying any sort of cargo weight. I found that on a tough grade I frequently climb, I now had to tack back and forth with the Nuvinci cranked all the way down and the Bosch cranked up to Turbo mode to make the climb. Previously I could do it in the 2nd or 3rd assist level at nearly, but not actually, the lowest gear ratio.
So I went back to the calculator and weighed my options. I briefly considered other hubs, but most of them only have 3 or so fixed speeds and are oftentimes intended as a replacement for a front chainring. I considered a Rohloff, but that seemed like an expensive investment in a 5-year-old bike completely out of warranty. I had also seen in multiple YouTube videos from experienced touring bikers and bikepackers that IGH's in general, the Rohloff included, aren't especially great at hill climbing compared to cassettes and rear derailleurs. However, most of these people consider the trade-off in durability and lack of required maintenance to be acceptable, which is fair as they are riding tens of thousands of miles or kilometers in a relatively short span. Our bike has roughly 3,600 miles on it after 5 years, so we don't really need that level of durability. I never seriously considered it, because it is an OEM-only component and is mid-drive mounted, but I was even briefly enamored as well of the Pinion Gearbox and the P-line model's ridiculous 600% gear range.
What I settled on at about a third or a quarter the cost of a Rohloff was a SRAM GX Eagle lunar-edition cassette (10T-52T), the matching derailleur from the groupset, and a Microshift bar-end shifter with the adapter to make it a thumbie. With a range of 520%, it is only 6% behind the highest ranged Rohloffs, which have a range of 526%, for a fraction of the cost. It is true that over time I will have to replace the cassette a few times, and may eventually catch up to the Rohloff in cost, but I'm fine with that, because given the amount of mileage we ride, that cost will have been spread out over decades for that to happen.
I'm pleased to say that I finished the install recently, after building a new rear wheel with a Velocity Dually 650B, 36H rim (had to special order) and a Hope Tech Pro 4 rear hub with Sapim Strong black spokes and Sapim 12mm brass nipples, laced in a 3-cross pattern. I kept the old wheel and shifter to have a back-up transmission just in case anything goes wrong. I completed the install with a KMC EPT 12-speed e-bike chain, and upgraded the tires from Schwalbe Super Moto-X's to Schwalbe Hurricanes. It now has a pleasingly fast top speed around 30 MPH. It can technically go faster--according to a bike calculator it should top out at 41--but because of that insane front cog on the Bosch, I actually can't access anything higher than maybe 4th gear on flats. I can only access 1-3 going downhill, which I actually find kind of nice, as 30 MPH is plenty fast on flats, and it's actually kind of nice being able to shift higher and still have pedal resistance when traveling downhill, as it is easier to control a bicycle while pedaling than while coasting. On most bikes, you'll spin out coasting downhill rather quickly. That said, I have ordered a 20T and an 18T to experiment with, which would be equivalent to a 50T and 45T respectively, as I've found the lower gears still a little tougher than I would like. That said, even with a 55T-equivalent monster Bosch cog in the front, it's already better at climbing than the N360 was with the same cog, which bodes well. That same stretch of grade is once again climbable in a straight line, although I do still have to use Turbo and be in 10th-12th gear depending on which section of that grade I am on. I also had to trim a bit more of my rear fender out of the way on the drive side, more than an inch, because the chain angle is so extreme on the 52T rear sprocket that chain slap while pedaling was causing the chain to grind the fender rather unpleasantly. Smaller cogs should paradoxically allow me to bike even faster on flats by unlocking higher gears, with the trade-off that I won't have as much downhill pedal resistance.
Otherwise, she runs phenomenally well now... feels like a brand new bike. The patina of scratches and wear on the frame and Bosch components gives away her true age, but the bike is a high-range beast now. Since it's a Bosch though, it's still a very refined beast, unlike Bruce. Acceleration never feels jerky or rough, because the amperage and the assistance algorithm are the same. All the tuning chip does is remove the speed limit for assistance so you can unlock the higher gear ratios of a drivetrain. While climbing, there is no risk of any issues, as you are by definition doing less than 20 MPH just owing to gearing, so the bike isn't doing anything it would not do ordinarily. At higher speeds, it is of course providing assistance when it normally would not, but by definition this is on flats or downhill, which means torque is low. I have not noticed any problems with overheating or anything like that. The Hurricane tires also seem to be a big upgrade over the Super Moto-X's, which come highly regarded in reviews, but in my own experience in 5 years of riding on them, seem to be overhyped. I've probably had 3 or 4 wipeouts on the Super Moto-X's, once on wet leaves, once on slick asphalt, and once on loose scree. They're not necessarily designed for those surfaces, but in each case I was moving in a straight line around 10 MPH. The Hurricanes on the other hand are, as far as my own hearing is concerned, completely silent, and feel extremely responsive on recent rides. Despite being the same width as the Super Moto-X's, you can feel the road surface with much more definition. I found the Super Moto-X's to have a bit of a spongy feel, a bit like wearing mittens, whereas the Hurricanes feel like form-fitting gloves. They also corner supremely well, do great on wet asphalt, and are supposed to have much better off-road grip, which I haven't tested just yet. I was surprised to find how much more nimble they make me on the bike today in street traffic on Valencia Street. I had to perform a number of sudden dodges, and each one felt much crisper, cleaner and faster than they would have been on the Super Moto-X's. Can't speak highly enough of these tires. Time will tell, but if they display the same Schwalbe toughness I have witnessed already in Super Moto-X's, Marathons, Marathon Pluses, Marathon GT 365's and Pick-ups, I have no doubt they will be just as durable.
I'd like to try the Johnny Watts 365's at some point, which are supposed to be even better all-rounder tires.
I have also been really surprised at both how much lighter, and simultaneously stronger, the new wheel feels without that N360 hub in there. I did not realize how much noticeable weight a larger IGH adds over a conventional hub.
So other changes I made earlier over the past couple of years include:
The finished bike.
A couple angles of the new wheel and drivetrain.
Cockpit.
Hurricanes.
So first a little background. We have had this bike for 5 years and collectively we (although mostly it's down to me) have put it through hell. I have definitely pushed it to its limits and beyond on many, many cargo runs on the extremely hilly streets of San Francisco. The most egregious were probably trying to haul 300 pounds of lumber, including a couple of heavy 4x8' sheets of plywood, and on another occasion 245 pounds of plate steel, on a Surly Ted trailer up the hill to our house. On those particular trips, the Bosch motor wasn't quite powerful enough for the task and I had to engage in some pretty strenuous pushing, on foot, in certain sections. However, I always made it home on the bike, and impressively, while I find the Bosch system a little underpowered these days, it never complained or broke down. As I have written elsewhere, we also have a 2007 HP Velotechnik Scorpion FS 20 that my spouse uses sometimes owing to disability and also for running our dog, which I had retrofitted around the same time. And about two years ago I also built a DIY e-bike from Grin components as a more powerful bike tractor for my particular hauling needs while still keeping it on an e-bike.
The R&M was pretty expensive when we got it, as R&M's are. However, after starting to work from home around 2018, and especially after the pandemic, my spouse rode it less and less, and as of early 2020, I had my bike tractor, Bruce the Moose, for running errands. Practical biking is most of the biking I do, so I just didn't have a need to ride the R&M very often. As a dual hub motor, AWD bike that produces something like 162 Nm maximum torque, Bruce is much better at any given hauling task.
This year has been a luckless year for me with Bruce, however. In December of 2021, I had an accident in which I tacoed the rear wheel and had to perform a rim swap. One of my XT90 connectors took mechanical damage in the crash, unbeknownst to me, leading to an arc fault a few rides later that fried my Cycle Analyst and torque sensor. I ordered new ones, and had the additional bad luck of receiving both a lemon torque sensor and a lemon Cycle Analyst. I actually haven't replaced the latter yet, which is still producing really bizarre regenerative braking numbers. Then more recently I braked suddenly on a ride to Sausalito from about 25 MPH, and apparently I had not threadlocked my front disc rotor bolts. As a result, 4 bolts had backed out, meaning all of the braking force in this stop was being held by two bolts, and two or three of the mounting shoulders on the motor casing broke. I RMA'ed it to Grin to replace the cover plate, got it back and starting building the wheel back up, only to find that the technician had misaligned the plate, introducing a 15 degree or so twist to all of my spokes, so I RMA'ed it again, this time free of charge, in order for them to do it correctly. Then I had a skid stop recently (a pattern seems to be developing), in which my rear wheel locked up, which is a common way to stop suddenly on a bicycle. Well apparently that isn't a good idea on a geared hub motor with regenerative braking, because after that stop, now my other motor, the GMAC 10T on the rear of that bike, makes a horrible noise while spinning. I'm currently in the process of trying to troubleshoot that.
So I've found myself needing to rely on the Homage a lot in between all of these repairs as a back-up bike (perhaps one of the fanciest of back-up e-bikes one could own). However, that bike had come to annoy not just myself, but also my spouse for a couple of reasons. In a nutshell, the first was the Bosch CX motor, and the second was the Nuvinci drivetrain.
I have found the Bosch system to be bomb-proof, as I previously stated. However, it is also self-repair-proof as a closed, proprietary system only available on OEM bikes. I had previously looked into re-celling the two 500 Wh Bosch batteries we own, and was annoyed to find that to avoid bricking the BMS on those batteries, you need to wire it in parallel with a benchtop power supply. I am skilled enough now that I will probably do that in the future, but it's still unnecessarily complicated and irksome. I've also just become accustomed to the power, acceleration and torque dual hub motors afford, and going back to a 250W system, however nominal that may be, feels a little lackluster. And lastly, and related to the previous point, I have become habituated to faster than 20 MPH speeds on an e-bike. It used to seem quite fast, but with 5 years of riding experience, it now seems quite sedate. I've found that the 30-35 MPH top-speed range of Bruce is the ideal speed to get sh*t done in an efficient manner and provide more than sufficient ability to manuever around all kinds of traffic. When you are limited to 20, I've found one often finds oneself 'stuck' behind other kinds of traffic because you don't have the speed or acceleration to pass safely, like a motorcycle for instance, would be able to do. There is nothing worse than suddently being stuck between two vehicles at speed.
Then there is the Nuvinci. The Nuvinci N360, in theory, has a range of gear ratios ranging from a factor of 0.5 to 1.8 multiplied times the rear cog. 1.8 divided by 0.5 is 3.6, or 360%, hence the name of the hub, N360. So with, for instance, a 16T rear cog, which we had, that gives you the equivalent of an 8T high gear, and roughly a 29T low gear. About two years ago though, the bike mysteriously got slower and slower, by which I mean the pedals would spin out at lower and lower speeds. At first it wasn't too bad, just a single MPH, but eventually it got so bad it was spinning out at 14 MPH. After a lot of research--watching numerous videos, reading technical manuals from Enviolo--I discovered the culprit. It turns out that there are two rings just outside the hub, but covered by the carrier assembly for the cables, that need to be perfectly aligned in order to calibrate the overdrive on the hub. If they are out of sync, you will shift the entire gear range of the hub down. The overdrive point is the maximum gear ratio, so any other position will only result in lower ratios. So I fixed that, which put the bike back at its usual 20 MPH, but even that maximum speed of a class I e-bike still seemed lackluster. Even my spouse felt this way. They are disabled, so they aren't a particularly strong rider and don't ride the bike as hard as I do, but they too had simply become habituated to that speed.
There is one other very annoying issue with the Nuvinci that breaks the illusion of being low-maintenance. I have had to replace the overdrive cable 3 or 4 times, because it has a tendency to fall out of its guide track. This invariably causes the cable to fray in short order, even when I used tougher Yokozuna cables, liberally greased, and it's impossible to fish the cable out once this happens, so it has to be replaced. This isn't particularly hard, but it is fidgety and a little time consuming, as the cable has to be cut to a precise length, otherwise the gear ratios will again be negatively affected by a too-slack cable, and it also necessitates removing the rear wheel and re-calibrating the overdrive again.
So the first thing I did was to install a Speedbox tuning chip after watching countless videos, mostly by Brits, of Speedbox-tuned bikes, many of them R&M's, hitting or breaking 30 MPH. I took into account the N360's gear ratios, now that I had confirmed restoration of its previous top speed of 20 MPH, and also the conversion factor of the Bosch motor, which is 2.5, and entered these values into a bike calculator online, which predicted similar speeds. Unfortunately, after installing the Speedbox, I was only able to increase the speed by a measly single MPH to 21, 22 if I really cranked. So it seems that N360's advertised ratios are overstated, at least in a 5-year-old hub. I suspect that they are not as maintenance free as advertised and there is some sort of gear wear or something internal causing their reliability to degrade over time. Entering these speeds into a bike calculator again, it seems as if that hub is now producing a range of ratios that is much narrower.
So my next trick was to upgrade the cog on the Bosch to a 22T. Because of the ratio of 2.5 on the Bosch, that is equivalent to a 55T chainring, which is fairly insane. This did increase the top speed to about 24 MPH, 26 at a really hard crank. It also made it very, very difficult to climb anything over an 8% grade while carrying any sort of cargo weight. I found that on a tough grade I frequently climb, I now had to tack back and forth with the Nuvinci cranked all the way down and the Bosch cranked up to Turbo mode to make the climb. Previously I could do it in the 2nd or 3rd assist level at nearly, but not actually, the lowest gear ratio.
So I went back to the calculator and weighed my options. I briefly considered other hubs, but most of them only have 3 or so fixed speeds and are oftentimes intended as a replacement for a front chainring. I considered a Rohloff, but that seemed like an expensive investment in a 5-year-old bike completely out of warranty. I had also seen in multiple YouTube videos from experienced touring bikers and bikepackers that IGH's in general, the Rohloff included, aren't especially great at hill climbing compared to cassettes and rear derailleurs. However, most of these people consider the trade-off in durability and lack of required maintenance to be acceptable, which is fair as they are riding tens of thousands of miles or kilometers in a relatively short span. Our bike has roughly 3,600 miles on it after 5 years, so we don't really need that level of durability. I never seriously considered it, because it is an OEM-only component and is mid-drive mounted, but I was even briefly enamored as well of the Pinion Gearbox and the P-line model's ridiculous 600% gear range.
What I settled on at about a third or a quarter the cost of a Rohloff was a SRAM GX Eagle lunar-edition cassette (10T-52T), the matching derailleur from the groupset, and a Microshift bar-end shifter with the adapter to make it a thumbie. With a range of 520%, it is only 6% behind the highest ranged Rohloffs, which have a range of 526%, for a fraction of the cost. It is true that over time I will have to replace the cassette a few times, and may eventually catch up to the Rohloff in cost, but I'm fine with that, because given the amount of mileage we ride, that cost will have been spread out over decades for that to happen.
I'm pleased to say that I finished the install recently, after building a new rear wheel with a Velocity Dually 650B, 36H rim (had to special order) and a Hope Tech Pro 4 rear hub with Sapim Strong black spokes and Sapim 12mm brass nipples, laced in a 3-cross pattern. I kept the old wheel and shifter to have a back-up transmission just in case anything goes wrong. I completed the install with a KMC EPT 12-speed e-bike chain, and upgraded the tires from Schwalbe Super Moto-X's to Schwalbe Hurricanes. It now has a pleasingly fast top speed around 30 MPH. It can technically go faster--according to a bike calculator it should top out at 41--but because of that insane front cog on the Bosch, I actually can't access anything higher than maybe 4th gear on flats. I can only access 1-3 going downhill, which I actually find kind of nice, as 30 MPH is plenty fast on flats, and it's actually kind of nice being able to shift higher and still have pedal resistance when traveling downhill, as it is easier to control a bicycle while pedaling than while coasting. On most bikes, you'll spin out coasting downhill rather quickly. That said, I have ordered a 20T and an 18T to experiment with, which would be equivalent to a 50T and 45T respectively, as I've found the lower gears still a little tougher than I would like. That said, even with a 55T-equivalent monster Bosch cog in the front, it's already better at climbing than the N360 was with the same cog, which bodes well. That same stretch of grade is once again climbable in a straight line, although I do still have to use Turbo and be in 10th-12th gear depending on which section of that grade I am on. I also had to trim a bit more of my rear fender out of the way on the drive side, more than an inch, because the chain angle is so extreme on the 52T rear sprocket that chain slap while pedaling was causing the chain to grind the fender rather unpleasantly. Smaller cogs should paradoxically allow me to bike even faster on flats by unlocking higher gears, with the trade-off that I won't have as much downhill pedal resistance.
Otherwise, she runs phenomenally well now... feels like a brand new bike. The patina of scratches and wear on the frame and Bosch components gives away her true age, but the bike is a high-range beast now. Since it's a Bosch though, it's still a very refined beast, unlike Bruce. Acceleration never feels jerky or rough, because the amperage and the assistance algorithm are the same. All the tuning chip does is remove the speed limit for assistance so you can unlock the higher gear ratios of a drivetrain. While climbing, there is no risk of any issues, as you are by definition doing less than 20 MPH just owing to gearing, so the bike isn't doing anything it would not do ordinarily. At higher speeds, it is of course providing assistance when it normally would not, but by definition this is on flats or downhill, which means torque is low. I have not noticed any problems with overheating or anything like that. The Hurricane tires also seem to be a big upgrade over the Super Moto-X's, which come highly regarded in reviews, but in my own experience in 5 years of riding on them, seem to be overhyped. I've probably had 3 or 4 wipeouts on the Super Moto-X's, once on wet leaves, once on slick asphalt, and once on loose scree. They're not necessarily designed for those surfaces, but in each case I was moving in a straight line around 10 MPH. The Hurricanes on the other hand are, as far as my own hearing is concerned, completely silent, and feel extremely responsive on recent rides. Despite being the same width as the Super Moto-X's, you can feel the road surface with much more definition. I found the Super Moto-X's to have a bit of a spongy feel, a bit like wearing mittens, whereas the Hurricanes feel like form-fitting gloves. They also corner supremely well, do great on wet asphalt, and are supposed to have much better off-road grip, which I haven't tested just yet. I was surprised to find how much more nimble they make me on the bike today in street traffic on Valencia Street. I had to perform a number of sudden dodges, and each one felt much crisper, cleaner and faster than they would have been on the Super Moto-X's. Can't speak highly enough of these tires. Time will tell, but if they display the same Schwalbe toughness I have witnessed already in Super Moto-X's, Marathons, Marathon Pluses, Marathon GT 365's and Pick-ups, I have no doubt they will be just as durable.
I'd like to try the Johnny Watts 365's at some point, which are supposed to be even better all-rounder tires.
I have also been really surprised at both how much lighter, and simultaneously stronger, the new wheel feels without that N360 hub in there. I did not realize how much noticeable weight a larger IGH adds over a conventional hub.
So other changes I made earlier over the past couple of years include:
- Upgrading to Ergon Bioleder GP1 grips. The original rubber Ergon's got fairly shredded after a few years of rough use. I applied some Sno-seal to the new ones to protect them from wet conditions, and they don't show any of the signs of wear the rubber grips would show after a couple of years.
- Upgraded from Shimano hydraulic brakes to Magura MT5 E-stops.
- Changed rotors and pads to Trickstuff. They are expensive, but magical. They more than pay for themselves in durability, longevity, the braking power they add and silence. They are the only rotors and pads I have had that require no bedding whatsoever, and only produce noise if the alignment is off or they are wet or dirty. None of the squealing you get from most rotors and pads after they are first installed before bedding in. The pads wear much more slowly, and the rotors much, much more slowly--I'm still over 2mm on the rotors after a couple of years of hill riding.
- Upgraded the seatpost to a PNW Bachelor.
- Added a Spurcycle bell and a Juiced Bikes horn/bike alarm.
- Changed the saddle to a Selle Royal Float unisex saddle that is comfortable for both of us despite different anatomy.
The finished bike.
A couple angles of the new wheel and drivetrain.
Cockpit.
Hurricanes.
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