Electronic transmission

If you Google the bicycles the pro’s rode pre 1980’s, I think you’ll agree with me that the cables running around the brake levers of the bicycles in this era reminds you of the VECO lines- obtrusive and ugly, but a necessity in life.

Bicycles started from a one speed machine to a 33-speed human powered vehicle. In the early days of multi-speed bicycles, a cyclist had to stop, dismount and change the gear manually. Fast forward a few years, shifting gears was done mechanically with a lever attached on both ends of the handlebar and later the bicycle frame. The lever is connected to the derailleurs via cable wire and shifting to any gear combination you want was easy.

Of course, people dream, and when they can’t make dreams work, they make stories and make movies out of them. Remember the 1982 film, “Firefox”? In that flick, Clint Eastwood stole a Soviet fighter jet that was “thought controlled”. Bicycle transmission is still a long way from being thought controlled but there is currently a project funded partially by Toyota that addresses this concept. And they’re not telling us when it’ll be available. Or it works like it’s supposed to.

But what is available right now, and it’s a commercial and technical success, is an electronic gear shifting made by Shimano called the Di2. An electronic gear-shifting system is a method of changing gears on a bicycle with electronic switches instead of levers. The switches are connected by wires or wirelessly to a battery source and to a small electric motor that drives the derailleur, switching the chain from cog to cog.

Shimano wasn’t the first to introduce EGS. In 1992, a French company Mavic introduced their EGS called, “Zap”, but it never took off. For the next 8 years, two more electronic gear shifting were introduced that flopped.Campagnolo, the “Apple” of the bicycle components, had been working on a prototype since the early 90’s but couldn’t make it reliable for commercial use. Then in 2009, rival Shimano released its own version with great success. Campagnolo, on the other hand, will be releasing their own EGS early next year.

These gadgets don’t come cheap. The price is double that of its mechanical version but we know prices will ultimately come down in the future. In the meantime, we keep dreaming of having a “Firefox” technology in our lifetime.

Finally, congratulations to Nino Surban for getting the bronze medal in the MTB XC event in the 2011 Southeast Asian Games in Indonesia…..Yesterday was a beautiful day to ride- very little traffic and cloudy skies that didn’t threaten to rain. I went to Magdugo, Toledo with lung specialist Dr. Paul John So. Last month when I rode there, the cemented roads, overlaid with asphalt, was clearly deteriorating. Today, the roads are newly overlaid with thick asphalt….There were 3 different crashes at the Mandaue Rekla yesterday- Igi Maximo, Dandan Climaco, Bryan Colina and Jaybop Pagnanawon- all were involved in the mess. Fortunately, it wasn’t serious except for the broken frameset of Jaybop Pagnanawon

RACE RESULTS: CAT C MANDAUE REKLA CRIT: 1- BOY PAGNANAWON, 2- RICK ERMITANIO, 3- JIJI SIMBAJON, 4- DANNY SIMBAJON, 5- CELSO NEBRIA