💾 Archived View for zaibatsu.circumlunar.space › ~solderpunk › phlog › bike-thoughts-and-projects.tx… captured on 2020-09-24 at 01:49:37.
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Bike thoughs and projects ------------------------- I read that Jynx (recent master of the tabletop RPG!) is thinkig of getting a bicycle[1], based in part on the influence of SparcIPX. This is great! SparcIPX also bears some small part of blame for my own recent bike madness, after he helped me through a minor adjustment to the front brake on my main bike. I find bicycles tremendously attractive, conceptually. The degree to which they expand your personal mobility, and increase the physical area in which you can realistically live your life, is absolutely incredible when weighed against their cost, mechanical complexity and maintenance requirements. This alone makes them an attractive alternative to cars for me, even independent of the environmental and health reasons to prefer them (which are also extensive). I think you'd have to be mad not to have this preference, at least in principle. Despite this, I've hadn't owned a bike or ridden as an adult until I movied here, and the reason is very simple. Unless you live somewhere with both the infrastructure for and the culture of cycling as a perfectly ordinary every-day method of transportation, riding can easily be such a dangerous experience that all the above benefits fade into irrelevance. You couldn't pay me to cycle around Auckland, NZ. I consider myself very lucky to live somewhere where cycling is so easy and effortless. For the past few weeks I've been spending a lot of time reading up on bikes, their history, a lot of mechanical and maintenance stuff, and even though I've become quite an enthusiast I've also realised that I am relatively abnormal in my feelings and it makes me reluctant to self-identify as a bike nut. The cycling industry is driven by, and cycling forums etc. are inhabited by, people who in my opinion (they, and you, are of course entitled to your own) have such a warped view of cycling that they destroy a lot of the beauty in it. I'm talking about people who think it is an excellent idea to make a bike 10 times more expensive, 10 times more fragile and 10 times harder to work on in order to make it 10% lighter or 10% more aerodynamic. These people have very strange ideas. They will happily make their bikes super expensive, so that they are very appealing to thieves, and make their bikes *easier* to steal (by putting "quick release" fittings, designed and useful primarily for racers, not everyday people, on everything), thus forcing themselves to put big expensive heavy locks on them, which partially negate the weight savings they paid so much for in the first place. My ideal bike is as close as practical to indestructable, and can be maintained entirely or almost entirely at home by any vaguely technically minded person, using generic tools which are not bike-specific and can be used for other things around the home as well. It should be as inexpensive as possible in light of the above requirements. Rider safety and rider comfort take priority over weight and aerodynamics. Afterall, even the heaviest bike that hasn't been deliberately weightened is going to weight less than half what I do. I am especially inspired by old English 3-speed roadsters[2] and by China's Flying Pigeon[3] (literally the most numerously manufactured vehicle on the planet). I don't, for the record, have anything against people who actually race bicycles, or realistically aspire to race bicycles. That's a perfectly fine thing to do. Rather, I am confused and frustrated that the "thought leaders" and market-steering enthusiasts in many parts of the world forcefully embrace bicycle designs and riding techniques developed for racing that make no sense in any other context, and look with scorn on anything that is more in the direction I outlined above, even though something like a Flying Pigeon is tremendously more affordable and useful for 99% of the human race. The housing complex I live in recently had a big clean-out of the communal bike/tool shed, which revealed a number of seemingly abandoned bikes. These were displayed prominently in the shared courtyard for a week for owners to claim, after which people were allowed to help themselves, with the leftovers taken away to be recycled. Since I'm keen to get as much hands on experience mucking around with bikes as possible, I salvaged a bike, which I suspect the previous owner had abandoned after crashing, at fairly low speed, into something head-on. The front wheel had broken spokes and a badly deformed rim, but everything else seems in working order, although the rear wheel is badly out of true, but I think it can be salvaged. It's an old Finnish bike, made by a company started in this very town and, I think, it's probably old enough (60s?) that it was actually made here, too. It's very much made in the "heavy, bomb-proof, easy to work on" mentality I outlined above, and I'm pretty enthused about putting some much-needed love and care into it when I get back from my holiday. Everything on it is steel, and it has one-piece (or "Ashtabula" cranks). I don't think there is anything on it which couldn't be taken apart with a screwdriver and a shifting spanner. It's a single speed bike, with a freewheel and coaster brake hub made by a Czech company using tooling bought from the old German company Fitchel and Sachs, after the latter was bought out by Taiwanese SRAM. A lot of the older Finnish and Swedish made bikes people ride around here have Sachs hubs, and this bike obviously is older than the SRAM buyout, so possibly the hub has been replaced. The bike has obviously had some rough and ready work done on it in the past (e.g. the kick stand attachment appears to have been cut off another bike and welded to the frame), so this wouldn't surprise me. A lot of people would think the bike not worth any time or effort, but bugger that. I can get a used replacement steel front wheel for it cheaply and easily. I'll sand the frame right back, remove as much rust as possible, paint it all black, then replace and re-grease all the bearings, and put a nice basekt on it (it already has a beefy rear rack). It will be a great "beater" bike, totally uninteresting to theives and plenty rugged enough to be ridden over cobbled streets and in bad weather. It will never set any speed records, but it will do a perfectly fine job of carrying me and my stuff to and from the grocery stores, library and garden allotment. Not that my current bike (a later product of the same company) doesn't, but it will be nice to have something that has a little bit of me in it, and also that looks a little more like a traditional roadster. I am also working on another bike project, building one from scratch out of random parts found at the local bike co-op. This will be something a little bit sportier and sexier than the "Finnish Pigeon" above, although I'm still striving to make it a practical bike. I found a nice (and large!) Peugeot road frame (I have had no luck identifying the model, despite many literal hours of obsessive searching), made of lugged steel, and also a pair of the legendary Mafac Racer[4] center-pull cantilever brakes. One of my neighbours, who is also a bit of a bike tinkerer, added a box of unwanted parts to the pile of abandoned stuff that came from the shed clean out, and from there I grabbed a nice set of aluminium mustache handlebars. I'm going to make a slightly nimbler single speed machine out of all this, for taking longer "just for fun" rides in good weather. My inspiration here is coming from French randonneur bikes and from the Bridgestone XO-1. I may eventually get photos of both bikes up on Gopher. [1] gopher://gopher.leveck.us:70/1/phlog/20180528a.post [2] https://sheldonbrown.com/english-3.html [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Pigeon [4] http://www.cyclingweekly.com/news/latest-news/icons-of-cycling-mafac-racer-brakes-206323