City Bike Churn, More Sam

Of all my fleet, the role that probably gets the most turnover is my city bike. This is the bike I ride the most often, if not always the most miles. It's my trailer puller, family rider, grocery getter, and occasional camper. Many times, I end up using a bike that just got bumped from it's main job: an old mountain or cross bike, pressed into civic duty.

My latest city bike was my old Raleigh Technium. With no luck selling it, I invested in some new bars:

I added some Velo Orange Klunker bars. Their 3" rise helps make up for the low stack of the 90s NORBA geometry. I liked this configuration well enough, though you can see how I had to a use long/high stem to get the bars where I wanted them, even with their rise:

Of course, shortly after getting these bars on, I sold the Raleigh on the iBOB list. I kept the new bars, though. Now short a city bike, but with an excess of mountain bikes, I've converted my old Karate Monkey to city bike duty:

I'll work on getting a better picture, but you can see the basic outline. These old 29ers make pretty good all round bikes: a little more road like geometry, strong brakes, great tire clearance, and useful braze ons in some cases.

For my KM, the rear rack braze on was placed high to avoid the disc brake. This puts the Burley rack stupidly high, but I don't notice any difference when towing the Picolo trailer.

I'm playing with a three speed drivetrain, but with gears before I commit to a hub. I probably won't get a hub--I can see why more gears were added. With just three, the jumps are big and I don't have enough gears on either end of the range. But it's something fun to experiment with:

You can also see here that I'm maxing out my wheelbase with the track ends on the KM. This puts the chainstays at something like 465mm long. Smooth!

My Ragley Carnegie bar may eventually get swapped for a Jones H bar. Or maybe those Klunker bars:

Sam is pretty much the only kid I have for bike rides anymore. Henry is too big for the trail-a-bike, and Kate's usually off playing with her girl friends. But if Sam's around, he's always up for a ride. Last weekend, we took an ice cream run, several miles to the nearest ice cream at UDF:

Sam wasn't cooperating for pictures this day, so I snuck this one.

He was more cooperative with an earlier trip to the zoo:

Though that trip was made by Civic, not civic bike.