Creepy Houses and Turtles

One sad fact about our new neighborhood is that there aren't any public playgrounds. Possibly, this will put a crimp in my blogging theme. That doesn't mean we don't get out anymore: one night after work this week, the boys and I set out to see an old creepy house that my friend Marc had showed me.

We stopped along the way so the boys could show me their impressive strength:

Milk Run with Sam

A grocery run on the bike used to be no big deal for us, just two miles each way to Kroger. With our new place, it's more like seven or eight miles, slightly uphill on the return trip. Saturday, Sam and I tried out my new Burley Travoy trailer for our initial big grocery run. Of course, we had to stop at our old haunts like the Avery park playground:

Fleet Update (Again)

A recent post on the Rivendell Bike list asked what is the ideal number of bikes. I should have three:

1) a mountain bike for fast single track riding

2) a road bike for sorta fast solo road riding

3) a city bike for camping, family rides, grocery runs, etc


So how did I end up with seven? I feel another downsizing event coming on. But here's the latest, this time in categories:

Mountain Bikes:

1a) Surly Karate Monkey:

I've tried to sell this bike a few times. The Jones is clearly a more premium bike, the Niner is better with B+ wheels... but I like the way the KM rides over either of them. Quick handling, a responsive frame, and dead simple technology is a winning combination for me. It's my favorite bike.

By the way, the left grip is spare orange bar tape. I ran out of grips during this build. No expense spared for my favorites!

1b) Niner SIR9:

Henry's Rack

I was working on my fleet in the shop the other night when Henry wandered in and asked about installing some bags on his bike. Do I have the stuff to do that? Well, of course. I'm happy to encourage any small bike interest anyone in my family has, so I shoved aside my latest project and we set to work. With a cheap Performance rack, my only set of panniers, and some homemade extensions, we were ready to roll:

These extra struts aren't going to win any awards for stiffness, but then again, Henry won't exactly be carrying all of our heavy camping gear back there, either.

New Bike Fix

I ordered up a cheapish frame off ebay recently--an early 90s Raleigh Technium Peak mountain bike frame. I'm hoping to combine the lively ride of my Raleigh Technium road bike with good brakes and the ability to run fat tires. Besides, who else is buying old Techniums?

Alas, when I went to put the frame together, I ran into an issue: the bottom bracket threads weren't aligned between the left and right sides of the frame. You can see the bottom bracket is way off center here:

Inappropriate Technology

With six bikes in the garage (at the time), but no fixed gear, something clearly had to change. My KM could easily be a fixed gear (track ends), as could the Technium or Polyvalent (forward facing horizontals), or even the Jones or Niner (EBB), but I like to do things the hard way: I converted my vertical dropout Rockhopper instead:

Bike Shop Update

I finally got tired of rummaging around in a cardboard box whenever I needed to find just the right stem:

25.4mm on the left, 31.8mm in the middle, 26.0mm on the right. Simple and easy. I change around stems and bars a lot, so I appreciate this.

I also sold my old Trek 510 last night, so I have a bit more room in my shop now.