Bike thoughs and projects

I read that Jynx (recent master of the tabletop RPG!) is thinkig of

getting a bicycle[1], based in part on the influence of SparcIPX.

This is great! SparcIPX also bears some small part of blame for my

own recent bike madness, after he helped me through a minor adjustment

to the front brake on my main bike.

I find bicycles tremendously attractive, conceptually. The degree to

which they expand your personal mobility, and increase the physical

area in which you can realistically live your life, is absolutely

incredible when weighed against their cost, mechanical complexity and

maintenance requirements. This alone makes them an attractive

alternative to cars for me, even independent of the environmental and

health reasons to prefer them (which are also extensive). I think

you'd have to be mad not to have this preference, at least in

principle.

Despite this, I've hadn't owned a bike or ridden as an adult until I

movied here, and the reason is very simple. Unless you live

somewhere with both the infrastructure for and the culture of cycling

as a perfectly ordinary every-day method of transportation, riding

can easily be such a dangerous experience that all the above benefits

fade into irrelevance. You couldn't pay me to cycle around Auckland,

NZ. I consider myself very lucky to live somewhere where cycling is

so easy and effortless.

For the past few weeks I've been spending a lot of time reading up

on bikes, their history, a lot of mechanical and maintenance stuff,

and even though I've become quite an enthusiast I've also realised

that I am relatively abnormal in my feelings and it makes me

reluctant to self-identify as a bike nut. The cycling industry is

driven by, and cycling forums etc. are inhabited by, people who in

my opinion (they, and you, are of course entitled to your own) have

such a warped view of cycling that they destroy a lot of the beauty

in it.

I'm talking about people who think it is an excellent idea to make a

bike 10 times more expensive, 10 times more fragile and 10 times

harder to work on in order to make it 10% lighter or 10% more

aerodynamic. These people have very strange ideas. They will

happily make their bikes super expensive, so that they are very

appealing to thieves, and make their bikes easier to steal (by

putting "quick release" fittings, designed and useful primarily for

racers, not everyday people, on everything), thus forcing themselves

to put big expensive heavy locks on them, which partially negate the

weight savings they paid so much for in the first place.

My ideal bike is as close as practical to indestructable, and can be

maintained entirely or almost entirely at home by any vaguely

technically minded person, using generic tools which are not

bike-specific and can be used for other things around the home as

well. It should be as inexpensive as possible in light of the above

requirements. Rider safety and rider comfort take priority over

weight and aerodynamics. Afterall, even the heaviest bike that

hasn't been deliberately weightened is going to weight less than

half what I do. I am especially inspired by old English 3-speed

roadsters[2] and by China's Flying Pigeon[3] (literally the most

numerously manufactured vehicle on the planet).

I don't, for the record, have anything against people who actually

race bicycles, or realistically aspire to race bicycles. That's a

perfectly fine thing to do. Rather, I am confused and frustrated

that the "thought leaders" and market-steering enthusiasts in many

parts of the world forcefully embrace bicycle designs and riding

techniques developed for racing that make no sense in any other

context, and look with scorn on anything that is more in the

direction I outlined above, even though something like a Flying

Pigeon is tremendously more affordable and useful for 99% of the

human race.

The housing complex I live in recently had a big clean-out of the

communal bike/tool shed, which revealed a number of seemingly

abandoned bikes. These were displayed prominently in the shared

courtyard for a week for owners to claim, after which people were

allowed to help themselves, with the leftovers taken away to be

recycled. Since I'm keen to get as much hands on experience

mucking around with bikes as possible, I salvaged a bike, which I

suspect the previous owner had abandoned after crashing, at fairly

low speed, into something head-on. The front wheel had broken

spokes and a badly deformed rim, but everything else seems in

working order, although the rear wheel is badly out of true, but I

think it can be salvaged.

It's an old Finnish bike, made by a company started in this very

town and, I think, it's probably old enough (60s?) that it was

actually made here, too. It's very much made in the "heavy,

bomb-proof, easy to work on" mentality I outlined above, and I'm

pretty enthused about putting some much-needed love and care into

it when I get back from my holiday. Everything on it is steel,

and it has one-piece (or "Ashtabula" cranks). I don't think there

is anything on it which couldn't be taken apart with a screwdriver

and a shifting spanner. It's a single speed bike, with a

freewheel and coaster brake hub made by a Czech company using

tooling bought from the old German company Fitchel and Sachs,

after the latter was bought out by Taiwanese SRAM. A lot of the

older Finnish and Swedish made bikes people ride around here have

Sachs hubs, and this bike obviously is older than the SRAM buyout,

so possibly the hub has been replaced. The bike has obviously had

some rough and ready work done on it in the past (e.g. the kick

stand attachment appears to have been cut off another bike and

welded to the frame), so this wouldn't surprise me. A lot of

people would think the bike not worth any time or effort, but

bugger that. I can get a used replacement steel front wheel for

it cheaply and easily. I'll sand the frame right back, remove as

much rust as possible, paint it all black, then replace and

re-grease all the bearings, and put a nice basekt on it (it

already has a beefy rear rack). It will be a great "beater" bike,

totally uninteresting to theives and plenty rugged enough to be

ridden over cobbled streets and in bad weather. It will never set

any speed records, but it will do a perfectly fine job of carrying

me and my stuff to and from the grocery stores, library and garden

allotment. Not that my current bike (a later product of the same

company) doesn't, but it will be nice to have something that has a

little bit of me in it, and also that looks a little more like a

traditional roadster.

I am also working on another bike project, building one from

scratch out of random parts found at the local bike co-op. This

will be something a little bit sportier and sexier than the

"Finnish Pigeon" above, although I'm still striving to make it a

practical bike. I found a nice (and large!) Peugeot road frame

(I have had no luck identifying the model, despite many literal

hours of obsessive searching), made of lugged steel, and also a

pair of the legendary Mafac Racer[4] center-pull cantilever

brakes. One of my neighbours, who is also a bit of a bike

tinkerer, added a box of unwanted parts to the pile of abandoned

stuff that came from the shed clean out, and from there I grabbed

a nice set of aluminium mustache handlebars. I'm going to make a

slightly nimbler single speed machine out of all this, for taking

longer "just for fun" rides in good weather. My inspiration here

is coming from French randonneur bikes and from the Bridgestone

XO-1.

I may eventually get photos of both bikes up on Gopher.

[1] gopher://gopher.leveck.us:70/1/phlog/20180528a.post

[2] https://sheldonbrown.com/english-3.html

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Pigeon

[4] http://www.cyclingweekly.com/news/latest-news/icons-of-cycling-mafac-racer-brakes-206323