A rare shot of Paul performing actual work on his own bike
A facebook posting about a friend’s garage sale a while back landed me an old Japanese Norco road frame that was filled with spider webs for $6. I figured it was the perfect opportunity to try my foot at riding a fixed-gear bike. Of course, I’d first need to build that bike, but how hard could it be?
As it turns out, the bike industry isn’t a real big fan of standardization. I’ve learned a lot about bicycles over the past month and half including the fact that you can buy a seat post in about 20 different sizes, some of them differing in diameter by less than half a millimeter. Even so, I managed to get my bike built with a lot of help from the people at Community Bicycle Network.
CBN is right down the street from where I live, yet I’d never set foot in the place until I needed used (cheap) parts for this frame. I’m sure part of the reason for the delay was the notion I had that anything with the word “community” in its title was mostly for hippies and/or homeless people. But when I did finally walk in, I found the place was basically a junkyard of used bikes and parts, and for $6/hr, I could stick my bike in one of their repair stands and proceed to destroy my ride with any of their bike-specific tools and a healthy dose of my own lack of bike-building know-how.
My fixed-gear-building ordeal inspired Paul to undertake a conversion as well, and I think we may have successfully pressured Jorge into doing the same. Now all we need are some top tube pads and colour-matched tires.
Cursing the lack of bottom bracket standardization. Swiss? French? What?
1 Comment
September 1, 2009 at 1:55 PM
Also – you’ll need matching speedo shorts and a gang symbol in the shape of a penii.