A Pre-Ride Checklist

Some of you may be experienced cyclists or mechanics. So the information in this post may not be new to you.

However, for those of you who haven't been cycling for very long, or are afraid to adjust anything on your bike (When I first started cycling, someone told me "derailleur" is French for "don't try to fix this!") I found this handy little infographic. It shows you what to check before you embark on a ride.

Even if the information is "old hat" to you, I thought you might enjoy the infographic just because it's nicely done:

From BicyclingHub.com

Never Again--Until Now, Of Course

In an earlier post, I talked about the futility (for me, anyway) of saying “Never again!”

I built up a Trek hybrid frame from about 1990 and used it as an errand/”beater” bike for a few weeks before deciding it was just a little too big for me and giving it away.  I said I wasn’t going to do anything like that again.

Did some famous person say all resolutions are temporary?  Or is that just some rationale I’ve devised for breaking vows I make?

 

Or, perhaps, I’m just in the habit of making promises to myself that I simply can’t keep.  You know, like the one that I was going to live as a cisgender heterosexual male.  Oh, well.

Anyway…You’ve probably guessed where this is going.  Another bike found its way to me.  Yes, really, it did…just like that kitten I brought home as a kid followed me home.

Actually, I found it at a yard sale in Brooklyn—not far from the neighborhood in which I grew up.  And the owner made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.  Well, I could have, but I don’t have that much resolve.  What can I say?

So for a princely sum of ten bucks I found myself in possession of a Schwinn LeTour manufactured in October 1975.

The frame itself had barely a scratch and seemed to be in perfect alignment. However, the rims and spokes were rusty, perhaps from sitting in a garage or basement.  Those parts, and the others—except for the tires and seat—were original equipment.

I took everything off the bike, as I would have done to overhaul it.  Then I unlaced the wheels, tossed the rims and spokes and gave the tires, seat and handlebars to Recycle-A-Bicycle.

As the bike probably hadn’t been ridden much, the other parts were in very good condition.  So I decided to list them on eBay, figuring that they’d be good for “period” restorations.

In my listings, I made sure to mention that the parts were original equipment on a ’75 LeTour.   A guy in Tennessee bought the derailleurs, shift levers, cranks and bottom bracket; other buyers bought single parts.  The brake levers—complete with the “suicide” extensions—went to a fellow in Switzerland!

While I didn’t make a fortune from those parts, they netted me enough money to buy a pair of wheels.  I know, they’re kind of strange:  the kind of “Deep V” rims you might find on a “hipster fixie”, with a coaster brake on the rear.  But I figure the rims will take a beating and the coaster brake won’t require a lot of maintenance.  Plus, the bike is going to be used for errands and such, and locked in all manner of places, so I wasn’t looking to assemble a technological marvel.

Those wheels were all I’d need to buy. (After assembling the bike, I bought the Wald baskets.)  The other parts came off other bikes or were acquired for projects I never pursued.  And I got the fenders in a swap.  Someone had drilled them for a custom fitting but decided he didn’t want steel fenders.  The way I fitted them to the LeTour is inelegant, but somehow right.  Anyway, it works.

I’m not going to sell or give this one away.  At least, not for a while, anyway. ;-)

A Guest? Or An Alien?

Perhaps you’ve noticed them:  the bikes parked on your block, at your workplace, in front of your favorite bookstore or café, or by any other building or structure that’s part of your everyday environment. They’re there for a couple of days, a week, a month or two, or longer.  Then they’re gone.

They can be any kind of bike, from a Columbia pulled out of a trash heap to a Campagnolo-equipped Colnago, a fixie or a downhill bomber, a classic three-speed or vintage ten-speed.

They’re there, then they’re gone.  Where do they—and, more important, their riders—come from?  Where do they go?  Why are they parked to the parking meters, signposts or fences where you see them?

At different times in my life, one of those bikes has been mine.  I’ve parked in front of campus buildings where I took classes for a few weeks, a few months.  I’ve locked my bike near office buildings where I took workshops or seminars, or worked temporary jobs.  I’ve left my bike chained in front of houses or apartment buildings where I tutored young people who were having difficulties pronouncing Spanish sounds, conjugating French verbs, following the currents of history or constructing a sentence—or simply passing some test or another.  And I’ve had to secure my bike to whatever immobile objects stood around court and precinct houses, sports areanae or performance spaces when I was writing some story or another for a newspaper.

And then, of course, there were the times I parked a couple of times a week, or every day or every night, for a week, a few months, or even a year or two in front of the house or apartment building of someone with whom I had a relationship—or simply some sort of recurring business or errand.

I wonder whether the bike in the photo has a story like any of the ones I’ve mentioned.  I saw it every day for a couple of weeks, then it was gone.  The last time I saw it, I didn’t notice any scratches or marks that weren’t there the first time I saw it.  That’s especially interesting, perhaps even a little disturbing, on such a stark white bike.

An Ideal Ride, Almost

Many cyclists have their own, very particular definitions of the "perfect" conditions for a bike ride.

Me, I don't have one scenario for the ideal ride.  Rather, I have a few different visions of the best conditions for a day of pedaling.

One of them came true today.  The temperature was neither too warm nor too cool:  For most of my ride, they hovered between 21 and 25C (70 to 77F).  They started as the former and rose to the latter before dropping back as I approached the Atlantic shoreline.  Further inland, the temperature rose to 30C (86F), according to the weather reports I saw. But I was spared that.

But even more important were the sky and light.  The sun shone, mostly through a filter of puffy clouds that did not threaten rain.  So I enjoyed the benefit of bright light without having the sun beating directly on me as it did during my Somerville ride on Memorial Day.

Plus, I encountered relatively light traffic.  I figured I would, which is one of the reasons I decided to do another Point Lookout ride today.  Tomorrow, the weather is expected to be the same, maybe a degree or two warmer.  Because it will be a Saturday, throngs of people will flock to anyplace with a beach.  But today I didn't have to be around them:  Long stretches of sun, sand and waves were almost entirely mine!

The only "smudge", if you will, in this picture was the wind.  It's not that I'm wind-adverse.  Rather, I found myself riding with the wind on the way out, but I had to buck it on the way back.  Like most cyclists, I prefer the opposite.  But I won't complain:  Everything else, including Tosca, was Ideal.  And any day I can ride is a blessing.

One Person's Trash Is Another Person's...Honjo? LeFol?

I used to know people who never bought furniture or electronic equipment:  They furnished their rooms, apartments or even houses—and made music, phone calls, designs and algorithms—with stuff people left curbside for sanitation workers to pick up.  I still know someone, a musician and bike mechanic (If he’s reading this, he knows who he is!), who has never purchased a power tool or even a vacuum cleaner:  He has refurbished stuff other people discarded.  He even owns a couple of bikes acquired that way. I, too, have had such bikes in my life.

Maybe it’s because most of my acquaintances and I are well into middle age that I no longer hear of people filling their living spaces with beds, couches or even desks or cupboards other people no longer wanted or needed.  Perhaps young people are still doing such things and I just need to make younger friends.  Or it may be that concerns over bedbugs and contagious diseases have stopped people from constructing their living spaces from the flotsam of other people’s lives.

I admit it’s been a while since I’ve done anything like that.  In fact, when I see piles of furniture and books, or bags of clothes or concatenations of toasters, blenders, food processors, microwave ovens, stereo equipment, light fixtures and framed prints relegated to the edge of the gutter at the beginning or end of a month (when people move out), I almost never stop even to take a look.  For now, I don’t want any living being besides Max or Marley to take up residence in my apartment unless he or she is helping me to pay the rent or is a partner in a recreational (not procreational!) activity with me.

The other day, I rode by an apartment full of stuff without the apartment abandoned in front of a recently-built waterfront condo building on Kent Avenue in Williamsburg.  I wouldn’t be writing about it if I hadn’t noticed something from the corner of my eye and checked it out.

It’s not every day that someone leaves behind a pair of hammered aluminum fenders with a randonneur-style rack. It would be serendipitous (Is that an actual word?) enough if they were from Velo Orange.  But I knew, as soon as I picked them up that at least the fenders aren’t.  

The pattern on them consists of hexagons that are more sharply defined than the polygons on the VO fenders:

I doubted then, as I do now, that they’re original LeFol or other vintage French fenders.  But could they be Honjos?  The pattern matches.  And, even more interestingly, they are 43 mm wide, the same as Honjos, whereas my VOs are 45 mm.  (VO also makes 35mm hammered fenders.) 

But I didn’t see any sort of markers to indicate their provenance.  I’ve seen a couple of pairs of Honjos before, but I can’t recall whether they had any decals or emblems on them.  I also don’t know whether some other company is making fenders that look so much like Honjos.  It’s not inconceivable:  After all, how could Honjo claim a patent infringement when its own fenders replicate 50- or 60-year-old French designs?

Anyway, the fenders are in excellent shape.  There’s a little bit of dirt on the underside, which shows they were ridden, but not much.  There are a couple of indentations where the fenders were fitted between fork blades or seat stays.  They were drilled for some frame that had threaded fitments in the fork crown and underneath the seatstay bridge, as Helene (my newer Miss Mercian) has.  The holes don’t seem gouged or otherwise enlarged and have no cracks or other stresses around them. So, if I wanted to use the fenders on Helene, fitting the front should be no problem, but the hole in the rear might not line up with the fitting on the rear bridge. 

Of course, I could plug that hole and use the fender with a bracket—on Helene or Vera.  But the rack is not meant to be used with panniers or loads of more than a couple of kilos—both of which I sometimes carry on Vera.

Before I try anything, I want to ascertain that these fenders are actually from Honjo (or LeFol?!) and not some knock-offs that would be a downgrade, quality-wise, from my Velo Orange fenders.