What would be nice is setting up as much manufacturing as possible in Africa for making bikes designed for Africa.
Bike maintenance isn't a skill issue. It's an issue of specialised tools and hard to get spares. Talk to your own Grand parents. If they weren't rich they'd have had to fix their own bike, and they wouldn't have had Google helping them.
What would be different about a bike designed for Africa than one designed for anywhere else? What parts that require specialized tools should be redesigned to use standard tools?
I'm thinking that in the west we either have very cheap bikes that aren't really designed for long term use, and more expensive bikes tend to use fancier parts.
Off the top of my head. Steel frame, can be repaired / modified with any old welder. Designed so it can be taken apart with the minimum of generic tools. Standard bearings, brake blocks etc (probably brake blocks that you can shove some piece of old tyre in).
Front forks and the crank require special tools to remove. I assume the free wheel assembly would be the same. I don't know if it would be possible to modify these to be serviceable with basic tools, the point is an African could probably work out how to fix a bike, the issue would be affording tools and spares, and availability of those tools and spares.
> Off the top of my head. Steel frame, can be repaired / modified with any old welder. Designed so it can be taken apart with the minimum of generic tools. Standard bearings, brake blocks etc (probably brake blocks that you can shove some piece of old tyre in).
So basically just your average cheap crappy Halfords Bike-Shaped Object type "bike"?
Well you strip all the crap off, don't you? Just run the barest frame possible.
You still have the problem that the bits that you cannot just knock up out of old Morris Minor steering columns or AK47 barrels are the bits that break.
I know one person who has legitimately worn out a bike frame, in 40-something years of cycling, and it wasn't me. It was a guy who rode his bike about 50 miles *every single day* and rode from Edinburgh to Glasgow and back a couple of times a week. Eventually it started cracking around the welds.
You do know that it is possible to buy a durable, heavy duty steel bicycle that is not department store trash, right? We have hundreds of these were I work.
They're actually surprisingly inexpensive, for what they are. It does look like they're single-speed which limits them to nice big flat sites, but they look like they'd hold up well.
Have made a few suggestions above. Obviously I don't see Africa as a uniform continent, but extremes of dryness and humidity can be found in different parts, in some areas roads are bad and so on. Also good places for bike locks (which we all need), maybe water bottles, cargo features and lighting (since some roads will be unlit (again a general issue.)
Yeah, that sounds about right. I assume such bikes, parts and tools do exist. Can probably order it all on alibaba. I intend to investigate and do this in the coming years, but have to attend to other things first.
The buffalo bike is one that was specifically made for developing nations and the project prioritizes local assembly and repair, while the bike is designed to sacrifice weight and aerodynamics, instead offering heavier-duty parts like thicker rims, puncture-proof tires, high-capacity racks, etc. This bike has two chains to reduce the likelihood of a critical failure and an internal coaster brake hub which is more robust to the elements.
Your average low-cost bike isn't intended to be used in environments with rough terrain and high contaminant concentrations without regular maintenance, and especially older bikes with things like cup and cone bearings which are more susceptible to dirt getting in, thinner tires which puncture more easily, and nonstandard bits and pieces like derailleur hangers which predate the UDH standard.
Buffalo bicycles cost around $150 at least. That's frankly way too expensive to be a good bike for developing countries no matter how well suited it is for rough terrain.
The best bikes I saw were ones that a kid from a family could buy for maybe $20 in local currency and the repairability comes from the cheap cost - if something breaks down, you can find the replacement part from a spare bike that broke down months ago.
oh wow, yeah, $150 is far too expensive. Its unsurprising, given how flashy their site is and their like 100 employees - what are they all even doing, other than patting themselves on the back?!
The site shows all the telltale signs of self-important, low-impact NGO.
Some parts of Africa are similar to elsewhere, but obvious things would be parts that can deal with either extreme dryness or humidity (both problems in different parts of the continent), good suspension (for areas with bad roads), bright colours (for visibility on shared roads), integration of bike locks and easy self-repair (for people in more remote areas).
Bike maintenance isn't a skill issue. It's an issue of specialised tools and hard to get spares. Talk to your own Grand parents. If they weren't rich they'd have had to fix their own bike, and they wouldn't have had Google helping them.