Reelight in 2023

 This isn't Nihola specific, but Reelights are great lights for utility cycles, so here goes.  (Also in two of the following photos, a Nihola is in the background!)

I have a lot of Reelight lights, the ones that go on racks ("cargo carrier", whatever) are especially good, as they are protected against damage.  Both Niholas have had one of those for years, I suppose a whole decade now.  There can be a little fiddling with spoke magnets, and the generator-cylinder can be pushed around by accident, but mostly things are great.  Then they improved things.  Not sure what year that happened, but in 2022 I got my first fancy new Reelight Nova.

The new generator goes by the rim, there are no spoke magnets, and the cable can be replaced.  The replaceable cable especially sounds good, as I have personally ruined 2 or 3 Reelights by pulling out or otherwise damaging the cable.  (In at least one case, destruction involved falling over on ice.)

Here we have the generator mostly installed.

I had, in 2022, the need to equip a pre-teen bike for winter school commuting.  I got a rear Reelight Nova for the cargo rack and installed it, zip-tied the cable like I should.  It worked OK.  I'm not so sure the light effect was better than the old models, but it was sufficient.  It started out blinking and went to steady light.  Could have blinked a bit more at low speed.  The generator needed to be installed quite close to the rim, which is potentially problematic for the rear wheel in front-facing dropouts.  The wheel can move if the nuts loosen, and it would take hardly any movement for the generator to rub on the rim.  In practice, the kid was light enough, and I tightened the nuts enough, that the wheel stayed put.  The generator was also not a problem when removing the wheel to change the tire, and was only rarely bumped into the rim.  Overall not so bad.

It ended badly however, due to some series of events that only my kid knows.

This is how it went.

One end of the cable is still in the light.

I think I'll get a new cable for the light some day to get it back in service.  I should point out that the cable exits the light housing sideways at an angle, which is less ideal than the old cable, which left the housing centered.  The large plug probably required this change.  In most cases this could be better, but specifically for the rear rack-mounted light, it exposed the cable to more risk.  After leaving the light, the cable had to traverse an air gap, near the outside edge of the bike, before it could be tip-tied to the rack.  This is the first time a rack-mounted Reelight has failed in this household.

Before that unfortunate event, it turned out that the inlaws had, for Xmas, bought a front version of this light, and found it didn't work at all for their needs.  They wanted to illuminate a bit of where they were going, which was not even slightly in the cards.  I scored that light, and on it went ... to replace a different front light that broke during a winter crash (or something).

Nice happy new front light (installed upside down for cable clearance).

I have high hopes that the new front installation will last.  For one thing, the light itself contains no battery and is therefore lightweight, and unlikely to get much of a shock if the bike should fall.  But also I like the placement of the generator better than a rear installation, high and mostly out of the way (its at top of the wheel, just visible under the snow).  The front wheel also has no need to move, so placement should be quite static.

The functionality as a light is pretty good, if your goal is to be seen, rather than to see.  It provides a sharp noticeable light spot to any eye that points its general direction, because it doesn't focus light into a narrow beam.  This works well for being seen out of the corner of an eye, I can confirm, and of course it always flips on automatically, being driven by the generator.  Overall pretty good.

So that is a story about Reelight and a kid bike.

A tour

 Well, the kids are rather too big to sit in a cargo bike (or trike) and get pedaled around now, so mostly one nihola goes down to the store, and mostly the other hides in the garage.  There is however one remaining additional use: transporting small dogs.  Small dogs do have legs, but we have ambitious goals.

Three people and two small dogs went out on a tour a couple weeks ago, myself on a nihola and two others on fatbikes.  (Those are very comfortable on gravel, BTW.)  The forests north of Oslo have a lot of paths, although unfortunately its hard to make round trips on paths which are easy to ride on.  I have tried a certain number of uncomfortable paths with a nihola, to be clear, but thats not a long-distance option.  There was one feasible gravel road I could see, about 70km.

(Actually there is another also, a bit over 40km round trip to "the queens view" but we've done that a number of times.  I could write about that some day.)

I have used Google maps to put together a representation of what we did.  So there you have it, 68km with 950m of climb, almost all gravel, on hills ranging up to 540m over sea level, done on a nihola by a regular guy.  We carried water, food and a good set of tools in two Ortlieb bags on the nihola.  The dogs had a combined weight around 15kg, but walked on all the significant climbs.

The uphills were work, even the downhills took time.  On one of those, I set a personal record for highest speed on two wheels with a nihola.  Long downhills and corners you see, I felt like there was some mild drifting in the gravel, and so I pushed it a bit.  (Didn't try that a second time.)

My advice on nihola tours: just turn the pedals and the kilometers will pass.  (It does help to have a quality gearing system installed.)

Greasing a Nexus

Niholas usually have hub gears, and these days those are usually Shimano Nexus 8 after the unfortunate demise of SRAM's P5 and S7 on the market.  These need grease once in a while.  For me, that means whenever they have a hard time holding one or more gears, or otherwise seem too crappy.  (Fun thought on crappiness: at least in hilly Oslo conditions, switching between Nexus 7 & 8 and SRAM S7 is a process of relief from the irritations of whatever hub you were riding, followed by growing irritation at the issues of the one you are now riding.)

So for a while after moving to Oslo I took my hubs down to Copenhagen for greasing, which came to an abrupt end after one visit to a well-established chain-store shop in Birkerød (north of Copenhagen).  I brought them two wheels without the bikes, one a Nexus 8 and the other a Nexus 7, and got back to two nicely cleaned hubs a couple days later.  All was well until I arrived home in Oslo and put the Nexus 7 to use as winter began.  Soon it was leaking, and smelled fruity.  Actually the smell was exactly like a "Muc Off" chain lubricant which has the distinction of not only smelling fruity, but being somewhat pink in color, achieving who knows what.  (The leakage wasn't pink of course, it was filthy, but I am really suspicious about the origin of the lubricant they used at the shop.)  So it leaked and stank, and eventually seemed rougher, and if I recall correctly was not as secure about holding a gear.  To cut the story short, the Nexus 8 had the same issue.

Screw the so-called professionals, it was time to fix this myself (the internet explains how).  I don't intend to write a hugely detailed rundown of how to take apart a hub, but basically you take the hub apart on the drive side until the sprocket is removed, then flip it over and use two thin wrenches (cone wrenches) to remove two nuts from the axle, then lift off the non-drive-side end of things and drop out the internals via the drive side.  I like to put the axle nut on the non-drive side to make it nicer to hold, and I made a handy hub-holder by drilling a hole in a board.  High tech stuff here.

tools of a nonprofessional hub greaser

10 year old Nexus 7 (SG-7C18)
after a dip

Nexus 8 (SG-8C31) dripping out
some pink stink after two
dip & grease rounds

I clean the hub shell out thoroughly via baby wipe and toilet paper, and also remove some grease-mess from the surface hub internals, but not so much.  I have not thus far attempted any disassembly of the hub internals, although I think the Nexus 8 might benefit from getting grease into gears that are not otherwise exposed (thats on the to-do list).  Hubs with coaster ("foot") brakes (as mine have) can have the brake pads jump off and they need to be set back correctly.  The brake pads on Nexus 7 have a spring which pulls them a little closed, so they need to be pried open a bit to sit on the hub.  You'll figure it out.  Kind of like Legos, with grease.

Shimano recommends a dipping kit, so I found one online, plus their official hub grease.  I dip the hub for "a while" and then remove it so it can drip for "a bit" before I put grease all over interesting places.  One thing I wondered in the years before I attempted this was how to grease the coaster brake components.  My answer: a whole ton of grease, just go nuts at that end of the hub.  Often I have extra grease pressing itself out the non-drive-side the first ride, but I don't much care.  Dry brake pads are lame, and there are hills here in Oslo.  I have read that some people may want different grease for the braking surfaces, so far I have not been sufficiently professional (or wise) to do anything like that.

So I have now done this procedure on a Nexus 3 & 8, plus at least three Nexus 7's, and of these hubs I've opened several more than once.  (Score keeping: I have 5 Nexus 7 hubs, also a rare Nexus 5 SG-5R30.)  But about opening some more than once.  You see, there is a drawback to doing this yourself.  Shimano likes cup & cone bearings, and those need to be tightened correctly, or else.

Nexus 7 (SG-7C30) with sad bearings

Nexus 8 (SG-8C31) with sad bearings

Now, I have read a bit about how to tighten cup & cone bearings and honestly what I read was not super helpful in this context, which is a gear hub with a coaster brake and bolt axles.  My current procedure is to get the wheel set in the frame, pull it back so the chain is sufficiently tight, and then tighten down the drive-side bolt in a serious way.  The frame should either be upside-down or hanging on something; the rear wheel needs to spin freely.  Then I loosely attach the brake arm and non-drive-side axle bolt, but do not tighten it so much that any pressure is applied to the nuts that adjust the bearings.  Then I turn the first (the larger) of the two tightening (cone adjustment) nuts until the wheel shows signs of increasing resistance when spun.  At some point I decide that it seems tight enough, then I tighten the second (smaller) nut good and tight (while holding the larger in place) and properly tighten the axle nut.  Now the wheel is probably tighter than it was before the axle nut was tightened.  If its too tight, rewind a bit, loosen things, tighten things again.  Spin the wheel a lot and go by feel.  If it spins really easily, thats probably bad.  Next time I go by a Danish bike shop, I should remember to spin some back wheels and get a feel for factory-fresh resistance.

My first bearing tightening issue was a bearing retainer failure (non-drive side) during or shortly after a big downhill on a hot-for-Oslo June afternoon, apparently braking was the final stress that tipped things over.  Once I reached the flat at the bottom of the hill, it was a fairly short distance before the wheel started crunching.  The bearings had lasted about 6 weeks after I had greased the hub.  I was surprised by this, because it wasn't the first Nexus 7 that I had greased up (the first one was the hub contaminated in Denmark).  I greased the first hub on the 1st of Feb 2018, and has done fine since.  I concluded that the cone adjustment nuts had probably loosened on this 2nd Nexus 7.  I grabbed the bearings and retainer from a different wheel, put things together again, and its been fine since.

I also greased the Nexus 8 that was Muc Off'ed in Denmark.  I was very pleased how the wheel spun so easily and had no observable looseness (as in, I observed no play).  Seemed good.  I guess I rode a couple hundred km's before I decided to do an uphill stretch standing on the pedals in 5th (direct drive).  As before, the bearing retainer (also non-drive side) broke into bits and this time the wheel was partly jammed, couldn't even roll the bike all the way home.  With this failure, it seemed clear the cone adjustment nuts where not loosened, apparently they were just not set tight enough.  So I fixed that also by replacing the bearings and retainer, but it wasn't so long ago that I can say how it will last.  (Side note: the bearings and retainer for Nexus 7 and 8 are interchangeable, at least for the hubs I have, and spares are possible to order.)  This second failure was the point that I adopted the procedure outlined a couple paragraphs above.

Anyway moving on to farther in the past, in 2017 we had bought a gear-hub bike for our son down in Denmark and almost immediately it went out into the forest and got a bit wet.  Apparently more wet than we realized.  We left it in Denmark until the next summer, and when we returned I noticed some roughness while spinning the rear wheel.  Upon returning to Oslo with the bike, I took the hub apart and was met by rust, as shown.

rust in the drive side bearings
of a Nexus 7 (SG-C3000-7C)

rust on the guts

rust in the shell

In light of the amount of time that bikes with these gear hubs are ridden or parked in the rain, I'm pretty amazed that this hub had sufficient water ingress to rust.  We did get it discounted from a bike shop, maybe it had more of a history than we realized, or perhaps these hubs are particularly vulnerable to water found in forest settings.  Or perhaps my son submerged it.  Anyway it works pretty fine except when coasting, then it rumbles.

A bit of a shame that the newest Nexus 7 in the fleet was damaged so soon after purchase, but I'll see about getting some years out of it anyway.  As much as I love to hate these things, they last forever.

Trends and perceptions

At work, two colleagues have in the past few years been shopping for cargo bikes/trikes and ended up with two-wheelers despite having me gently feed them testimony of life with a trike.  (The front brakes do make a Nihola a difficult sell in Oslo, so maybe that was blunting my otherwise smooth sales pitch.)  I don't think these two colleagues have made poor choices in the end, and I've never even riden a cargo bike, so who am I to judge?  People just love two-wheelers.  Related observation: trikes that tilt are trending (see Butchers & Bicycles MK1, Babboe Carve, Sblocs).  Generalized: it seems to me that the greatest challenge to trikes is the way people view them, which is apparently slow.  Maybe slow and boring, who knows.

Does a tilting trike actually address a real issue, or just a trike-newbie's perception of a real issue?  (The classic box trikes where the whole box rotates do have an issue.  Perhaps this is the root of the problem.)  I don't doubt that an empty tilting trike can corner faster than an empty Nihola, but who is qualified to say if that additional potential for speed makes any sense?  We are talking about a heavy machine either way, a machine designed primarily to carry your own kids.  My recollection of driving the Nihola with kids on board is that I could already drive dangerously fast (with a downhill slope to assist) and that I could hold the magic 25km/hr perfectly safely on flat ground.  It corners pretty well, and gets better with more load in front.

In case someone wandering the internet searching for opinions on this matter should find their way here, I want to state clearly that I think tilting trikes represent pointless complexity and have significant drawbacks, when compared to a one-piece design such as Nihola.  (Yes I know, these words will vanish into the vast vortex of the internet, where they shall be entirely irrelevant in the face of social trends.)  I must say I have never ridden a tilting trike.  I have heard from my colleague doing his shopping that the tilting hardware can make you suffer in difficult situations, and I certainly believe that.  I specifically like the feature of the Nihola that it is one piece and no nonsense, its good for climbing curbs, parking crooked on the roadside, starting again, climbing steep hills, and generally doing whatever is asked without a fuss.  I note the high load floors of the tilters, and I look at the additional moving parts, to me this all screams of a solution that is worse than the problem it was intended to address.

Now, I'm not just someone wedded to one particular manufacturer of trikes.  (Though my particular brand of choice does stand out.)  I saw this the other day in Oslo, looks like a fat-tire, no-tilt, disc brake, proper-steering trike.  Seems to be made in Asia, and sold as CargoKid in Denmark.  Comes only with electric assist, and I wonder if those tires can possibly be sufficiently durable.  Quite interesting, I would give it considerable thought if I was in the market.

its a CargoKid product, not a Nihola

I've been spending some time today catching up on the state of things, and I got reading in depth about the Swedish maker Livelo, which was openly inspired by Nihola.  I like a lot of their choices, although I would hesitate to choose a bike/trike that is too optimized for child transport, it should also work after the kids grow up, after all.  I could make a similar complaint about the CargoKid trike above.  My trikes have certainly gotten some paint damage from transporting awkward items such as wood and other bikes, don't imagine that would go well on fabric.

a picture grabbed from the Livelo page