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.

Un Mirage, Aujourd'hui Et Hier

If you entered the world of cycling during the 1970's, as I did, you recall certain iconic bikes.  They're not necessarily the high-end ones:  You most likely would have been riding one of those if you had become a cyclist earlier or were wealthy.  I'm thinking, instead, of bikes like the Peugeot U-08, Raleigh Grand Prix and Super Course, Fuji S-10s and Nishiki Olympic and International.  They were the bikes on which many of us learned about cycling:  that is to say, when we went from being kids who banged around on bikes to adolescents and young adults who commuted, trained, raced, toured or were messengers astride two wheels.

Another bike of that genre was the Motobecane Mirage.  I was reminded of that yesterday, when I saw one parked.

Of course, a Mirage from my youth would not have looked like that:  For one thing, red on black, seemingly ubiquitous today, was not quite as common a color scheme.  Even more to the point, one of those old Mirages would not have built in China, or this way:

No, those old bikes would not have had their aluminum frame tubes joined by cobbly welds.  Instead, like most bikes of any quality made at that time, their steel tubes would have been fitted and brazed into lugs.

The result would have been something like this specimen from around 1981:

From Mr. Martin's Website

Like earlier Mirages, this one is constructed from high-carbon steel tubes and lugs.  Though it's one step above entry-level, it had workmanship, a finish and ride better than other bikes in its category. 

Motobecane is said to be the first European bike-maker to equip new bikes with Japanese drivetrain components like the SunTour derailleurs and Sakae Ringyo crankset you see on this bike.  Those components--especially the derailleurs--were significant improvements over the gear found on earlier iterations of the Mirage:

The derailleurs are Huret Allvit:  the same ones found on many entry-level European bikes during the Bike Boom era.  (Schwinn equipped several of its models with rebadged versions of the same derailleurs.) While as advanced when it was introduced in 1958 as the first personal computers were two decades later, they became anachronisms just as quickly.  So did the steel cottered crankse after Japanese companies like Sakae Ringyo (a.k.a. SR) came out with relatively low-priced cotterless cranksets around the same time SunTour introduced its VGT rear derailleur, of which many are still in use nearly two decades after SunTour stopped making derailleurs.

Now, some components on the new black Mirage I saw yesterday are certainly vast improvements over (though not as attractive as) the stuff on the green Mirage--and, some would argue, on the blue one. And even if the new machine is a good rider, somehow I will never be able to see it as a Mirage from my youth. (Pun intended!)

P.S.  I actually owned and rode a Mirage--which was my commuter/beater--for about two years.  It was like the green one in the photo, except that mine was black with purple seat tube and head panels.  I loved the way it looked, and rode.  Sadly, like several of my commuter/beaters, I crashed it.  Or, more precisely, I rode it into one of the deepest potholes in the history of paved roads and cracked the top and seat tubes just behind the head lugs.

My First Fixie: A Peugeot U0-8 Conversion

Thirty years ago, the only people who rode fixed-gear bikes were racers.  Even messengers, for the most part, hadn't glommed onto the simplicity and "cool factor" or riding a "fixie."

That meant, of course, that very few people knew about building them and that parts weren't readily available.  Bike books, at the time, contained little or no information about how to build, maintain or ride a fixed-gear bike.  In fact, the authors of those books most likely never rode or owned a track or fixed-gear bike.  If I remember correctly, Bicycling! never had any articles about them.

Back then, I knew only one person who rode a fixed gear.  That is what he used for his winter training; sometimes, he'd take his "fixie" on rides with the Central Jersey Bicycle Club, of which both of us were members.  He was a bit of a gearhead as well as a fitness fanatic; he meant well, but his enthusiasm for fixed gears probably scared a few people off.

One of my few sources of pride is that I wasn't one of those people.  I figured that if he could ride a fixed gear, so could I.  And I couldn't help but to notice that his "fixie" wasn't a fancy bike:  If I recall correctly, it was a mid-level Italian road frame (a Legnano made from Falk tubing, I think) and the components, while good, were nothing special.

So I set out to convert a Peugeot U-O8 I'd been using as my commuter and "beater."  I don't have a photo of it, but when I started, it looked like this:

My U0-8 was the same color as the one in the photo and, from what I can see, the same size. Like most French bikes of its time, it came with French-threaded parts, including the Normandy rear hub.  I knew enough not to thread an English- or Italian-threaded freewheel onto such a hub.  So, I looked and I looked (Remember, we didn't have the Internet in those days!) for a track cog that would fit.  Finally, I located a source:  Mike Fraysee, who imported French bikes into the US and sold them under the name "Paris Sport", had a few. He also had the requisite lockrings.  A few days later, I had both and a Sedis 1/8" chain that Peugeot used on its three-speed bikes.

Although I had worked in two bike shops, I had never worked on a fixed-gear bike.  So, I had no idea that track hubs (or, at any rate, hubs made for fixed gears) had two sets of threading:  a right hand-threaded "step" onto which the cog was installed and, in front of it, a left hand-threaded "step" for the lockring.  That design "locks" the ring against the cog and prevents it from unscrewing when you decelerate or stop without hand brakes.

Well, I installed the cog and tightened the lockring as much as I could in a vice.  Before installing both, I coated the threads with LocTite.  

Believe it or not, I actually got away with riding that arrangement for a few months.  Then, one day, I locked my legs when a taxicab made a right turn from the lane to my left on Lexington Avenue near Grand Central Station.  Although I managed not to run into that cab, I toppled over when the ring and cog unscrewed.  When I got back up, I screwed them back on, but they wouldn't stay:  The threads stripped.

I got the bike to a nearby shop.  "Wut da fuck iz dis shit?," the grizzled mechanic growled.  "U coulda got yerself killed!"

He was right:  Not only did I have an unsafe rear wheel, I had a terrible chainline.  It's a wonder that the chain stayed on the chainring and cog, let alone that the cog stayed on that hub for as long as it did. 

And I wasn't wearing a helmet.  But a parked Mercedes broke my fall and kept my head from hitting the pavement.

I wouldn't repeat the fixed-gear experiment for another decade.  By that time, I had a real job and bought a real track bike.  That will be the subject of another post.