Best drivechain for beach, seaside, coastal, winter, generally salty environment?

Question

I live by the beach. Although I guess this is a similar problem to those who ride on salt-laden winter roads...

It does take a while but, as evidenced by the endless bikes abandoned around the neighbourhood, eventually:

• the chain seizes (individual links seize and jam in the works), and/or
• the derailleur seizes (the spring stops pulling the mechanism left/right), and/or
• the cables seize (they do not move through the housing anymore), and/or
• the...?

Actually, that's about it. Just those three things must be the root cause of 90% of the bikes abandoned in the neighbourhood; usually at, maximum, 5 years old. Sometimes, but rarely, the bottom bracket seizes, or the brakes jam, or the pedals jam, or the lock (if locked up) itself jams, but those three are the most commonly observed causes for end-of-life (at which point a malicious drunkard comes along and kicks the back wheel into a not-round-or-flat shape).

So, question, what can we do to mitigate these problems and keep them on the road a little longer?

Obviously, completely replacing those three parts every 3-4 years (plus the chainring), is a start but, advanced question, what materials can we replace them with to reduce the maintenance further.

Unfortunately, because the life-expectancy is so poor, and enthusiasm to be careless about locking it up so keen, price is a major concern. Is there such a thing as an all-plastic derailleur? Would the price of hydraulic lines really be worth the risk of theft? A hub and belt drive is perhaps ideal, but so expensive!

Just your two cents of insight please?

Answer 1

As someone who lives on a peninsular and services bikes, I'll throw in my oar, though there's probably overlap with other answers.

My own bike has a Sturmey Archer 3-speed hub, gates belt drive and hydraulic disc brakes. The brake pads have stainless steel backs. All the bolts have been replaced with stainless steel equivalents where possible and the gear cable is stainless. The exposed bit of chain for the hub gear shift is covered in wax. I consider this bike "zero maintenance" as the brakes are self-adjusting and the belt requires no lubrication. It gets cleaned down with detergent a brush and a hose every so often. Headset and bottom bracket were packed with grease on assembly, and in an ideal world I would inspect these annually. If I had deeper pockets, I would have bought more gears in the hub but the 3-speed is very cheap and works well.

For derailleur gear bikes, it's sufficient to use stainless steel inner brake and gear cables, and good quality outer casing. The chain and the pivots of the derailleurs need to have lubrication applied regularly. Certain types of shimano rapid fire shifter will seize up due to salt corrosion if not used, but if the bike is used everyday, its chances of survival are good: it should wear out before corrosion stops moving parts from moving. Cosmetics will suffer pretty rapidly though. Use plenty of grease when assembling the bike.

You talk about a plastic derailleur and of course they exist. The S-Ride ones are very plastic and older Sachs and SRAM designs. Are they more durable? a drop of oil in the right place every now and again does alot of good.

When you talk about the cost of the belt drive and hydraulic lines etc, hydraulic brakes are pretty cheap now, cheaper than good quality mechanical brakes, and have better performance. It doesn't make your bike significantly more attractive to theives. The belt drive is a big cost and requires a compatible frame but has the benefit of thousands and thousands of miles of cycling with very little maintenance effort on your part. In a salty environment with an apathetic maintenance routine, you could be changing a chain after every winter or more often, and the cost accumulates past the level of a belt. But you can be more careful and look after your chain if you have the time.

---

Other interesting sea damage I've witnessed but not mentioned:

• aluminium spoke nipples dissolving to white powder within a year or two (expensive race wheels used along a seafront road)
• aluminium frame tubing expanded and split along a chainstay (over one winter outside through the storms, cheap alu hybrid bike)
• cracked aluminium headtube from expasion due to corrosion between headset cups and frame (longer term damage)
• normal seized brake pivots, stuck headset spacers, seat posts and quill stems

Answer 2

Get yourself a good quality Dutch bike, with internal hub gear, a fully enclosed chain and good quality other components. That way the chain and gears are not open to the salt and the rest should withstand most of what the weather can throw at it.

Keep the bike clean and polished but no need to attend to it daily. I live within 5 km, 2.65 mile, from the sea and most of the bikes here do not have any trouble at all. That are basically mid to good quality Dutch bikes. The very expensive sporty bikes and the very cheap bikes do not fare as well.

Answer 3

Some brake possibilities:

• Use stainless steel cables for brakes and gears. Most modern cables are stainless steel, but older BSO bikes probably aren't.
• Use full-length runs of outer. This minimises the number of places where salt can get to the inner cables.
• To protect the head-end, consider bar-mitts or pogies that will encase your levers and warm your hands. There's not much you can do at the caliper end though.

Other:

• Wash your bike after every salty ride - don't put it away wet with saline water. That could be as simple as running a garden hose over the lower parts.
• Dry your bike - Simply put is to towel down with an old cloth. My bikes live in a garage with a humidity control, so I can put wet gloves up one evening and they're dry to ride again next morning.
• Chain care - you will need to clean and lubricate your chain more often. A "wet lube" would be better than a dry lube, but I personally wax my chains and while snow/salt isn't a thing here, the waxed chain survives winter much better. I got 3000 km off a normal 10 speed chain on a road bike, and even more off a 7 speed bike.
• Full mudguards/fenders. They do wonders for redirecting water/slush from the wheels away from the bottom bracket and front chainring area. Keeping your backside cleaner is a happy by-product. The rear guard should be slightly over half the circumference of the rear wheel, and the front should be about 110~120 degrees of arc.
  Guards will also protect brake calipers to some extent.
• Pedals - again simply wash them with the bike.

Potentially you could use hydraulic brakes, probably disk rather than rim based. However disk brakes have rotors which will likely rust as the outer surface slowly wears away removing any protective layer.

Maybe this is one of the situations where a true fixed speed bike makes sense, but relying on the wheel's friction to stop you in the snow feels like a bad idea. Not recommended.

If money is available, consider an Internally Geared Hub instead of a derailleur. A 3/5/7/8 speed IGH will provide gears without exposing the mechanism to the elements. However they also don't work well with multiple chainrings, so figure out a combination that works for you and do away with the front mech completely.
A follow-on is to go from chain to drive belt, but that means expense-most bike frames can't accept a drive belt setup because it means a cut through the right-side rear triangle.

After winter and the salt is gone, you should do a deep service on your bike, and repack the cup and cone wheel/BB bearings, or if they're cartridges then clean and check them. A marine-rated grease would make sense.
Flush out the freehub and pedal bearings and relube them, and check cables etc. If this is your winter bike, do this before storing it for the summer - don't let it rust up over the summer.

Answer 4

Kit:

I would take inspiration from the beach cruisers of decades ago. Although they are not that popular nowadays because "more gears = better" nonsense, they were mostly single-speeders with coaster brake for very sound reasons!

If your area has moderate/steep hills you can look at options with the Sturmey Archer 2 speed kick shift hub with coaster brake (2 gears and brake with zero cables).

If your area is mostly flat or with some gentle hills I would go single speed but crucially I would choose an MTB cassette hub with sealed bearings and with a single speed cog adapter instead of a traditional/BMX freewheel. The reason being, the cassette style hub will stand up a lot better to the salty environment. If you go for the BMX style freewheel you can view it as a consumable that will need to be changed every year or so depending on the usage.

The MTB cassette hub option would rule out the rear coaster brake though. But you could still run with only a front brake for less maintenance. Although some people might find the ride less safe without a rear brake (particularly in wet/icy conditions. But my answer to that would be that lowering your tire pressure to achieve a larger contact patch is much more important for safety in wet conditions than having a rear brake.

In any of these cases I would still recommend a front brake as essential. Never ride without a front brake (unless you are riding a pump track or some other niche use cases). Front brakes due to the short cable tend to be much more reliable in that sort of environment anyway, representing a negligible maintenance effort.

That said I wouldn't entirely rule out a belt driven bike. There are some options on the market now that aren't too expensive. Check this for example https://www.prioritybicycles.com/products/priorityclassic2

Maintenance:

The key here is to keep your bike inside (at least overnight). No bike will survive for long in that environment if kept outside at night.

Get a bicycle chain cleaner kit (one of those plastic contraptions with some brush rollers that you hold around the chain and spray some de-greaser in while turning the pedals). Keep this in a large dedicated rectangular plastic bucket. Every once in a while just put your bike over it and do a quick round of cleaning and leave it in the bucket for next time.

This will give you a hassle free way of keeping your chain clean.

Answer 5

I’d start with regular maintenance. Regularly clean the chain, lube it and wipe it down afterwards. Use dry lube or wax to attract less dust and sand. You can clean the derailleur with a garden hose and apply some penetrating oil afterwards. Silicone lubricant spray can help to extend the life of cables and housing.

For the shifter cables there are systems with continuous liner where dirt can only get in at the very end. If you had a lot of money you could get electronic shifting.

For the derailleur – if the reduced gear range is okay for you – you could remove/disable the front derailleur and only use the rear derailleur to reduce the amount of maintenance required.

I don’t think there are any derailleurs which are especially resistant to sand and corrosion. I’d go for cheaper (not the cheapest) 8 or 9 speed components from Shimano or SRAM because they should have solid quality while requiring less precision than modern 11 or even 12 speed systems.

Many bearings (e.g. cup and cone hub bearings) can be serviced or replaced.

Answer 6

Living in a similar environment, I gave up on trying to maintain the chain on my winter bikes many years ago. No matter what I did and how much effort I made, the chain would always end up rusting.

The best solution i have found is a singlespeed bike with a rustproof chain and a thick/heavy wet lube. No cleaning, rarely needing more lube, just ride and then put it in the shed. Total maintenance cost is 1 chain (~£20) per year.