Can't find the original thread, but thought you'd all like to know that my pulleys are now up - thanks to some expert installation work by a certain recombodna (reference available on request)
CityCyclingEdinburgh Forum » Stuff
Pulleys
(27 posts)-
Posted 11 years ago #
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Is that the Helios up there?
I have one of those pulley things, never got around to installing it*. Installed one for the washing to hang on instead!
* - though I may put it in the garage if I can get around to it...
Posted 11 years ago # -
yes, it's a helios but not 'the' helios. :)
Posted 11 years ago # -
"it's a helios but not 'the' helios"
Just as well I'm not confused.
Posted 11 years ago # -
It took some craning of the neck towards the monitor until I saw the folded steerer, then thought 'Ah, they folded the steerer...hang on the tandem doesn't have a folding steerer...ah, it's the other Helios'
Posted 11 years ago # -
Dahon Helios SL - lightweight folder
Circe Helios - compact tandem
Posted 11 years ago # -
Posted 11 years ago #
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Forgot to say: even though I love my flat's 6-bike storage unit dearly, that is definitely cooler than it.
Posted 11 years ago # -
Impressive! Ideal for those with higher ceilings.
Posted 11 years ago # -
I believe the new Transport Museum in Glasgow (I've still to get there) also has mounted its bikes on the roof where they are out of the way.
Posted 11 years ago # -
They're on a rather cool Mobius strip effort, which keeps them out of the way but also makes them rather hard to ogle. The recumbenty stuff is at ground level.
Posted 11 years ago # -
my flat's 6-bike storage unit
Details please! This sounds good. Or is it a euphemism for 'spare room'? :)
the new Transport Museum in Glasgow
I've been and thought it was easily the worst of the three or four incarnations of the Transport Museum I've seen in the last few decades. If you've never been to the Transport Museum, they have interesting things there, but if you have I wouldn't recommend going back. It's in a grim setting, on a bleak wasteland on the far side of a car park beside two roaring motorways. If you go by Underground as I did take a pair of industrial strength ear defenders for the walk. The building is far too small - exhibits are crammed in so you can hardly squeeze between the cars. The bicycles are way up in the air in an arty sort of way so you can't examine them - who would be interested in bicycles, the designers appear to have thought. And the building itself seemed poor quality - when I was there it had just stopped raining and there was an impressive waterfall cascading off the roof, just missing the front entrance, which itself was hard to spot from across the car park. Possibly the architect forgot that it rains in Glasgow.
Posted 11 years ago # -
I've got a couple of these (the pulleys, not Helioses, erm, helois' erm Helii?!?) in the toy-shop... oops, garage. Work fine and the price was right :-)
Posted 11 years ago # -
CC: Details please! This sounds good. Or is it a euphemism for 'spare room'? :).
Partly, in that it is in the
mancavespare room, but its footprint before I took up cycling was effectively zero. The computer desk and a clothes rail used to live underneath/inside it.
The chap who owned the flat before us built it. Still a keen roadie, judging by his Strava traces.
Posted 11 years ago # -
How do you screw the pulley lifts to the ceiling if you don't know where the joists are? I can just see me yanking down several square metres of plasterboard and battens.
Of course, I am also an engineer and possessed of all manner of measuring devices (if not detecting devices), so naturally the above hypothetical situation is presented for the purposes of educating the less investigative.
Posted 11 years ago # -
Uberuce Thanks! Dead impressed.
Posted 11 years ago # -
@uberuce Nice! and simple!
I don't understand why folks with garages don't just use hooks like this (or sets of 2), rather than bother with pulleys. can't be that much space saved? We always had hooks in our garages/sheds and worked well, unless the canoes were up instead.
Posted 11 years ago # -
@SRD, because I'm short and it's easier for me to use a pulley than hooks ;-)
Posted 11 years ago # -
Looking at a similar solution to that in Uberuce's picture for my own bike storage requirements. Looks like the most effective use of space considering we have a similar number of bikes to be parked.
BUT a little concerned at whether hanging the full weight of the bike by a single point on the front rim is a good idea. None of my bikes are of the heavyweight Pashley-style variety, but none of them are carbon framed featherweights either. Am I worrying about nothing?
Posted 11 years ago # -
@Bhachgen I suspect so. I have a feeling this was debated in some length either here or on another forum. Conclusion was broadly that the rims are under much more strain when you're cycling the bike than when it's on the wall.
We've got three bikes held up in this way and haven't had any problems (except the one time that the weight of my singlespeed pulled the attachment out of the wall - just make sure you a) hit the joist and b) use an appropriately sized screw ;) )
Posted 11 years ago # -
My dad's a physics prof and a cyclist. He wouldn't have hung his bikes that way if it risked deforming the rims.
Posted 11 years ago # -
Considering the weight of the bike is a fraction of the weight of the human rider, and that the rim "hangs" off the spokes (rather than being "held" up like columns), I'm sure the rim is more than capable of supporting the weight of the bike.
Posted 11 years ago # -
A counter-intuitive thing* about bikes is that you're actually hanging from the top half of the wheel.
If you've ever looked at how skinny and spindly spokes are and thought they couldn't possibly take the compressive force of a rider landing on the ground off an undropped kerb without folding up like cooked linguine, then you were absolutely right - they can't.
What they can do is endure the tensile force between the rim and the hub, and when they are in the top half, that's what they're doing. When they're in the bottom half they're still being pulled, since wheels are laced up tight, but the deformation of the rim presumably reduces it.
I don't know what this force distribution is, but the important bit is that having weight pull down on the top of the rim is what happens to it all the time anyway, only since no-one's sitting on it and bouncing down off a dropped kerb or gnarly dirtjump, the stess is pitifully tiny compared to its day job.
*might not be counter-intuitive to people who build wheels.
Kappers, you dirty rotten ninja.
Posted 11 years ago # -
If you stagger the hooks - alternate hooks more forward than the others - you can have them closer together. You don't get the handlebars hitting each other. Decathlon does a good hook.
Posted 11 years ago # -
the stress is pitifully tiny compared to its day job
Kaputnik and Uberuce are on the right track. Hanging a bike up by its rims (the right way up or upside down) is, in force terms, exactly the same as leaving it sitting upright on its wheels when you lock it against a railing or a wall.
The ground exerts a force on the tyres equal to the weight of the bike, and that force comes from the total mass of the bike. It doesn't matter if the 'ground force' was applied to the tops of the wheels with the bike upside down (assuming the bike was over an inspection pit or something). You could stand a bike on the ground with your hands under the contact patches. The ground exerts the force through your hands, but if you lifted them clear, you would be exerting the force on the wheels instead. If you held the bike by the tops of the wheels instead, you'd have the pulley + hook situation.
That when holding a bike up the force is applied to the inside of the rim makes no odds, because the wheel is a rigid structure. You could visualise it as though you'd parked your bike at work without any tyres; the forces are the same.
Posted 11 years ago # -
I guess the discussion Bhachgen mentioned centred on whether it matters that the force is concentrated on the hard-on-hard contact point of the hook on the inside of the rim, compared to the broader, softer contact zone of tyre and rim.
Even at my clumsiest, I hang my bikes up without any violence, whereas dropped kerbs and potholes generate dynamic stresses, which are silly-big compared to static ones.
I did a science workshop with my charges at the afterschool club recently which demonstrated this neatly. Four eggshells can take an unbelievable weight if you place it on carefully. I mean that literally. I hadn't set out enough heavy things to break them because I genuinely thought I was overengineering and had collected an excess of heft, so the kids had to run off and fetch me more comics and textbooks to add weight. If you plonk a single hardback of modest page count down, they fold up instantly, even with a comic or two underneath to provide a buffer.
I ate a lot of omelettes in the run up to that day. It was awesome.
Posted 11 years ago # -
...aaaaand there's an example of how brilliant this forum is. Several informed responses then leading off on intelligent tangents. Thanks folks!
Posted 11 years ago #
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