The Saga of the Bike Friday Silk

 Regular reader(s) of my blog may recall I briefly owned a blue Bike Friday:

I bought this bike off eBay, hoping to fix two issues with my Bike Friday Crusoe:

- I wanted a better fold, and

- I wanted more tire clearance

This BF was interesting because it was the New World Tourist front frame (a bit heavier duty than my Crusoe), but with the Silk rear end. The Silk rear end folds the bottom bracket with the rear wheel, helping to keep the chain on the chain ring and fixing the #1 aggravation of folding a Bike Friday.

Return of the Quickbeam

I recently sold my Titus Silk Road ATB, and my old Trek multi track, and my new Dahon folder, and my Rockhopper cheap bike challenge, and even my modern Vaast gravel bike, so my bike fund was unusually flush. As was garage space. I just bought a Surly Straggler frameset, because in the great tradition of Surly bikes, I had almost all of the parts on hand to throw at it:

The Straggler is a fine bike, really a slightly updated Cross Check with disc brakes. The slight updates are worthy: a bit taller head tube and a bit lower bottom bracket start to fix two of my biggest concerns with the old CC. With the fancy Rene Herse tires, it rolls along really well. But... I'm not really in love with disc brakes for road bikes. They stop fine. These old Shimano mechanical units are super simple to work on. But I just like the simple look and feel of rim brakes.

The Bikes of 2024

Happy New Year to all! I feel like my bike flipping has been slowing down, but I expect writing this post may disabuse me of that notion. Regardless, here are the changes that happened to my fleet last year:

Jan: I bought a Specialized Expedition frame that I converted from a comfort bike to an adventure bike, mostly as a winter project:

New Bike: Vaast A/1

In the middle of the summer, I got an itch for a proper gravel bike. I have several bikes that are perfectly adequate to ride on gravel roads, of which there are none near me, but you know how marketing works. Some random googling found the Vaast A/1 over half off online, a bike that recently got a positive review from those picky folks at Bicycle Quarterly--they compared the Vaast's unique magnesium frame favorably to their boutique steel frames. I'm not one to ignore these overlapping signs.

I clicked buy, and a few days later there was the giant box on the porch:

Zizzo Liberte for a Tall Guy

I mentioned in my previous post that I recently hopped down to Cincinnati to pick up a nearly new Zizzo Liberte folding bike. I already have a folding bike, my Bike Friday Crusoe, but I was wondering if a different folder would put me in a sweeter spot on the folding bike continuum. 

I didn't even test ride the Zizzo when I bought it, but a quick spin down the street told me it was much too short for me. Zizzo claims this bike is good up to someone 6'3" tall, my height, but I think they base this on the seat height--it was almost tall enough. But reach-wise, the bike was much too short. I set the bike aside while I ordered up some parts from Aliexpress and waited for them to arrive. The parts arrived this week and I got to work, giving me this:

Old Bike Meets Old Trail

I've purchased two bikes in the last week or so (the Rockhopper, and a new Vaast A/1 that I will write about soon). So I certainly don't need to be be checking FB Marketplace, but there I was Friday, checking again, and came across this ambiguously labeled ad:

But I could see it was a Zizzo Liberte, a lightweight folder that normally costs about $400. I hesitated a moment or two, but I couldn't pass up the price, and so found myself on Saturday morning driving down to Cincinnati. Since I was going right past Caesar's Creek State Park, I threw the Rockhopper in the trunk to get a ride in on the way home.

Cheap Bike Challenge: Another Rockhopper

Over on the iBOB list, there's a summer challenge to buy a bike for less than $200, spend less than $200 fixing any issues, and then ride it at least 200 km. I had an idea to pick up a '90s hybrid for this, but a lack of choices in my size combined with unresponsive sellers left me at a loss. I didn't really want another old mountain bike, but sometimes you have to go where the market takes you: