Sheldon Brown's Bicycle Technical Info

Posted by ostacke 8 hours ago

Sheldon Brown's Bicycle Technical Info(www.sheldonbrown.com)

239 points | 58 commentspage 2

sloosh 5 hours ago|

I always loved this quote from here: https://www.sheldonbrown.com/stuck-seatposts.html

> To update an old saying, 28 grams of prevention are worth 454 grams of cure.

hinkley 2 hours ago|

I have a vague recollection of someone using a cheap old saddle and a rubber mallet to unstick a seat post.

Friends don’t let friends put aluminum posts in steel frames. Especially if those friends ride in the rain instead of wussing out and calling for someone to pick them up.

simlevesque 6 hours ago||

RIP to this legendary hacker.

cguess 6 hours ago|

Amen. If you've ever had to deal with repairing French frames from before the 1980s you know that finding a memory leak in a race condition is easy in comparison.

wampwampwhat 5 hours ago||

I'm going to repeat this verbatim in my next technical interview. I still have nightmares about an old peugeot px10

bookstore-romeo 4 hours ago||

This is an incredible ressource without which I feel so many bikes and bike parts would go to waste. At the bike coop I volunteer at we’re trying to follow Sheldon’s footsteps by collecting information and procedures that are about making bikes & parts last for as long as they possibly can. What’s truly amazing is that all that documentation is amazing for both low-resource repairs on the cheapest of old parts and vintage part enthusiasts.

I think Sheldon Brown’s impact is a valuable lesson on sustainable engineering and the enormous role documentation plays in it

hilsdev 6 hours ago||

This was a major influence for me, both getting into single speed and fixed gear biking before the craze, and building geo cities sites with my friends in high school

2color 2 hours ago|

same

ian-g 6 hours ago||

I used to work on bikes professionally, and this was the first place we went for help. Even today, it's one of the clearest resources out there

behole 5 hours ago||

Legend! I was a bicycle mechanic for a decade and this guy was our jezus! He influenced so many of my creative bicycle builds and exposed me to things like Alex Singer, Rene Herse, bicycle quarterly etc.. Big love for Sheldon and all his passion and work.

cos2pi 6 hours ago||

A wealth of knowledge here, especially helpful for wheelbuilding and checking the compatibility of archaic sizing systems. Lennard Zinn is another great reference in bike maintenance: https://lennardzinn.substack.com/

sebastian_z 4 hours ago||

There is (was?) a bike shop in Pittsburgh, Kraynick's Bike Shop [1], where you could bring your bike and use their tools. It was nice, and I appreciate the DIY ethics and generosity.

[1] https://kraynicksbikeshop.weebly.com/

barbs 2 hours ago|

I get the sense that there are a good number of these around the world. There's one I go to Melbourne sometimes, it's awesome.

https://thebikeshed.org.au/

comprev 5 hours ago||

I learned wheel building many years ago from Sheldon's website and that lead to many great memories fixing other racer's wheels around camp fires in my 20s.

A fantastic resource!

matsemann 4 hours ago|

Similar story. As a student I bought an old bike and restored it thanks to lots of info I found from Sheldon. And building a wheel was such a fun but weird experience. Part mechanics, part art.

I ended up writing my thesis on bicycle wheels after this. Or, it's a thesis on optimization algorithms, but I managed to play around with optimizing wheels as the "real world application". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10410813

jannniii 4 hours ago|

So happy to see this featured here! Had been tinkering with bikes a long time before finding Sheldon’s site, but when I did I was dumbstruck by the amount of insight. And to top that, what a person he was. RIP

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