...especially if you're not going to follow any of them anyway.
It's kind of ironic that I'm making New Year's resolutions for bike stuff, considering what a state of absolute wreckage the rest of my life is in. But I figure I've got to start somewhere, and bikes have been on my mind a lot since my time is no longer taken up with mundane pursuits like employment.
First off, I want to get more miles. The goal last year, and the one before, was to get fit enough to complete comfortably a double-metric century. I've done 126 miles before in a day, but only once, and at an age when thirty wasn't yet on the horizon. I've done a hundred once or twice more, with 6-hr times, and plenty of 75s. I could do a metric century right now, except that it would get dark too soon to finish.
Second, I want them to be miles that I can feel proud of. I've always had a vague sense of embarassment every time I put my bike in the back of the pickup truck. I've tried to observe the rule that a ride needs at least to last longer than the drive to the start, but it needs to be more serious than that. I want to ride out my front door, put in my miles, and ride home. Mountain biking will have to observe different rules, as I can't imagine doing the forty mile turnaround to Yellow River, and get some meaningful dirt too. But I'll make honest road miles my sustainance, and keep dirt for dessert.
Third: Bikes for transportation. There's no reason I can't use my fixie to drop letters at the post office, or Pee Wee Patel to ride to CVS. I've got a butcher's bike that would be great for grocery shopping, and few enough time constraints. If I've got to trip over 30 bikes scattered all around the house, they may as well earn their keep.
Fourth: Finish up some projects. Pee Wee's got bad brakes. I bought a new set of pads but haven't gotten around to installing them. The butcher's bike is in just as many pieces as it was when I opened the box two years ago. You can't ride what doesn't work. And I can combine this with...
...Fifth: More hours at SOPO. The South of Ponce Bike Co-op needs warm bodies and weak minds, and I've got both. If I volunteer there and help other folks fix their bikes, it buys me credit and cred, and my own projects get done too.
There's more, that doesn't merit it's own number or bullet point. At 45, I feel stupid wearing a pro rider's jersey with sponsor names all over it. It feels as absurd as dressing up like an old-west prospector to go to the supermarket. ("Yipee! I done found me some bread! An' some o' them-there individually wrapped processed cheese slices!") So I"m looking for functional bike clothing that doesn't make me look like a lycra billboard, or cost like the Rivendell retro guys. I"m buying interesting used jerseys off Ebay (my favorite is Aeroflot; I mean, what brand name has less credibility than the Soviet national airline?) but the wool ones bid up in a hurry, and most of them contain a lot of orange, a color that makes me look like I've got a liver disease. So I'm looking for knit woolens from other sports and casual wear. I want to get some quality slacks in a dark color and wool or wool-blend, and convert them to cycling knickers. And I even want to take that Butterick pattern for cycling shorts, jersey, and cap, and run up a set or two, since I do have that serger now.
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
a rough and timorous piece that helped me figure out another one
December 6, 2009 riding rabbit blog
This is going to be less of an essay than the sort of wordy self-indulgence that makes diaries and blogs so enjoyable. I’m starting out with hardly any thesis, expecting to ramble for a few hundred words, then with a flash of insight, make a rhetorical leap worthy of Spider-Man, and wrap the whole thing into a neat bundle. It’ll probably peter out after a few depressing paragraphs, draw no conclusions, and I’ll go back to playing solitaire.
I’ve always been of the solitary sort, sometimes due to circumstance, sometimes social ineptitude masked as choice. The seeming ease with which other people interact looks like a magic trick, or a fantastic lie. One reason I gravitated to bicycling, besides the fact that it got me out of the house when I was too young to drive, was the fact that I could do it without anyone else’s cooperation. Now, with nearly thirty years of semi-serious riding under my wheels, most of my miles have been solo.
Apparently this isn’t true for everyone. Once, after a particularly bad shellacking in a criterium, I purchased a paperback book entitled Beginning Bicycle Racing. In the chapter on handling, the author suggested a drill in which you would gather five or six of your riding buddies, and scorch around the local little-league diamond bumping wheels. At the time, I didn’t have five or six acquaintances, much less buddies. Moreover, I was the only person I knew who rode a bicycle. Later, he suggested borrowing equipment from other riders in your club. Even today, it still seems to me that if I belonged to a racing club, I wouldn’t have needed to buy a book called Beginning Bicycle Racing.
For all this time, I’ve been virtually the only cyclist I knew, by far the most serious one, and every book or magazine article I read appeared to have been written on some velo-centric planet, a place where Andy Singer has his picture on billboards like Chairman Mao. They suggested haunting the flea markets in search of a titanium Bontrager with the custom-geometry fork, riding secret stashes of trail, and of nighttime rides that ended in trailhead keggers. All of this was as distant and unlikely as the planet Vulcan. That is, until today.
Three or four years ago, I was chatting with a guy at the Yellow River trailhead, and he mentioned an illegal trail he’d been riding, with a ladder bridge, a wall ride, and a lot of sinuous singletrack, all hidden on a patch of undeveloped land in an industrial park. He gave me very explicit directions and recommended that I check it out. I followed his directions on the way home, and couldn’t find the entrance. Came back the next day and had no better luck. Got hurt and couldn’t ride, got caught up in school and couldn’t ride, got sent out of town and couldn’t ride. Never found the place.
Then, this morning, I was back in town for the weekend, and needed a mental-health ride really bad. The Ti Bon was on the roof of the truck, it wasn’t yet eight o’clock…and I just couldn’t work up any enthusiasm for Yellow. So I figured I’d make one more search for the elusive trail. On a whim, I reversed the directions I’d been given—right off the interstate, then second right--- and sure enough, there was a little sliver of singletrack running back into the woods. I parked the truck, clipped in, and followed it.
Okay, it’s not great riding. There’s virtually no elevation gain, and the trails are zigzagged so tightly that they occasionally grow together. The woods are just calf- to thigh- diameter trees, clearly new growth on land that was cleared but never developed. It’s too tight for my full-speed-ahead Bon, and I was constantly running wide on the corners. But it does have a ladder bridge, of erratic width and haphazard slope, a wall ride without enough run-in, and a plank bridge that dumps you down the spine of a rain gully. But the best part wasn’t the riding, but the ambiance. The outside sweeps of the curves are marked with lines of old softball trophies. There are bridges made from a refrigerator door and an old sliding board. Race banners, weathered into illegibility, hang in tatters from the trees, along with an Irish flag. And best of all, like Ralph Steadman hallucination, you come around a twisty and meet up with a giant fiberglass chili pepper, pilfered from the top of a Chili’s restaurant.
I rode the whole loop, twice, savoring the ambiance, the feeling of being one of the in-crowd. I noted each incongruous element: the pair of hiking boots, the little silver trophy cups, the way the trail was purposely built right at the edge of the ditch. After an hour and a half, I wasn’t tired or even winded, since there was never any space to build speed or hills more than head high to climb. I pulled the trash I’d picked up on my ride out of my coat pocked, stuffed it into the garbage back hanging from a nail at the trailhead, and rode away, feeling like I’d finally become part of a larger fraternity.
This is going to be less of an essay than the sort of wordy self-indulgence that makes diaries and blogs so enjoyable. I’m starting out with hardly any thesis, expecting to ramble for a few hundred words, then with a flash of insight, make a rhetorical leap worthy of Spider-Man, and wrap the whole thing into a neat bundle. It’ll probably peter out after a few depressing paragraphs, draw no conclusions, and I’ll go back to playing solitaire.
I’ve always been of the solitary sort, sometimes due to circumstance, sometimes social ineptitude masked as choice. The seeming ease with which other people interact looks like a magic trick, or a fantastic lie. One reason I gravitated to bicycling, besides the fact that it got me out of the house when I was too young to drive, was the fact that I could do it without anyone else’s cooperation. Now, with nearly thirty years of semi-serious riding under my wheels, most of my miles have been solo.
Apparently this isn’t true for everyone. Once, after a particularly bad shellacking in a criterium, I purchased a paperback book entitled Beginning Bicycle Racing. In the chapter on handling, the author suggested a drill in which you would gather five or six of your riding buddies, and scorch around the local little-league diamond bumping wheels. At the time, I didn’t have five or six acquaintances, much less buddies. Moreover, I was the only person I knew who rode a bicycle. Later, he suggested borrowing equipment from other riders in your club. Even today, it still seems to me that if I belonged to a racing club, I wouldn’t have needed to buy a book called Beginning Bicycle Racing.
For all this time, I’ve been virtually the only cyclist I knew, by far the most serious one, and every book or magazine article I read appeared to have been written on some velo-centric planet, a place where Andy Singer has his picture on billboards like Chairman Mao. They suggested haunting the flea markets in search of a titanium Bontrager with the custom-geometry fork, riding secret stashes of trail, and of nighttime rides that ended in trailhead keggers. All of this was as distant and unlikely as the planet Vulcan. That is, until today.
Three or four years ago, I was chatting with a guy at the Yellow River trailhead, and he mentioned an illegal trail he’d been riding, with a ladder bridge, a wall ride, and a lot of sinuous singletrack, all hidden on a patch of undeveloped land in an industrial park. He gave me very explicit directions and recommended that I check it out. I followed his directions on the way home, and couldn’t find the entrance. Came back the next day and had no better luck. Got hurt and couldn’t ride, got caught up in school and couldn’t ride, got sent out of town and couldn’t ride. Never found the place.
Then, this morning, I was back in town for the weekend, and needed a mental-health ride really bad. The Ti Bon was on the roof of the truck, it wasn’t yet eight o’clock…and I just couldn’t work up any enthusiasm for Yellow. So I figured I’d make one more search for the elusive trail. On a whim, I reversed the directions I’d been given—right off the interstate, then second right--- and sure enough, there was a little sliver of singletrack running back into the woods. I parked the truck, clipped in, and followed it.
Okay, it’s not great riding. There’s virtually no elevation gain, and the trails are zigzagged so tightly that they occasionally grow together. The woods are just calf- to thigh- diameter trees, clearly new growth on land that was cleared but never developed. It’s too tight for my full-speed-ahead Bon, and I was constantly running wide on the corners. But it does have a ladder bridge, of erratic width and haphazard slope, a wall ride without enough run-in, and a plank bridge that dumps you down the spine of a rain gully. But the best part wasn’t the riding, but the ambiance. The outside sweeps of the curves are marked with lines of old softball trophies. There are bridges made from a refrigerator door and an old sliding board. Race banners, weathered into illegibility, hang in tatters from the trees, along with an Irish flag. And best of all, like Ralph Steadman hallucination, you come around a twisty and meet up with a giant fiberglass chili pepper, pilfered from the top of a Chili’s restaurant.
I rode the whole loop, twice, savoring the ambiance, the feeling of being one of the in-crowd. I noted each incongruous element: the pair of hiking boots, the little silver trophy cups, the way the trail was purposely built right at the edge of the ditch. After an hour and a half, I wasn’t tired or even winded, since there was never any space to build speed or hills more than head high to climb. I pulled the trash I’d picked up on my ride out of my coat pocked, stuffed it into the garbage back hanging from a nail at the trailhead, and rode away, feeling like I’d finally become part of a larger fraternity.
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
bontrager, again
Bontrager
I finally rode the Bontrager this past weekend, with a fair amount of vigor, and I’m still not sure what to think.
I got up early on Saturday, and took it out to Yellow River. The trails are sufficiently dried out from the last batch of floods to re-open, and were surprisingly free from damage. The only pedals I could find were an old pair of not-quite SPD clones, made by Wilderness Trail Bikes. Their bodies resemble the old Ritchey pedals, very flat, but with bright yellow plastic washers instead of springs to control the release tension. I must have bought these at a yard sale, probably as a box lot, because I can’t imagine a price low enough to have been fair. The plastic (“elastomer”) washers went the way of all pplastic washers—that is, they embrittled, either from cold or just age, and split. The previous owner tightened down the adjustment to make up for the lack of springiness, discovered that they wouldn’t release, and, with a florid curse, sold the damned things. To me, apparently.
Anyway, they were the only stray pedals I had, so I threaded them in, adjusted the brakes, twisted the fork adjusters to see if they’d turn, then mounted up and rode. The Bon is long in the top tube, and is equipped with a 135mm stem and straight handlebars. These combine to rotate the rider far forward and head down. I felt like a missile ready to be launched. The real effect of the rider’s position is to weight the front wheel quite heavily.
The drop-in at Yellow River is a downhill, off-camber sweeper, steep enough to pull you into it too fast, especially when you’re still finding your position on the bike and trying to warm up. I picked my way through it, just trying not to look like a tyro, tripod-ing along with one foot out. The first climb, on the other side of the creek is one of those that falls between the middle ring and the granny, washed down to the bare clay, with wrist-sized roots standing 3 or 4 inches above the surface. I usually do these in the middle ring, using steady, heavy power to keep the front wheel light. If I’m really strong, I’ll wheelie over the roots, just touching down between every third or fourth one, and letting the rear wheel walk over them. But in the push-up position the Bontrager demands, I feel myself pushing the front wheel into the terrain. I keep the power on, and let the fork bully its wway through. The rubber fork boots are always squished, and the fork feels like it’s already used half its travel. I haven’t taken a measuringing tape to it, but it may actually have.
The tires have to go. I don’t recognize the model, but they’re something from Specialized with tiny, shallow trianglualr knobs. They look like they’d be okay on pavement, but on dirt, there’s no bite, much less the increasing grip you’d want as you bank the bike over. I can’t say how much ofthis is from their age—I mean, what can compete with that new-sneaker feeling?—and how much is the design, but I’ll swap them for a pair of Velociraptors before the next ride.
So, I was riding Blankets Creek the next day, on the advanced loop, where the trail is just a narrow shelf sculpted out of the cliff side. There’s a wall on the right, and a drop on the left, going down maybe 25 feet to the lakeshore. It’s not quite a sheer drop, but much steeper than 45 degrees. The trail is about handlebar width, gradually ascending, and there’s a stairstep rock in the way, maybe the height of a curbstone. I unweight the handlebar, give a good hard pedal strok, and expect to wheelie over. The front wheel stays stubbornly on the ground, deadheads into the rock, and stops me short. I unclip on the left, stab my foot at the ground…and there’s no ground there.
That’s one of the noble traditions of mountain biking, is falling end over end, wondering when it’s going to stop, and how much it’s going to hurt. And at the bottom, there’s the other noble tradition, that of the bike landing on top of you. No injuries, just a mounth full of leaf mulch, and the chore of climbing back up, with a bike that, although made of the wonder lightweight metal, is still to heavy to carry effortlessly.
I’m still of two minds about the Bontrager. I like the non-conformist design, the pioneering name, the Ti frame with its crooked decals, the XTR/XT group. I don’t care for the greasy wooden tires, the flat-footed fork, or the flying-over-the-bars position. Oh, and brakes are Rube Goldberg at his worst, although they work better on the trail than you’d think from adjusting them in the workstand. I’ve already bought an old pair of Dia-Comps, cyclocross brakes from about 1986, and found a pair of Velociraptors in a giveaway box at the curb. I’ll switch the pedals for real SPDs, and start looking for an 11 degree bar and a shorter stem. I’m reluctant to delve into the black art of fork repair, especially with an orphan like Judy, an acknowldeged dog when it was new. I’ve got a couple of possible trades in the junk box, that can’t be worse and might be better. Or I”ll see if there’s an Arlo Englund Total Air kit to be had. I don’t trust myself to measure the offset correctly, and don’t want to wreck the handling of a bike that I find marginal already. I really want to like it, but the Moots has set the bar awfully high.
I finally rode the Bontrager this past weekend, with a fair amount of vigor, and I’m still not sure what to think.
I got up early on Saturday, and took it out to Yellow River. The trails are sufficiently dried out from the last batch of floods to re-open, and were surprisingly free from damage. The only pedals I could find were an old pair of not-quite SPD clones, made by Wilderness Trail Bikes. Their bodies resemble the old Ritchey pedals, very flat, but with bright yellow plastic washers instead of springs to control the release tension. I must have bought these at a yard sale, probably as a box lot, because I can’t imagine a price low enough to have been fair. The plastic (“elastomer”) washers went the way of all pplastic washers—that is, they embrittled, either from cold or just age, and split. The previous owner tightened down the adjustment to make up for the lack of springiness, discovered that they wouldn’t release, and, with a florid curse, sold the damned things. To me, apparently.
Anyway, they were the only stray pedals I had, so I threaded them in, adjusted the brakes, twisted the fork adjusters to see if they’d turn, then mounted up and rode. The Bon is long in the top tube, and is equipped with a 135mm stem and straight handlebars. These combine to rotate the rider far forward and head down. I felt like a missile ready to be launched. The real effect of the rider’s position is to weight the front wheel quite heavily.
The drop-in at Yellow River is a downhill, off-camber sweeper, steep enough to pull you into it too fast, especially when you’re still finding your position on the bike and trying to warm up. I picked my way through it, just trying not to look like a tyro, tripod-ing along with one foot out. The first climb, on the other side of the creek is one of those that falls between the middle ring and the granny, washed down to the bare clay, with wrist-sized roots standing 3 or 4 inches above the surface. I usually do these in the middle ring, using steady, heavy power to keep the front wheel light. If I’m really strong, I’ll wheelie over the roots, just touching down between every third or fourth one, and letting the rear wheel walk over them. But in the push-up position the Bontrager demands, I feel myself pushing the front wheel into the terrain. I keep the power on, and let the fork bully its wway through. The rubber fork boots are always squished, and the fork feels like it’s already used half its travel. I haven’t taken a measuringing tape to it, but it may actually have.
The tires have to go. I don’t recognize the model, but they’re something from Specialized with tiny, shallow trianglualr knobs. They look like they’d be okay on pavement, but on dirt, there’s no bite, much less the increasing grip you’d want as you bank the bike over. I can’t say how much ofthis is from their age—I mean, what can compete with that new-sneaker feeling?—and how much is the design, but I’ll swap them for a pair of Velociraptors before the next ride.
So, I was riding Blankets Creek the next day, on the advanced loop, where the trail is just a narrow shelf sculpted out of the cliff side. There’s a wall on the right, and a drop on the left, going down maybe 25 feet to the lakeshore. It’s not quite a sheer drop, but much steeper than 45 degrees. The trail is about handlebar width, gradually ascending, and there’s a stairstep rock in the way, maybe the height of a curbstone. I unweight the handlebar, give a good hard pedal strok, and expect to wheelie over. The front wheel stays stubbornly on the ground, deadheads into the rock, and stops me short. I unclip on the left, stab my foot at the ground…and there’s no ground there.
That’s one of the noble traditions of mountain biking, is falling end over end, wondering when it’s going to stop, and how much it’s going to hurt. And at the bottom, there’s the other noble tradition, that of the bike landing on top of you. No injuries, just a mounth full of leaf mulch, and the chore of climbing back up, with a bike that, although made of the wonder lightweight metal, is still to heavy to carry effortlessly.
I’m still of two minds about the Bontrager. I like the non-conformist design, the pioneering name, the Ti frame with its crooked decals, the XTR/XT group. I don’t care for the greasy wooden tires, the flat-footed fork, or the flying-over-the-bars position. Oh, and brakes are Rube Goldberg at his worst, although they work better on the trail than you’d think from adjusting them in the workstand. I’ve already bought an old pair of Dia-Comps, cyclocross brakes from about 1986, and found a pair of Velociraptors in a giveaway box at the curb. I’ll switch the pedals for real SPDs, and start looking for an 11 degree bar and a shorter stem. I’m reluctant to delve into the black art of fork repair, especially with an orphan like Judy, an acknowldeged dog when it was new. I’ve got a couple of possible trades in the junk box, that can’t be worse and might be better. Or I”ll see if there’s an Arlo Englund Total Air kit to be had. I don’t trust myself to measure the offset correctly, and don’t want to wreck the handling of a bike that I find marginal already. I really want to like it, but the Moots has set the bar awfully high.
Monday, October 26, 2009
bon bon bon
I was poking around on EBay the other day, and I stumbled across a bike worth looking at. It was a Bontrager titanium mountain bike, size large, complete with an 8-speed XTR grouppo. I started lusting after a Bon in about 1992, when Bicycle Guide (blessings on its long-departed soul) featured a Bontrager RaceLite. Keith Bontrager came from a cyclocross background, and built his mountain bikes using what he’d learned there: short top tubes, steep head angles, and comparatively little fork rake, all combined to put more of the rider’s weight on the front wheel for traction. At the time, I had relatively few hours on singletrack, but plenty of playtime in construction site mud pits, where the red Georgia clay turned into an excellent lubricant at the first sign of rain. I had a hearty terror of my front wheel washing out at speed, and the Bontrager’s design assuaged that a little.
Keith also has a background in mechanical engineering. Unlike a lot of builders who worked from rules of thumb or tradition, he calculated loads and strengths, and had concluded long ago that bicycles needed more strength vertically at the head tube than anywhere else. So he built his frames light, too light to survive, and then welded little scalloped gusset plates at the sites of stress, like the headtube junction and the bottom bracket. They had a look somewhere between purposeful and Frankensteinian, and I was smitten. Unskiddable in front, expensive, with weird features, and a name I couldn’t pronounce. I started saving my pennies.
Fast-forward to 2006. I’d bought an entry level ‘cross bike, with an aluminum frame and fork, steep geometry, and loads of toe overlap. I was riding at Yellow River (all my bikes get singletrack time, even the velodrome fixie) and hating it. My hands were on top of the bars, and I was keeping my weight on the saddle, just trying to keep from getting shaken to death. On a downhill, I moved my hands to the drops, just to reach the brakes, and suddenly, it made sense. With weight on the front wheel, the running-on-stilts feeling disappeared. The front tire knifed into the dirt, and the rear drifted just the least bit as I swept the turns. And I realized again that I still needed a Bontrager.
Seventeen years later, I still haven’t ridden a Bontrager. But there’s one heading for my house right now. In the time since reading that first review and now, I’ve gotten the kind of career that makes a $1400 frame a matter of flashing the plastic. Unfortunately, Bontrager hasn’t waited for me.
At the time of that first review, Bon frames all came with a Switchblade fork, straight replaceable blades pinch-bolted into a machined crown. The idea was that the blades could be made light enough for resiliency, and just tossed if they got bent. When suspension forks, with their unvarying geometry started springing up (ouch!), Keith simply bolted Mag-20 fork legs into his own crowns and raised the head tubes on his frames. But shortly thereafter, the oil-pissing Mag series went extinct. For a while, RockShox was willing to make custom- crowned Judys for a few larger small customers, like Tom Ritchey, with his penchant for 1” steerers, and Bontrager. But soon enough, the books quit balancing, and Keith folded his frame shop, taking a job designing (and destruction testing) components for Trek.
When I bid on the EBay Bon, the price was holding at $510, with less than a day to go. I bid a grand plus a buck, not to buy it, but to keep the other bidder from stealing a nice bike for half of nothing. And I won. Total price, with shipping, was $950.
I hadn’t had time to think, or to ask too many questions, either of myself or the seller. But the more I think, the more I believe that I haven’t realized any Bontrager dream.
This is a titanium Bon, a last ditch attempt to give cachet to a bike that deserved it but had lost its market. It was probably made by Litespeed, which isn’t bad in itself, but the master (or should I say El Patron) never even saw it, much less wielded the torch. Since Ti frames are always strong but occasionally noodle-y, it’s almost certainly made from straight-gauge tubing, with no need for gussets. And finally, by ’95 or ’96, the custom fork crowns were long gone, and Bontragers were all married to that bitch Judy, with geometry to accommodate her.
It sounds like I’ve just bought a regular Ti bicycle, just another damn Litespeed. A nice enough bike, especially with the XTR, but nothing to get overwrought about. And one that’s unlikely to threaten my custom-geometry Moots. I look forward to riding it, and finding out. I’ll keep you posted, but I expect that I’ll strip the Bontrager, give its better components to the Moots, and ride it as a singlespeed.
More to come.
Keith also has a background in mechanical engineering. Unlike a lot of builders who worked from rules of thumb or tradition, he calculated loads and strengths, and had concluded long ago that bicycles needed more strength vertically at the head tube than anywhere else. So he built his frames light, too light to survive, and then welded little scalloped gusset plates at the sites of stress, like the headtube junction and the bottom bracket. They had a look somewhere between purposeful and Frankensteinian, and I was smitten. Unskiddable in front, expensive, with weird features, and a name I couldn’t pronounce. I started saving my pennies.
Fast-forward to 2006. I’d bought an entry level ‘cross bike, with an aluminum frame and fork, steep geometry, and loads of toe overlap. I was riding at Yellow River (all my bikes get singletrack time, even the velodrome fixie) and hating it. My hands were on top of the bars, and I was keeping my weight on the saddle, just trying to keep from getting shaken to death. On a downhill, I moved my hands to the drops, just to reach the brakes, and suddenly, it made sense. With weight on the front wheel, the running-on-stilts feeling disappeared. The front tire knifed into the dirt, and the rear drifted just the least bit as I swept the turns. And I realized again that I still needed a Bontrager.
Seventeen years later, I still haven’t ridden a Bontrager. But there’s one heading for my house right now. In the time since reading that first review and now, I’ve gotten the kind of career that makes a $1400 frame a matter of flashing the plastic. Unfortunately, Bontrager hasn’t waited for me.
At the time of that first review, Bon frames all came with a Switchblade fork, straight replaceable blades pinch-bolted into a machined crown. The idea was that the blades could be made light enough for resiliency, and just tossed if they got bent. When suspension forks, with their unvarying geometry started springing up (ouch!), Keith simply bolted Mag-20 fork legs into his own crowns and raised the head tubes on his frames. But shortly thereafter, the oil-pissing Mag series went extinct. For a while, RockShox was willing to make custom- crowned Judys for a few larger small customers, like Tom Ritchey, with his penchant for 1” steerers, and Bontrager. But soon enough, the books quit balancing, and Keith folded his frame shop, taking a job designing (and destruction testing) components for Trek.
When I bid on the EBay Bon, the price was holding at $510, with less than a day to go. I bid a grand plus a buck, not to buy it, but to keep the other bidder from stealing a nice bike for half of nothing. And I won. Total price, with shipping, was $950.
I hadn’t had time to think, or to ask too many questions, either of myself or the seller. But the more I think, the more I believe that I haven’t realized any Bontrager dream.
This is a titanium Bon, a last ditch attempt to give cachet to a bike that deserved it but had lost its market. It was probably made by Litespeed, which isn’t bad in itself, but the master (or should I say El Patron) never even saw it, much less wielded the torch. Since Ti frames are always strong but occasionally noodle-y, it’s almost certainly made from straight-gauge tubing, with no need for gussets. And finally, by ’95 or ’96, the custom fork crowns were long gone, and Bontragers were all married to that bitch Judy, with geometry to accommodate her.
It sounds like I’ve just bought a regular Ti bicycle, just another damn Litespeed. A nice enough bike, especially with the XTR, but nothing to get overwrought about. And one that’s unlikely to threaten my custom-geometry Moots. I look forward to riding it, and finding out. I’ll keep you posted, but I expect that I’ll strip the Bontrager, give its better components to the Moots, and ride it as a singlespeed.
More to come.
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Meet Pee Wee
September 12 2009
Blogger
I rode PeeWee last night. I have to point out that there was a time, a period of my life I refer to as ‘a body in search of a personality’, that I named all my bikes. My Kona single speed, for example, was Sofia, an acronym whose first two letters were Single and Orange, the rest being too banal to report. Admittedly, that bike needed a better identifier than its model name, which was a Hawaiian word of at least twenty letters that covered the entire top tube. When I had to speak with the distributor about a warranty issue, I just described the bike as ‘the single with the stupid name,’ and he knew which one I meant.
Anyway, PeeWee is the only bicycle who still has a name, or needs one. He’s an Indian knockoff of a Raleigh Tourist, a rod-braked behemoth with twin top-tubes and 28x11/2 wheels. He’s got a full chain case, a mousetrap luggage rack, and a hairpin saddle that looks like a Prince Albert’s truss. Sold under the name RetroBike, he was actually manufactured by Avon bicycles in Hyderabad, and embodies a wistful nostalgia for the empire, and the sun setting upon it.
I call him PeeWee because of a passing resemblance to the balloon-tired tanker that PeeWee Herman rode in Big Adventure, and Patel because it’s the only Indian surname I know. His head and seat angles recline to a hammock-like 65 degrees, and the narrow bars simultaneously put you in a position that gives nothing to pull against for climbing, and no leverage for steering. The rod brakes are imperfectly copied from their Raleigh originals I suspect, and even if they aren’t, well, there’s a good reason why nobody except Avon and Flying Pigeon uses rod brakes anymore.
Oddly enough, though, the whole amalgam seems to work. The bars shouldn’t be able to control the huge wheel flop of that Easy Rider head angle, but the gyroscopic effect from the giant wheels, more appropriate for a Conestoga wagon than a bicycle, comes on with any perceptible motion. The result is that he rides easily at walking pace, hell, at window shopping pace. Trackstands aren’t necessary when you can cut your speed to half a mile per hour, and creep along, a two-wheeled black snail, while waiting for the traffic light.
Even more surprising is the brakes. With an action best described as ‘placebo effect,’ the pull-rods and pivots manage to create just enough shoe pressure on the rims to make a pulsing vibration, accompanied by the sound of a freight train uncoupling, The levers bottom against the bars regardless of adjustment, and the pad bolts strip out with a stern look, much less over tightening. In spite of all this, I’ve never felt myself endangered by a lack of stopping ability. In part, it’s the same manufacturing tolerances that make them ineffective when applied, also keep the brakes from releasing fully either. Partly it’s the little bottle generator that drives off the rear tire sidewall., and seems to engage spontaneously. And partly it’s those big wheels, that just let you drive right through the pothole or off that curb instead of stopping. But yesterday, I rode in rush hour traffic, from the house on Carter Road to Emory hospital, with a basket full of Little Debbies and cookies, then rode back in full dark, down Clifton Road and Dekalb Avenue, on a Friday night, and never felt myself to be in danger. Exhausted, yes. Knees and hips blown, yes. But entirely confident in road holding, in spite of the clatters and clanks PeeWee emits at speed.
Every time a real Raleigh Tourist comes up one EBay, I put in a hopeful bid. I run a search for ‘rod brake’ every week and bid on all the men’s Brit bikes that show up. (I won’t stoop to a Flying Pigeon, though because it’s likely no improvement over what I’ve got.) But in the foreseeable future, PeeWee will be my errand bike and townie, rattling and juddering through Decatur. At least until I finish my Avon butcher’s bike.
Blogger
I rode PeeWee last night. I have to point out that there was a time, a period of my life I refer to as ‘a body in search of a personality’, that I named all my bikes. My Kona single speed, for example, was Sofia, an acronym whose first two letters were Single and Orange, the rest being too banal to report. Admittedly, that bike needed a better identifier than its model name, which was a Hawaiian word of at least twenty letters that covered the entire top tube. When I had to speak with the distributor about a warranty issue, I just described the bike as ‘the single with the stupid name,’ and he knew which one I meant.
Anyway, PeeWee is the only bicycle who still has a name, or needs one. He’s an Indian knockoff of a Raleigh Tourist, a rod-braked behemoth with twin top-tubes and 28x11/2 wheels. He’s got a full chain case, a mousetrap luggage rack, and a hairpin saddle that looks like a Prince Albert’s truss. Sold under the name RetroBike, he was actually manufactured by Avon bicycles in Hyderabad, and embodies a wistful nostalgia for the empire, and the sun setting upon it.
I call him PeeWee because of a passing resemblance to the balloon-tired tanker that PeeWee Herman rode in Big Adventure, and Patel because it’s the only Indian surname I know. His head and seat angles recline to a hammock-like 65 degrees, and the narrow bars simultaneously put you in a position that gives nothing to pull against for climbing, and no leverage for steering. The rod brakes are imperfectly copied from their Raleigh originals I suspect, and even if they aren’t, well, there’s a good reason why nobody except Avon and Flying Pigeon uses rod brakes anymore.
Oddly enough, though, the whole amalgam seems to work. The bars shouldn’t be able to control the huge wheel flop of that Easy Rider head angle, but the gyroscopic effect from the giant wheels, more appropriate for a Conestoga wagon than a bicycle, comes on with any perceptible motion. The result is that he rides easily at walking pace, hell, at window shopping pace. Trackstands aren’t necessary when you can cut your speed to half a mile per hour, and creep along, a two-wheeled black snail, while waiting for the traffic light.
Even more surprising is the brakes. With an action best described as ‘placebo effect,’ the pull-rods and pivots manage to create just enough shoe pressure on the rims to make a pulsing vibration, accompanied by the sound of a freight train uncoupling, The levers bottom against the bars regardless of adjustment, and the pad bolts strip out with a stern look, much less over tightening. In spite of all this, I’ve never felt myself endangered by a lack of stopping ability. In part, it’s the same manufacturing tolerances that make them ineffective when applied, also keep the brakes from releasing fully either. Partly it’s the little bottle generator that drives off the rear tire sidewall., and seems to engage spontaneously. And partly it’s those big wheels, that just let you drive right through the pothole or off that curb instead of stopping. But yesterday, I rode in rush hour traffic, from the house on Carter Road to Emory hospital, with a basket full of Little Debbies and cookies, then rode back in full dark, down Clifton Road and Dekalb Avenue, on a Friday night, and never felt myself to be in danger. Exhausted, yes. Knees and hips blown, yes. But entirely confident in road holding, in spite of the clatters and clanks PeeWee emits at speed.
Every time a real Raleigh Tourist comes up one EBay, I put in a hopeful bid. I run a search for ‘rod brake’ every week and bid on all the men’s Brit bikes that show up. (I won’t stoop to a Flying Pigeon, though because it’s likely no improvement over what I’ve got.) But in the foreseeable future, PeeWee will be my errand bike and townie, rattling and juddering through Decatur. At least until I finish my Avon butcher’s bike.
Monday, September 7, 2009
You've got to start somewhere
You've got to start somewhere, or more accurately, I've got to start somewhere. In the same way that you get fit enough to ride long miles by riding long miles, you turn writing from a blood-sweating chore into a routine occurance by stretching the writing muscles, opening up the metaphor glands, and flushing the lactic acid out of the logic system. So I'm writing for an hour every day. Most of it won't be literary gems. In fact, to say that any of them will be gems is a statement of sheerest optimism.
The Venn diagram that describes my life consists of circles whose only point of commonality is, in fact, myself. Disparate as they are, I'm guessing that nobody who is interested in one will want to know about the others. Thus is born Riding Rabbit, the blog. And as Friends of the Rabbit, you won't be subjected to unwanted information about my largely fallow sex life (unless a yeast infection keeps me from riding), my weird and annoying social circle (unless they are riding with me or preventing me from doing so), or issues of home renovation (excepting the new bicycle room I need to put onto the Shabby Shack). These all have seperate blogs, all on different hosting sites, and under different user names. Thus I can have the sort of wide-open frankness that airs out your soul, without running into the Facebook phenomenon that results in everyone knowing all your business.
The Venn diagram that describes my life consists of circles whose only point of commonality is, in fact, myself. Disparate as they are, I'm guessing that nobody who is interested in one will want to know about the others. Thus is born Riding Rabbit, the blog. And as Friends of the Rabbit, you won't be subjected to unwanted information about my largely fallow sex life (unless a yeast infection keeps me from riding), my weird and annoying social circle (unless they are riding with me or preventing me from doing so), or issues of home renovation (excepting the new bicycle room I need to put onto the Shabby Shack). These all have seperate blogs, all on different hosting sites, and under different user names. Thus I can have the sort of wide-open frankness that airs out your soul, without running into the Facebook phenomenon that results in everyone knowing all your business.
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