major minor adjustments

About a week ago, as Tren Way was riding with gggwqqquuuijjjjjjjjjjjjjjkor8dnjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjj                                       jjjjjjjjo905tju66666666666666666666666666666666666666666666666665 l.

Sorry. Heidi Cat sat on the keyboard.

Where was I.... Last week, as we were scouting Borfo's cOld Pasadena Ride, my pal Stevo mentioned that my saddle might be a little high. The general rule of thumb is, when your foot is on the downstroke, your leg should be very slightly bent. But my legs hyperextend — when it felt like my legs were straight, in fact they were bowed slightly in the opposite direction. When it felt like my legs were a little bit bent, they were merely straight, & my lil legs didn't have the full amount of leverage at their disposal. Stevo suggested I lower my saddle just slightly, maybe half an inch.

I lowered it half an inch. My legs felt comically bent. So I raised it back up about 1/8 inch (for a net drop of 3/8 inch). I could tell immediately that I had greater leverage (my bike felt more maneuverable & also lighter). But I felt like I had less muscular strength to call upon. I found myself sliding back in my saddle to get that former amount of leg-stretch, because that's where my muscle-power was, which is kinda funny if you think about it. But I'm forcing myself to sit right, & my muscles are adjusting. It reminds me of some advice from a mechanic at BikeRoWave: If you don't adjust your bike to fit your body, your body will adjust to fit your bike. The mechanic meant it as a warning, but I feel that my body had already (badly) adjusted & that now it's in the process of adjusting in good ways. It feels like existing muscles are shifting to a different part of my legs. I'm not experiencing the soreness one gets from building new muscle. I'm experiencing old muscles figuring out where to go to access their power. It feels strange, but it's starting to feel really good.

All this got me to thinking. I know a fair amount about bikes — I'm not a mechanic by any stretch of the imagination, but I've been riding nearly every day for almost seven years. With the help of the mechanics at various co-ops, I've taken apart & re-assembled every bike I've ever owned, right down to the ball bearings. And I STILL missed the outward clues to a really obvious, major problem. This, while knowing full well about the hyperextension thing — it's considered beautiful in ballet, though it poses its own, different issues for dancers. A little critical distance can be good, to see what I'm too close to see. And it also got me to thinking about adjustments, in general. My seat post wasn't outrageously high for me, but a very small adjustment made a very big difference. It's one of the things I love best about bikes — every single time I ride is an opportunity to assess how things are going & to see what I can improve (in my bike or in my person). This is true of every sport, & ballet too (which is like a sport). But it's especially true with bikes, as there are so many variables to adjust. It's a linear sport — you're always moving forward. Figuratively, too.

sometimes

Sometimes, when I arrive home & chuck my bike on my shoulder & run up my stairs, when I catch my breath & my eyes fall on the Motobecane ... sometimes, I decide I should just yank that old whitewall off it that very instant. I should put on the matching blue-striped tire &, while I'm at it, I could probably stand to patch up one of the old 27x1-1/2s I've got lying around so that I have a spare but, wouldn't you know it, I need it now, so wasn't that a lucky thing. Then I look up & see that it's 2:45 in the morning, & I wonder if my roommates think I'm crazy.

And then I look down at my grease-stained fingers. I look at the TWO tire levers I've broken in an effort to get that damned ancient tire off (it was utterly ossified), & I look at the shredded selfsame ossified tire I eventually sliced off with an x-acto blade. Sometimes, I smile a little & I think, "No. They don't think anything about my sanity. They know."

nevermind about acceptance

I want what I want, & I'm going to work towards what I want until I get it. And what I want is the paint off. If I have to sand- or ball-blast the frame to make that happen, then that is what I will do.

That is all. Everything else shall remain as I wrote it. Um. With edits.

Love,
Katie

puch it up!

I've been slowly working on a "new" bike, in the background, when I'm not at the shop. It's made by Puch, an Austrian manufacturing company that once made cars, bikes, mopeds, and motorcycles. (I also heard they made lawn mowers & chainsaws, but that has not been verified.) Now, they just make bikes. Estimates by those who purport to know put this bike as manufactured in the early '80s.

The bike was a gift from Tony Sem, back when the eponymous Nishiki was stolen off the front of a bus. Grateful as I am, and love it as I do, the bike is pretty hard to describe as anything but a beater. A cerulean-blue paint job, chipped, revealed a lighter, aqua-blue underneath. The seat stays had broken at some point & been welded back together. Mysteriously, every element of the frame (top tube, bottom tube, seat tube, rear stays, even the fork) had scotch tape on it, somewhere. As though scotch tape would do ... something.

What the.

Now, I like bikes. I like fixing them up to my specs, & I like the challenge of turning something modest into something interesting. So I was looking into ways to make this bike something other than a beater. Then I ran into Ephraim at LA Brakeless while I was shopping for parts. He & I chatted about wheelsets & cogs, what gear ratio I hoped to run, & the not-particularly-to-my-liking paint job. He mentioned stripping & powdercoating it. Stripping a bike of paint is either cheap (if you sand- or ball-blast it) or very cheap (if you use harsh chemicals & fervor). Something about taking off the paint myself appealed to me. I don't know. I can be stubborn & foolish. Ask anyone I've ever dated, ever, and they will tell you this is true.

Three rounds of scrubbing the thing with incredibly harsh chemicals later, and the frame is finally, mostly, clean of the blues. Interesting: It's a gun-metal-grey steel frame under all that. The lugged frame was brazed together using a brass-colored metal that fades & streaks nicely into the gun-metal. And then there's the issue of the paint. I will never get absolutely all that paint off. Currently, it's flecked with the cerulean blue, a detail I'm not really all that sad about. While the idea of not painting the bike a different color had come up once I discovered the lovely gun-metal-grey beneath, I've since decided to clear-coat it as is, flecks & all. [NB: Fuck the paint. I had an idea for this bike, & it didn't involve flecks of cerulean blue, I'll tell you what. I gave up too easily on that one.] Unexpectedly, it's going to be a pretty nice-looking bike, indeed. Pictures to come after my next trip to BikeRoWave, assuming I remember to take them.

Serendipity. Acceptance. Hard work & mirth. Something. I just get the feeling I'm going to like the hell outta this bike, especially after I kit it up with the components I want: Brooks honey saddle with matching bartape & toe straps, or Brooks dark brown saddle with matching toe straps & shellacked brown cloth bartape.

That's it, pals. See you on the road.

Love,
Katie

one week, three blisters

Friday, at the Intelligentsia Venice "Preview Party," my hand slips off a gaewan lid, & I pour 202ºF water onto my hand. An enormous blister forms on my left index finger immediately. (Iron Goddess of Mercy, not so much.)

Cut to the following Thursday when the wheelset arrives for the bike I'm building, & I chuck some innertubes and tires on those rims with a quickness. On my thumbs, soft & pink from lack of wrenching, I got two more blisters.

Bikes & tea, folks. Dangerous stuff.

1: Gaewan mishap.
2, 3: Tire install boo-boos.

new developments on my bike

In order of appearance:

A couple months back, I bunged up a brake lever. I replaced the pair with in-line levers. (They're housed on either side of the stem, not on the drops.)

Old bartape plus a missing tube plug meant new sets of both. Experimented briefly with white bar tape, but a.) eh and b.) it got filthy in three minutes. Back to black.

I'd been riding with my seat too low. I didn't notice because I was focusing on the difference in riding with drops. A new seat post let me raise that sucker a good three inches, and suddenly I have a lot more power.

I went from 27" wheels with 1.5-inch diameter inner tubes to 700s with 23mm diameter inner tubes. A smaller, thinner wheel gives the frame more space and highlights the fact that it's really quite small (49"). Raising that seat made the bike look downright dainty.

I got the wheelset (or half of it) for doing some work for a fixed-gear shop, and so I was paid in fixed-gear parts. The rear wheel has a flip flop hub. So I flipped it. I'm learning how to trackstand.

New lights. Because when someone points out that those gummy Knog ones look like cystic outgrowths bulging from your seatpost and stem, you can never ever wash that imagery from your mind.

My bottle cage got in the way of hiking my bike onto my shoulder to take it up and down stairs. I've been doing more of that lately, for one reason or another. Off it goes.

My brakes screamed bloody murder. I replaced the brake pads, and now we're good to go ... downhill. (A fixed-gear bike negates the need for brakes, but I'm keeping at least the front one as a backstop. Maybe it's not so hardcore. I'm okay with this.)

And there you have it. It's like a whole new bike.