Hacker News Reader

Comment by acomjean | Hacker News Reader

chains are a pain. But belt drives have been around for 10 years now and you hardly see them.

Chains are the most complex part of the bike with the most moving parts. You have to lubricate them, they stretch.. But they work well in all variety of conditions (even rusty and squeaky) and are fairly cheap.

Sheldon Brown's (RIP) bike pages have some good articles on the good old chain.

old school html ahead: https://www.sheldonbrown.com/chains.html

https://www.sheldonbrown.com/chain-wear.html

View on HN

    > Sheldon Brown's (RIP) bike pages[...]

Off-topic, but how sad to see the state of that website today. I read Sheldon's website religiously before he died, but hadn't seen it in over 10 years.

This[1] is how it looked like when he was alive. Now it's stuffed full of ads, and the first thing you see is a pop-up cookie warning about "our social media, advertising and analytics partners".

1. http://web.archive.org/web/20080111140407/http://www.sheldon...

I didn't get the pop-up, but your right, its a hard with all those ads. The info is good, but without adblockage...

There are some clasics on the archive. Browser tips: http://web.archive.org/web/20071227104629/http://sheldonbrow...

how to make a website: http://web.archive.org/web/20071227104613/http://sheldonbrow...

Sheldon Brown's wife was my CS prof at northeastern[2] and someone named John Allen[1] seems to be keeping the site up to date. Oddly John's bike blog page is pretty good and ad free. Lots of words on the old web.

http://john-s-allen.com/blog/

http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/fell/#Courses

Chains are inexpensive, very efficient, and easy to replace or service. There's a reason bicycles have used them for over 100 years.

Belt drives are comparatively expensive and don’t work with derailleur gears. Internal gears, especially cheap systems, still cannot offer as many gears as a derailleur. Belts also need to be pretty tight and thus cannot be used on most bicycles with a rear suspension as the distance between the pedals and the sprocket changes under load. So many people opt against belts.

I have seen quite a few belts on internally geared hubs - a quick search turns up quite a few[1] commuters shipping w/ belt + Nexus internal hub.

1: https://www.bikeexchange.com/blog/best-urban-belt-drive-bike...

Absolutely: internal gear hubs are the only gears you can use with belts. They just tend to be substantially more expensive for the same amount of gears as a comparative derailleur. Internal gears also tend to have a higher friction than derailleur gears - the really good ones such as a Rohloff speedhub cost > 1000 EUR. Even a comparatively mundane Alfine 11 gear costs ~ 400-500 EUR. A pinion gear isn’t exactly cheap either.

In return you get a mostly maintenance free setup. It’s great, but I probably wouldn’t opt for it for a city commuter bike.

There are plenty of motorcycles with belt drive, the suspension doesn't seem to be a problem.

motorcycles have different issues. The gear changes are internal inside the transmission, not in the belt drive line. Also, bikes tend to have multi-link suspension with chain growth through the travel. This allows the suspension to be reactive to pedaling forces to reduce rider induced pedal-bob that eats efficiency.

And most belts are a permanently closed loop, unlike chains which can be opened and closed. This means you need an special frame with an openable rear triangle.

It doesn’t actually need to open, but the frame must be built to support belts. The lower bar of the rear triangle must pass over the belt.

Interesting comments about the suspension. Several models of motorcycles use belt drive and they have both front/rear suspension.

BMW uses them on some of the F models, Buell’s where all belt drive and I think all Harley’s use a belt transmission.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com