Farewell, Mr. Brown.

The bicycling world lost a great man Sunday. Sheldon Brown, the preeminent authority on bicycling design, history, and repair, passed away from a heart attack at age 63. I wasn’t even aware that he died until my brother told me today.

When I went full bore into bicycling the past year, pretty much any question I had (and I had a LOT of questions) could be answered by doing an internet search, and I would ultimately find an answer by Sheldon. At first I would always wonder "why does this guy who looks like C. Everett Koop keep popping up every time I search on something bike related?" Then I found his website, and it was like striking gold.

I never met him but always wanted to, because anyone with that kind of knowledge about something I hold near and dear must be an absolute thrill to talk to.

He always struck me as an eccentric, larger-than-life figure, and his wisdom is known worldwide. You’ll be sorely missed, Mr. Brown.

(image taken from Wikipedia)

Walt's Turn

Ahhh, Walt. After I finished up with Carmela, I took a day off from restoration. Well, I didn’t really have a choice because the next day was Thanksgiving. Friday, I got to work on my aged blue Schwinn.

My process was to be the same that I used for Carmela. A week prior, I bought all the things I figured I would need to restore him: brake and derailleur cables, steel wool, naval jelly, and Simichrome. As with Carmela, I completely stripped the frame. This time was different, however. As I sat among a pile of rusty and greasy bike parts, I just couldn’t muster up any ambition to go any further with the project. He was going to be a much more labor-intensive endeavor, and I just wasn’t up for it. The photos will illustrate why.



























I still have every intention of making him whole again, though. It was a perfectly capable bicycle before the start of the restoration. It may be rusty and the brake pads may be hard as old pencil erasers, but it still rode nicely and comfortably. When I ride it, the sensation is like watching an old golden retriever; you can see the white whiskers around the mouth and it moves slowly, but there’s an air of dignity. It’s almost regal in a way. I cable tied all the components to the frame so it’s basically a big pile of bike parts stuck together (rather appearing like a sculpture, really), but he’ll be back. I need to concentrate on an even bigger project at the moment:

Project Sell the Condo and Move Into an Actual House So I Have a Place to PUT These Bikes™

Carmela

As you all must surely know by now (I seem to bring up the point pretty often), I work in the city. More accurately, I work in a college town. When holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas arrive, the students get out of Dodge all at once. I have yet to witness a Chanukah mass exodus, so I can’t really vouch for that one. What this means is that every mode of motorized transportation will be working to and filled to capacity. What this means to me is an über-cramped train ride and unbridled lunacy all around me. I have learned to take the day before these holidays off and remove myself from the situation entirely.

Last Wednesday was that day.

I had been eagerly waiting since Saturday to work on both Walt and, as I have named the newfound Raleigh, Carmela. Again, I have no idea where these names come from. In hindsight, I should have waited to name the Schwinn. I could have instead named Carmela Walt, as in Sir Walter Raleigh (I know, I know.). My original plan was to take Carmela’s wheels and put them on Walt, and just sell off Carmela for parts. I spent about an hour comparing the two bikes. Prior to Wednesday, I hadn’t really had an opportunity to closely inspect Carmela and her condition. I swapped the wheels, and I probably could have made them work on Walt with a little reengineering. But the more I studied the two bikes, it became clear as the nethers on a tall dog that I should be channeling my energies into restoring Carmela. Aside from oxidized aluminum, tire sidewalls like the inside of a Butterfinger, and a little rust, she was an excellent foundation. Walt would have to wait and I got down to work.

I completely stripped her of all her parts and got to polishing, using what has quickly become one of my favorite tools: my Black and Decker rotary tool. It’s basically just a Dremel clone and it has proven indispensable in many projects. I spent the entire day wearing a face mask, reading glasses, and spattered metal polish, and I am very pleased with how she turned out. I decided to make her my city bike, so I set her up as such. I removed the ten-speed drop bars and put on my usual flat bars, and I sprung for some new brake levers, grips, tires, and fenders. The result is what you see below. I wish I had taken more before pictures. Alas, I did not. I have scads of after shots, however!

BEFORE:















AFTER:

Are They Bikes or Rabbits?

My lady fair and I are revamping the condo because we reeeeeally want to sell it and get an actual house. With closets. And no one attached to our walls or ceiling. And maybe, just maybe, a garage or basement. This past Saturday while LF was at work, I pulled all the carpeting up because we want to replace it with a wood floor. The carpet was crap to begin with, and three cats and their clumsy owners have done nothing to help its sorry state. I may dedicate a series of posts to this process, so stay tuned.

I started at around 8:30 in the morning and finished about twelve hours later. Well, I didn’t finish completely; I got all the carpeting, padding, and tack strips out. I simply didn’t have the energy left to remove the seven billion little staples that held down the padding. Mustering up what little juice I had left, I dragged the old carpet out to the rented dumpster. The Condo Association rents a large dumpster twice a year so owners can unload accumulated detritus from their basement storage units. They also do this so that if there are any renovations, the owners have a place to throw the debris rather than jam our usual dumpster. The Association is absolutely instrumental in the NO OLD APPLIANCES policy, but inevitably the policy gets violated. There’s always some schmuck who throws in a microwave, TV, or dishwasher in there.

I made the first trip with the super-silty carpet scraps, and it was completely dark where the dumpster sat. Under the pile of debris, I could see a glinting bicycle wheel.

Hmm...

I pulled on the wheel and out came a bike. All I could read was "Raleigh". So, I hauled it into the house, and it's a burgundy Raleigh Record 12-speed in fantastic shape. I pumped up the tires and took it for a ride—never taking into consideration that it’s pitch black outside and I haven’t even checked if the brakes work or if the front wheel is on tight--and it's a nice and solid little bike. All it really needs is a polish and some tires, and it’d be a capable road bike once again. I'd put its vintage at somewhere from the 80s. Naturally, I immediately started scheming all the things I could do with it. I could takes its alloy wheels which are the exact size of Walt’s and sell the frame. I could strip it down and turn it into a nice little fixie (what I would probably like to do most). Or, I could just leave it as-is and use it as a road bike. There are many options, but it all comes down to this:

Where the hell would I keep this one?

And yes, for those at home keeping score, I now have six bikes. I’m a sucker for strays. What can I tell ya.

Those Were the Days. And So Are These.

I ’m sure at some point in the past year I’ve mentioned my delight with Broadway Bicycle School here in Cambridge.

My friend Ben and I had previously gone to another bike shop in town, as I was looking to buy some fenders and perhaps a few other odds and ends for Walt. The guys in there are nice enough, but they don’t seem to have much appreciation for anything that isn’t current. They had a brown Huffy 3-speed from about 1976 or so, and I thought it was one of the most interesting bikes in there. They thought I was joking. I asked one of the shop guys about pricing for truing wheels, and when I told him that it was in reference to a ’74 Schwinn Suburban, he actually referred to it as a clunker, and then proceeded to tell me why, point by point.

Man, that is NOT cool. I left without buying a thing.

I will grant you that by today’s standards, my bike is nothing special. Hell, maybe even in 1974 it was nothing special. But what matters it what the bike means to the owner. There’s a connection that I’ve mentioned before. Some have owned Ford Mavericks and it was their favorite car of all time. I’d never own one, but the reasons are my own. It doesn’t give me license to dump all over that person because their choice doesn’t agree with mine.

Anyway, enough about that. They’ve gotten my business a couple times, and that’s about all they’ll get from me.

Finding a good bike shop is on par with finding a good auto mechanic or doctor. If you do find them, keep them. They may be out of the way, but it’s worth it. My shop of choice is Broadway Bicycle School. The second I walk in there, I get a sense that this is what shops way back when must have been like. It’s tiny, dark, and funky. It’s obviously been there for quite awhile, because it has that oh-so-desirable worn-in look and feel to it. Customers are greeted the second they walk through the door, and even if someone’s in the middle of a repair, they’ll drop what they’re doing to help you. I liken it to what gas stations were like in the 50s: you pull in, and a virtual pit crew would come out to check oil, tire pressure, wash windows, etc.

Also, it’s abundantly clear to me that these people not only respect bicyclists, they just love bikes of any and all types. Since all my cables are 34 years old, I decided to replace them all. The woman who helped me—I never did catch her name but will next time I go there—remarked that she was happy to see me resurrecting Walt, and then she waxed a little poetic about the benefits. I knew I was in the right place. They’ve never made me feel stupid for asking obvious questions or embarrassed because I have something old. They just love bikes and they love to help people, and it’s obvious. Plus, they’ve always had what I needed.

Another feature of BBS is their drawers and drawers full of used components. It’s like going to a swap meet and I could spend hours poring over the drawers alone. I’ve bought quite a few used parts there, and I’m sure that I probably could have gotten new parts cheaper somewhere else. But that’s not the point. It’s about giving things a second chance or more. I can talk about the romance of bicycles till I'm hoarse. I suspect these folks are in the same boat. If I were to own a bike shop, this place is what I would aspire to.

Oh, and as for the fenders that I didn’t buy, I found a guy on the Schwinn Forum who has a set for me, and they’re even for a ’74 Schwinn Suburban, in opaque blue, no less.

Superfund Sight

My bike is locked up in the basement of my office building. Before I even had a bike here, I would walk past that bike rack and would see the same bikes every day, and they seemed like they had never been moved. There was an electric scooter locked up to it as well, and I think it was there for a year and a half. One day, the bike rack was completely empty. Hmm.

Then, in April of this year, I decided to bring a bike into work, but I didn’t want to lock it up outside because I knew it would suffer a horrible fate from a combination of bad weather, thieves, and vandals. Wait! The bike rack in the basement! No longer empty, but plenty of room for me.

I don’t know when it started, but a strange pool of brown water started to accumulate in the area of the bike rack, and a couple bikes were sitting in it. The rack resides in a strangely shaped nook, and it has accumulated a fair amount of garbage over the past year, mostly coffee cups and soda bottles. There’s even a door arm rest from a circa 1982 Japanese car down there. I moved the rack as far away from the pool as I could. Well, the pool is getting bigger, and it’s starting to look like a tributary of doom. I don’t know where this stuff is coming from or even what it is, but man is it gross.


The bike rack in itself is strange; it seems almost like a halfway house for wayward bikes. They’ll just show up and stay for awhile, but they’ve obviously been out of commission for a long while because the tires are flat. I think a lot of times students buy a new cheap bike to have on campus, lock it up, and lose the key. Or, they graduate and decide to cut their losses so they don’t have to find a way to get it back to their hometown. Curiously, some older bikes will show up and they’re usually unlocked. Stupid. Amazingly, they stay there for a very long time, in limbo until their owners finally get around to getting it out of there. Or the bikes finally get noticed by someone and get stolen. I’m pretty sure that 95% of the time it’s the latter. I lock mine up like it’s 2AM in Central Park.

Walt

L ooks like Nora’s got a little brother. Actually, it’s probably more like a son, because this guy’s a good 30+ years younger. His name is Walt.

My folding bike has some drivetrain issues that I have to contend with every time I use it, and it’s making for a rather joyless ride. I had a trike that had the same kind of drivetrain issues, and that thing had me crashing all over the place because of it. Issues of this nature typically present themselves at the most inopportune time, such as crossing a busy intersection on Mass Ave. The adjustments it requires I’m quite capable of doing myself, but I believe there is a manufacturing defect involved here. I’m going to bring it back to the shop from which I bought it for service, and because they have such weird hours and I get home late, I’ll probably need to leave it with them for a good long time. Well, I don’t like being without a bike—not even for a day—so I went looking for something to fill the void.

Mind you, I really like my folding bike. It makes perfect sense for my work situation, and it’s a little workhorse. It best shines when I use it as a pack mule, whether it’s hauling groceries for a month’s worth of lunches or going on location for photographic purposes. What it isn’t particularly suited for is the kind of rigorous riding I like to do. By rigorous, I don’t mean jumping curbs or going for thirty mile stretches. I simply mean going all over hill and dale for an hour, sometimes fast, sometimes slow. One of the shortcomings of the folder is its small wheels, which are absolutely punishing on anything less than perfectly smooth road. If on a bike path and running over a root poking through the tar, the impact will completely upset the flow of the ride; each bump like that literally has me shaking it off for the next couple yards. It’s incredibly jarring. I’ve found that I’m riding less because of it, unless I need to get to a music store or similar destination. I seem to be riding less for fitness than I am for missions.

I started a casual pursuit looking for a cheap city bike; something that if were stolen or vandalized, I’d be more apt to be disappointed rather than homicidal. I work in Cambridge, so it shouldn’t be too hard to find such a specimen, right? I kept my limit at $50 and got to pursuing. It took a couple weeks, and I of course suffered some of the obligatory disappointments.

One good example was an older Univega 10-speed that appeared to have been made into a hybrid. Perfect. The picture looked good and the seller seemed to be reasonably forthcoming. So, arrangements were made and I’d go there with money in hand, ready to ride away. It was an altogether strange meeting. I walked there in the pouring rain, and the seller turned out to be a professorial-looking dude, and all he said was his name. Behind his house, he had an arsenal of bikes in various states of disrepair. The Univega looked decent, and I did a quick check of all the major points like wheels, brakes, and drivetrain. I started by spinning the rear wheel by hand. I didn’t get far; the wheel rubbed the frame and I asked the seller if it was because the wheel wasn’t square in the dropouts. “I dunno” was all he could muster up, and he did nothing else to rectify it.

Okayyyyy…

Then he suddenly discovered that the rear wheel also had a broken spoke. I asked if he had another wheel floating around (there were a bunch) that we could swap out. No was the answer, and that was the deal breaker. I said thanks but no thanks and got out of there.

I will never understand why this happens. As I’ve said before, what’s the point in not being honest and forthcoming in an ad? Why not spare yourself the embarrassment? If there’s a flaw, the seller is going to find out and call you on it. How could that possibly be worth it? Equally as disappointing is when someone doesn’t have a clue about what they’re selling. How could you not know the frame size of your own bike? That’s the first thing a buyer needs to know!

Anyway.

Just prior to stepping out the door to meet up for that fruitless meeting, I spied an ad for an old Schwinn in working condition. I couldn’t tell how old it was, but it was definitely older. I sent an email to the seller and figured it’d be a waste of time because the ad was a couple days old, the price was good, and it was Craigslist after all. Deals like that don’t stick around long.

As a most welcome surprise, the seller was a woman, probably in her mid twenties or so. I don’t get the opportunity often, but I prefer to deal with women. When dealing with men, there’s a (usually) unspoken sense of competition and one-upmanship. Think of two dogs sniffing each others’ nethers.

That's right.

The seller and I had a brief email exchange and I went to her house at lunch. There was a visible sense of relief on both our parts when we met; she could see I wasn’t a derelict or sexual predator, and I could see she wasn’t batshit crazy. She showed me the bike and was almost apologetic for the fact that it some rust and chips in the paint. I assuaged her guilt by telling her that was exactly what I was looking for. I took it for a brief ride down the street, and that was that.

I’ve ridden a lot of bikes in my life, and there’s just something about an old bike. New bikes are great because, well, they’re new, and everything’s tight and immediate. Old bikes, though, there’s a certain visceral exchange that unfolds; a warm electrical connection. All its parts have mellowed together with age so there’s more of a sense of it being one rather than a mere sum of its parts. Nora’s got that, and this one certainly does too. I paid the woman, and then rode off with a smile on my face for the next fifteen minutes. I can’t even tell you the last time I rode a ten-speed. I think that bikes nowadays are over-geared. Who actually uses 24 speeds?

When I got back to the office, I did some research. What I have is actually an opaque blue Schwinn Suburban, manufactured in January 1974. It’s my intention to pretty much leave it as-is, polishing and lubing notwithstanding. These bikes came standard with fenders, but the previous owner removed them at some point. I guess I’ll just put some Planet Bike or Freddy Fenders on it. Now that I’ve experienced the joy of staying dry and clean, I don’t think I can do without fenders anymore.

I’ve always considered the act of naming an inanimate object as, well, goofy. I guess that all changed when we got our Suzuki Esteem wagon. When I saw this bike, all I could hear was the name Walt. Why, I have no idea. But there it is.

The pictures are horrible, I know. They were taken where I keep my bikes at work, in the basement of my office building, and the lighting is sub par for picture-taking. More on that tomorrow.

Update on Nora

I realize that the post title looks like a news flash regarding a hurricane. Alas, it’s not. It’s actually good. I emailed the National Bike History Archive of America (yes, there really is such a thing) some time ago to find out whatever I could about Nora, the bike my lady fair saved from the landfill. I just received this email this morning:

“The bicycle you have indeed is a 1942-43 "Victory" war restricted model made to government specifications for WWII war workers. These usually did not have headbadges since brass was restricted from used in WWII- as was chrome. Even the plastic grips are WWII spec. It was made by the Huffman Company (now Huffy). It is a nice piece that ought to be saved.”

Well then, I’ll do just that! All the more reason to leave it completely original.

Yoga Velocipede

So now you know of my newfound love for bicycles. When I was a little kid, I had a Huffy BMX bike, blue with day-glow orange pads. This was in 1979. My family had moved to Chalfont PA from Bolingbrook IL, and as a means to take away some of the sting of getting uprooted yet again, my father had the brand-new Huffy waiting for me when I got there. Prior to that, I had hand-me-downs from my older brother, and I didn't ride much. Once I got my Huffy, however, that all changed.

Honestly, I beat the hell out of the thing. Fond of the sensation of flight, I derived great pleasure from jumping curbs, dirt piles, ramps made from sawhorses, etc. This was also before the advent of bike helmet usage, and I somehow survived a multitude of wipeouts. My Huffy was my ticket to everywhere, and I used to take it on epic journeys with my brother. Well, the journeys seemed epic, mostly due in part to its being a single-speed bike and my legs were pumping at a furious pace to keep up with my brother’s ten-speed.

I hit a growth spurt, and I was quickly outgrowing my Huffy. I’m sure it was grateful for this fact because the rims were rather bent up, the rear hub disintegrated, and the crank dissolved. I got another hand-me-down ten-speed, and it got me around. I ran into problems when I continued to ride it like it was a BMX bike, however. When we moved to Plattsburgh NY, I got a Schwinn ten-speed. It was a great bike, but it still wasn’t a BMX bike. At that time, mountain bikes were rare, and I wasn’t even aware if such a thing existed. The closest thing to it that I found was a Huffy Baja, but it just seemed like a ten-speed with knobbies.

We moved again, and I just didn’t ride anymore for a couple years. Mountain bikes suddenly appeared out of nowhere and the scene just exploded. So, I bought a Schwinn something-or-other that was black chrome. I had incredibly lofty aspirations to hit all the state forests and become some type of mountain biking legend, desperately trying to rekindle my BMX love affair. Well, I was a good fifteen years older and woefully out of shape, so the bike got little use. I sold it.

In my usual fashion, I got the bug again. This time was a Mongoose MTB. Again, nice bike, but the inevitable happened—it sat.

Fast-forward a couple years (okay, seven), and I bought the Huffy beach cruiser that I mentioned in the previous post. It was cool for a week, but it lost its zeal quickly. The disinterest was a direct result of frame just being completely wrong for me. I had never actually heard of being “fitted” for a bike at that point, especially in the case of buying an off-the-shelf bike at Target.

Tired of watching it rot in my basement in the winter and my patio in the summer, I decided to convert it into something more suitable, also mentioned in the previous post. That’s my city bike, and it feels like a new bike now. It got me back into biking.

Once bicycles starting piquing my interest about this time last year, I just started noticing more of them and more about them. I was always trying to decide what would be the perfect, all-around city bike. It couldn’t be too flashy, because attention is NOT what you want to draw when the thing is locked up overnight. If not stolen completely, it will often be “liberated” of its components. The ideal solution seemed to be folding bikes. They’re absolutely ingenious; you can take them on the train, and are incredibly easy to fit in your car’s trunk. Our Scion xB can swallow a lot of cargo, but because it’s relatively short, it doesn’t accommodate bikes very well. Two full-size bikes with their front wheels removed *just* make it in there, but there’s room for nothing else.

I did an incredible amount of research on folding bikes, and the name that kept cropping up was Dahon. It’s great working in the city because there are bike shops aplenty. Finding a folding bike in my neck of the woods is no small feat. Demographically, it just doesn’t make any sense to stock these at stores in the suburbs. I took a couple for a test ride, and I couldn’t believe how nicely they rode. They are very intelligently geared, so you don’t need to pedal like crazy to compete with traffic. The riding position is very comfortable, and because the center of gravity is so low, it handles surprisingly well. I decided on a Dahon Vitesse D5. It has a 5-speed hub (internally-geared hubs are my absolute favorite form of multi-gear drivetrains), and it literally takes me ten seconds to fold or unfold it. A thoughtful touch they added is a seat post that is also a pump. Genius.

It fits under my desk at work, but it’s pretty disruptive as I bring it in or take it out at lunch because all eyes are on me when I do---I have to add another ten minutes to my schedule to allow ample time to field questions. My only option is to lock it up on the bike rack outside, but I fear the aforementioned liberation of its components. If someone’s going to molest my bike, let it be the Huffy.

I’ve had it for a month now, and I adore it. Yeah, I look like a Shriner when I ride it. So what. It’s a fantastic solution that just happens to be an equally fantastic conversation piece. Incidentally, the MBTA requires one to have the folded bike in a bag if you're going to take it on the train. Dahon makes such a bag, and I refer to it as an "Over the Shoulder Folder Holder".

Sorry.

I've added some links to bicycle stuff. Check 'em out.

Scoodily do-wow-wow-wowww.

Just a couple things:

1. I’ve actually been riding (gasp!) the Goldwing. Last year was supposed to be the year to get things sorted mechanically, and this was to be the year to get things sorted cosmetically. Well, that got pushed up a year. This is the Mechanical Year. Hopefully for ’08 I will stick to my resolution of starting work on the bike in January, and NOT wait until May. Regardless, I’m giddy. I’ve had it for three summers so far, and I’ve put more miles on it this year alone than I have in the past three. Ahhhh.

2. I’ve become completely obsessed with bicycles. I work in the city and at lunch would go for walks, as far as I could go within an hour. This rarely exceeded three miles. It was great exercise, but I know every square foot of this city within a three mile radius now, and frankly, it gets boring after awhile. Also, I wanted to start bringing my camera into work to shoot some stuff, but the places I wanted to go take too long by foot, especially when burdened with heavy camera equipment, and being at the mercy of the train just isn’t the way to go—it could take two minutes to arrive or twenty. Nuh-uh.

The solution? Bicycle! I have a Huffy beach cruiser-type bike that I bought a couple years ago. I affectionately refer to it as my Hundred-Pound Huffy, because man, it is one solid bike. I bought it because I hadn’t ridden a bike in a long time and figured I’d ease back into it with something mellow. It had chrome fenders, big fat whitewalls, big ol’ granny seat on springs, coaster brake, and crazy longhorn handlebars. Well, the very traits that drew me to it are also the very traits I removed almost immediately. In the city, none of that stuff makes any sense other than the seat. The chrome fenders were so cheap and thin, they’d rub; the handlebars put my wrists at a punishing angle, and the fat tires had so much rolling resistance, it always felt like I was riding in sand.

Another little feature that I just couldn’t get used to was its coaster brake. When I was a kid and had a BMX bike with a coaster brake, that was one thing. But as an adult a good hundred pounds heavier, a coaster brake is terrifying. Time to stop increases exponentially due to increased inertia, and something had to be done. So, I liberated another bike of its front brake. Huge difference. There were many other alterations I’ve made, but in the interest of space, I’ll just say that its current state is bone fide city bike with a three speed hub.

In doing all those improvements, I suddenly became infatuated with bike construction, components, history, and principles. My Lady Fair also caught the bug. We bought a Fuji Crosstown hybrid for her to ride, and when she’s not riding it, she’s talking about riding it. Knowing what a freak I am for anything old, she spied the other day a bike of unknown age and manufacture sitting next to some garbage cans, soon to be destroyed by a garbage truck. Naturally, she rescued it for me.

Wow. This bike is quite something. I don’t know how old it is, but it really is OLD. My guess based on the limited amount of research I’ve done so far is that it’s from the mid-forties to early fifties. The sprockets are unlike anything I’ve ever seen. To look at them, you’d think they were missing every other tooth. Nope, that’s just how they were designed. The only name I can find on it is on the hubs, a company called “New Departure”. This particular hub was made from 1937 until the mid-fifties, so that’s what leads me to believe that it’s the age I said. I gave it a once-over last night, and clearly everything on this bike is original. Unbelievably, the tires even hold air! The pedals are wood, and it has a surprisingly comfy seat. I took it for a spin, and I can’t get over how smooooth it is. My intention at first was to completely restore it because I assumed everything would be rusted out and unusable. On the contrary, it’s in perfect working order. All I’ll do to it is lube what needs to be lubed, and I’ll just let that awesome patina just keep right on going.

We call her Nora. As I get more information on what this bike actually is, I’ll post about it.