shameless plug

It's been a slow year. Not a lot to report from 2010, save the mundane training and daydreams of the coming season, but I had to put this out there somewhere.

In April 1990 I set out to get my first messenger job in Boston. I poked around for a proper bag, but none of the bike shops had anything, but everyone pointed me to the same place: CourierWare in Cambridge. A little pricey at $100, but I walked out with a handmade bag and a "lifetime" guarantee.

7-8 years on the job, a couple years traveling the world, many sixers and twelves, fetching diapers, groceries, ten years of plain old commuting, until February 2010: I'm down to three of the original seven pockets.

I mail it in to CourierWare, now somewhere up in Vermont, and two weeks later, bam: repaired, totally gratis, and back on the job. That's two months shy of twenty years, still under warranty. Holla.

Y.A.F.G.B.A.

Yet Another Fixed Gear Bandwagon Article.

This isn't particularly fascinating, considering that "this single speed/fixed gear thing is really catching on" and "my-day-on-a-fixed-gear" columns are so frickin' commonplace these days, that I don't even bother to link them anymore...

But, once upon a time, after my first couple months messing, I stripped down an old Torpado and flipped and chopped the bars back in Boston...so for days gone by, I'll link another one from the Boston Globe.

Summary: Newbie gets a "Boston" Langster, gets the local messengers to weigh in on it, finds himself irresistible to the ladies (one lady, at least), gets the nerve to flip it to fixed, gets passed by pregnant joggers and old people walking, impresses a local hipster. Yawn.

Not very remarkable, but a lot of references to the "messenger tribe" - man is that getting old (ok, I've used it myself, plenty, but I think I'll stop now). But the messenger reviews are always interesting. They don't like the drop bars, as "risers have been popular in Boston since the 90's"...they don't think the carbon fork/seat post will be strong enough...they think aluminum is too fragile and steel is more appropriate for the rough stuff.

I always take it with a grain of salt when someone gets "the messengers' opinions" on something, because 10 guys will have 10 opinions. Like I've said before, the options are endless...when I was there, and I'm sure it's still true: there's messing in Boston with drops, flats, risers, fixed, free, brakes, brakeless, steel, aluminum, carbon...if I learned one thing there, it was that everybody had their own favorite, and lots of people switched it up just for kicks. Half the fun is just mixing it up.

Back to your day jobs, not much to see here. I think I may officially swear off these articles. Besides, my geared bike should be here in three days, perhaps in time to ride the Monsters of the Midway :)

It's on, baby. It's ON.

Breaking Away references notwithstanding, it's no secret that most bike fanatics love Italy. The land that gave us Campy, a framebuilder in every village, and Giorgio Moroder.

Michelangelo, of course, gave us perfection in oil and stone, at least the closest thing to perfection that anyone had achieved to date. Giorgio Moroder, on the other hand...if you're still scratching your head: he's the guy that did the background music for Flashdance and Scarface. As a matter of fact, if you picked a movie made between 1980 and 1984, when a character was looking wistfully off in the distance, and one shot was dissolving into another, cheesy dramatic synthesizer music in the background...that cheesy music...THAT's Giorgio Moroder.

Where am I going with this? I've wanted an Italian racing bike since around the time Giorgio was doing lines off his Moog. Somewhere between Pasadena and Chicago, there's a Pinarello with my name on it: aluminum & carbon fiber frame, 1350 gram clinchers, 17 pounds, race-ready with a where-it-counts mix of 105 brakes to Campy carbon fiber rear derailleur.

...and it's got the ugliest paint job ever. It screams 1983. It's the anti-Colnago. Oh well, all the better to fly under the radar. Say hello to my little friend.


I'm gonna have to change the name of this blog.

pimp your ride & rep your hood

I'm generally not one to rave about "this year's model" of anything, especially when it's last year's model with a new paintjob. However, I saw this in my LBS and I have to admit it looks pretty good.

The folks at Specialized just realized that there isn't a lot they can do to differentiate their single speed from anyone else's (how wrong they are, but more on that in a mo). So this year's Langsters come in a few flavors: the Boston, the London, and the NYC (pictured).

The Boston looks a little dull (maybe that's the point, so it won't get nicked?) and it's only marginally different from the usual crop in that it has a brake lever on the flats. Woohoo.

Its polar opposite (in terms of flying under the radar) is the London. With an Austin Powers inspired paint job, I'm almost impressed...though I'm sure I'll change my mind for the worse when I see a local Fixed Gear Poser atop one, replete with a Freitag bag.

As an aside, I love Freitag bags, when they fit. Old and tattered, well used in all seasons: good. Shiny and new, on a vintage-cycling-capped, retro-band-t-shirted, heavy-metal-tight-jeans-wearing FGP: bad. I'd get one myself, but I've been sporting my Courier Ware bag for 17 years and counting, and I'm kind of attached to it. A mom we know recently moved to Switzerland and came back for a visit, sporting a Freitag bag that looks totally appropriate. My wife mentioned that I should get one, since my bag is so raggedy, and I had to explain why that just wouldn't fly.

Back to the subject at hand. The NYC model of the Langster is little more than a paint job, but it scores a few points. First of all, the straight bar is 40cm wide, which is pretty narrow for a production bike. The fact that the chainstay sports the message "Driver carries less than $20 in cash" really nails the courier entendre. (Never mind the fact that a real courier would lift the sticker from a cab, spraypaint an old peugeot canary yellow, and save $700.) It looks good, though I suspect it would wear thin if a crowd of FGPs show up on them. It's pretty damn flashy, so you'd better back it up by using that bar to cross up a power wheelie off the line.

Still, you have to give them points for trying. Why not more? A real NYC bike would be made to look like a '78 Sears Free Spirit, without any decals, and it would come with an 8 pound Kryptonite. The Chicago would have all weather tires and a 54x16 since there aren't any hills to speak of. The SanFran would have a psychedelic paint job and a 2:1 gear ratio. {Note: Apparently I was even ahead of the Web team at Specialized, who had not updated their site with the '08 models. It turns out there are Chicago (bullhorns) and a Seattle (fenders & mildly swept straight bar) models.}

I think there's really so much more to be tweaked on these bikes, since half the fun is personalizing them for yourself, gearwise. Someone ought to set up a flash-heavy web site where you can pick a frame (italian lugged steel or titanium), a paint scheme, some combination of bullhorn, straight bar, fg/fw/both, 0/1/2 brakes, velocity/hi-performance rims, clips/pedals, carbon fiber/retro campy....etc. You could sell bikes from $500-3,000 without worrying about distributing to bike shops.

You heard it hear first. Alas, I always have more ideas than time...

Ain't nobody dope like me, I'm dressed so fresh, so clean

Slow ss/fg/mess news day, so I dug this up from the framebuilder's mailing list. Alex Meade set out to create the most maintenance-free bike possible:



Scavenging key parts from a "chainless" or shaft-drive bike, he got the drive/chainstay from a Taiwanese supplier, and being a framebuilder with loads of time and patience, ended up machining, brazing, cutting, or otherwise constructing the bike to fit the part. It's a 7-speed, so technically it doesn't belong 'round here, but it's so sleek (overlooking the commuter topend), so I'll make an exception. It looks like a single speed, and it would make a damn clean bike if you got rid of those pesky cables and brakes. If it could be built as a fixed gear, I might even suspend my front brake fanaticism, just to be able to ride the simplest bike ever.

Doubt I'll ever run across one though, since it was a serious pain to construct, and this is coming from a guy with a framebuilding jig, a lathe, and access to the engineer that designed the shaft. You can read some details from the thread of the framebuilder's list or better yet, go straight to the pictures.

frame i'd trade a pinky for

Jon Kendziera makes Jonny Cycles, handmade steel goodness out of Madison, Wisconsin. Grab a pile of cash ($1575+ track, $1850+ road) and get on the list. He's also got brilliant lugged stems to tide you over, and everything has stunning detail to paint and stainless. This one, for his painter, won the "Best Track Frame" at the NA Handmade Bicycle Show 2006, which ain't no small accolade. In addition to stainless head tube, it's got three "vents" in the top tube, not unlike a Buick Skylark from the 50s. See more of it here.

Cool guy. He once emailed me loads of useful advice on fork trail for a kids' cyclocross bike, and I wasn't even buying anything from him. Plus he won the track skid comp at the first (fixedgeargallery) Fixed Gear Symposium, blowing a tire in his 500'+ run.

Seeing bikes like this make you want to learn how to braze frames, yet at the same time, you realize you need jigs, experience, and a stunning painter...so you're better off saving up for one.