Meet John's Plow Horse

March 24, 2023

Fit to Be Ride

Surly Long Haul Trucker

As it was born on CraigsList in January of 2021. 56 cm frame. Flat pedals. Designed to easily carry 300 pounds of rider and gear (thank goodness I’m nowhere near those numbers!) Tubus racks. Orange Velo hammered silver fenders. Brooks B67 saddle. As you see it, it weighs 34 pounds, almost twice the weight of my carbon fiber road bike. Everything I’d read about the Trucker said that it had a 9-speed cassette. This one has a 10 (11-36T) . 48-36-26T touring triple up front. I love the name of the color: Granda's Thermos. I have no doubt that my grandfather had a thermos just this color.

The Plow Horse As It Came From the Field

Road Test

I rode it up and down the block once or twice, took it home, had my wife take a picture of me standing with it in the driveway, and put it in the garage until the weather warmed up. It was January, and I’ve never been a cold weather rider. It was early summer before I started riding the Trucker regularly. Then I started messing with it to make it my own.

Scary Steerer Tube

It still had the full length of its original steerer tube. There were so many spacers below the stem it looked like a woman in Myanmar with neck rings.

Spacers Gone Wild (The faux leather Brooks microfibre bar tape started delaminating almost immediately and got changed out)

Way too upright for me, so I moved the stem as far down as I could. Then all that steerer tube above the stem looked like something that might impale me someday if I hit a big bump, so I had it cut down. A Ready, Fire, Aim! decision as it turns out.

Stem Solution

Still not comfortable. Decided to pay for a Retul bike fit. One of the conclusions: Your handlebars are too low! Now I didn’t have any steerer tube left to raise them back up. Ended up putting on a longer, high-angle stem that both raised the bars and stretched my posture a bit more forward. I originally installed a top cap mount for the Wahoo, but it didn’t work with the new stem. The solution: reverse the out-front mount that came with the Wahoo to face the rear and put the Wahoo in upside down.

Backward Facing Wahoo Mount (elegant solution patent pending) and the New Stem

Feeling Good in the Hood

Still not comfortable. Replaced the brake levers with Tiagra ST-4700 shift/brake levers to get hoods with a more comfortable profile. The Tiagra shifters aren’t connected to anything (the Trucker has Microshift bar-end shifters) but it pretty much solved my hand comfort issues. That and double wrapping the bars with an intermediate layer of gel inserts.

Nonfunctional Tiagra Shifters Behind the Brake Levers

On the Rack

Installation of the short-pull Tiagra brake levers forced me to add Travel Agents to double the pull for the V-brakes. That caused conflict with the rear rack. That forced me to fiddle with the mount of the rear rack to the frame. That required me to find and modify a special 4mm hex wrench to be able to mount and unmount the rack. Sort of a redneck solution but it worked. As Roseanne Roseannadanna would have said, “It’s always something.”

Applying the rear brake with the Travel Agent installed caused the Travel Agent to hit the rack mount and stop, forcing all the remaining brake movement to be on the opposite side, which was enough to significantly warp the rim sideways. Note the stack of 6 washers on the rack mount bolt to back the rack away from the Travel Agent.

Let There Be Light

With the handlebar bag there was no place to mount a headlight on the bars. I found a local frame builder to braze eyelets onto both sides of the front rack where they don’t interfere with the panniers. I attached a Problem Solvers headlight mount on the left side. If ever I wanted I could mount a GoPro on the right side.

The low mount of the headlight provides better definition of debris, potholes, etc. in the roadway in the dark.

Power Play

And finally I mounted a PedalCell dynamo on the front fork. Not a permanent installation like a hub dynamo. The cable runs up to the stem where it can go inside the handle bar bag to the power hub.

Unlike the dynamos that were around when I was a kid that rested against the side of the tire, the PedalCell dynamo has a thick o-ring that rides on the rim.

Voila!

The differences are not all obvious, but it's a better behaved critter now. For the moment you'll have to imagine the red Orlieb panniers front and rear.

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Mike AylingJudging by the paintwork it has not had much use.
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1 year ago

John ChimahuskyThe fellow who sold it to me told me he had not ridden it much. I’ve put about 5,000 miles on it since I bought it.
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1 year ago