Doubtless we are all at it.. scanning Ebay listings for an appropriate old bike to turn into a fixie oozing street cred, because no – you didn’t just buy it off the shelf, but you agonised about getting the frame restored, picking up a bottom bracket that fits, some cranks and getting the chainline sorted, fitting a quill stem rather than those oh so modern Ahead ones.. well here’s some bits to help you on your way:

What kinds of frames are good for a fixie conversion?

Here it is important to make one distinction between ‘fixed’ and ‘single-speed’ – if you purely are after one gear as opposed to tons, your options are more extensive – but if you are prepared to take the plunge and pedal from the moment you get on the saddle and kiss goodbye to freewheeling, then fixie is the way to go.

Needless to say, riding fixed takes some getting used to as all of us have at some point got into the habit of resting our legs a little by free-wheeling, tackling bumps by standing up on the pedals a little, being all aero going down the hill (again with our pedals horisontally) or indeed going around corners and making sure to lift the pedal on the side of the corner we are turning into to 12 o’clock so we avoid the embarrassment of our pedals scratching the ground. On a fixie you of course can’t do any of that and there will be a few times when we are reminded of that when first setting out on a ride.

Funly enough I think you get used to it quicker than you think though and next time you get on a normal roadbike you will find yourself pedalling incessantly wherever you go and you literally have to remind yourself that you can relax..

Back to frames though – so if you just want one gear and the ability to back pedal or coast there are plenty of options out there – just take any modern road or mountain bike and use spacer kits to fit a single gear in place of your cassette, choose one of your chainrings (The innermost often is easiest), but again will depend on your chainline and there you are.. you can free wheel and you have a gear, simple as that. Remember that for this set-up you will need a rear brake too as front brake alone won’t provide enough stopping power.

If you are ready for the full monty – going fixed, you need to find yourself either a track frame which has the characteristic horisontal rear drop-outs or one of the older racing bike frames that have the more diagonal drop-outs. You’ll need this to be able to move your rear wheel in the drop-outs to make sure the chain is tight enough and won’t fall off the chainring while you are pedalling. This is super-scary and has happened to me a few times and I really don’t recommend it! You can part with the rear brake as you can use your legs to slow down the rotation of the cranks in order to slow down the bike, but to be road-legal and safe you will still need a front brake as that is the most effective in shaving off your top speed quickly and also helping you cope with stop-start town traffic.

With track frames you need to keep an eye on what the forks are like – track bikes don’t have any brake mounts at all, nor bottle mounts etc and this includes track-specific forks so if you want to take a track bike on the road, you’ll still need either road-forks, forks that have been drilled to accept a brake or if they haven’t and you have thin bladed steel forks, you can use an innovative system of clamping the breaks onto the fork legs themselves.. Hub Jub (scroll to the bottom of the page) will sort you out with these.

This shouldn’t be a problem though as depending on the steerer size you can swap forks around pretty easily and of course with the more vintage race bikes they will have brake mounts too.

What about sizing?

You should definitely know your sizing before you bid on a bike for yourself. If you know this, try to go for something as similar to your regular set-up as possible. You can fix discrepancies of a centimetre or some millimetres with different stem lengths and the fore/aft position of the saddle, but a massively too big or too small a frame is like signing yourself up for trouble. Big frames mean you have less room for adjusting seatpost height, your stem will have to be shorter and the shorter the stem the twitchier the bike is to steer. Besides when we talk Ahead stems you will be hard pushed to find something shorter than 80mm anyway. Too small a frame means you will either have to go for very long stems 130mm and beyond, but that means you will need an Aheadset and quill stems often won’t be able to help.. also you could be setting yourself up for some knee trouble if your knees aren’t in line with the centre of your pedal in the three o’clock position.. which can happen with both too big a frame and too small a frame.

What to do if you don’t know your size – go to a bike shop and ride some bikes! Some will have a measuring system and can get pretty scientific about it, but even trying some frames in different sizes will give you a steer in a general direction. Framesizes are these days the measurement of the top tube centre to centre and comparing your measurements with the sizes of the bikes listed for sale on Ebay should give you a rough steer. Do bear in mind that road frames in general are lower to the ground than track frames so if your road frame size is 55cm, for an old school track frame you should be looking at something like 53-54cm.. here the big thing is not the reach to the handlebars, but the fact that the geometries are taller (i.e the seat tube tends to be a little longer on a track frame) and getting too big a frame will not give you a lot of clearance from the top tube or room to adjust the seatpost height!

Other things I should bear in mind?

That leaves us with the issue of bottom brackets – these can be a potential minefield as they will largely determine what kinds of cranks you can use and thus, your chainring and chainline too. Good thing would be to go for bikes where the seller specifies the type and thread of bottom bracket (English or Italian) and in general as much detail about the bike as possible. This will all help you when scavenging for components later and of course on some frames the bottom bracket will be already fitted, which can be a mixed blessing depending on its’ state.

The rest? Well – pretty straight forward really – a matter of gathering the components you need and getting down to wielding some spanners. You’ll need some bike specific tools like a chainwhip, set of hex keys, an adjustable spanner or some 15mm and 17mm spanners, bottom bracket tool and crank extractors depending on type, some cable cutters and so on. Nothing too daunting and plenty of advice available on line so go for it – give it a try!