Surly Bikes
What’s new? Nothing? Oh cool. Yeah, the weather is CRAZY, huh? Well, what did you think of that Chicken Parmesan? That was meatloaf? Oh. Dear God. I think I’m going to be sick.
But wait, remember Meatloaf? I remember seeing the cover art from Bat Out of Hell and immediately buying it, believing that any tape with a naked warrior jumping a motorcycle out of hell would easily put my baddest tapes to shame. But when I got home and played it for the first time, I gotta say, I just don’t think many 12-year-olds are prepared to deal with that kind of disappointment. I’m not saying it was a bad album, I’m saying 80’s metal was all I really understood or cared about at that time, and what was that, a piano? The tape was thrown away out of disgust. Come to think of it, you might be the first person I’m telling about that whole episode. Huh.
Anyways… I’m glad you showed up because I have something to tell you: We updated the Straggler dropout!
We updated the Straggler dropout because we had a small rash of people that ripped the back of their dropout off when they caught their rear derailleur on a trail feature, or when they tried to re-align their derailleur hanger after catching their derailleur on a trail feature.
This was a small group of people, but when this happened these friends of ours had to walk home, and that shit is not cool.
To keep this from happening, we removed the drive-side rear axle position screw. This is a running change to the Straggler, meaning the newest order of them have this change. It’s a small change, but we thought it best to make sure we’re on all the same page.
Moving forward from NOW, all Stragglers will only have one threaded hole for axle position per dropout:
Rear on the non-drive side to combat brake jack
Forward on the drive side to combat wheel slip under power
Thanks for listening, may this riff help those miles melt into oblivion: