This bike, formerly knows as RedBike, formerly known as That Wobbly Goblin, now known as RedCoat*, received an important upgrade and revised mission statement. What was once my city bar-bike, then my coffee carrier, is now my wee Z transport velocipede 1 (of 2). Thanks to Friend of TLTC Carey Woo for donating the seat, to Bell (now owners of the Co-Pilot brand) for special stay adapter clamps for this bike, and Ace for four other specific small items (bolt/nut/washer sets to replace dubious metal screws on this Monkey Wards frame)… the bike is done and ready for Z’s maiden voyage!

*This name change came about today. I was riding Crook through town, pretty fast, wearing a bright red collared Dickeys-style work shirt, and a guy on the side yelled ‘the Redcoats are coming! The redcoats are coming’ and it was awesome. Now, Crook ain’t red. But THIS bike is, so there we are.

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The Chinese historian claims this was the first velocipede, about what, a millenium earlier than the European flavor. Hm.

I think his Lu Ban also invented the iPad…

http://www.metro.co.uk/weird/818853-was … ever-cycle

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apparently, sam worthington is such a bad driver that a buddy bought him a bicycle. thus, he crashes that all over h’wood now. hahahaha, pretty fucking funny, actually, but good on him for EMBRACING the velocipede.

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Our man Raully Raul, my college roomie and one of my bestest pals, came to visit us this weekend. Raul is an active, crafty fellow: he climbs mountains, he climbs effing ICE, he surfs, etc and he works with his hands, from woodworking to photography. It all makes him a better architect, and an interesting guy, in my opinion. And he loves to try new things. So, on his arrival, I showed him and a few other friends the bikeBasement and my stable of excessive velocipedes. Later in the evening, he noted to me ‘hey, I’d love to try and ride one of your fixed-gears…’

Now, from someone else, that might have been the Akavit talking, but not Raul.
I was stoked. So, we made plans to check them out in the morning. The next day, I brought out wrongBike for him to try. I figured it was the most upright positioned build, with an easy posture, a light gearing, and was a good first try for fixie business. We headed down the hill and across the street to some flat area, went over the basics about fixed-gears: fixed drivetrain, no coasting, brake location, back pedaling, don’t lose concentration and try to stop pedaling, and so on. Soon, he was ready to go. And man, he took to it faster than I did by a MILE. Soon, we were up in the Scotts Valley side of MV, and off to the bike path. We took the bike path end to end a couple of times, and he grew stronger and more confident. We tried different pacing, so he could observe the relationship between pace and effort: too slow and it’s muscle work, too fast and it’s heart work, but 80rpm and it’s the perfect balance. Anyway, it was a colllle and windy day, so after awhile we headed back to the house. We saw a LOT of ALC training riders on the path as well, and I believe Cyclomania may have passed us or just missed us.

Once home, I gave him each of the other bikes in turn, so he could compare. Now that he had a sense of fixed riding in general, time to try different morphologies of the builds: different gearing, different bars, different ride positions. He liked the drops on Ghostal a lot, and got really jazzed by Crook.

In fact, he was the first person to ride Crook other than me, and thankfully, no deaths.

Anyway, I thought this was a GREAT spiritual mission for Fix-e. This was once my first single-speed and later fixed-gear and also my first build. Lung walked me through the entire bike. So the bike was decommissioned late last year when I gave Lung the wheels, and I had shelved it for a time, deciding what it wanted to be, now that I had more bikes to ride on a regular basis. But Raully Raul was now committed. He enjoys a car-free lifestyle in LA, living near the beach and walking or bussing everywhere. So he was pretty excited about getting a bike again for the first time in years. So, I thought, here’s Fix-e’s new home.

There were several things I loved about that night’s build:
- We got to work on it together, mirroring what Lung and I did on this same bike
- I was able to build a functional fixie entirely out of parts in the bikeBasement (a point of pride for lung and I both)
- Raul was stoked to do it, and man, he is crafty as I mentioned, so we were tearing apart the brake and effing with the wheels and so on like as if he’d been wrenching bikes for a year.

It was a great time!

Fix-e 3.0 consists of the original frame and cranks, which were still intact. In fact, that’s how we were able to assemble the bike in one late evening: the cranks and headset were still together and good to go. I used a Dimension arc bar, which Raul liked the position of, being a longer version of what he rode on wrongBike (though he may go old school drops eventually) and one of the Vista’s breaks I mean brakes, from before the wrongBike build, but with new modern rubber. We strung it to a chrome Odyssey lever, and this is perfect Raul right here: he solved Fix-e’s annoying cable hanger problem in like 3 seconds.

The cable hanger is OEM and has an open slot in the front so that the cable can be removed from the hanger, right, but it is designed for conventional 10-speed brakes and cable housing arrangement: with a BMX lever, the cable and it’s little cable stop still want to jump forward and out of the hanger if you really slam on the brake. This was a safety problem I struggled with throughout my riding this bike. I tried all sorts of things in the past: mangling a cable stop, adding a washer to the hanger, changing cable and brake lever positioning, etc. Raul? He proposed bending the shit out of the hanger at an upward angle. BOOOOOM. SOLVED. I was stupified. I never considered taking pliers to the damn thing.

I used my IRO wheelset from the rapidly bone-picked Villain build on Fix-e 3.0. Those are awesome wheels, and a large part of why this new build came out so well, I think. They’re smooth, clean and black. We used a 15t cog to compensate for the chainring’s relatively small size, trying to get close to wrongBike’s inchgear. The chain I had on hand JUST fit, but that was with the back axle just entering the dropouts, which are the old lateral kind that you enter from the BB side of the wheelstays. So I recommended he probably would want to get a longer chain and rechain it at home. I mean, I always like a fresh chain on a bike regardless.
Clip/platform spikey pedals (my ole AnkleBiters, in fact) and my trusty yellow seat that used to go with Toro, and the bike was ready to go. A final safety check, and we were done, at 12:03am. Not kidding.

Raul was excited.

Next day, we waited for the rain to break, and wifebot(tm), who was pretty into the new build and wanted to see Raul ride it, kept watching for optimum weather, which never really came. So in the afternoon, we headed out and Raul took his inaugural ride. Here you can see he represents the Team lope and TRDL brands, and enjoyed TLTC SAG support.

Raul FLEW up the street. Wifebot(tm) even exclaimed ‘whoa he’s flying up that hill!’
I think the foot was good and everything worked out. It was so awesome to see Raul, who 24 hours prior had never ridden a fixed gear, now was riding around on his OWN fixie. SOLID.

We took the wheels off, crammed it into the trunk of his rental car, and they were off to LA.
He’s already changed out the chain, and next step?
SURF BOARD rack.

3 gets you 6 he learns to skid stop before I do.
In fact, he may already know how by the time of this writing.

Welcome to the Team Lope family, dude!

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tole!

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here’s a snippet from a great ARTICLE i found today in urbanvelo, a pittsburgh-based (represent) cycling publication.

the article spoofs that dante left out the circle of hell reserved for bike thieves in the divine comedy and goes on to regale the story of it’s publication under it’s own title, "tractatus di ciclisma," and recent discovery in florence. pretty good stuff.

: : :

"Then my guide said to me, ‘Now it is time to quit the wood; see that you come behind me. The path I shall lead does not burn, and you would do well to follow close behind.’

Once our feet resumed their path, the tormented continued their ancient wail. My guide, the Poet, beseeched me to view the next pit with cautious eyes. I surmised that, like the ones before, this pit’s walls were steep so that climbing out is prohibited by design. In the center there rose a summit with strata of endless undulating paths encircling the conical mount.

The Poet advised that I look more closely at one of the layered paths. On it, a most peculiar sight did move before my eyes. What appeared to be a bicycle was actually a party of five fools bonded together for all eternity.

They formed themselves, two apiece, into the wheels of fleshy bicycles. Hands grasped ankles in a human wheel at the sight of which I might have laughed had not such exultations of pain carried through the air. The fifth and most rigid among them clasped the hands of the wheel-men, whose thrice wound palms and fingers formed axles. Together they rolled. Each wheelman’s spine was repeatedly subjected to the gnash and grind of the rocky path.

I asked my guide, Virgil, what these violators had done to be sentenced as both man and machine, dehumanized and beaten by the weight of their own movement.

My guide said merely that I have not yet looked closely enough. And as I returned my eyes to the tissue and sinew that tore at every revolution, I saw one of the bicycles become unsteady. Rolled away from its lane beside the mountain it did, and an explosion of noise filled the pit. A grand team of one-hundred and eighty horses sped from behind the unstable human bicycle to trample the five punished souls.

On the uneven path pocked with holes, the five wheelmen—although bloody and weak—quickly reassembled their velocipedic form and continued their roll within the narrow confines of their path.

My guide revealed to me subtle tortures which my eyes did not independently perceive. The cyclists’—if that they can be called—path was one of many unending undulating surfaces, alternating between climb and descent. Both were designed expressly to insure that neither climb nor descent is of such length that a traveler might gather momentum. Instead, the wheelmen are frustrated by the sharp curve of the path in descents.

Whether the onslaught of horses gains mastery over the velocipedes depends upon their position within the path. If their machine of marrow strays away from the mountain to which their path is bound, the horses’ authority is summoned. With no appropriate markings delineating the bicycle’s space, the cyclical men have taken to riding so close as to grind their shoulders against the escarpment solely to prevent an equine trampling.

‘Who then dear guide,’ I pleaded, ‘are these sufferers who ride the shoulder of the path to avoid an explosion of horse power?’

And Virgil answered, ‘the contortions you see before you are the eternal humiliations of those who sought to misappropriate a bicycle from the world of its rider. They did so disrespect the joy and utility of the world’s greatest contrivance that they spend eternity in futile and dispiriting detour.’"

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