bike mania

edit: yea...posted at work so i'll have to take pics when i get home

i did a bit more work on my huff puff bike this weekend, as christine puts it (my motorcycle is my vroom vroom bike). i took out my old schwinn roadbike, which is old, scratched up, the seat post is permanently rusted inside the frame, the pedals and gears are a but unsmooth and will probably break sometime in the future. but recently i cut the handlebars into bullhorns (see tutorial here) and suddenly the bike is highly awesome. i'm not sure what the exact appeal of bullhorns and single speed bikes are, but they're popular in urban areas like cambridge/boston, and i've long jumped on the bandwagon.

this week i finally got in touch with a few fellow bikers on craigslist and met up with a guy who sold me another set of drop handlebars and a set of road tires. i love meeting people and talking about bikes with them. this guy rode up on his track bike which was clean and basically simple to the point of being almost only a frame. he carried the tires, tubes, and apparently enough parts to almost make a complete bike, on his back, because he had gone around selling parts on craigslist all weekend. we chatted about track wheels vs traditional road wheels and how to use wd-40 to clean handle bar tape gunk.

so then i went home and put together the wheels for my old scwhinn revival. i used to have a set of thicker (>23 mm) wheels whose bearings were also worn and i had removed them to try to clean...but now i have a set of thinner wheels i had bought, a set of tires i just bought, and when i put them together they were a nice, sleek setup. so i had the bullhorns on the frame already, i put the two wheels on, and installed an old noseless bike saddle that i had spray painted because it was shockingly pink before. i had one bike chain left, and it happened to be a single speed which fit pretty well - i had to take off 6 links for it to fit on the largest gear in front and the 2nd smallest on the rear wheel.

i took the bike for a spin despite not having brakes. it starts a bit slow but it seems to have a good top speed because of the gear ratio - my other single speed has a bit too low of a gear ratio so i have to pedal a bit too fast. and thus my old heavy schwinn is on its way to becoming a cool cambridge city bike with bullhorn handles, a noseless saddle, and sleek wheels. can't wait to ride this one around.