What Else Have We Here?

I haven't yet begun to work on my estate-sale find.  That probably won't begin until next week.  

Funny, though, how I'm thinking about the details, even though I haven't even started to build the wheels or assemble anything else on the bike.

At first, I thought I would wrap the bars--Velo Orange Porteurs with bar-end brake levers (the same setup I have on Vera and Helene, my Mercian mixtes)--in leather or the Deda faux leather tape, which comes in a shade that more or less mirrors a Brooks honey-colored B17 saddle darkened by  few of thousand miles and a couple of applications of Proofhide. (Yes, that's the saddle I plan to use--unless someone wants to trade me a black or blue one for it.)  I prefer the feel of actual leather, but the Deda is pretty nice and is more durable.  My only complaint about it is that it's full of Deda logos.

But, as I was trolling eBay, I chanced upon this:

Pardon the condition of my nails.  It's finals week!

Tressostar cloth tape.  Eight rolls:  four in blue, four in gray.  (No, this isn't a Civil War re-enactment!)  Best of all, the right shade of blue and the right shade of gray for the Trek:

Like much NOS (new old stock) bicycle equipment found on eBay, they came from a bike shop that closed.  

The seller was offering the tape at $10 for two rolls:  a pretty good price these days.  (Around the time  the world was discovering Bruce Springsteen, I paid $1 for two rolls of the same tape in red!)  He had four rolls of each color remaining and I offered to buy all of them.  He asked for $20.  Yes, for eight rolls.

I am thinking about wrapping the bars "barber pole" or "candy cane" style, using both colors.  I would wrap the entire bar, as I did on my Mercian mixtes, because I occasionally use the forward position.  Also, when bar-end levers are used, the cable sits against the bar, as it does with "aero" road levers.  That means they have to be taped or clamped against the bars.  If nothing else, covering them with whatever bar wrap I use will be more attractive than the electrical tape I use to fasten the cable housing to the bar.

Hmm...Now that I'm going to use cloth tape, maybe I should try something I've never done before...Shellac?

Are You Pondering What I'm Pondering?

Over the years, I have come to realize that there we have rationales, and we have our  motivatons, for cycling.

The rationales are the reasons why we say we ride:  You can get to work faster than you can on the bus.  It's less expensive than even mass transportation, let alone driving, even if you are one of those people who will commute or go to the store only on top-of-the-line equipment.  When you pedal, there is one less motorized vehicle on the road--which, of course, is good for the environment.  And, it's good for your heart, lungs and everything else in your body (well, almost).  Hey, I know of people who gave up their gym memberships after they started cycling to work.

Now, of course, those are all perfectly good reasons to ride.  But I don't think anyone--even one who fancies him or her self an environmentalist or a "health nut"--has ever become a "lifer" on the bike only because of such rationales.

Professor on a bicycle

In much the same way that the things that the things you live on are not the same as the things you live for, the things that keep us cycling for decades have more to do with our motivations.  Some of them can be the spawn of rationales:  You might keep on riding because it's helping you to breathe or sleep better, or it's saving you money.  But I think that if we keep on riding from childhood into old age (even when other forms of transportation and exercise are available to us), the things that motivate us are not nearly so pragmatic.

The greatest motivator for me is, of course, that I love cycling.  I have not found any other activity that allows me to spread my wings and keep my feet on the ground at the same time:  I feel the exhiliaration of gliding through the city and country and a connection, if not entanglement, with the ground or the street under me.  And it frees my mind:  I sometimes find myself working through a problem or simply generating an idea that I couldn't when I was in my apartment or at my desk.

I suspect that most lifetime cyclists (or, at least, people who ride for as long as they are able) are spurred by the sort of motivation I've described.  A former partner once observed that for me, cycling is as much a spiritual or metaphysical experience as it is anything else.  The long ride I took every Saturday was, she said, "your equivalent of church".

Now, I'm not a very religious person, but I understood what she meant.  For me, cycling has always been expansive:  My mind is as free to move as my body is when I'm astride two wheels.

I must say, though, that not all of my thoughts are profound. (You know as much about me if you've been following this blog!)  Sometimes my mind plays, or I simply get giddy or silly.  But even in my most mirthful moments, I have never come up with the sort of riddle this creature is pondering:

Yes, I give him or her "props" for that.  But then again, he or she has had 40 million more years than I've had to come up with such a witticism!

My Morning Commute: Only In 1984. Only From Cannondale.

On my way to work today, I saw only one other cyclist.  I wasn't surprised because this morning was the coldest we've had since February.  And it was windy, which I really noticed when crossing the RFK Bridge.  

That cyclist, though, was riding a bike older than he is.  That, in itself, is not so unusual, as I often see people--particularly the young--on machines passed on to them by parents or older siblings, or found in basements, garages, barns or yard sales.

Some of those bikes could fetch money on eBay as "vintage" items.  In a way, that's very funny to me, because I remember when they were the sorts of things you'd see every day.  Most were good for the sorts of rides and riders they were designed for, but we never thought they were exceptional in any way.

But the rider I saw today was pedaling a rig that was unusual when it was made--and simply strange today:

Cannondale made its first mountain bike in 1984.  It's the one in the photo above--and the one ridden by the fellow I saw today.  Unfortunately, I didn't get to take a photo of the bike.  But, from my brief glimpse of it, I don't think it had been ridden very much.  

When that bike was made, mountain bikes were still new to most people who didn't live in northern California or, perhaps, upper New England.  It seems that those who were involved in the then-evolving sport of mountain biking hadn't developed any notions about what mountain bikes were "supposed" to be.  

At least, their notions seemed fluid compared to those of us who were road bikers, even those as young as I was:  While the designs of certain components had evolved and refined, a good road racing, touring or sport-touring bike had more or less the same design and elements (lugged steel frames with a certain range of geometries) they'd had for about two or three generations before us.  

On the other hand, the first mass-marketed mountain bike--the Specialized Stumpjumper-- began production only three years earlier.  Its design was a kind of cross-breed of the custom mountain bikes Tom Ritchey, Gary Fisher and a few other pioneers had been making for about half a decade.  Although the first shipment of 125 Stumpjumpers (built in Japan) sold out in six days and subsequent runs sold even more quickly, the Stumpjumper would not set the standard for mountain-bike design--at least, not for very long. 

The truth was that even folks like Ritchey, Fisher and Chris Chance were still figuring out how to design their bikes, which had begun with Schwinn cruisers retrofitted with multiple gears and caliper brakes.  By the time the Stumpjumper came along, they and folks like Charlie Kelly were building lugged or fillet-brazed frames of chrome-moly tubing with long wheelbases--which, really, were lighter (yet stronger) versions of the old cruisers.  

According to the information I've come across, all of the early mountain bike frames--including that of the Stumpjumper--were built from steel.  That is no surprise when you consider that about 99 percent of bikes were still being fabricated from that material. The only difference was that the lighter, more expensive bikes used alloy steels--maganese molybdenum (Reynolds 531) or chrome molybdenum (Columbus and Tange), while cheaper, heavier bikes used carbon steel.  

Although bikes were made from it as early as the 1890s, aluminum was little-used as a frame material until the mid-1970s, when the "screwed and glued" Alan frames were built.  A few years later, Gary Klein designed an aluminum frame with wide-diameter tubing to make it stiffer.  In 1982--the year after the Stumpjumper first saw the light of day--Cannondale made the first mass-produced aluminum bicycles.

Those first Cannondales were road bicycles--racing, touring and sport models.  If you rode one of those early Cannondales, as I did, you know that their design has changed quite a bit.  So, I think it's fair to say that if Cannondale was still figuring out how to make aluminum road bikes, they were really starting from "square one" with that first mountain bike.  But it's also fair to say that no one else knew how to design aluminum mountain bikes, for--at least, from the information I've gathered--no one else, not even Klein, was building them at that time.

For all I know, the fellow I saw today on an early Cannondale mountain bike may have no idea about the history I've just described.  He probably just knows that he's riding a funny-looking bike.  Maybe he doesn't care.

Still, I can't help but to wonder who came up with the idea of designing a bike around a 24 inch rear wheel with a 26 inch front. As fluid as ideas about mountain bikes were at that time,  Cannondale was probably the only bike maker that could get away with doing such a thing.  And 1984 was probably the only year they could have done it.