I had an interesting ride the other day. I was on my Black Mountain Cycles Monstercross, on my way to see my mom. The BMC has a pretty normal cross geo, which in itself is pretty close to road bike geo going back before I was born. I had it setup with a Velo Orange Granola handlebar:
No, I'm not selling my bikes for half price. I'm getting rid of half of my bike fleet.
One day as I was tripping around stuff in my garage, I looked around and realized I had two of everything, bike wise:
- two 700c, steel frame, fixed gear bikes (Rivendell Quickbeam and Trek 610)
- two 700c, steel frame, medium tired all rounds (Black Mountain Monstercross and Surly Straggler)
- two 29er mountain bikes (Cotic BFE Max and Giant Trance)
- two 20" folding bikes (Bike Friday Crusoe and Bike Friday New World Tourist)
In the interest of freeing up some space and funds, I decided to unload half of my bikes. Since I had two of everything, this was theoretically simple, but some decisions were harder than others. Let's look at them, from the easier choices to the more difficult:
Round 1: Mountain Bikes: Cotic vs. Giant
Regular reader(s) of my blog may recall I briefly owned a blue Bike Friday:
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.
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
* The frame was $100 on ebay. I probably could have found a complete bike locally for not much more if I wanted to be patient, but this came up at the right time when I was looking for a winter project.
** Not really a Jones of course. But after owning two Rivendell Clem Smiths and two Jones LWBs, I guess I felt like trying another long chainstay bike.
This frame as envisioned by Specialized is an old man's comfort bike:
Round about four years ago, I stopped on the way home from Detroit to buy a Bike Friday I'd found on Craiglist. I was riding a Dahon, my first folder, and I was hoping the Silk I bought that day from Roger would be a nice upgrade. I didn't care for the Silk, and ended up driving to Indianapolis to meet a guy from Chicago and trade it for a Crusoe, which I still have and enjoy.
Which is a long intro to leading up to another CL search, another meeting with Roger on the way back from another trip to Detroit, and another new folding bike. This time, a Brompton:
I've had my '84 Trek 610 for about two years now. It's set up as a geared/fendered/650B bike right now, which had me missing a nice 700c fixed gear. I put up a wanted post on the iBOB list and ended up meeting Andrew to buy this old Specialized Sequoia frameset. I quickly got to building and set it up in an image of what my Trek used to be, a 700c Albastache-barred fixed gear:
Looking back over my bike fund spreadsheet, there's a lot of action to cover in my usual bike churn. More than usual, even. I don't write here much anymore, but sometimes it's useful for me to track my history and collect my thoughts about what has passed through the garage.
With the addition of the Rapide from my last post, I sold my Ragley Marley (cheap-ish) to my buddy Marc, trying to consolidate my moutain bike fleet down to boost wheeled 29ers. I had a lot of good rides on the Marley, and no real complaints with it, but the churn is relentless. I credit the Marley with opening up my eyes to the newer geo bikes, and how well they can work:
Henry and I spend all together too much time watching car shows on TV. These are the HGTV equivalent shows where they buy a beater and fix it up over the course of an hour. Some of the projects that really caught our attention were the rat rods, where they fix up the car underneath but leave the outside looking deliberately rough. I don't have the time/space/money/know-how for much car work, but a bicycle rat rod is something we can try together...
Our project started with an early 90s Schwinn High Plains off CL. The previous owner was abandoning his dreams of a fat tired drop bar bike with a 3 speed internally geared hub, so we picked up the pieces for just $50.
Once again, I failed in blogging by not taking a clean "before" picture. But we got to work stripping off the parts, and then stripping the powder coat from the frame and fork. Two coats from one can of paint stripper was enough to peal it down to bare metal:
For the better part of the last two decades, I've been chasing my slightly offbeat image of what a mountain bike should be. 29ers when everyone was on 26ers, single speeds, rigid bikes, Jones bikes, plus tires, funny handlebars and suspension seatposts... I've had them all. In the meantime, the mainstream trail bike has been coalescing around a pretty stable image: a 29er full suspension bike, 130-140mm travel, with an aluminum or carbon frame, a dropper post, slack geo, and a mild rise handlebar. Which basically describes my latest bike, a Vitus Mythique:
You know what? Sometimes conventional wisdom is conventional because it just works.
Sam and I have been getting out quite a bit this early fall. Driving, biking, or walking, Sam is ready to go.
One of early random road trips was up to Malabar Farm state park. Why? Because we threw a penny at the map of Ohio and it landed nearby.
We found a nice hiking trail to a small cave there:
In the bike nerd corners of my internet, there is sometimes discussion about Marino bikes, an extremely affordable custom frame builder out of Peru. For less than the cost of a generic Taiwanese frame, you can have a custom frame delivered to your door. Finally, on a bit of a whim, I plunked down my $100 deposit last December. I wanted something like a steel version of my Marley, but not quite so slack, with more stack, more mounting points for stuff, and a little bit longer chainstays. And built for 29" wheels, since they have mostly taken over the mainstream mountain bike market.
I never really appreciated the thought that goes into designing a hardtail's geo. The big question is, what length fork do you design around? If you plan to run a suspension fork (as I did), do you design around a fork length at 25% sag, no sag, or something else? In the end, I took a bit of a pass on this, and designed it around a 485mm rigid fork (eg, Krampus style fork), knowing that the sus fork would slacken the angles and raise the bottom bracket. My geo ended up like this:
I had an interesting ride the other day. I was on my Black Mountain Cycles Monstercross, on my way to see my mom. The BMC has a pretty norma...
