You can watch a video of the conversion here: https://youtu.be/IjJAGbwNdYs
I owed a beautiful Tout Terrain Silkroad touring bike. The ultimate bike for expedition touring. The spec of the bicycle:
- Frame stainless steel drops outs and integrated stainless steel rack. Frame designed for 26″ wheels. Also had steering stops to stop the bars swinging around when on the side stand. The forks used the SON self connecting fitting so your dynamo hung is not plugged in but makes a connection direct with the fork. The frame can take 2.3″ off road tyres with fenders!!
- The rear hub was the Rohloff and the front hub was a SON dynamo with the self connecting fitting as described above.
- Brakes Shimano XT
- Crank was a Middleburn
- Chain, spiders cogs front and back optimised for Rohloff.
- Lights front and back were SON
- Grips some really nice Ergon with bar ends. GP3
It is an amazing bike with complete reliability but to make it even better I wanted to change the chain for a belt. I had to go on to the Gates website to figure out what size belt I would need. It is an easy task, you put in the length of the chain stay and the ratio of gears you want and it tells you your cog sizes and belt length. The website link is here. http://gatescarbondrive.com.
The only things I need to buy for the conversion were:
- Belt
- Rear cog
- Front cog
- Spider for the Middleburn crank to ensure best belt line
- Snubber
The snubber is recommended by Rohloff but you see lots of professionally built bikes that don’t bother using them. It is a little wheel about 10mm big that sits near the belt. You must not let it touch the belt or you will have undue belt wear. It just sits 1mm away in case the belt tries to come off. With the new centre track belts from Gates that is very unlikely, but I fitted it anyway as I like to be proper.
If you want to see a video of the conversion please watch the video below.