Today was not a very good day, but...
I took Ernie's new Suede Coasting bike for a quarter mile test ride.
It is amazing. It is bone stock; have yet to fit the reflectors and ding-bell, supplied.
It WORKS right out of the box. Those images show how simple it is to put together.
You need only a ten mm and a six mm of Allen wrenches and a thin-ish 15mm open end,
to spin and snug-on the pedals, which are the standard left-thread, right thread stem-type,
marke "L" and "R" for the respective sides of the bike,,,,just like they did in 1900.
The documentation is all there in the box: including
the official Shimano set-up directions for their Coasting System's adjustments.
My two Limes, with the same system: neither one "worked" out of the box;
they both needed considerable fiddlingwith the two or three vital, basic adjustments.
GIANT gets the nod for this bike. It WORKED just right, upon the first ride.
It is not anything "noisy" as you hear in the horrible USA Shimano sales blurb video of the previous page.
Click here, please, to hear a terrible, truly dis-informational,
terribly mic'd sales presentation?
Laugh at the human comedy of it all?
~~~
serious again now:
IT IS A MAGNETO, Shimano people; not a "dynamo". Japanese engineers can be forgiven for teminology errors.
USA product managers cannot be forgiven for plain, dumb, parroting :| of incorrect terms.
MAGNETO. NO brushes, no wear-out. NOT "DC", but alternating current. NO moving parts,
but for the magnet-lined I.D. of the front hub, which also bears the nutted-on spokes.
And, Mr. Matt, the shifter is not a "bell crank"; although a bell crank
is a small part, mechanical translator,
graphically illustrative of how the Coasting system shifts. The other end of the cable, pulling that little bell crank,
is in the box which you showed, opened up. It winds a partial turn on the white, plastic pulley wheel.
Snick, snick, snick.
With thirty PSI in its tires, oh, how easy it cruises and snicks through the three gears.
Yet, I have not checked the SUEDE's Shimano Coaster mechanism for adjustments, at all.
It's just fine, as it left GIANT's quality control final checkpoint.
But, so sadly, Trek failed that departmental operation. I have TWO Limes to prove that neither would shift =at all=,
as supplied. No excuses can be accepted for such sloppiness as leaving the pot set at "N", at the factory, which means
NO SHIFTING. Don't leave your COASTING bike set at "N" (little hole, slot inside, of the "brainy box", as I pet-named it.
What a bargain this quality Giant Coasting bike is! Again: on sale locally from the authorized dealer,
and I chose to take mine IN THE BOX, put it together myself, right...no scuffs, no scratches, no dust on it.
And the demo bike there was marked, SALE $329.95 (plus sales tax). We paid $340, in all, for the boxed bike;
MACK CYCLE would have assembled it for me, and solicited to do so. I said, thanks but, I would really like to DIMS.
LIME wins on "looks" dept. in my opinion.
SUEDE wins on "it works out of the box, probably."
The demo Suede at Mack Cycle was not so lucky: it does not shift; it's in second gear, always.
So, =that= example needs some very simple DIY adjustments.
---rant space:
Advice: Get one of these for cheap while they last.
You will be delighted. It is a city bike, not a mountain bike.
Fit it with fenders if you are ever to splash through puddles.
I don't get it with guys and ebike and road bikes and NO FENDERS.
DUCK it all! You ride only on bone-dry days? You never hit a damp section of road?
YOU don't care about the Skunk Stripe? YOU don't care about the massive amounts of GRIT
thrown by the front wheel, right into your chain, to wear out, ten times faster, your al-u-min-e-um
front chainrings (stupid metal for that purpose!).
BLACK planet bike fenders are nearly invisible and not girly and if you KWYADAWYADI, they need no "zip ties"
and they don't make even a slight rattle, ever, and they weight about as much as a half of a bottle of water.
FENDERS are a bike necessity. I see guys on fenderless bikes and consider them to be "sunday lycras" or... NANCY BOYS.
Sheesh, but I do digress and rant at times. Forgive me? And you with ebikes, throwing all that mud and crud up into the bottom
of your battery bag, into your various connectors....it just goes on and..
I'll SHOW you how the LIME looks in daylight with DULLED-down plastic fenders: you can't hardly see 'em.
GLOSSY fenders glare and show dirt and look foo-foo. Rub 'em flat with a Scotchbrite pad and soapy water, off the bike?
_______end rant____________
__________________________________________________
COASTING BIKES, cruiser bikes, fixie and singlespeed bikes:
they really are FUN bikes to ride if you don't have to deal with long hills of any great note.
I love my LIME....
For some reason, just luck of the draw, Ernie's SUEDE, even out of the box,
runs even more quietly than the LIME: there is always a slight clickedy-click of from these Shimano
three speed rear hub transmissions, whether coasting or being pedaled. The noise is hardly a noise,
but just a quiet clicking like you derailleur guys are used to hearing when you coast.
I'll try to get an image up soon of the finished bike.
I'll try to make a video of Ernie riding the bike.
I quizzed him (he's very camera and "ego" shy, not one for YouTube show-and-share).
"Can I at least tell the folks about your biking history?"
"OK. The last time I rode any kind of bike at all, would have been 1948, at the latest.
It was my older brother's bike; he had gone off to college by then, and his late-thirties
Columbia Silver Streak was idle. But I could and did ride it once in a while, just around the neighborhood."
"So you rode that bike, of Howard's, say, pre-War?"
"Oh yeah.
But it was not used very much. I never rode the bike to school;
I walked the two miles. Columbia was made right there in Hartfort, Ct"
(Ern's home town).
Howard had little interest in the bike; it saw little use.
"What else do you recall of that bike, Ern?"
"Well, it was a cruiser, steel, heavy, balloon tires, and...
it had these oil cups, flip-caps, and the one I most recall was on the coaster hub,
you'd oil it once in a while with a heavy oil. The bike never broke down or got any flats,
but, again, we did not ride it all that much."
Why didn't you keep the bike, Ernie? You never throw anything away, practically.
"I was going off to University (Miami), and dad was selling his '28 Packard sedan to the local garage man.
The man cut off the back of the body and converted the perfect-running, strong old Packard to a tow truck.
I asked my dad to send Howard's (unwanted then) bike down to me, here in Miami.
Dad said, "Sorry, Ernie...it would cost too much ship to be worth it. I'm giving to the garage man, along with the Packard.
-----
So, when you see in a few days, I hope, Ernie on his Suede,
it will be a round and round in this courtyard, and it may be a silent movie,
and you will see an older man, but I will meld-in a picture of him, as he looked
in, say, 1939 or 1948. Back in the saddle again...
"Did you ever wear "knee pants"?
"OH, yes! Knickers, we called them (short for "knickerbocker", UK dudes)."
"My very favorite pair were of thick, ribbed, corduroy, and they rubbed at the knees,
making
a noise that boys like, but mothers,
don't."
Francis said, "Ernie! That corduroy noise is annoying! Space your legs apart when you walk by?"
"I can't help it, Mom." (He could, but
he liked to rub his knees together as he passed by Frances, just to...you know...
just to beat the band. 
Just to annoy Mother, just a bit. :wink:
Here is that old, deteriorated video, of a silent home movie film, of myself and ERNIE,
as he looked fully 25 years ago, when he was younger than I am, myself.
It's only a few seconds of horsing around. He looks not so young, nor well.
Well, you are seeing there a man who has just survived near-fatal cancer treatment.
Ninety percent of those who had his kind of cancer (hystiocytic (sp) lymphoma), DIE.
He survived, and has remained cancer free to this very day.
Sample of what was,
[youtube]_fDxAThIrkg[/youtube]
reid narrates this horrible old fail-bread system.
same couple, same home, so many, many years ago.
And soon, you'll perhaps see him, and the same home and all,
only this time it will be his first bike ride in fully sixty one years,
and this time I will be doing all the camera work.
ADDENDUM: Miami is one of the biking-est places in the world, owing to the climate,
and owing to the fact that it is the poorest-per-capita city in the USA:
greatest contrast, too, between mega rich, and super poor. These extremes have one thing in common:
both tend to ride on fenderless bikes, of $50 value, to over $10k cost. The rich guys, mostly fat, wanna-be Lances,
will not have fenders on their fair weather bikes, which see perhaps, a few hundred miles before Owner keels of heart failure.
On the other end, are the very poor and relatively ignorant bike-only riders. They have no car.
Almost none of the bikes I see in poor miami, have any fenders. This, due to the cost and to the =anti fender=
mentality of bike makers and sellers and users, who think "I'm a guy! And fenders of any sort make a bike look less manly."
But tell you what, when it rains hard again, like it did yesterday, I'm going out into a warm Florida downpour, on the LIME,
no poncho (I will love to get soaked with warm rain water. But I won't be "hurting" the bike, and NO stripe on my back and NO
mud thrown into the chain. I'll return, lightly hose the bike in the rain, put it in the garage. And then force-dry it with a Cyclone fan,
and then lightly wipe with microfiber or Bounty brand, moistened towels, and GoJo non-pumice, if there's any road grime.
And though a bike ridden in the rain will suffer eventually, hell, I only expect to use this LIME for a few years at most:
One of the other of us is sure to die ere long, so what the duck? GET OUT and get into the rain (Florida, not Idaho in September)
----
edit history: there are too many typos and formatting errors, which, even now at fifth revision (no one has applied yet, so no "last edited by, appears. It is like this: dyslexic and failing eyesight (cataract and the usual post-forty "presbyopia"=old eyes, PLUS now, since the beating, when tired, as I am now, the right eye sees a horizontal (horizontal to left eye), the right eye sees that horizontal line at anything from sloping ten to forty degrees. this is hard for the brain to re-sort. I make many typing errors,
so would you, I guess? try smearing Vaseline on a pair of semi-dark glasses, and you get an idea of what I deal with, aside from dyslexia.
But! I kin rite gud! An' I NEBBER digress, no sirs! :lol: :lol: 
