Bikes, what I have learned as a "mechanic" and the LT100

For the better part of 3-4 years now, my better half and I have been deeply obsessed with bicycles of all kinds. In turn, I have become somewhat of a "mechanic", fix expert, know it all about bikes, of all kinds. DISCLAIMER: I mostly work in a basement or dinning room.

Evolution: We started with mountain bikes, that we did not ride in the mountains. Like most SoCal imports, we used our bikes for everything. Why can't I just ride my flatbar fully suspended mountain bike everywhere, on 50 mile rides, and to a coffee shop? The answer, you can, but it will suck! This lead us, over the course of 3 years (our formidable biking years), to adopt 3 bikes each, mostly. One road bike, one "city bike", and one mountain. This is not all inclusive, not perfect, and sometimes there are crossovers.

Today: All 3 of my bikes are esentially custom built, a fast sub 20lb road bike, a 29er franken-mountain bike 1x9 with no suspension, and a 1994 Specialized Crossroads commuter/cross bike that i converted to drop bars. Gen (Master Blaster), has a Riv Sam Hillborne for inbetween stuff (Long slow rides), a Riv A. Homer Hilsen for faster "road" rides, a Public C7 city bike for tooling around, and a 1994 Bridgestone MB6 for the mountains (someday).

All of our bikes are steel, with the exception of my 29er, witch is aluminum with a steel fork. We both like the feedback of steel better, I just went with Alu on the mountain bike to save weight.

What I have learned as a rider and mechanic:

1. Being short is difficult, but you adapt. (In life and with bikes)
-The world is made for Men who are around 6 feet tall, and women who are about 6 inches shorter, I can search craigslist, ebay, and walk into a bike shop, and both of us will have the same problem, our bikes have to be ordered, or custom made. We never get to test ride the "rite size".

2. Bike maintenance is a continual learning process:
-I know 10x more today about derailleurs, than I did even 1 year ago, it's all about cable tension.

-Don't discount good tires, patching sucks.
-SRAM chains with the "master link" are the best thing ever, I can remove the chain to clean it.
-build or buy a chain "whip", you will need this, cassettes get changed.
-Bar tape get's worn out quick, not from use, but from swapping bars!
-Furniture polish cleans/protects amazingly well.
-Buy ferrules (cable ends) in bulk.
-Double tighten/check everything (some bike shops don't do this)
-Noisy usually means DIRTY.
-10k other things.......

3. EXPENSE: Don't get me started, and don't walk me into a bike shop, some bikes are great, some suck, and most bike shop employees are confused (Apologies to the ones who are not). An expensive shiny bike, may not be for you. You must go by feel, with a close 2nd in aesthetics.

-Sometimes it's not worth it to source/build you own bike, and vice versa. There's no hard rules for this. You will learn the HARD way, it's a law of nature.

4. Clothing: I tried to fight it for a long time, but what the masses sell, work. Lycra and wool wick sweat, and tend to stink less. Cotton sucks and hurts, it's great for sitting here, or even going to the Gym, but smooth light things are excellent on a bike.

-Underwear is not your friend. Spandex and/or chamois are. -Old Jerseys from unknown rides are cool.

NEXT: We are both doing larger rides, Master blaster is doing the Venus ride in the next couple of weeks, probably fretting about it right now : ). I'm going to attempt to qualify for the Leadville 100 by racing in the Apine Odyssey 100k on September 15th. I have never ridden over 53 miles on any bike, and I have never ridden that far on a Mountain bike, so this should be interesting. As a supplement to training/stress releif, i'm carpooling to work, and riding home. Ole blue is sitting with me today, being dirty:

What is the point of this post? I'm not sure, maybe so I could type it out, and Imagine the other things I need to do also, Like a FIRING of my pottery, or building a set of stairs for our house!

I swear the next post will be about a firing, and photos of said disaster!

Colorado is burning, and so are my lungs.

Since my last visit, the state has become engulfed in flames, my leg has healed greatly, and it's HOT. That's right, currently Colorado has more than 8 major fires burning in the state, one of witch cropped up just a short distance from us yesterday. There is almost no chance the flames will reach us, but smoke certainly has. It's not helping that the temperature has topped 100 all week (106 on Tuesday, tying a record from 1878). It's brutal, the smoke in the air takes me back to my youth, when you would take a deep breath of that southern California air, and feel that pain! We will be taking an extended trip to the homeland for the next couple of weeks, and hopefully it will be enough time for the fires to be extinguished, for me to age another year, and hopefully to pull some riding time in California.

Image courtesy of the Daily Camera/MARK Leffingwell

I think my favorite part of the last couple of weeks was a TV interview with an evacuee, she was somewhere in the range of 75-90 years old, and proclaimed that the fire was horrible, but it's "all going to burn eventually". YAY! I'll leave you with that one....

Why?

Why do I take so long to post again? I'm not sure, I guess it's an internal question, but needless to say, our lives have been busy, and I have been busy reading other blogs! Yard work, biking, working, and life have kept me busy. I recently started going to a kickboxing glass with G, and have found myself "overly competitive", witch leads me to my current partially torn calf muscle! I'm okay, but I certainly won't be running for a bit (No complaints here), so the bike is going to see a lot of road time. Speaking of bikes, I think we decided that neither of us cares how many we have. G has been talking about a track/single speed style bike (maybe fixed...!), and I think it will be fun. A few years ago I commuted on a "bikes direct" style single speed roadie, and it was one of the best rides I had, I just loved the simplicity. Pottery, ahhh, It's been over 1 year since my last firing, so my plan is to roll one up in the next 2 weeks, I have plenty of material. I guess I have been waiting because I had planned to setup a small fire pit in the yard (maybe it will happen this weekend), and do a traditional pit firing. We will see. Pics next time.

Snowpocalypse part II

It just brings out the dumb.. 1-3 inches per hour, through tomorrow I think.

I swing my wheel at thou.

Blah, Blah, Blah. Yes, I have not posted in 2 months, but I have been BUSY. Hobbit Hole renovation (sounds like porn, sorry), The holidays, etc. However, we have good news Marge! I aquired a long lost friend, the Brent C pottery wheel!

This one is about 20 years old, and falls into the era which I would have used in high school. Up to this point, I have been gratefully using a Creative Industries "Clay Boss" that G.E. bought be a few years ago, had she not done this, I don't think I would have ever revived my work. I can say that it has been "Okay", it got me back into throwing, but I was never able to get the wheel head to level, or center properly, even after sending the wheel head in for replacement. Apparently other people have had this problem on that model. I just felt that I got as much as I could out of that unit, and moved on to something else. I was able to pick this one up off of craigslist, mildly used. I guess he purchased it 20 years ago, used it 10 times, then stored it away!
Be prepared for the thickest, best pottery our studio has ever seen!

I leave you with a picture of the hobbit hole, not scary anymore..