I was going to write a roundup tonight, while I’m here here on the deck with a whisky and a beer and Miles Davis and my netbook, but even though it’s after midnight it’s still too hot for thinking as well as for sleeping.
But I do want to tell you how much I love my Wald folding grocery baskets. Even if my boxes of, say, more fans are too big to fit inside, they make a nice big platform to strap things to.
Filed under: BikesBSNYC Product Review: Walmart’s Mongoose Cachet “Fixed-Speed” Bicycle.
Apparently “Fixed speed” means single speed as suspected, but it comes with a fixed/free flip-flop hub. Sounds good, but also as anticipated the quality (or at least the quality control) appears to suck, bite, and blow all at the same time.
He also reviews the Surly Big Dummy (carries things, hard to wrangle indoors).
Filed under: BikesWhile I think Grant Peterson from Rivendell (and Bridgestone before that) is an important foil to the high tech side of cycling, and he’s done a lot to bring back practical road bikes after the skinny-tired dark ages of the 1990s (when there was very little in the happy middle ground between touring and racing frames), I’ve learned to take his technical pronouncements with the same grain of salt I take Bicycling magazine and I usually find happiness somewhere between them. But this article on the drawbacks of carbon as a frame material (specifically its catastrophic failure mode) are pretty close to my thoughts on the matter – at least with regards to the outsourced, made-for-a-price-point carbon I can afford. I weigh 180 lbs when I’m in shape so I’ll stick with steel forks and aluminum bars, thanks. Also see the Busted Carbon blog.
Filed under: Bikes
Well, they call it a Fixed-Speed Bike so it’s probably just a freewheelin’ one speed, but I still hope this foreshadows the imminent implosion of the fixie fad. Partly because after evangelizing fixed gears since 1998 I’m almost embarassed to be seen riding one now, but mostly because it’ll mean lots of nice cheap track hubs flooding the market. I like the irony of naming it the “cachet”. I also like how it has all the hipster kids who ruined fixed gears up in arms about how it’s ruined fixed gears.
I jest, but I think it’s actually good that they’re offering a simple, cheap bike that has little to go wrong with it, instead of the $200 full suspension “mountain-style” bikes that department stores usually foist on the unsuspecting. update: apparently it’s still junk.
40 lbs shipped, though… I really hope it comes with 15 pounds of packaging.
Filed under: BikesThis time of year the weather can be pretty much anything, and I’ve learned not to get my hopes up too much about nice days in March… but sometimes you can tell when the weather’s really turned. For the past 3 weeks I’ve been seeing definite signs that it’s really spring.
One sure sign is that the idiotic whimsical concept bikes are hatching after spending the winter as larvae deep underground below the frost line (thanks BSNYC). Now you know where potholes come from.
A roundup of bike things I tried and liked in 2009 – an annual new year’s tradition on the iBOB bike list:
Cyclocross brake levers – they’re great for using drop bars offroad, since I want to keep my bars set up for road riding, not high and close for ‘cross. They’re great for riding on the bar tops in city traffic too.
Jandd Mountain Wedge III: A really big seat bag. It holds what I need for all-day autumn rides (lunch, rain shell, gloves, extra warm layer, digicam, tools & tube) and it expands to hold even more. It fits any saddle, which is good since I gave up on Brookses after having the second one stolen off the bike a couple of years ago.
Planet Bike Blaze 2W: I gather from recent discussions on the BOB list that there are other, possibly better LED lights around, but this is the one I tried, and I like it. It’s plenty bright (my previous LEDs were just adequate) and it was easy to find and fairly cheap at Mountain Equipment Co-op.
Filed under: BikesSeen outside Canadian Tire when I was there yesterday. I wonder if it’s functional. Nicely done with the sight and muzzle brake.
Last summer’s spike in dangerously clueless newbie cyclists riding the wrong way in the bike lane on Queen’s Quay has been followed by rows and piles of bicycles abandoned in snowdrifts this winter (I guess people got where they were going before the first snowstorm hit, and took the streetcar home). I’ve been following one particular bike down the street since December.
I wonder what’s the best formula for waxing your chain if you’re going to store your bike inside a snowbank?
It’s a global epidemic: see the Bicycles in the Snow pool on Flickr.
Filed under: Bikes, Toronto