I like everything about it except that it only supports 168 pounds. I’d be strongly tempted to add another layer or two of card sheet and see if it would hold me, but the number is specific enough that I suspect it’s more complicated than that. But man, I REALLY want to try.

I haven’t been 168lbs since either my Freshman year in college, or two years ago, on the South Beach Diet, and while I’m going down, I’ll never get THAT down again, because the last time it involved both the lack of weightlifting AND the lack of cycling. I need more energies!

But still. I’m intrigued on this template…

http://gizmodo.com/5020499/cardboard-bi … n-the-rain

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Fix-e repaired and ready to roll, Lung and I set out on our first CM in several months, resplendent in our TL jerseys. It was a brisk night, but not intolerable, especially when you factor in riding heat and the insulation of hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands, of other riders.

It was a huge Mass this time, as the Summer ones tend to be, and the ride was almost entirely positive, diverse and entertaining. I could do without the flagburner guy hijacking Mass for his own agenda, but it was one of the rides where we didn’t see any car vs rider fracases or crazy exchanges. My bar booze bucket held on well, for the sause that added pep to the evening, and the new harder gearing on the bike meant for a slower, slightly more challenging maneuvering experience in the clogged parts of the Mass, but awesome all the same.

Plus, no deaths!

The police were very supportive this month, corking for us at many intersections, and later giving Team lope a special escort.

We ended up peeling off at 745pm to engage in other evening plans, and getting home while it’s still light and your wifebot(tm) is ina great mood only added to the experience. I had crackerjack chicken and orange sauce which I absolutely inhaled.

A great night all around…!

Team Lope Critical Mass photoset

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I love MAKE and Instructables… but someone wrote a how-to on uglifying your bike? Really?

I mean, really?
You need help, on the one mod anyone can do fearlessly?

http://www.make-digital.com/make/vol11/?pg=76

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i’m pretty fucking impressed with the simplicity of THIS.

bolt two magnets on your spokes. bolt the light on your axle. as the magnets pass the light, they pass a charge to a copper coil in the light, causing it to blink. fucking GENIUS. plus, with no batteries, it’s lighter in weight, AND "green." (batteries are "bad.")

not to say there are no downsides. for one thing, these lights are mounted at the axle, which is a sub-optimal placement for drivers to see them, especially the front one. for another thing, they’re made for axle nuts, not skewers. so forget about putting them on a roadbike, unless you mod up a different method. (bummer, i know. hahaha!!!)

there are both left- and right-side variants available, along with a version that includes some form of capacitor within the lights, enabling them to continue to blink for several minutes after your wheel stops moving. and yet another version utilizes the capacitor in such a way that it allows the lights to be on steady, vs. blinking. there are also two varieties of mounting, so they can work on bikes with disc brakes or other eccentric hardware at the dropouts.

i think it’s effing cool, and i’m always in the market for axle-mounted lights, specifically for a project i have sitting out on the back deck. and at EUR34 ($45USD) for a set (one front, one back) or EUR13,50 ($19USD) for individual back lights (slightly more for individual fronts), it’s totally reasonable to own, too.

APPROVED!

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WobblyGoblin(tm), formerly known as RedBot(tm) , is the somewhat laughable result of the chain of events, so to speak, to come out of the LookTheft(tm) of 2007. As you know, R3 readers, my sweet, sweet Look was stolen last summer, which necessitated both the purchase of a new higher-end road bike for the efficiency, (the Cervelo, next the new Look) and a city bike for urban travels, during which I might want to leave the bike unattended for a period. However, THAT bike project, which started as a frankenbuild single-speed, and was meticulously, lovingly torn apart and rebuilt as a sweet, sweet fixed gear by the name of Fix-e. Which soon became obviously more precious emotionally than any city bike, and not disposable enough to use as originally intended. So I was back at square one. I decided to hunt down a beater, something I could ride around town in a mellow manner, lock up and go to the movies, and whatever happened to it, from vandalism to partial theftery to complete theftery, was no problem, A disposable bike! And yet, it must be aesthetically pleasing enough to me that i want to ride it, let alone look at it. Yet, not so aesthetically pleasing that it would be desirable as a purloined product. I looked around the city on an exploratory mission with one Lung, but even the unridable, broken down junkers were over $150, every available frame around being desirable for either a burning man bike, a messenger beater or a fixed gear conversion by someone or other. I was surprised. So, that was a bust. I was considering one of a few models of entry level single speed bikes new, but while it would be sufficient for low-speed, low impact, disposable riding despite the bottom end components, it did not meet the requirements of low theftability. EVEN assuming it was black electrical tapefied.

Enter ebay!

I came across this seller, among many auctions that I was considering, including cheapie beater 10-speeds that would require conversion and be difficult to resist making awesome, and other cruiser type old bikes, who had absorbed a number of these bikes from Montgomery Ward back in the day, and has been slowly converting the stock into motorized bicycles to be sold locally in Kansas. This bike was one of three he was selling off which were too beat up to be worth prettying up for sale. I got it for $40 + $40 shipping. Add replacement tyres (these are old, and dry rotted, and I never ride someone elses tyres!) and the requisite research to size them ($40) and a new seat to replace the beautiful but ripped up and ass-threatening original ($30) and three sweet, sweet seal horns ($3 ea.) and I’m gold, Jerry, gold!

The ride is melllllloow. You can get a little bit of speed on it, but it’s kind of rickety and I want to minimize my crash damage risk. HA! It’s got a coater brake AND a kickstand, and tells you so (the former, not the latter) right on the frame. And, thanks to my sweet, sweet horn mod, you can hear me coming from a block away!

WobblyGoblin(tm), locked up to a theater or pub near you! (or near me.)

RedBike Photo Gallery

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ok, some background for the non-bike-geeks on the forum. WR and i frequent a blog called BIKESNOBNYC, which is essentially a guy with a beautiful biting wit tearing hell out of all cyclists of all varieties, but with a particular penchant for digging into fixters (fixie hipsters), whom he notes are riding fixies cause it’s cool, not cause they know anything about cycling at all.

along that thought train, BSNYC has a couple of fixter-specific buzzwords and catchphrases that he’s thought up, and which he elaborates on, on at LEAST a weekly basis. one is "the fixed-gear apocalypse." this is when the fixters will take over the world and everyone will be riding a fixie that makes no sense whatsoever, but hey, it’s COOOOOOL!!! another is the "fixed gear pie plate," which takes too long to explain. but the big one, the relevant one to this post, is the "pistadex." the most common track frame to see fixed on the streets of a major urban center is the bianchi pista. and it’s SO popular that the craigslists of most M.U.C.s contain endless listings of them for sale, either frames or complete bikes.

the "pistadex" is the average craigslist selling price. as the pistadex rises, so nears the fixed gear apocalypse. and so on.

so bsnyc has absolutely nothing to do with THIS, but someone has bought it and put up a single page on it. we shall see where it goes from here.

HERE’S bsnyc’s post about it, which is funny as shit.

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http://www.cyclelicio.us/2007/08/sfpd-b … video.html

bring this video on your ipod for confrontations later.

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i shit you not. THIS video is from 1899, and produced by thomas edison.

new is the new old.

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So this past week I made some significant changes to the gearing on Fix-e, and went from a 16 to a 15 in back, and then to a 14. This means a tougher inch-gear, allowing me to go faster on the flats, but makes it harder to climb, because the cadence is lower. Wifebot(tm) decided it was time to get on the bike again, and wanted me to take her on a ride, and because she fears the traffics and the deaths, we drove in to Marin and parked at my office, and used that as our HQ for the Paradise Loop, which is nearby (which is why I can do the 20-mile loop at lunch) and so soon we were ready to go. I had tuned up her bike, which hadn’t been ridden in three years, and I was eager to get on fix-e and see what was what. For one thing, I had never ridden Paradise fixed. Another, I dropped gearing to a harder gear, so I wasn’t sure how that was going to work. But it was time to find out, and so we did.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that I totally mashed on this! I wasn’t going fast, by any stretch of the imagination, but it was a manageable gear. It will be interesting to see how it fares on the next Headlands ride, that’s for sure. Anyway, we did reverse Paradise, so we knocked out the Camino Alto section first. Got passed by a lot of riders but we were going slower than even I needed to, as wifebot(tm) got her bike legs again. The descent we chose to do the squirrely single lane route vs going down the back side of Camino Alto, and it was challenging while managing it on my one brake and lots of back-pedaling. The new rims are deep non-machined wheels, so you have to put more muscle into the braking. Kind of tiring, but all fixed descents are.

On the way up the Tiburon section, my wifebot(tm) got into her groove and took off, and I had no hope of keeping up. Just when I got to about the half way point, I heard the telltale POP-FISSSSS of a flat. Dammit! Jack Baur would say.

Anyway, I pulled off and got out of the way of the deaths, and examined my problem. On the one hand, it was the front wheel, which is easier. On the other, on a fixed gear, the rear wheel flat is easier than dealing with it on a road bike, so it wasn’t too troubling either way. But here’s the wrinkle: it wasn’t a puncture flat. It was a sidewall failure. What the? I said. Then I examined the wheel and noted that the ENTIRE circumference on that side was showing signs of sidewall failure, kevlar threadbare areas exposed. With dread, I regarded the bike and saw the problem clearly for the first time. I’m amazed I didn’t see this earlier. The brake calipers are too short for these rims! I wasn’t expecting this. The brake pads were half hitting the rim and half hitting the tire sidewall. More on the right side than the left, apparently.

I didn’t have the socket to adjust the brake levers (!) which surprised me because I thought I had gone through the bike and gathered every sicket needed for my road kit. I did, except for where I didn’t, I guess. Anyway, What I was able to do was loosen the brake caliper closing distance at the cable hanger thing, and that meant at least they wouldn’t rub as easily. But another problem occurred: I got the tire off and pulled the tube, got my replacement out and… huh. SHORT valve, not long. The valve barely poked through the rim. Which meant that i couldn’t get the CO2 nozzle head around it. Fortunately, I made wifebot(tm) bring a separate road kit on her Bianchi, so I took the micropump from that, and could just barely get to the valve. But only just barely. I could only inflate to maybe 30psi… I would lose more air than I would add half the time. It took about 45 minutes but I finally got the bike road worthy. The front end was squishy and REALLY dodgy (can’t turn much, can’t lean forward) but it was at least ridable, which was a good thing, 12 miles from the car.

This meant I had to take it slower, not only to ease pressure on the wheel and avoid the potholes and road obstructions, but also because I was not using the brake! So I did the back half, and the descent, without the brake, which is NOT the Thommy way. I went VERY slow. But the successes were had. Reuben sandwiches in Tiburon, sat by the water (in the cold wind, not 24 hours from record heat wave days) and then rode back to the car, with no issues.

So, I consider the ride a success, and have new challenges to solve: need new tires, as this front one is trashed, and need to see if I can get longer calipers. But hey, rode Paradise fixed for the first time, and Team Lope representeds!

See those bits of light shining on the rim from the shadow of the tire? Those are sun poking through the THREE different places where the sidewall failed!

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80kg of cargo
196 days
no fixed gear

amazing!

http://kubiac73.blogspot.com/2008/02/ar … rs-by.html

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