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!

There's Hope--Really!

While pedaling up a hill, I saw this:

Now, the hill wasn’t particularly steep or long, and I was riding Tosca, my Mercian fixed gear.  But right now she has a gear of 47x17, which isn’t high but isn’t exactly a climbing gear.  Still, I managed to get up that hill without getting out of my seat or breaking a sweat.  But I have to admit that I liked seeing “There’s Hope”—which is all I saw as I started the climb.  It was only about halfway up when I realized that the place was a barber- and beauty-shop.  Until I saw the subtitle, I thought it might be a storefront church or one of those centers where twelve-step programs meet—neither of which would have surprised me in that neighborhood.

I think it’s kind of funny that a barber- and beauty-shop would have such a name.  Perhaps I should have gone in and asked whether they’d make the same claim for someone who’s as completely un-photogenic as I am.

Anyway, after ascending that hill, I came to a garden.  Well, all right, the name of one—sort of:

Somehow I never associated Eden with mountains.  In any event, I’m glad the city created that green mall along Mount Eden Avenue, which traverses a low-income neighborhood that immigrants from the Caribbean, Latin America and West Africa call home.

A bit further up in the Bronx, I felt a bit like an urban archaeologist when I came upon this, across from the WoodlawnCemetery:

Here in New York, one occasionally sees advertisements that were painted on the sides of buildings decades, or even generations, ago.  Although almost nobody would consider them Fine Art (at least, not with a capital “F” and a capital “A”), some show a level of illustrative vividness—and pure-and-simple imagination and craft—one rarely finds today.  That is why I have respect both for whoever created, and whoever actually painted, those ads. I am sure those people are, unfortunately, long dead.

On the other hand, the graffiti “taggers” who painted their "signatures" on the building next door (which I wasn't able to photograph)  may be alive and well.  Perhaps they have become “legitimate” artists; perhaps they are doing things entirely unrelated to art.  Or—this being the Bronx—they also might be long dead.  Somehow it’s strange to see graffiti (at least here in New York) that seems almost as much an ancient artifact as a grotto unearthed by some construction crew building a hotel or office tower or parking lot in some city along the Mediterranean.

Speaking of history:  Believe it or not, in the Bronx, there’s a still-standing house that’s even older than this country.  This house was built sixteen years before the Declaration of Independence—and two centuries before I was born:

The Valentine-Varian  House is now home to the Museum of Bronx History.  Unfortunately, it wasn’t open when I got there.  But I’m going to make it a point to go there again soon, when it is open.

If that house is still standing—and I climbed some hills (by choice)—I feel that I can say, after all, There’s Hope!

P.S. Can you guess what this building is?

 

The Real Reason To Ride A "Flip-Flop" Hub!

When I converted a Peugeot U-08 into my first “fixed-gear bike” (I hadn’t even heard the term “fixie”!), hardly anyone else—and only one cyclist I knew—had ever ridden one.  Others had seen them—actually, track bikes, which are a slightly different species— in a store or trade show, or in a magazine or catalogue (Remember, there was no Internet in those days!) but could not conceive of riding them anywhere but a velodrome. 

Riding a fixed-gear bike, even with brakes, seemed like one of those things that someone like me would do.  You see, I was not much more than twenty, full of testosterone and other substances, some of which were produced by my body.  Most of the cyclists I knew then—including members of the club I sometimes rode with—were older and started cycling when there were even fewer adult cyclists, and thus less of a knowledge base, than we have now.  I would guess that none of them had seen anything with a fixed gear, let alone seen anyone riding such a machine, when they first took up cycling.

Now, of course, hipsters and all sorts of other people ride “fixies”, at least in places like New York.  A few ride real track bikes. Others are on bikes that came equipped as “urban fixies” or “singles” while still pedal converted ten- and three=speeds.  As it happens, I now ride one bike that’s made for single-speed/fixed gear use (Tosca, my Mercian fixie) and another (my LeTour) that was converted from a 1970’s ten-speed.

Even if there weren’t so many people riding single speeds and fixies, people probably wouldn’t look at me askance.  After all, I am now a woman of, ahem, a certain age who lives with cats.  I am more or less expected to be eccentric, just as nobody was surprised that I tried “crazy” things when I was a young male.

Anyway…There were some things even I didn’t know about when I was cranking down on the French-threaded bottom bracket lockring I used to secure my fixed gear to the Normandy hub that came with that Peugeot.   One was, of course, that track hubs had two sets of threads:  one on which the cog threads and another, threaded in the opposite direction, for the lockring.  It’s amazing that I rode my first fixie for as long as I did without unthreading it!  Another thing I didn’t know about is something that’s nearly ubiquitous now:  the “flip-flop” hub.  Almost all “urban fixies” and “singles” are equipped one; so are many conversions and even true track bikes that are ridden on the streets.

A few “flip-flop” hubs are made for a fixed cog on each side.  Usually, each cog is of a different size so a rider and “flip” the wheel to get a different gear.  But the more common configuration is a fixed gear on one side and a single freewheel on the other.  If you’re riding your fixed gear and get tired, you can “flip” over to the freewheel so you can coast for at least some parts of your ride.

But I discovered another practical reason for a “flip flop” hub yesterday, when I was running some errands on my LeTour.

I’d been pedaling through an industrial area of Maspeth, a part of Queens almost no tourist ever sees.  There, the streets are moonscapes or the Ho Chi Minh trail or whatever metaphor you want to use for something that has more potholes than smooth surface.  The reason for such road surfaces is, of course, the trucks that rumble over it.

I’d been pedaling at a pretty good pace when, suddenly, my rear wheel seized.  Since I was riding the “fixed” side, my feet, pedals and cranks stopped in unison:  On a “fixie”, if your wheels aren’t turning, neither are your pedals.

When I stopped, I discovered the cause:  The chain had popped off the cog and wedged itself in the gap between the right crank and bottom bracket shell.  When I got off the bike, I discovered that part of the chain had doubled over itself on the rear cog, which had unscrewed—along with the lockring—from the hub. 

That led me to think that perhaps the lockring had vibrated off before the “derailment”.  Whatever the cause, I knew I had a particular problem:   After reinstalling the cog and ring, I could tighten the cog easily enough just by pedaling it, but since I didn’t have a tool—or even a hammer and screwdriver or punch—I couldn’t tighten the lockring enough to prevent a similar mishap.

So—you guessed it—I “flipped” the wheel to the freewheel side.  And I was back on my way.

Now you know at least one reason why you should ride a “flip-flop” hub on your commuter or errand bike!  And you don’t have to be a crazy young guy or a woman “of a certain age” with cats to get away with it.  As Ru Paul says, it’s how you “work it”!