02 February 2012

Future Shock Today

Someone--I forget who--once told me, "Anything you do in a car, you can do on a bicycle." 

My grandmother once told me, "Be careful of what you wish for; be careful of what you believe in."

Never did it occur to me that those two statements could actually converge.  Now I realize that it was bound to happen, given that I wished to believe the statement that opened this post.  If I do say so myself, that statement been true in my life:  I've never owned a car and have no wish to own one.

But I never realized just how true it could be until I came across this:



Who would have thought it possible to take the same obnoxiously loud stereo systems some young men have in their cars and transplant them onto bicycles?  The Future Shock Bike Crew, that's who.

The Crew consists of unofficial founder Nicholas Ragbir and his sister Jessica, and of Bhimraj brothers Anil and Travis.  They emigrated with their families from Trinidad and Tobago to the Richmond Hill neighborhood of Queens--about seven miles. or a quick run on Tosca, from my apartment.



I've actually seen them on the streets.  Unfortunately, I was on my way to or from work, or was weaving through traffic, so I have never had the chance to talk with or photograph them.  However, I recently found a page devoted to them on the Worldwide Cycling Atlas.

I wonder how long those young people keep on "pimpin' out" their bikes with stereo equipment and "peddling" their music through the neighborhood.  Their exploits involve DJ'ing and engineering as well as cycling.  Who knows:   They might develop whole new genres of cycling, entertainment or technology.  Whatever they do in the future, I hope it's as much fun for them as what they're doing now!

01 February 2012

Sheldon, Aaron and Bob



Today was an unusually warm day for this time of year.  Because of a scheduling oddity, I didn't have classes today.  So, I took Tosca out for a ride through some of the landmarked areas of Woodside and Jackson Heights, as well as the promenade along that starts near LaGuardia Airport and goes to the World's Fair Marina.


Then I had an appointment in Manhattan, to which I rode Vera.  I changed bikes because I changed clothes:  from sweats and trainer shoes to a skirt, blouse and dressier shoes.


After my appointment, I took a quick swing down to Bicycle Habitat, from which I ordered Tosca, Arielle and Helene as well as some of the components I hung on them and other equipment I use with them.  Hal wasn't in, but I did see two employees I hadn't seen in a while:  Aaron and Sheldon.






Sheldon is an old riding buddy whom I didn't see for about a decade or so until I bumped into him in the shop not long before my surgery.  I don't think I'd seen him since some time in the fall:  I think I showed up on his off-days or -hours.


Aaron, like Sheldon, has been working in the shop for some time.  He doesn't want me to publish his photo. However, he said I could publish photos, and write about, of one of his bikes, of which I'd only heard before today.  




It's a nice Bob Jackson from, I believe, the '70's.  He's outfitted it with contemporary components: The only "period" pieces are the SunTour ratchet shifters and Cyclone rear derailleurs.  I can understand using those:  I used them myself, back in the day.


I remember, as a teenager, seeing Bob Jacksons, Mercians, Ron Coopers and the frames of some other English builder--I don't remember which, except that I don't think it was Jack Taylor--in a catalogue somewhere.  






I knew that the best racing bikes were believed to be those from Italy and a few American custom builders. The English made some excellent racing frames, too; in my heart of hearts, I really wanted one of those--or one from a French constructeur--even more than an Italian bike.  I would eventually ride, and race, on a couple of Italian bikes, but I really liked the ride qualities of those English frames (I got to try a few that belonged to customers in shops where I worked.).  Plus, the Italian racing frames always seemed gaudy to me, even in my youth; I always felt that my "bike for life" would have the meticulous lugwork and other detail of those English builders.  Their workmanship impressed me more than what I saw on the Italian bikes.




The only braze-ons the frame has are for the water bottle cage (on the downtube only) and a "stop" for the shift lever band.  That was typical on bikes of that time:  at least a couple of bikes I owned were so made.


That frame is at least thirty years old, and it's not hard to imagine Aaron--or somebody else--riding it for another thirty years.  I think Bob Jacksons are still being made--although, by this time, I rather doubt Bob Jackson himself is building them.  I don't know whether Ron Coopers or Jack Taylors are still being built:  I haven't seen references to them in recent catalogues or magazines.  At least it's nice to know that Mercian is still keeping up the flame they, and those other builders, kept burning for decades.  

31 January 2012

The Rise And Fall Of Rapid Rise

I forget who told me that there's no idea so bad that nobody will try to revive it.

Here's a case in point:  low-normal rear, and top-normal front, derailleurs. 

On the bikes most of you ride, pushing the right lever forward shifts you to a higher rear gear (top-normal), and pulling the lever brings you to a lower gear.  Conversely, pulling on the left lever shifts your chain to the larger front sprocket, and pushing it drops your chain to the smaller, or lower gear (low-normal).  The derailleurs I'm going to talk about do the exact opposite. 

It seems that every generation or so, someone tries to revive the idea.  Why, I don't know.


This is an early example of the genre:  the Simplex Champion de France, circa 1935.  Believe it or not, it was a technological marvel for its time, even though it couldn't handle much more than a 22 tooth rear cog and a difference of 8 between the largest and smallest cog. 

It is, I think, rather elegant:  In particular, the cage shape makes me think of a part of a piano rather than a bicycle.  However, the shifts of single-pulley derailleurs are inherently imprecise; low-normal operation only exacerbates the problem.

As one might expect, World War II halted derailleur development and all but stopped their manufacture altogether.  The 1950's would see new innovations and experiments, including the pull-chain mechanism (which Shimano briefly revived on its mountain bike derailleurs during the late 1990's) and, most important, a derailleur with a parallelogram mechanism rather than a single arm or cam.  However, Simplex and other companies also revived low-normal rear derailleurs.

To be fair, the first modern rear derailleur (and, some would say, the first that shifted well)--the Sun Tour Gran Prix of 1964--also was low-normal.  But within two years, Sun Tour abandoned that operating principle, realizing that the slant-parallelogram design (which is found on every derailleur of any quality made in the last quarter-century or so) did more to improve shifting than any other idea or innovation.

However, Sun Tour continued to make front derailleurs that were "top normal" well into the 1970's.  I had one such derailleur.  It shifted well enough until the spring started to lose its tension.  With a low-normal front derailleur, you can sometimes adjust the cable tension to make up for the lack of spring tension.  That's not an option with high-normal front derailleurs.

It's also not an option with low-normal rear derailluers.  I briefly rode one on my mountain bike about fifteen years ago:  a Shimano XTR.  Luckily for me, the shop from which I bought it allowed me to trade it in for a more conventional XT rear.  The owner of the shop reasoned that the amount of wear I put on the XTR made it depreciate enough to warrant an XT as a replacement.

I'd say that was an example of addition by subtraction:  I was happy with the XT, as I was with an earlier version of the same derailleur.  On the other hand, I never liked the low-normal XTR, which was one of the most expensive derailleurs made at the time.  It never had the firm, postive feel I like when shifting:  Even when the gear engaged smoothly and silently after a shift, it always felt as if the chain would slip or jump off the gear at any moment. 

Other cyclists with whom I rode--who included hard-core mountain bikers as well as roadies like me who went off-road for a change of pace--felt the same way about that derailleur. And, in looking back at some old magazines and books, it seems that every time low-normal derailleurs come out, the high-mileage and hard-driving riders don't like them.  Even less-experienced riders who thought they were the newest and latest thing soon soured on them.

I see that Shimano has given up on low-normal (or, in their lingo, "rapid rise") rear derailleurs, at least for now.  I wonder whether they, or any other company, will revive them.  Maybe they will in a decade or so, when there's a cohort of cyclists who didn't use rapid-rise and who don't heed this gem of wisdom from Ecclesiastes:  There is nothing new under the sun.

30 January 2012

Old-School

Now here's some real old-school lugwork.






There's a "mirror," if you will, of the front fork pattern on the rear stay, near the seat cluster.






I tried to get a better image of it, but it's in a display window.  That window is long past displaying anything, with all of the clutter in it.


The shop behind that window isn't much bigger than my living room, so they have to use every available space.  






Gray's, on Lefferts Boulevard in Kew Gardens, has most likely been in business for longer than I've been in this world. Bernice,the proprietess is a very sweet woman who's probably a decade or two older than I am.  Her husband passed on a few years ago.


One thing that makes the shop interesting--and a reason why I stop in from time to time--is their stock of older parts.  Bernice knows what they are, and what they're supposed to fit, but she's not a cyclist herself and doesn't claim to be any sort of bike enthusiast.


She is one of those old-time shopkeepers who, on slow days, chats with people in the neighborhood.  Today, a woman who seemed to be a couple of decades older than her was there, and they were just talking about family, the passage of time and such.


It's one of those shops that opened when the neighborhood around it was very different.  At one time, Kew Gardens--in which George Gershwin lived and Paul Simon and Jerry Springer were born and raised-- was full of neo-Tudor houses and had an almost-suburban feel.  I suspect the shop opened during that time.  Later, Kew Gardens was nicknamed "Crew Gardens," for all of the airline personnel who lived there.  


Many of the private houses have been torn down and apartment buildings have risen in their place.  Now, Kew Gardens is mainly a community of Orthodox Jews and emigres from Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan.  Among them, there doesn't seem to be very many cyclists:  Just about everyone I see riding comes, as I do, from other parts of Queens or from Brooklyn.


What seems to keep the shop in business is that it's near Forest Park.  And the shop is one of the few in the city that rents bikes.  A few cyclists I know are familiar with the shop; apparently, they go there for the old parts and the pleasant atmosphere, even if it's in cramped quarters.  


Gray's isn't what some cyclists would consider to be a "pro" shop, and doesn't try to be one.  It's, more than anything, an old-fashioned family business that happens to deal in bikes. In a way, it's fitting to find an old-school Hetchins there.

29 January 2012

Pancake Rides





This is the time of year for the "pancake ride."


You've probably been on one:  You ride to someplace where pancakes (and foods that go with them) are served.  And then you spend the rest of your ride burning off what you just ate.


In two of the clubs in which I rode, Pancake rides were hugely popular and, certainly, the winter rides that had the biggest turnouts.


The club to which I belonged when I was in college (Rutgers) held those rides every other Sunday in January and February, if I recall correctly.  The rides took us from the urban confines of New Brunswick, New Jersey into the rural areas of western New Jersey.  Actually, many of the club's rides did, but the Pancake ride had a particular destination:  a firehouse that served pancake breakfasts during the winter. I think the proceeds were used to fund the volunteer fire department located in the firehouse, and that everyone who cooked, served, seated people and did all of the other work were family members or friends of the firefighters.


One of the greatest draws of that ride, apart from the complete lack of traffic outside of New Brunswick on a winter Sunday morning and the bucolic countryside, was what we called The Bottomless Plate.  Yes, it was an all-you-can-eat affair.  In addition to the pancakes, the house served hash browns, sausage, bacon and scrambled eggs, as well as coffee, tea and hot chocolate.  It may not have been the best-quality stuff, but when you're cold and hungry, just about anything edible is delicious and hearty.  


As I recall, that firehouse was very welcoming to us.  That's particularly surprising given how much we ate:  Those of you who are better than I am in math can calculate how much Bis-Quick it took to feed thirty to forty cyclists who'd just cycled twenty  or so miles in twenty-degree weather with a wind-chill of about five or ten degrees.  Also, I should add that some of us were young (i.e., college age) males, who typically had bottomless stomachs and empty wallets.


These days, of course, I'm not a young male.  But all of my changes don't seem to have filled in the bottomless pit in my stomach!  


Anyway, I decided, just for the heck of it, to type "pancake rides" into a Google search box.  It seems that they're going on everywhere, and they're not confined to winter.  Still, I'll probably always think of them as winter rides.   I mean, how many other foods feel warmer and cozier after a ride on a cold day?

28 January 2012

As Good As A Tree...Or A Colnago?

One of the most parodied (and most eminently parodyable) poems in the English language is Joyce Kilmer's "Trees."


Hmm...Even though I know it wouldn't have fit the meter or rhythm of the poem, it might've been better if he'd written, "I think that I shall never see/A bikestand as good as a tree."




Certainly a parking meter isn't quite as nice a stand--although it's a lot easier to loop a chain around it:




The paint job tells me someone was trying to make that bike unattractive to thieves.  However, if that was the owner's/rider's intention, something else on the bike counters it:




Now, if you're going to so much trouble to make the bike unappealing, why would you announce, in screaming red letters, that it's a Colnago?


Of course, the bike is not a Colnago. (I know; I owned and raced on one and have seen many others.) Could it be that it's some kind of post-modern irony (translation: a joke)?  Could this cyclist be saying, "Ha, ha, it's not a Colnago?"

Who'd've thunk it--putting the Colnago name on a bike would make it less valuable?  What if people put Mercedes-Benz stars, or blue-and-white BMW shields, on their 10-year-old Hyundais?  Would that make them less of a target for car thieves?  





Actually, the basket almost made me wish it was a Colnago. It reminded me of the bike someone I met once in Williamsburg (where else?) about ten years ago: a vintage Cinelli track bike (not the ones sold today with the Cinelli label), with equally vintage Campagnolo Pista components and Mavic SSC rims--and a flowered basket strapped to the handlebars.


None of those bikes, though, will ever have a stand as good as that tree on which I leaned Tosca today.

27 January 2012

When Hipsters And Hasidim Use The Same Adjective

From Indigo Jo Blogs


When people on opposing sides of the same issue are using "stupid" as a prefix for the same word, the thing they're talking about can't be good.  Right?


I'm thinking now of bike lanes.  Both cyclists and the people who hate us, or merely find us a nuisance, use that same adjective in reference to the lanes.  


I was reminded of this when I stumbled over a site called "Stupid Bike Lanes" and read articles like this, and the comments on them. 


Of course, the velophobes--who include all sorts of (but not all) people whose way of life or business is auto-based--think we're getting in their way of getting to wherever they have to go and believe we're getting "special privileges."


As any number of other bloggers (including yours truly) and commentators have pointed out, the antipathy toward cyclists, particularly in urban areas, is often generational and based on socio-economic or ethnic issues.  Here in New York, non-cyclists hold contradictory views of cyclists: the messenger, the hipster, the Whole Foods customer and the simply rich.  What reinforces these stereotypes is that those who most vociferously oppose the bike lanes tend to come from what remains of the blue-collar class and groups like the Hasidic and Orthodox Jews who have large families that they transport in vans.  So, they are always driving, it seems, from one available parking spot to the next and, as they see it, the bike lanes take away those spots.  


The bike lane-haters who are actual cyclists don't dispute those objections, and in fact cite one basic flaw of most urban bike lanes:  They run alongside parking lanes and, therefore, directly in the path of opening drivers' side doors.  I've been "doored" a few times: on all except one of those occasions, I was riding in a bike lane.


Some bike lanes are badly designed in other ways.  The most obvious flaw, aside from the one I just mentioned, is that many of them go nowhere, end abruptly or in the middle of busy intersections, or are so poorly marked so that only those who already know where they are can find them.  


All of the problems I've mentioned actually make cycling less safe than it is in the traffic lanes of most streets.  And they indicate that those who design them know as little about cycling as transportation, in an urban area, as those who hate cyclists.

26 January 2012

Reconciliation



One of the nice things about being my age is that, if you're lucky, you can start to reconcile all kinds of things that seemed irreconcilable. If you're not lucky, they reconcile themselves, though perhaps not in the ways you'd intended--or one might destroy the other.


Where am I going with this?  Well, it's about cycling, but it also has to do with stuff you'd find on my other blog, if you read it.  So consider yourself forewarned.


You see, from the time I found out about John Rakowski, I wanted to do something like what he did.  He cycled around the world, turning his pedals on every continent except Antarctica.  (What would penguins think of some guy with a bike laden with full front and rear panniers, camping equipment and bottles of water anyplace they'd fit on the bike?)  He recounted his adventures in Bicycling! magazine during my teen years.


Rakowski was in his early 50's when he undertook his journey, which lasted three years, if I recall correctly.  As it turned out, he was living not far from where I lived, in New Jersey, at the time.  And, yes I met him, and he signed my magazines.  


Well, the fact that he lived nearby and did what he did would have been reason enough for me to take him as an inspiration, if not a role model.  But there was another reason--apart from the "local boy" and "cycling" aspects of the story--that meant so much to me at that time in my life.


However, as important as his feat was to me, I never talked about it with anybody.  For one thing, no one else in my family, or even in my circle of peers or the neighborhood in which I was living, shared my passion for cycling.   It was as if the so-called "bike boom" had passed them all by.  Everybody predicted that I would "grow out of" my obsession with cycling as soon as I got my driver's licence.  Then again, people said I would "grow out of" all sorts of other things, as if they were tops and shoes.


You may have figured out where this is going: something else I didn't "grow out of."  I'm talking, of course, about my wish to be able to wear bike jerseys and shorts with cleated shoes (in that place and time, almost no one had ever seen them), or skirts and blouses with heels, as a way of life.


The reason, of course, I didn't "grow out of" those desires is that there was more to them--which, of course, I didn't talk about with anybody.  Wearing the clothes wasn't the point for me; I wanted to be the person who was expected to wear them--or, at least, a person who wouldn't face opprobrium for doing so.  


That John Rakowski was a man, and most cyclists were men, was problematic.  How could I want to ride around the world and win the Tour de France and be a woman at the same time?


Today, of course, there are more female cyclists than there were in those days, and women's racing enjoyed a heyday during the late '80's and the '90's.  I could not understand why only men should race, tour or participate in most other sports.  Title IX had been enacted around that time; however, it would take time for women's sports to gain any momentum because the sorts of sports programs, like Little League and Pop Warner football, that existed for boys didn't exist for girls.  


It was a time when many people--including many women--thought sports were "unfeminine."  I recall one girl in my high school who was as an even better athlete than most of the boys.  Her family, which included three brothers who were athletes,  was supportive of her interests.  However, some of the teachers and other adults tried to discourage her, saying that no man would want to marry her.  I couldn't understand that:  She was a very attractive girl who had no difficulty getting dates.


Fortunately for her, she was able to play basketball and a couple of other sports in college.  Of course, I would have wanted to be like her.  Perhaps I could have been:  I played soccer in high school.  However, my real passion always lay with cycling, and only a few colleges had teams or even clubs for cycling.  To my knowledge, none were for women.


Although I repressed my desire to be a woman then, and for most of the next three decades, I always felt, deep down, that there was no contradiction between wanting to ride the world, and to race, on my bike--and being a woman.  What has always drawn me to cycling is the freedom I feel when I ride.  I feel as if my spirit is unchained, that--if you'll indulge me a cliche--I felt as free as the wind and as open as the air.  


And that, naturally, was what the woman in me wanted.  She wanted to be free from what I now realize were the same boundaries that seemed to contain me when I was off my bike.  When I say what I'm about to say, I don't mean to aggrandize myself:  To be a long-distance cyclist at an age after you were supposed to have a drivers license and a car, you had to be an independent spirit.  And, of course, it's impossible to be anything else if you want to live by the imperatives of your spirit rather than the dictates of your school, community and society.  That's doubly true if your subconscious or unconscious gender--the one you are when you're by yourself--is different from the one on your birth certificate, and for which you are being trained by your school, church and other institutions.


I wanted to be free--to be Justine, on a bike.  At least I lived long enough to know that those things weren't contradictory, and to meet people who understand that.  And, just as important,from my point of view, is that I've begun to develop a language to explain my complications, contradictions and complexities.  It makes sense to me, which means that I can also make it make sense to others--well, some other people anyway.  If they don't understand, or don't accept it, that is all right.  


I am Justine, and ride wherever and whenever my time and resources allow.  Hopefully, some day, I'll have more of both.  For now, living my life and riding my bikes are inseparable, and offer me so much.

25 January 2012

Riding Off Into The Sunset Out Your Window





Yes, I've hit Lotto.  Just to prove it, here are photos from my exotic midwinter cycling vacation.

Hey, who wouldn't want to see the sun setting over the ocean on a clear, mild day?




Or see the blue of the sky consumed into the blaze of orange and red and purple, and spreading in waves of deepening blue?




If any of you have not yet entered the workforce, you can look forward to long meetings and workshops.  It's not a sign of a character flaw if your mind wanders during them.  In fact, I'd argue that if you see what I saw out the window, and you pay more attention to it than to what's going on in the room, it's a sign that you're spiritually healthy.




Just don't tell that to the people who were running the workshop.  

I got outside, and on my bike, just in time for this:





In what exotic locale was I?, you ask.  Would you believe Kingsborough Community College, at the southern edge of Brooklyn.  I took the long way back, so in all I still managed to ride about 40 miles yesterday.  And I didn't even have to leave home.  Well, not really, anyway!

23 January 2012

Disraeli Gears



"Campagnolo trying to do mass-market derailleurs was a bit like the British Royal Family trying to do marital fidelity--it was never going to work because, although they knew they should do it, they considered the whole idea inherently beneath them."


So begins Michael Sweatman's page about the Campagnolo Nuovo Valentino extra derailleur on his site Disraeli Gears.  He says it's about half-complete; I almost don't want him to finish it because so many of his entries leave me in eager anticipation of more.  


His pages include his own wry commentaries, as well as photos and technical information, about derailleurs that have been made during the past 80 years or so.  Disraeli Gears is arranged by models, brands, countries and decades, as well as by several of his own themes, such as the ever-popular "A Riot of Colour."


Now I'm going to answer the question some of you are asking:  Yes, Disraeli Gears is named for the Cream album released in November 1967.  According to Ginger Baker, the album got its name when Eric Clapton talked about getting a racing bicycle and Mick Turner said, "Oh yeah--Disraeli Gears."


My guess is that Turner was high when he made that remark.  (For that matter, Clapton and Baker probably were, too.)  I won't speculate on whether or not Sweatman was high when he wrote any of his entries (or whether he ever was).  However, he does reveal one of his food vices in this entry.


Even if all you know about derailleurs is whether or not your bike has one, Disraeli Gears makes for a lot of interesting and entertaining reading.