New bike time!

So while that ass String puts on multimedia interspeciesal extravaganzas (no, interspeciesal is not a bloody word, but then, neither is irregardless -which I hear daily), It takes me all day to get pictures to bloody show up. Dammit! However, I now have it all figgered out.

Well, the big announcement today is that the new ride is finished and has been delivered to the fleet.

Please note the matching braided cable there. Thank you.

So here’s skinny:

The platform is IRO Cycles’ lovely Angus frame. Just imagine a Soma Rush with a threaded headset. Originally, she was to be a veritable spread of ooh-ooh parts, but as the budget mushroomed, tough decisions were made. Most notably, I cheaped out on the Hubs. Gone are the dreamed-of black Phil Woods, and here are the IRO hubs. They’re good hubs mind you, the same model as the Harris Cyclery hubs in fact. The other deep cut was the decision to replace the MKS track pedals with some good ol’ Wellgos. I had considered getting the Custom Nuevo Wides, but Mr. Pedalstrike scares me. A lot. This is a fixed-gear after all here.

By fixed gear, all you non-bikies, I mean that this thing does not coast. If the rear wheel is turning, so are the pedals. That’s all there is to it. Slowing is achieved by resisting the rotation of the pedals, and in an emergency/steep hill encounter, aided by a front brake. Many consider this the “purest” form of biking, but I find the sort of hierarchial thinking implied there unnecessary. I came to it as a result of years of curiousity and the lure of extraordinarily low maintenance. I’ve noodled about on some friends’ fixed gears and found it very strangely rapturous. So here we are.

Right then, so first off, this bugger is light. Compared to the long-suffering, steel-rimmed, junk-dangling, crap-tubed Norco, it’s liiiiight. I’ve not weighed it yet, but it’s at least three pounds lighter than my old Kona, and a good ten pounds lighter than the abovementioned beater. The first time I shouldered it to go up the stairs here at Fort Pri, I nearly began sobbing, as the horror my right shoulder has become so accostumed to never came.

Early missions out of The Shire headed to The Drive or the Isle of Gran have yielded both moments of unadulterated joy and periods of terror. As I’d said to Milktruck in an email a while back, fixed-gears are like little fascists; “Oh, you don’t want to pedal now? PEDAL NOW!” Momentary lapses in the pedalling motion, say to scratch you arm or adjust yourself on the saddle are responded to with an immediate and most unpleasant reminder. In severe cases you will be hauled off the thing and maimed, but this happens very, very rarely. I pedal almost all the time anyway, even while braking, so it’s been good so far.

Something that all will no doubt be amused by is the gear ratio I’m running over here. At pickup time, my bikeshop homies grinned and said, “Oh, the gear, well, you’re a heavy mileage logger, and it’s a flat city, sooo…” I knew then I was in trouble.
43/15.
Saving you the math, that’s just over eighty-three gear inches. That’s a fucking track gear. Basically y’all, the higher the gear, the faster you go and the more work it takes to get there and slow back down. The gear inches refer to how big the wheel would theoretically be if you had no gears at all, as in those direct-drive “high wheel” bikes of the last century. Conventional wisdom says that “safe” is around fifty-five to seventy-five inches for street riding. Eighty-three? Uhh…
Here, I’ll get away with it, but in Halifax or San Fran a gear that tall would KILL your ass. Going up the hills is fine, it’s going down them that holds all the potential carnage. But I’ve got my brake, and really, it’s madly high rpm spinning that would send me into a bloody heap first.

Yes, that’s spelled wrong. But european languages are fucking hard when anata wa are Japanese ne? They make the best bars in the world, so be nice. And after all, that is how it’s pronounced.

My rapidly aging ass is worth it. Plus the leather treatment process is a relaxing activity that smells good. How often can you say that?

Those bar ends are going to be naked until my Japanese grips arrive. And yes, that’s where they pay me to be all fucking day.

Now, how long before my first crash on this fine new machine? The ECIAD betting pool is on one month, at fifty bucks. Bastards.

-marko