Blame It On The Moon

Once again, I cut through Flushing Meadows-Corona Park on my way home from work.  It was the site of the 1964-65 World's Fair, for which its iconic Unisphere was built.  Nearly three decades later, Men In Black was filmed there.


A German tourist I met in the park reminded me of that.  In fact, he said, it was from watching Men In Black that he first learned about the borough of Queens.  I was reminded of the time three young Germans approached me near the West Fourth Street subway station in Greenwich Village.  They asked me how to get to the South Bronx.  They wanted to go there because they had recently seen Fort Apache, The South Bronx.  I tried, to no avail, to dissuade them from going.


But I didn't have to do anything like that for the youngish man from Munich I met today.  He remarked on the wonderful light of this afternoon turning into this evening in that park as I took this photo:

All of the light has seemed different since my moonlight ride on the wee hours of Saturday morning and the "Super Full Moon" that rose that evening.  Plus, it seems--even more than other full moons I've seen--to have brought some strange sights my way.


I encountered one of them in the bike rack at work:

I wondered whether that vestige of a downtube was there only to support the front derailleur.  There seems to be no other rationale for it.  Maybe it was conceived by someone who believes that we have heads so that we'll have someplace to put our helmets. 


Or maybe it was designed by the same person whose bike was attached to a fire hydrant by the longest chain made of 3/4" thick case-hardened links I ever saw.  I doubt anyone could have cut that chain, at least not with the sort of tools bike thieves carry with them. But it didn't take someone with a PhD in quantum mechanics to figure out that he could lift that bike and chain over the hydrant and into the back of his van. (I didn't see the theft. I just know that professional thieves, at least at that time, used vans. So, that bike's owner and I assumed that scenario played out.)


The sad thing is that faux seat tube isn't even the worst piece of bike design I've ever seen.  Actually, I've seen a lot of things much worse than that.  You tend to come across them when you work in a bike shop for a while.

Maybe the designers of that bike and the owner of the bike that got stolen from a fire hydrant could have blamed the moon--even if it wasn't the Super Full Moon.


And that friendly German tourist and I can blame it for the photos we took in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park.

To Do: Build New Rear Wheel

A dreary, rainy, chilly day. Amazing, how spoiled one can get after a couple of nice days.  But it's officially spring. And  we had a "Super Full Moon" the other night.  No wonder my late night-early morning ride didn't seem so dark!


Tomorrow it's supposed to clear up.  I'll ride to work and, hopefully, for a bit after that. 


I'm going to build a new rear wheel for the rear of Marianela.  A couple of spokes have broken on the one I have.  I think it had to do with the build quality of the wheel.  So I'm going to build with another flip-flop hub (Formula sealed bearing under the IRO brand.) and a Sun CR-18 rim.  Normally, I prefer Mavic rims, and that's what Arielle, Tosca and Helene have.  But Mavic doesn't seem to be making anything in the 27 inch diameter these days, and I don't want to take chances with used rims. The alternatives are Weinmann (which I used to like, but seem to get mixed reviews these days), Alex and a couple of "mystery" brands.


I know, 700 C is the standard diameter.  That's what all of my Mavic rims are.  But Marianela came with 27" wheels, and the rear brake is a long-reach centerpull with its pads about as far down as they'll go.  I really don't want to get a longer brake, as all that seem available are BMX-type brakes, which wouldn't work well on the bike or with the levers I'm using.  Plus, in spite of its length, the rear brake is powerful.  That has to do with the long straddle cable which wraps around the lug that joins the stays to the top tube.


The wheel will probably cost more than the bike did.  But I figure that it's still cheaper than buying a new hybrid or low-end road bike.  I've done that before, and within a year I end up replacing all of the parts.  Plus, for a heavier bike, I like the way Marianela rides.  

Twin Tubes, Again

Slept late but still got out for a late afternoon ride.  Along the way, I saw someone riding a bike I haven't seen in a long time:

If it looks like the seat tube swallowed up the rear tire...it did, sort of.  That's because the seat tube isn't a tube.  Rather, it's a pair of parallel tubes, much like what one finds in place of the top tube on a mixte frame.  On this bike, the rear tire actually runs between the twin parallel tubes.


I didn't see this exact bike.  But I saw someone riding one like it.  Like the one in the photo, it was a track bike, which is the sort of bike on which this frame design seems most appropriate.


The idea behind it was to make the chainstays and wheelbase shorter, which gives the bike more torsional stiffness while making it more responsive and its handling more sensitive.  It seems that every generation or two, someone pushes the idea that stiffer is better.  And the last time that idea came around, I bought into it.  After all, I was still a guy back then. So what  did you expect.  Stiffer is better indeed.  


Anyway...before I get myself in any deeper, I'll tell you more about the bike.  I actually got to ride one when I was working in a shop about thirty years ago.  It was indeed the stiffest and most responsive bike I'd ridden up to that time.  But it was so sensitive that if you sneezed, you'd probably end up across the street.


The funny thing about Rigis was that the road models seemed to be even more extreme than the track models.  Maybe that was because the shortness of the stays and steepness of the frame angles seemed even more unusual for a road than a track bike.  Look at the photos on Bianchigirl's page to see what I mean.


Back then, we all thought the Rigi was some radical new design.  Turns out, an English builder had the same idea, and for the same reasons, before World War II:

To learn more about this late 1930's Saxon bicycle, check out Hilary Stone's article on Classic Lightweights UK, a beautiful and fascinating website for the bike enthusiast.


I guess in another decade or so, someone'll revive the design.  Plus ca change, plus la meme chose.