My commuter bike is a Brompton P-Line, which I’ve done various customizations on, and I’ve done a couple videos on this topic. This post is about upgrading the wheels on it, and why you should avoid OmniWheels. 😭
The #1 best Brompton upgrade I’ve done is the GoRack. One of my more popular videos is this one:
The GoRack is really a game changer in terms of stability and easy of use. The wide base is amazing, and extremely easy to roll around. The wide strong axle with the roller blade wheels makes it a very very smooth experience. I have tried ‘easy wheels’ and extender arms. They don’t come close.
The GoRack comes with a swivel office chair wheel on the rear. The swivel part and the wheels themselves make a bit of noise on bad roads. And I live on a VERY bumpy road. So I got to thinking, can I find a better option than the stock wheel?
The quick answer is yes, I got these off ebay and modified one by cutting off the guard. Here is one unmodified:
These wheels are wider than the stock wheels, so that meant that when they turned they would hit the rack. By removing the guard, I was able to stop it from doing so. Here are my modifications:
In terms of noise, these are maybe slightly quieter as the wheels themselves don’t rattle. They have built-in bearing and don’t shimmy like the original GoRack wheels. But not by much. They are SILKY smooth in use tho, so this is an upgrade for sure and I will be using them moving forward.
Here they are in action:
But the rattling still remained, and I isolated the sound to the swivel mechanism, which had some play in it so it could, y’know, swivel.
So I needed a way to swivel the wheel but without any play that would cause rattle. I thought about ways of doing this, possibly using thrust bearings or other parts. But ultimately the size of the wheel and size constraints put this outside of my amateur engineering skills.
But hey aren’t those weird wheels that are omni-directional? Then I wouldn’t even *need* a swivel, it will just turn as needed! That’s when I picked up one of these and printed a caster for it:
Thankfully it was very straightforward to print a caster, because, well, I am glad that I spent as little time as I did on it. The first test drive was not very good:
The most concerning thing was the very very obvious plastic marks on my floor:
Thankfully they cleaned up fine. But I don’t want to take this in any store and mark up someone else’s floor!
And if I was looking for a smooth, quiet rolling experience, this was pretty much the opposite. Rolling the bike around was a loud, clacking experience.
Conclusions
I think there is probably a follow up to this I could do to build swivel caster with a thrust bearing and use a couple of those rollerblade wheels to remove the rattle. But I think changing out the wheels was good enough for me. This removed one of the two sources of noice. The only drawback I would say is they roll *too* well. The bike will roll much much easier, and if you are on an even slightly slanted surface, it will wander. But overall its definitely an upgrade.
I would avoid the omni wheels. Its a novel concept, but that’s about it. Even if they didn’t mark up my floors, I wouldn’t use them because they don’t really roll freely.