While His Fixie Gently Weeps

Sometimes I think that if Salvador Dali had composed music, it would’ve sounded something like the tune to  “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”.

Now, if he’d designed bicycles it would have been interesting, to say the least. While going to the store, I think I saw an example of what might’ve resulted:

For one thing, I was intrigued that this bike came from Biria, a company that’s been known—at least in the US—mainly for city bikes with upright bars.  Perhaps if Biria’s focus is indeed urban bikes, this model makes sense.  After all, I don’t think very many people in small towns in Wyoming or West Virginia are going to ride a bike like that.

Another thing that caught my attention is how close the rear tire comes to the seat tube:

And that’s with the wheel all the way back in the dropout:

What’s even more interesting is that other attempts to shorten the wheelbase (or, at any rate, the rear part of it) have included curving the seat tube, as on this KHS bike from the mid-90’s:

 

And Schwinn, in the mid-70s, offered a bike called the Sprint with a similar seat tube.  Like many other Schwinns of that era, it was an extremely strange bike:  Save for the curved seat tube and the short (at least relatively) wheelbase, it was no different from the Continental.  At least the KHS was based on something that bore some semblance to a track bike.

 

Then there was the Rigi, made in Italy during the early 1980’s.  I never owned, but I had a couple of opportunities to ride, one.  It certainly lived up to its name:  I can recall few, if any, other bikes that were more rigid and transferred power to the rear wheel as much as that bike did.

 

I would be really curious to find out what effect, if any, the curved top and down tubes have on the ride of the Biria I saw today.  Whatever its ride, I don’t think its rider has to worry about stopping power:  It has a coaster brake on the rear wheel and a caliper brake for each wheel!

The Real Pista

In an earlier post, I recounted my misadventure with my first "fixie" conversion:  a Peugeot U-08 on which I tried to lock down a fixed cog and lockring to the stock Normandy hub by the force of my youthful hormones.

Before that, I wrote about what might have been the wildest bike I've ever owned:  a KHS Aero Track.   Since then, you've read about my many adventures on Tosca, the fixed-gear Mercian I now ride.

While Tosca's frame has track geometry, more or less, I never intended it as an NJS-approved (or -approvable) velodrome bike.  Instead, I think of it as a cross between a track bike and the British "club" machines from the 1930s through the 1950s:  Something I can ride for a couple of hours, or more rather than the minutes or seconds it takes to sprint around banked curves.

And, yes, it has a "flip-flop hub" (as those club bikes often had) brakes (!) and water bottle braze-ons (!!)--and bags, even.  

But I once had a track bike that had  none of those things. It wasn't even drilled for brakes. (The KHS was.) It had a "flip-flop" hub--for fixed gears on both sides. The bike I'm going to write about was intended as a track machine, pure and simple.

It's a name you've all seen, but in an iteration you haven't seen unless you probably haven't seen unless you've been cycling for a couple of decades.

It's---drumroll--a Bianchi Pista.  But not the one that all of the hipsters in Williamsburg were riding around 2005.  That, while probably a decent bike, is a Chinese knockoff of the Pista I rode for about five years.

This BIanchi Pista was made in Italy, in the same factory as their other racing bikes.  Its tubes were Columbus Cro Mor, which were said to be stiffer than the SL tubes of my Colnago.  

Actually, given that and the tight track geometry, the Pista wasn't quite as stiff or harsh as I expected it to be.  Mind you, it's not what I'd ride on a hilly century, but I found I could put in an hour or two without feeling that my dental work was going to fall out.

Then again, I very rarely rode it on anything rough.  Most of my rides on the Pista were in Prospect Park, only a couple of blocks from where I was living (in Park Slope, Brooklyn) during the time I rode it.  For laps starting in Grand Army Plaza, the Pista was great.

But, eventually, I got tired of that and, if I recall correctly, needed some cash for some harebrained venture I came up with.  The guy who bought it from me had aspirations of actually becoming a professional racer. (I don't think he did, but that says nothing about the bike, really.)  He talked me down a bit in price because he didn't like the color (which, of course, I loved) but still preferred it to "Crest toothpaste green", as he called BIanchi's Celeste finish.

When I first got the Pista, I had my Mondonico--my first purple bike--and, by the time I sold it, I was riding my Land Shark--my first purple-and-green, and my first custom, frame. Also, at the time I bought the Pista, I was just starting to do some fairly serious off-road riding on a Jamis Dakota and, later, my Bontrager Race Lite.

Another Blast From My Past: A KHS Aero Track Bike

Here is one of the wildest bikes I've ever owned:

If you've been cycling for 15 years or more, or if you live in a city with a lot of messengers or hipsters, you've probably seen this bike:  the KHS Aero Track bike.

Mine came in the shade of orange, and with the translucent blue panels, you see in this photo.  The frame was built from True Temper Cro-Mo steel.  Most of the components were basic, entry-level stuff from Taiwan, with one exception:  the Sugino 75 track crank.  Had I known better, I would have taken the crank off before I sold the bike!  

(The crank was nice, but it was bolted on to a cheap bottom bracket and, in turn, a cheap chainring was bolted on to it.)

The model you see in the photo is from 1999.  I got mine late that year, and rode it for about three years.  Mainly, I took it on training rides in Prospect Park, which was just up the street from where I was living at the time.  I took a few rides on the street with it--without brakes.  I was in really good shape at that time, but I was going through a kind of midlife crisis that would end when I began my gender transition.  In other words, I was going through one last "macho" phase of my life and I'd convinced myself that only sissies rode fixed-gear bikes with brakes.

But I digress.  My KHS might have been the most responsive bike I ever had.  When you look at the geometry, you can only wonder how it could not be so.  On the other hand, in riding it, I'd feel bumps and cracks I couldn't see in the road.  And, in addition to being harsh, it had that "dead", non-resilient feel a lot of oversized aluminum bikes have.

Still, I had some fun rides on that bike.  The reason I sold it, ultimately, is that it never fit.  It seemed that the Aero was offered in three or four sizes that did not correspond in any way to the proportions of a human body.  And there were large gaps between the sizes.  

A couple of years before my bike was made, KHS made the same model with a curved seat tube that made the rear chainstays and wheelbase shorter.  I never rode it.  But I knew other riders who did; one told me it was more comfortable (!) while another said he liked the response of it.  Chacun a son gout.

In addition to the ride qualities I've mentioned, and its distinctive looks, I will remember my KHS Aero for another reason:  It was one of the last bikes I had in my life as a guy named Nick.