Bicycle pics - post them up

[Autobahnschleicher]

The IGH isn't doing anything in 2nd gear.
It has no gears turning inside creating any additional friction at all, it's locked.
Only in gear 1 and gear 3 you have additional losses in the drivetrain compared to a purely derailleur based drivetrain.
I'm running a 58T chainring instead of a 52 chainring to keep myself in 2nd gear when cruising as this is the most efficient gear it has.
However my bike realy needs the lower gears when I'm not riding in flat terrain.
58:28 is too tall of a gear for climbing and larger cassettes mean I'll need a longer cage derailleur.
Longer cage+larger cassette mean the ground clearance starts to get dangerously low as this bike has 406 mm wheels with 28 mm tires.
Of course a front derailleur would be a better solution, but my frame can't fit one.

Conclusion:
Not much to gain by removing the IGH besides a slight weight reduction, but I'd lose my slightly less efficient climbing gears.

Anyway, this is a touring bike.
It's not a racing machine, it's priorises comfort over speed.
It is slower than my fairly aggressive road bike when I'm running it in a speed optimized setup. (UCI doesn't like that)

If I wanted to optimize my recumbent for speed, I'd get a narrower seat at first because the current seat is wider than my upper body and creates more drag.
After that I'd run a rear shock with remote lockout.
Then I'd be looking at fairings, and if I run fairings, I'll need to keep the hub as 58:11 would be too short of a gear for topspeed and significantly larger chainrings aren't realy a thing.

But at that point this bike wouldn't be a good base for such a project.
It has small wheels, it's heavy, it has suspension and it's rather wide.
No amount of modifications would make it competitive with let's say a Milan SL or POB in therms of speed.

[Should be biking]

My wife was out of town last week so I got to use the garage.

[Grant-53]

I put two gears on my 3 speed hub 3 teeth different: 13/16 or a 25/28 and a short cage shifter.

[MetroMPG]

I just picked up this 1980's vintage scratch 'n' dent 'n' rust special for $20. It's a 1987-ish Canadian made Raleigh Sports.

The patina was free.

My brother said: looks like a "grandpa bike!" Yup. I like the aesthetic. (This must have been very close to the final years of production for this style of bike.). Saddle is not original.

Believe it or not, it's my first Sturmey-Archer 3-speed machine. I think the 3-speed era sort of petered out around the time I learned to ride a bike.

The previous owner tried to "fix" the misbehaving gears with half a can of WD-40, but it needed more attention than that. Only 1 gear was working reliably (and of course it was high gear).

A couple of Youtube instructional videos + a couple of hours tinkering, and it's now shifting smoothly into all 3 gears.

The (old) tires hold air, and the brakes work too. Score!

I still have my 1960's CCM single-speed w/ coaster brake that I use for easy errands in the summertime. This one may get a basket, some cosmetic TLC, and see similar light duty.

[redpoint5]

For the longest time I thought WD40 was a lubricant, instead of the solvent it is.

[Piotrsko]

The sturmy's were really touchy about the position of the rod for shifting. Typically your choice was 1st slipped and 3 engaged hard...fixing 3 messed up 1. All due to a crappy selector and an old sticky tangly cable...need a genuine sturmy selector, which were available new last I checked

30 wt oil was my favorite lube, application through the appropriate capped hub fitting. Not more than a squirt or it all ran out of the shifting side

[Grant-53]

With a 20 inch wheel the 28T cog and the IGH in low, the equivalent gear-inch size would be 31 inch diameter. This will not climb telephone poles but should be good for most hills.
Some people do Sudoku but I like to plot gear ratios on natural log scale graphs. That way I can find the best gear spacing and shift sequences.