What's Wrong With This Picture?

I saw one of these LOOK posters on a bus stop on my lunchbreak today, and finally thought I had to comment on it -

If you're squinting at the text, here's what it says:

"Avoiding a crash comes down to one simple action: Look. Last year over 3,000 cyclists were struck by motorists. To find out how you can make New York a safer place to ride, go to looknyc.org."

Okay, so I'm pretty obviously in favor of the sentiment of this ad, and NYC's new Department of Transportation has been doing seriously wonderful things lately. But take a closer look at the picture. What happens to the bike lane after the intersection? It disappears! How New York! And what's the car doing? Why, it's making an illegal left turn against traffic onto Lafayette, course. So what's the implicit message of the ad? "Hey drivers, when you're doing something stupid and illegal, be sure to watch out for cyclists"? Or is it, "Hey cyclists, be careful out there, 'cause drivers do some really dumb stuff sometimes"? Hrmph.

P.S. I'm a huge fan of jaywalkers, and I'm glad this ad features one.

Dandy-Horse

Before they figured out about chains or invented the penny-farthing, there was the dandy-horse.
This can be a useful bit of trivia if, say, you break your boyfriend's bike chain. Then you can say "I didn't break your bike, I made you a dandy-horse"

Source: the totally fascinating
Bicycles & Tricycles By Archibald Sharp
next stop: the front driving safety.

Singlespeed on the Super-Cheap and Easy

Boyfriend Scott's bike was making the telltale pop-pop-pop sound whenever he pedaled hard. Pop-pop-pop means "Replace my drive train! Pronto!"

I told him what was happening - the gears wear out and the chain stretches, and eventually you get the popping sound 'cause they don't fit together right any more. If you only replace the chain instead of both together, you'll still get the pop-pop sound because the new chain won't mesh right with the old gears. SheldonBrown.com has a whole article about it, of course.


Scott asked me if I could switch it to a singlespeed, too. He's the "I only use the highest gear of my hybrid bike, anyway" version of singlespeed. So we pulled off his 7-speed freewheel, and switched in the not-very-worn 16-tooth freewheel that had just been sitting on the other side of the flip-flop hub on my fixie. And we did the ceremonial snipping of the cables and denuding of deraillers. His bike (a Raleigh C-30) has vertical dropouts, so I couldn't get the chain tension right, and the chainline (going from the big ring to where the little ring had been) was wack, so it kept throwing the chain. Ugh! I broke my boyfriend's bike! I sent him to BikeWorks for a half link, but that didn't resolve the problem.

There's a standard way around this, which is to re-space and re-dish the wheel from having room for a whole 7-speed freewheel to just enough room for a onesie. That seemed like way too much work for this bike. So I got him another chain, and came up with this hack. I'm sure this has been done before, because it's one of those things that feels so obvious when you stumble on it, but here it is for the taking:


Here's what I did: I put his derailler back on to use as a makeshift chain tensioner. For this to work, the derailler has to be locked in the right place. Ideally, you could do this with the limit screws, by dialing in the top and bottom limit screws so that the derailler won't budge in either direction. But limit screws are designed to keep the chain from falling off either end of the freewheel cluster, not to lock it in place somewhere in the middle. The lower limit will reach, but the top won't. So I dialed in the lower limit screw to hold the derailler in the right spot. Then I dropped a shortened piece of brake cable through the derailler and locked it in place by snugging the anchor bolt.

The result: A derailler with a hot second of cable that stays put inside the derailler itself. Neat-o, huh?

This could be way more simple and elegant if you have a decent hardware store handy. Get a screw or bolt that matches the diameter and pitch of your limit screws, but is about a centimeter longer. Replace your top limit with this one - you can put your derailler wherever you want it with no cables at all!

Purists, take note: I know I could take a few links out of the chain. I'm trying to convince Scott to use 42/16 instead of 52/16 because I want his knees to last. I'll pull the links if it works for him, otherwise he'll be rocking the big ring.

Mercy!

I leave Wednesday for the big trip. Here we go! I've spent countless hours tracing out my hoped-for route (the end of the Northern Tier with a detour around the Green Mountain Loop) across the contour lines of New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. I made myself a faboo saddlebag. I've found some friends and friends-of-friends to stay with en route. I've trained and tuned up my bike. I've been 90% packed for more than a week. I'm just about as ready for this as I'm gonna get.

Today I loaded everything up and took Mercy for a test spin down to the beach and the only dirt road I know in NYC outside of Staten Island. The good news: Nothing fell off or even jiggled very much! The other good news: It still felt really good with most of the weight up front now that it's fully loaded (~25 pounds of gear in the front, maybe 10 in the back with 4 full water bottles). The bad news: I think the raincoat material I used for the saddlebag is a bit flimsy and prone to tearing. Not that there's a real danger of it falling apart on the road, but it might wind up a rack-top trunk instead of a saddlebag a few days in.

A few more snaps all loaded up:
The bike is a 70's (I'm guessing) Mercier mixte, with all the parts switched out from when I got it except the headset, brakes, bars, and fenders.
Gear-heads, here's the fine print:

Stronglight 99 triple cranks
Eggbeater pedals
Original mafac racer brakes & levers
Original stronglight headset
SRAM long-cage plastic rear derailleur
Shimano ??? front derailleur
Shimano bar-end friction shifters
XT 9-speed cassette, of which 8 are usable due to wacky mixte geometry (the middle stays get in the way, so I set the r/d limit screws as if the smallest cog wasn't there)
Vittoria Rando 700 x 32 tires
Brooks Pro saddle (borrowed from my commuter)
The front rack is an Old Man Mountain that mounts using a special skewer. The up-side for me: it's super easy to install ( the front rack won't fit in my bike box so I'll need to re-assemble it in my hotel room) The down-side: you have to pull the skewer the whole way out to change a front flat.

Finally, here it is all boxed up! I got a fancy aircaddy box that lets me put the bike on the plane without disassembling it -- the back wheel is still on -- I just had to pull the seat and front wheel and turn the bars backwards.

Thanks, everyone for your well-wishes! My next bike-y post will have the mountains in the background instead of my porch! There will be stars, it'll be cold at night, and I'll eat lots of pie. Hooray!

A Saddlebag Like no other

Here's some snaps of the gigantical saddlebag I made for the big trip. I already have a handlebar bag and a pair of Ortlieb panniers for the front where I'll carry my heavy stuff - I'll carry my clothes on the back under my bum in the bag.

It's held in place under the seat with a wooden dowel I sharpened with a pencil sharpener - it fits exactly into a groove I made in the top of the bag. Then it's bungeed to my back rack so it won't bounce around too much. I have a re-purposed leather belt that I'm planning to shorten and poke extra holes in to put where the bandana is now.

Materials: an old yellow raincoat, an old curtain, a zipper, 2 bungee cords, 1 bandana, a strip of reflective tape off my fireman coat, and of course, 6 feet of pink bias tape and some white squiggly stuff.

The bag is pretty huge - it's got all my clothes for the trip in it - two pairs of spandex, 2 jerseys, socks, undies, a wool hat, a jacket, a towel, the works! And spots for 4 water bottles on the sides.

I took my loaded-up rig for a test spin around the park this evening, and it felt really great - all the heavy stuff is up front, which works well with my old french bike's geometry. Also, the big, tall Mercier bike feels totally plush even loaded up. It's like butter, if butter would take you down the backroads at 11 miles an hour... The real test comes in 10 days - cross your fingers for me!

How can something so wrong feel so right?

Here's some snaps of my hacked Raleigh Record. I call it my Raleigh Wrong. I picked up the bike for ten bucks from the Community Cycling Center in Portland, where I learned to wrench (Hi Paul and Rich, if you're out there!), thinking it'd make a sweet fixie that was just short enough to fit me. From the decals and with the help of RetroRaleighs, I think the frame's from around 1962. Me minus twelve! The frame had obviously spent too much time outside - when I started to overhaul it, the seat tube was literally full of dead bees.

So I rode home, happily oblivious to the numerous compatibility issues of updating old Raleighs with more recent parts. The bottom bracket and headset use a different thread pitch, for one. For two, the wheels were some odd "juvie" size (not 650B, cross my heart), and had had their inner tubes replaced with blobs of solid rubber. The fork took a 90mm hub instead of the now-universal 100. So the part-swapping began... Three forks, two stems, much hacksawing, cussing, and JB welding (and many happy rides) later, here 'tis.



The long story:

I crammed a 700 wheel on the back by hacksawing the ends off the dropouts, hacking off the existing brake bridge and JB Weld-ing on a new one. I switched out the front fork for a standard 700, but kept kicking the front wheel due to pedal-toe-overlap issues. So I installed a (gasp!) carbon 650C front fork i picked up off ebay and built up a 650C wheel (Shimano XT hub, Alex rim) to go with it. I built a "matching" rear wheel lacing a Kogswell rear to an Alex 700c rim, but that got stolen, so now I'm back to the old Quando/MA3 wheel off my first fixie.

To any i-bobs, fork re-rakers or bike geo-meters tuning in: The Raleigh Record has the slackest head tube angle I've ever ridden. Before the front-end swap, the ride was totally stable no-hands, but really floppy at low speeds. Switching to 650C effectively pointed the front of the bike down 2.5 cm and steepened the head-tube angle somewhat. The result - still stable, but much more maneuverable in urban (i.e. swerving up to the light between idling taxis) situations - not to mention no longer kicking the front wheel and crashing to earth while attempting to track-stand. In short - now it's better suited for how I use it.

The other parts and gizmos:
Stronglight 93 double cranks, single-ized (44/18 gearing)
Brooks pro saddle
Nitto bullhorn bars, cork-taped on top, hockey-taped at the ends
Shimano UN-73 bottom bracket with Phil retaining rings (see Sheldon's article for the whys and wherefores)
Wellgo pinned BMX pedals - no retention
Ritchey Logic headset
Shimano 600 brake levers, one of which goes to a Reich PowerBell-BRRRRING!
Ortleib bar bag
reflectors galore

Also check out my flowery chain - It's an Abus I picked up during the Kryptonite recall - the original nylon chain-cover wore out, so I quilted myself a new one. I know I shouldn't ride with my lock around my waist, but I do, so it might as well be pretty!