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I am kind of burned out on writing more or less exclusively about my "big picture" thoughts on ideas at the intersection of computing technology and environmental sustainability. I'm still very much interested in and thinking about and reading about those issues, and rest assured you Shall Not Be Spared the future walls of text which will inevitably arise from this. But nobody wants to read that kind of stuff all the time. I don't even want to *write* that stuff all the time, writing exclusively in negative tones, beating dead horses. Here on the small internet I'm largely preaching to the choir anyway. I miss how much more casual and varied and uncontrived my writing used to be in "the good old days" (my phlog is over five years old now, I missed the anniversary once again). So I'm going to try to kick myself back into that groove for a bit. Excluding my upcoming ROOPHLOCH entry, which is going to talk mostly about how the post was made, I'm setting myself the goal to write three posts this year which have nothing to do with computers, nothing to do with the internet, and nothing to do with the terrifying realisation that the sun isn't going to die for another five billion years and even the greenest Utopian fantasy vision of future civilisation has no hope of lasting that long without running into some kind of problem.
So, here's the first of those three, a long overdue update on my "Franken-Peugeot" project bike. I wrote a little, probably close to two years ago now, about the kind of riding I was doing in Sweden in since my short-lived "Hi-ten Heroes" gemlog. But I haven't written anything about the bike *itself* since I stopped updating the project log I maintained in my gopherhole back when I was actually building the thing up. I guess a condensed form of the information in this post should end up in that project log in future, but for now I'll do a bit of long-form rambling here.
Franken-Peugeot gopherhole section
There haven't been any really substantial changes, rather just some refinements and accessorisations, driven mostly by practical demands arising from a shift in usage habits when I moved to Sweden. When I started this project out in Finland, I was lucky enough to live only a few hundred metres away from where I worked, so there was no point in riding to work and this bike was used exclusively for recreational riding. This meant that I never *had* to ride my bike when it was dark or wet and so for a long time I was able to get away with not worrying too much about certain practicalities like lighting or fenders. I had a crappy little AA-powered clamp-on headlight (nothing on the back) and also a plastic rear fender which clamped on to the seatpost which offered less than fantastic coverage but was enough to stop me coming back from off-road rides a day or two after substantial rain with big stripes of mud up my back. But when I moved to Sweden I started also using this bike to get to commute to and from work every day - a pretty short and straightforward commute, to be sure, but even that was enough to mean that I had to make improving these aspects a much higher priority.
Actually, I had already fitted a front wheel with a Shimano dynamo hub (acquired from the co-op where the Franken-Peugeot was born) and a front light even shortly before I left Finland, because I knew I wanted to be able to do rides in the evening after work, and it gets dark early for a lot of the year up that far north. The light was the very first accessory for the bike that I really splurged on, in the sense that its cost was non-trivial compared to the cost of the bike itself (admittedly an artificially low barrier for defining something as a splurge because the bike itself was outrageously cheap at 70 EUR). It's a Busch & Müller IQ-XS, one of the ones with the beautiful polished aluminium bodies. It looks fantastic and also works great. I am constantly astonished by the distance at which reflective road signs light up as I approach them. But I didn't bother getting a rear tail light at the time because I very, very rarely rode on roads shared with cars in Finland, and avoiding doing so in the evenings was straightforward as my favourite close-to-home routes were gravel trails along the river anyway. This wasn't going to cut it in Sweden where I was obliged to actually be on proper roads in the dark, so I augmented the IQ-XS with a B&M Secula (divine power not involved, I guess). I have it clamped to one of my seat-stays, just a little way above the brake bridge. I did it this way, rather than clamping it to the seatpost, so that I had the option of using a small saddlebag without blocking the light. That hasn't ended up happening, but it works just fine where it is.
I also installed a set of SKS Bluemel fenders, silver with reflective stripes, which are still there to this day and working pretty well for me. The installation was kind of fiddly. At the time I was running 35mm Panaracer Pasela tyres, and getting the front fender to fit underneath the fork with an amount of clearance that I was comfortable with turned out not to be possible. I ended up using a Dremel-esque tool to remove the part of the fender forward of the bracket which attaches it to the brake bridge, and I also abused a drill bit pretty heavily to vertically elongate the screw hole in said bracket so that it mounted a little higher than it otherwise would. This looks a little ugly, I have to admit, but I still have the intended coverage for the rear half of the front wheel, which is the important half. Both of those Pasela tyres are gone now and I am on 32 mm Schwalbe Marathons - quite a bit less fancy, it's true, but I found the Paselas surprisingly difficult to mount and wasn't too impressed by how quickly the tan sidewalls started to look noticeably thin and brittle. I'm kind of bummed out about smaller tyres, even if it is only a slight decrease, but the front fender clearance situation looks a lot more feasible now, so I might try to get a full front fender in there for this winter. Installation was also made fiddly by the frame's lack of eyelets for attaching the stays. The internet is fully of suggested hacks for working around this, and I bought a bunch of rubber-backed P-clamps from a hardware store with the intent of using them as improvised stays. I honestly can't remember now why this didn't work out, but obviously it didn't because I resorted to just using cable ties. This is ugly and imperfect because the stays can kind of slip to one side of the drop-out blades or the other if the fender gets a sufficient sideways knock, but if this causes rubbing you hear it immediately and it takes five seconds to pop it back how it should be. Not ideal in any sense, but it has been "good enough" for two years of regular riding now.
Finally, while in Sweden I did a few more S24Os and had anticipated doing many more because I was supposed to have stayed at that job for five years (and still I wonder if maybe I should have..), so I felt it time to finally sort out some kind of serious load carrying solution. This was my second real splurge for this bike. I bought a very nice front rack by the Finnish company Pelago, and it remains the single most expensive item on the entire bike. I bought not *just* out of Finnophilia, but mostly because I genuinely believe it is the one and only high-quality front *or* rear rack made today which can be quickly and easily and securely mounted on a bike whose frame/fork doesn't have any kind of eyelets or braze-ons designed to facilitate mounting a rack (cable ties obviously don't cut it here!). It doesn't achieve this through any kind of ingenious out-of-the-box thinking, it just has a bracket for the brake bridge which you put between the fork and your brake calipers, and an adaptor plate thingy at the bottom of its stays which goes right over a non-quick-release front axle, between the fork blades and the nuts that hold the thing on. Really simple - Pelago achieved compatibility with pretty much any bike under the sun simply by giving a shit about compatibility with pretty much any bike under the sun, and I respect that (yep, you can get racks and baskets by Basil with the same mounting system, but they're not stainless steel, they're steel with a cheap, thin chrome plating and the web has plenty of photos of what they look like after a few winters). The result is very stable, is rated for 10kg, is compatible with Ortlieb panniers, has a nice bracket for mounting the IQ-XS light off to one side, and has perfect styling for the rest of the bike (it comes in black, too, if you have one of those ugly modern bikes).
Oh, wait, that wasn't finally at all. I also ended up replacing the giant vinyl Selle Royal sprung saddle that the bike was initially fitted with. The main reason was that the vinyl surface had some pretty big cracks in it. This wasn't a comfort issue at all, but it meant that when the bike got rained on while locked up outdoors at work, the foam underneath the vinyl soaked up an astonishing quantity of water, which could remain hidden deep inside even the day after the rain, only to be effectively sponged up onto my backside when I rode it, even after wiping the surface free of any visible rain with a cloth. Somewhat to my surprise, I ended up trying out a rather racier saddle than I would have expected myself to, a WTB Pure. It's "only" the entry level version with rails made of regular old steel, but it is still astonishingly lighter than the old saddle. I've forgotten the actual weights of both, and don't really care because this is not a superlight bike in any case and I'm not a weight weenie, but at the time out of curiosity I weighed them both and was really surprised at the difference, I think it was actually close to an entire kilogram. I'm also surprised that it is not anywhere near as uncomfortable as I expected it to be despite being narrower and harder. Not that it couldn't be comfier, but I have managed 50 or 60km rides on it, in ordinary clothes, without problems. I always used to lust after a leather Brooks, and I suppose that in some sense I still do, but I remain strongly put off by the combination high prices with a reputation as thief-magnets and the need to be concerned about wet weather.
Anyway, with the lights and fenders and rack sorted I feel like the Franken-Peugeot has really graduated from being a "project bike" to being something of a "finished product". I haven't had to do any work on it which wasn't routine maintenance in a very long time, literally years, just replacing consumables which wear out on all bikes. It hasn't failed or let me down in any way during that time. It works just fine for commuting, for shopping with panniers, for weekend rides on either pavement or gravel. It worked for single-night tarp camping trips when I could do them, too. Unfortunately I now live in a barbarous land which does not recognise Everyman's Rights (and this is how I feel about them, now, that they are literally rights everybody innately has which governments either recognise or do not, as opposed to bestowing them upon us), so I probably don't have any more S24Os on my immediate horizon. This bums me out if I think about it too much, but I'm trying to stay upbeat and treat it as an opportunity to pivot my recreation riding toward longer distance "sport touring", which is something that's always been on my radar. I still haven't done a "metric century" (100km) ride, yet. For the first time I live somewhere with a very extensive train network which also has excellent support for taking your bike on the train, which seems a good match for this. I can ride 100km away and then get a train back, instead of riding 50km away and then turning around, and if I plan my routes to never get too far from a station then I always have an easy escape option in the event of mechanical failure, injury or exhaustion. I don't know how the combination of the Pure saddle and my moustache handlebars will hold up to riding over that kind of distance - but I'm optimistic, and keen to find out.