March 2012 – Page 2 – CanooterValve

Culture Clash

Bikes Comments Off

Mar 162012

I’ll admit that yesterday’s post had me missing what I guess you’d call the good old days of my little bike shop. Far from being buffoons, characters like Rich are actually pretty epic guys, the kind of people about whom tales are told.

Good people. Story makers. Legends.

The last time I saw Rich, we’d put together a night ride and were almost back to the parking lot when we noticed he wasn’t with us. I think he was using borrowed lights and had two sketchy tires and various other potentially problematic things going on, so we mounted a search party and doubled back. After an extra hour or so riding around in the woods yelling his name, we ended up finding him back in the parking lot where we’d started. Did his lights burn out? Was he OK? His explanation: he just decided to do some “freeriding.” Like God and guys who compete in those lumberjack competitions, Rich’s ways remain shrouded in mystery, and I hope he’s OK out there, still freeriding wherever he is.

Speaking of rebels with no regard for how The Man tells them they should live, by now we all know bicycles have been absorbed into the world of high fashion. Whether they’ll actually be digested or not is yet to be seen, but the insular bike industry is semi-atwitter over the entrance of Levi’s Jeans into the otherwise hallowed and bespoke world of bike commuting fashion. Yes, enough people are finally hipsters for Levi’s to bother making a skinny jean for bike riding, and like all heartless mega-corporations, they’ll probably price them for less than $200 and make them readily available, just to undercut Rapha.

But all of this high-fashion, low-brow tomfoolery is nothing compared to the cresting wave of Change about to descend on the bike industry as most of us know it.

Meet the Bicycle of Tomorrow:

As we know, there’s a lot of “interactivity” going on at the SXSW conference right now, and some of it’s taking place between bicycles and people. Specifically, people who don’t want to ride bicycles are suddenly interested in owning a bicycle, a phenomena brought on by the inevitable march of fuel costs for most Americans, along with the post-tipping-point sense that riding a bike to work is suddenly acceptable. Americans want to give this bike riding thing a try, and, being Americans, their first step in that process is to give the bike a motor. I’ll let Good.is explain the thinking:

For bike commuting to become a practical option for the average office worker, it may have to clean up its act. Not everyone can show up to work with grease-streaked pantlegs, pit-stained and panting. Bleary-eyed morning routines are challenging enough without turning them into an athletic achievement. Plus, hauling most bicycles onto public transportation can be more trouble than it’s worth in many unequipped transit systems.”

Hence the folding, electric-motored commuter bike pictured above. Designed by Gabriel Wartofsky at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, this particular bike’s production was given some momentum by entrepreneur Bob Vander Woude. According to Good, Vander Woude witnessed the huge increase in electric bikes in China and ran the numbers. “He cites a report from Electric Bikes Worldwide Report that found electric bikes will be one of the world’s top industries by 2025 with 130 million bikes sold per year, four times the current haul.” He’s ready to make a bet that they’re on their way here.

And he’s probably right.

What remains to be seen is what affect an influx of electric bikes will have on bike culture as we know it. Not to be all xenophobic and elitist here, but even the most casual of cyclists today has at least a passing familiarity with self-propulsion. It hurts when you pedal up hills. And while that doesn’t bring the average bike commuter particularly close to Jens Voigt level exertion, it’s something. While legal confusion still exists regarding the definition of a “bicycle” vis-a-vis “electric powered wheeled thingies,” I can’t help but think removing the effort and self-reliance from riding a bike isn’t a revolutionary new development; it’s the steampunk reinvention of cars.

Maybe that’s a good thing, and I suspect electric bikes are still more of a gateway to actual bike riding than anything else, but what concerns me is that riding a bicycle is supposed to be a little difficult. You’re supposed to have to work some and to pay attention to the world around you–something cars have shown us becomes increasingly difficult the more removed we are from exposure and physical exertion. If the wave does hit U.S. shores, I’m going to go ahead and predict carnage. Sure, carnage is always a safe bet, but if you’re frustrated with the quantity of bleary-eyed weavers on your morning commute already, wait until they don’t have to pedal to go fast and–as Good suggests–don’t have to necessarily be fully awake, either. See, a bike ride isn’t supposed to even be possible if you’re “bleary-eyed.” Contrary to what we might think, single-speeders who drink themselves right up to the starting line at local races, puke, then proceed to rip the legs off the rest of the field are actually relying on the act of bike riding to pull their shit together. Similar pre-ride rituals prove way less successful when a motor’s involved. I tend to suspect the same buzz that gets you turning the cranks is the buzz that helps keep you aware and alive in traffic.

So we wait and see. Maybe it’ll pass, or maybe electric bikes will just slip into bike culture virtually unnoticed. But probably not. It’s been scientifically proven that the gold standard in pain, the most grueling activity anyone can undertake on a bicycle, is to race cyclocross while listening to Bjork.

Like it or not, if electric bikes begin to dominate our commutes, I suspect we’ll all have a new standard.

The Rich

Bikes Comments Off

Mar 152012

So it looks like I’ll be living in Portland before the end of April. While a fresh start in the Pacific Northwest won’t do much to help cure my coffee addiction, it should do wonders for everything else. There’s a strong sense that Portland is where my family was supposed to’ve been living all along, and finally venturing off of our mostly abandoned Appalachian mountain top is going to feel pretty good.

Still, there’s a lot to miss about this place. The view off my back porch, for one thing.

Notice the conspicuous lack of civilization? Plenty of stars visible at night, and a whole lot of singletrack. On some quiet farm roads around my home, I’ve ridden ten mile stretches without seeing a single car. Granted the ones you do see tend to be doing 85mph in a 30mph zone with at least one rebel flag visible from every angle, but still, the riding is pretty spectacular.

And yet it’s the people here that I’ll miss the most. When you start a business in a small town, you meet a lot of really memorable people. Extremely memorable. Sometimes, you kind of wish that they weren’t so memorable. Occasionally, you hold your head in your hands and say things like, “Jesus Christ!” over and over again because the people all around you are just so fucking memorable that it’s almost like you can’t forget them no matter what you do. Still, you come to love them, all of them, the way Jeffrey Dahmer’s parents sort of had to love him.

When I first opened Speedgoat fifteen years ago in an old one-room school house here in Laughlintown, PA, the first person to walk in the door was a sour-faced girl from just up the street who asked, “So what is this supposed to be, a bike shop or something?” Over the years, we came to regard her as “just that way,” which is a kind of coping mechanism for dealing with assholes when you’re trapped in a small town. She’d grunt a greeting if you passed her on the street, and there was a genuine sense that life for her was every bit as awkward as she made it for everyone else, so that you learned not only to tolerate her disdain for you, but to rely on it. Making her uncomfortable at having to acknowledge your existence was a kind of ritual, like reading the paper with a cup of coffee, and you eventually learned to look forward to it.

I will also never forget Rich, a local guy who still lived with his parents about a half mile away. Unlike most of the people in the neighborhood, Rich was not merely remarkable for Laughlintown. Rich would be remarkable regardless of where you put him. Tending to sled dogs in Alaska (which he did) Rich would have been considered remarkable. At a Slayer concert in Copenhagen, Rich would have been considered unique. In fact, when I try to imagine a scenario in which Rich seems even slightly less remarkable–even remotely at home–I’m left imagining as a character in a yet unmade Will Ferrell movie about guys who try to open a meth lab in a suburban mall. There are also a handful of scenes from Cheech and Chong movies where he wouldn’t necessarily seem out of place, though you still wouldn’t be able to take your eyes off the guy.

Rich frequently reeked of urine. There’s not really any other way to write that, and there wasn’t really any other way to deal with it, either. He came in my shop–lived in my shop, honestly–wearing tattered daisy dukes, one of four concert shirts, and always a headband of some sort, and he smelled like piss. He was a genuinely sweet guy who probably wouldn’t hurt anybody, but the smell thing was unpleasant.

He became a fixture at my shop in the early days. So much so that once I accidentally locked him in the building at night while I was in the back building a bike (eventually he had to interrupt a disc brake installation and ask to be released because he was late for dinner and his mom would be mad).

For a while I worried that customers thought he worked there, but eventually I didn’t care. More than once, I looked up to see Rich carrying on a conversation with someone who’d arrived to pick up a bike valued at three or four thousand dollars. Such is the powerful joy of buying a new bike that a man could step out of a new Range Rover, accompanied by some variation of the perfect wife and often angelic children and/or a golden retriever recognizable from television commercials, enter my store to pick up a new bike, and within minutes be deeply engaged in a meaningful discussion with a guy who’d pissed the same shorts he was still wearing earlier that morning.

I should point out that Rich rode bikes. A lot, and strangely. He’s one of the few people I know who really have been stopped by the police for riding a bicycle while intoxicated. Rich frequently rode mountain bikes with us while clutching a gallon jug of iced tea in one hand, either because he didn’t have a functioning bottle cage, or just because he preferred the gallon jug. I can’t remember. Once he forgot a helmet and refused to ride without one, a perfectly proper decision, if odd for a guy whose every other waking moment seemed focused on total self-destruction. I let him borrow an old motorcross helmet. It was like a 90-degree day, and we briefly thought he’d lost consciousness at the top of one of the climbs. I no longer have that helmet. His crashes were never lethal but always somehow magical. He would constantly berate himself for a lack of courage in attempting tricky sections, seriously furious with himself, but simultaneously giggling. He always laughed during crashes, and every one I can remember had a kind of drawn out quality to it, like a death in Shakespeare, with lots of giggling and self-immolating commentary and a gallon jug of iced tea rolling down the hill after him.

He was sort of awesome.

I will submit to you that it is not possible to forget a man like that, but Rich also exemplified the most unique thing about this town I’ve called home for the past fifteen years: the freakish balance of rich and poor. This particular part of Pennsylvania is home to some of the wealthiest and most powerful families in America. Dick Cheney has shot defenseless birds within a few miles of the old Speedgoat building. They still hunt foxes here, wearing pantaloons and such. No shit.

They also drive Bentley’s while wearing camo baseball caps.

The contrast between haves and have-nots can be painfully striking here, and those who have are a largely secretive lot–not nearly as buffoonish a part of popular culture as, say, Donald Trump. They take their cues not from Paris Hilton but from European aristocracy. It’s a quiet kind of impenetrable wealth, and this leads to its own odd moments.

I once had the CEO of a major company haggle with me over the price of a $400 bike (which he insisted he wanted to buy on the spot, despite my patiently explaining that it was two sizes too big for him). His great quote, uttered before storming out was this: “I run a two-billion dollar company, and you won’t take fifty dollars off this bike for me?” There’s not really anything coherent I can type about that.

But Rich had of course infiltrated these ranks, in his own way. During one bullshit session at the shop where some guys were discussing the world’s nicest cars, Rich started nodding.

“Lamborghini,” somebody said, and Rich nodded, “Yep, I’ve been in that.”

It soon became apparent that we were taking turns asking Rich a question, not just naming a supercar.

“Ferrari Testarossa?” Other Ferraris?

“Yep. Yep. Been in that. Yep.”

It became surreal. Lots of Porsches he’d been in multiple versions of. In many of them the car had been moving. Crazy fast, even.

When we got to the Shelby Cobra–not a kit car, but like a genuine 1966, 427 Cobra–somebody finally asked him how he’d been in all these cars.

“My buddy manages that garage they built underground up by the Rolling Rock club,” Rich said. “Sometimes when I’m up there to see him, we take the cars out.” Wearing shorts that risked arrest for indecent exposure, smelling of his own urine and likely carring a gallon jug of iced tea, Rich had gained access to estates onto which the Pennsylvania State Police were not permitted to go. Collectively, we imagined him passing through those giant metal doors with giant pistons and gears like you see in most movies involving underground secret bases or operation, and I can honestly say that we were in awe of Rich.

One day in Portland, maybe sitting at a Stumptown or in a crowd of fellow cyclists at a stop light, I will remember Rich and start laughing uncontrollably and in public, doing my best to pretend I’m coughing but fooling no one, and in this way I will remember my first foray into entrepreneurship and my time in this part of Pennsylvania.

No Asylum

Bikes Comments Off

Mar 142012

It occurred to me this morning that I need some sort of top secret code name for the suspension project, which continues to inch ever closer to reality. Mentioning that you’re looking for a top secret product development code name in a public forum is either some clever-ass reverse psychological marketing, or just plain stupid, but after a whole lot of years spent hunched over my test paper and scribbling frantically without letting anyone else in the class see my work, I’m all about sharing. If this bike ever does get made, it will probably be because of good friends and people just like you, whoever the hell you are, so why bother with the cloak and dagger bit.

Yes, the last time I started a little bike company, I chose the name myself, and I’d like to think I’ve learned enough from that experience to see the benefits of doing the complete opposite of almost everything I did back then.

So once upon a time I started this company called Asylum Cycles, and we sold what was basically a Titus Racer-X with 29’er wheels. It was a pretty popular frame–so popular, in fact, that Titus went ahead and started selling the Racer-X 29 based on exactly what they’d built for me. Well, maybe not exactly. I think they offered different colors. To be fair, they gave me advance notice–that is, if you count me seeing photos of the new bike in an issue of Mountain Bike Action. Other than that, it was a total bindside. If anyone out there knows the players involved, for the record, Cocalis wasn’t the one responsible for the shenanigans, and the ownership certainly had a right to do whatever they wanted with a frame they were producing. Even really sleazy shit like shipping me a bunch of frames and then putting their own version on the market. This is call “capitalism,” and lots of dicks do it.

Before imploding, Titus went on to rename that bike the “Rockstar,” which is the kind of self-inflicted wound I’ll go ahead and count as my payback. “Rockstar”?

But I still have the original prototype frame, for which I created a special Marzocchi Shiver SC fork with chopped stroke (Marzocchi was an Italian company that used to make suspension forks people occasionally purchased, before Fox entered the market and SRAM bought Rockshox.) Inverted forks convert pretty easily for use with bigger wheels, and the old silver Shiver tended to look about as “prototype” as possible, partly because Marzocchi themselves didn’t seem to know what the hell it was supposed to be.

I modded the older one on the left, not the newer model with fancy "painted legs" and stickers that didn't arrive with oil already underneath them.

Originally based on way steeper geometry, my frame absolutely came alive with the taller fork and slacked out head tube angle. It was seriously shocking, how much better what turned out to be about a 70.5-degree head tube angle was with big wheels. I couldn’t stop riding that bike.

That was a long time ago, when Gary Fisher’s first hybridy sort of 29ers were just entering the market and baffling people left and right. I dissolved the Asylum Cycles name years ago, so we definitely won’t be using that name for any new company, even if it would make some of my old t-shirts and jerseys almost relevant again. Fact is that even after I shut Asylum down, the design process kept rolling on behind the scenes, eventually evolving into the creature at the top of the page, a design I’d like to think is more than a few lifetimes better than old Horst-link designs, and something deserving of all new names.

“Rockstar” being taken, I’m really at a loss for what to call the project at this point. For now, I’m leaning toward “Project Danzig.”

SXSWTF?

Bikes, Gadgets Comments Off

Mar 132012

The bicycle that shifts by reading your thoughts has surfaced again, this time at the South by Southwest “music, film and interactive conference” in Austin, Texas. I’ll admit to not fully understanding what the SXSW “conference” is, exactly, though it appears to be both a showcase for derivative hipster music and an excuse to write off travel expenses for tech nerds whose companies won’t cover travel to Burning Man. In keeping with the theme of information nobody gives a shit about then, I’d like to hereby announce that I no longer care how anybody controls his or her bicycle. Mind controlled bike done as a publicity stunt by Toyota to sell cars, battery operated suspension systems, four D-cells that pump water from a Camelbak directly into your mouth–whatever. I’m all for it.

Yes, it’s 2012 now, and I’ve decided there’s no place left for my usual neo-retro-grouch pose on this subject. Why be a critic? I like conferences. I like music you have to be drinking to enjoy and rooms filled with hotshit tech entrepreneurs who still live at home. Have a new web and iPhone app that lets me swap dryer lint with a person in Ohio? Nice work! Made a film that re-imagines Hitler’s death as the work of time-traveling Icelandic superstar, Bjork, who assassinates Nazis with sound before a grand finale battle scene with the ghost of Wagner? How creative! Do tell me more about your mash-up of dubstep, ’80s metal, and things Mike Patton would say out loud in a Whole Foods. Seriously, who says America’s best days are behind us? If this is what we make now, I’m all for it.

But let’s go all in.

If Toyota’s “embrace the green and figure out how to wedge an iPhone in there somewhere, too” hipster ad campaign helped pay even a small part of the development costs of a new Parlee frame design, then sure, add all the neuro crap you want, as long as we all get to see that new frame. Hell, I’d like to see corporate money going to lots of innovative small bicycle companies. We’re hip now, bicycle people. We can help sell Michelob Ultra. Work it.

Here are just a few of my dream announcements at this year’s SXSW conference:

PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi announces a “potential” new design project in collaboration with “genuine” frame builder Richard Sachs to develop a clear plastic bicycle frame that doubles as a habitat for endangered Beluga Sturgeon eggs, with built-in rear-wheel assist motor powered by “mass hatching.” Sachs, who does not attend the event, issues no comment, but a photo surfaces on Facebook depicting him emptying a can of Mountain Dew into a toilet.
Pabst Brewing Company owner C. Dean Metropoulos debuts a film and YouTube channel about the development of the company’s combination urban bicycle and home brewing system, featuring a bicycle frame crowdsource designed by “everybody in Minneapolis.”
In an attempt to build credibility in the U.S. market and citing “deeply waning interest in Jennifer Lopez,” car manufacturer Fiat announces a joint partnership with Nokia and bamboo bicycle guru Craig Calfee, to create “a stylish and modern take on the classic ‘Fred Flintstone’ human-powered vehicle.” Ashton Kucher is a rumored investor.
In a clear bid to return to his roots, Hollywood director Sam Raimi announces a documentary on the making of frame builder Erik Noren’s Evil Dead track bike, a bike that uses a chainsaw chain and is painted with genuine blood because Noren is, as Raimi announces at the movie premier, “Fucking awesome.”
Long-time sponser of events in which people are barely conscious of what snack foods they actually ingest, Doritos, announces a partnership with FedEx, Taco Bell and online retailer Competitive Cyclist. For a “very modest” additional charge, your Pinarello Dogma 2 with Super Record 11 EPS is now available shipped in its own impact-absorbing, environmentally friendly* and delicious Dorito-based taco shell. (*Legal disclaimer: some Dorito-based products have proven unable to decompose naturally under any circumstances, including human consumption.)

It’s a brave new world of corporate sponsored innovation, art and “interactivity” and I, for one, am ready.

Bicycle Superheroes

Bikes Comments Off

Mar 122012

After the heavy talk and something like introspection going on here lately, I thought it was high-time for some meaningless pander to my demographic. I’ll also be packing up my family soon for relocation to Portland, and I plan to make the trip with wife, dog, and cat safely stowed inside the car and my three kids inside kennels strapped to the roof. No doubt the same “nurture nazis” who think it shows a deficiency of moral character to “Romney” the family dog will cry foul here as well “Oh, you drove three thousand miles with your kids screaming on the roof,” I can hear the parenting critiques now, “How could you do that? What’s wrong with you?” and blah, blah, and really how can you explain the necessity of this without meeting my kids, shown here uploading the source code to Norton Anti-Virus 2006 to The Pirate Bay?

No one puts baby in a corner, Symantec.

Or here, protesting what I was serving for dinner?

So to preempt the inevitable criticism, here is my official act of pandering: bicycle riders are so great!

Last Thursday in Chicago, Eric Puetz witnessed a mugging while riding to work at his bike shop, then stalked and pounced on a mugger. Quoth Puetz, “”The real thing that made this possible was the bike. I think we should nominate this bike as the hero.” A Redline Conquest? Abso-freakin-lutely! Redline’s been making badass, affordable ‘cross bikes for a long time now, and it’s about time somebody used on for crime fighting.

"Guilty as charged But damn it, it ain't right There's someone else controlling me."

No word on the quality of the dismount that took down ~~young Lars Ulrich~~Larry Bostic, the assailant, but I’d like to imagine it looked like the complete opposite of this.

And then there was last Monday’s story of Kevin Pratt, the cyclist who jumped into the Willamette river in my soon to be home of Portland to rescue a developmentally disabled man who’d misjudged the degree of difficulty involved in swimming out to a dock. Just a great story.

And the heroes in both cases. Bicycle riders. Just remember who brought you all this positive awesomeness when I need some of you as character witnesses.

Friday’s Human Struggle

Bikes Comments Off

Mar 092012

Yesterday’s post was a little on the somber side, so in slightly less intense human condition news, I’m hoping for the best for Andy Parks.

Aren’t familiar with Andy? He’s an adventurous young man planning to ride his bicycle across part of the UK to raise funds for his favorite football team. Unfortunately, Mr. Parks does not have a particularly admirable track record when it comes to fund-raising endeavors. In fact, given his previous experiences, it seems every bit as likely that Mr. Parks will be killed by a falling piano on the morning of April 9th as it does he’ll complete his planned ride. (I struggled with the urge not to even post the link to the original article there in that earlier sentence, because the straight journalism is funnier than anything I can write here.)

Degree of difficulty is not the issue. While red-blooded American benefit rides usually involve pedaling two or three thousand miles while a distraught family member shadows you in the minivan, the sum total of Andy Park’s trip is a much more reasonable forty miles.

Yes, forty miles.

This, you might be thinking, is some kind of joke. Has the UK instituted some new variation of the metric system that twists our own (goddamn proper) American units of measure just to confuse us and make us look even dumber? Who schedules a fund-raiser to ride fewer miles than some of us commute to and from work each day? I’ll let Darlington’s Northern Echo news site explain:

Mr Parks, 20, hopes to raise more than £500 to pay for shares in Darlington FC 1883 Ltd – the community company set up to buy the football club and lift it out of administration. However, although the cycle ride is only 40 miles, he is mindful that previous challenges have enjoyed limited success.In 2009, when the club was last in administration, Mr Park and best friend Keirran Lamb attempted to walk 120 miles from Darlington to Lincoln in just over two days. But after about 90 miles, Mr Lamb began complaining of chest pains before collapsing of exhaustion.”

OK, so his first attempt, a long walk, was thwarted by the nefarious “walking” portion of the effort. That doesn’t bode well, but Mr. Lamb will not be accompanying Andy on his next effort, and clearly expectations have been adjusted here: we’re talking about a forty mile bike ride instead of a 120-mile walk. Easy.

To be overconfident in Mr. Park’s success this time around, however, would be a mistake. Consider his follow-up to the failed “long walk” fundraiser.

The following year, Mr Park set off to walk to Macclesfield ahead of another Quakers game to raise money for a wheelchair for a family member. After five hours, his torch ran out of batteries. As he was crossing the road to change them, he tripped on a kerb, smashed his head open and had to been [sic] taken to hospital.”

This apparently shorter walk also met with failure–and a kind of spectacular failure, too. If there’s one thing at which Mr. Park excels, it would seem to be undergoing grueling physical trauma under the least taxing of circumstances. Put into perspective then, for a gentleman who’s demonstrated great difficulty in walking across the street to plan a bicycle ride–of any distance–is pretty ballsy stuff.

Undaunted, Andy Park believes his changes to be better than ever on a bicycle, commenting, “Cycling is easier than walking and, fingers crossed, I will have no problems like I have had before.” You have to admire the courage of his positive thinking, even while being slightly terrified at how casually he discusses the act of riding a bicycle, a device that, in his hands, could well cause the death of untold millions.

One promising development is the inclusion this time of a seasoned support team. Park will be joined by two other fans of the Darlington team he’s supporting, Jake Craggs, and “businessman” Andrew Foulds, and they are more than up for the challenge. “Mr. Foulds,” according to the Northern Echo article, “has two false knees and will complete the ride on a 50 year-old bike.” None of this, Mr. Foulds believes, should present any problems. “I’m going along to make sure Andy gets over the finish line this time,” he is quoted as telling the Echo.

The article concludes with information about how to sponsor Mr. Park, which I’ll of course reprint here in order to help in any way I can, and some information about buying shares in the Darlington football team. Potential investors interested in owning a part of the team just like Mr. Park are urged to bring two forms of identity, “one of which must be a photo ID,” presumably to speed up the process of identifying bodies later.

Please consider visiting Sponsorandy.org.uk to support Andy’s effort, or consider saving the lives of potentially dozens of men in the town of Darlington, by visiting Blundelltosincil.co.uk and buying all of the shares of the team yourself. Should you attempt a fundraiser to assist you in this, please just make sure it involves bicycle riding, which is much safer than walking.

If Andy Park isn’t a testament to the indomitable human spirit–the ability of the mind to tell us we can push forward, onward, doing things that aren’t really that difficult despite how badly we always seem to screw them up, then I don’t know what is.

All the best on April 9th, Andy. You will be missed.

Not Winning

Bikes Comments Off

Mar 082012

Today’s post is a bit of a downer, but sometimes I miss Laurent Fignon. I miss the man, sure–with the possible exception of Zabriskie’s occasional flourishes, you really don’t see anybody whose personal character gets priority over even aerodynamics these days–but I miss the idea of Laurent Fignon, too. Maybe it’s just the gray day outside, and I don’t know that I can explain what I mean, other than to tell you there’s a kind of beauty in not winning, too. One that sometimes matters more than winning.

To be sure, Fignon was a winner–not only a two-time Tour de France winner, but one of those guys who tended to win in spectacular, well-earned ways that include gritted-teeth and great story lines, like a kind of scrawny, bespectacled Jens Voigt. At the risk of alienating all the ~~Justin Bieber~~ Brothers Schleck fans out there, I’ll admit I’d rather watch Fignon install cleats than watch those guys race. But the defining moment–or what became the defining moment–of Fignon’s career is of course his eight second loss of the ’89 Tour to Greg LeMond, whose aero bars and spoked/disc wheel configuration made the Frenchman’s trademark Lennon glasses and “cheveux” seem like a boat sail. Even LeMond, himself no stranger to adversity and well-deserving of every win, seems to have felt a little bad about that one.

The thing is, there was always a kind of peculiar grace in Fignon’s demeaner and how he accepted defeat–a kind of deep humility you don’t often see in the age of Kanye West and other high-profile professional pouters. But it was Fignon’s other great loss, his death in 2010, and what he had to say about it as it approached, that has always stayed with me.

Despite treatment of more than seven months, my cancer had barely reduced. No matter how strong my willpower, if we don’t find a good treatment, the cancer will overwhelm me and I will die. I don’t want to die at 50, but if it’s not curable, what can I do? I love life. I love to laugh, travel, to read, eat well, just like a good Frenchman. I am not afraid of dying, it’s just I am not ready to die.”

At the time this was certainly a strong contrast to the yellow bracelet mania and power of positive thinking that was rampant in the world. I have deep respect for Lance Armstrong’s work to fight cancer. Like many superstar athletes receiving checks from the likes of Nike and Oakley, Armstrong could well have had what passes for a very meaningful life without any of the added responsibility and emotional expense associated with launching a full-scale assault on cancer. Anybody should respect Livestrong, and respect as well the dollars it’s raised and people it’s comforted. And yet–though it’s probably just me–the power of positive thinking approach has always seemed a bit like an exclusive club. I wish I didn’t think that, but I do, and I find that profoundly disturbing. While I certainly understand the value of staying positive, to imply that winners win battles with cancer is also to suggest its opposite: to die makes you a loser.

This was driven home recently with a very unfortunate death in our community. At the service I was struck by the burden the living tend to place on the dead, our expectation that they died to show us something or teach us, when of course their death was as deeply personal and incomprehensible as their birth.

It isn’t about us.

Fignon’s statement has always stayed with me because he refused to entertain us with his death. In the same way he never saw his eight second loss to LeMond as the defining highlight of his career, he didn’t seem to consider his death the defining moment of his life. While not a sentiment that translates easily into a yellow bracelet or ad campaign, there is something deeply reassuring and unconquerable about that.

And yes, I do just miss the glasses, too.

And Just Like That, Hydraulic Road Discs are Here

Bikes Comments Off

Mar 072012

Get used to seeing the non-drive side profile of road bikes.

Thanks to Facebook, we have a pretty accurate idea of exactly when the next major change in cycling took place. Before Cyclingnews drove the point home, phone camera shots of Colnago’s C59 Disc had already begun to surface. Given the time difference between the U.S. and Taiwan, it was around 3:30am that my friend Chuck posted a few photos of the Formula hydraulic disc levers on the C59 and TRP’s Di2 hydraulic levers. So let’s call it: 3:30am Eastern, Wednesday, March 7th, 2012, disc brake road bikes arrived.

Volagi certainly called it, and they deserve a lot of credit for taking a risk and going off the front of the pack so early. It’s moves like that that give small companies a foothold and a chance to grow, and it certainly looks like Volagi has the wherewithal to welcome more and more companies aboard. Personally, I tend to think the Liscio frame design Volagi’s created is actually pretty unique even without the disc brakes and leaf-sprung top-tube/seat stay design Specialized liked so much. In some ways, the Liscio has more in common with “adventure” brands like Salsa than it does Colnago’s new C59–and that’s exactly why Taipei’s unveiling of hydraulic disc brakes on “pure” road bikes is so significant.

But what does it all mean? Should you panic? Rejoice? Hoard canned food? Here’re some things this will probably mean:

Electronic shifting will become standard equipment on all high-end bikes. Yes it will. You need the interior space of the hood for a hydraulic master cylinder and piston, leaving no room for the clock-like shifter mechanics we once knew and loved. Big Winners: Shimano. Big Losers: SRAM and Campy. (Campy made a valiant effort there, but everybody is going to design around the Shimano electronic shifting system.)
At least some crazy shit is bound to happen. Yeah, Tyler shouldn’t have been scrubbing his brakes so much on that descent, but the bottom line is that weird shit always happens when there’s a tectonic shift in the cycling industry, and there is a vague whiff of “let’s see what happens” out there regarding hydraulic discs on road bikes. Despite the best efforts of everyone involved, some small percentage of chaos will occur around this, likely including a whole lot of carbon fiber recycling. Despite all the amazing stress analysis and structural design programs out there, plenty of companies proved unable to build a basic ‘cross fork that didn’t howl like a banshee, and plenty of carbon fiber frameset manufacturers still find out the real durability of their stuff once the warranties start piling up. And let’s not even talk about wheels. Big Winners: Mayhem. Dentists. Big Losers: The unsuspecting.
“Road” techs are going to get their asses handed to them. Plenty of great mountain bike mechanics can’t set the angle on STIs or Ergos to save their lives, but I’ve met more than a few bike techs from highly regarded boutique road-specific shops whom I’d not let within a kilometer of my hydraulic brakes. Most of these guys are gifted bike techs who just happen to lack any mechanical aptitude whatsoever–meaning they can install the hairiest of power meter equipment and they never forget to unwind their torque wrenches after each use, but changing light bulbs around the house is a challenge, and they haven’t the slightest idea what makes an automobile go. With even the best instructions, there are just fundamental mechanical things you need to know in order to make hydraulic disc brakes work consistently, and genuine road bikes with hydraulic disc brakes are going to force the issue. Big Winners: UBI, Lennard Zinn. Big Losers: The unsuspecting.
Cyclocross bikes are going to be awesome. Seriously, electronic shifting with hydraulic disc brakes? A few possible cases of “rotor brand” aside, you’ll be able to tell the guys with the hydraulics, because they’ll be the ones riding one lap up on the field. At least until their bikes need serviced. In most ‘cross conditions, the differences will be dramatic. Big Winners: The 1%, sponsored athletes. Big Losers: Canti’s, “Suicide Levers,” people who race ‘cross in nice weather.

Now we sit back and watch each brand decide whether to adopt or not, and when. By this time next year, the road disc thing likely still won’t have sorted itself out completely, and we’ll be looking at the first waves of major 650b wheel size adopters. Sometimes, I’m happy not to be a product manager at a bike company.

The Bike Electric

Bikes, Gadgets Comments Off

Mar 062012

Apple's Recent Patent Wires Your Bike

I like bicycles, sure, but I’m quite fond of fancy tech bullshit, too. Technology that uses your phone to give everybody in the room a copy of Photoshop, for instance, is cool. Combining technology and bicycles, however, doesn’t seem to agree with me. Maybe I’ve set up too many cycling computers (or, as customers tend to call them, “speedometers”), or maybe I’m just really old now, but I continue to think adding electronics to bicycles is weird.

Obvious exceptions here include bikes with electric motors, lights, and power meters–things that are notoriously challenging to pull off sans electronics, but the most recent push to wire every aspect of our lives–including our bike–strikes me as slightly anti-bike.

Recently looking at the patents Shimano has in the works for taking Di2 and smearing it across every possible function of the bike, including suspension systems, might be what has me going just a little Luddite here, but the recent press about Apple’s “Smart Bike” is what really caught my attention.

In case you haven’t heard, Apple has filed for a patent that essentially wires up your bike, using sensors everywhere and wireless technology to basically record everything, including “speed, distance, time, altitude, elevation, incline, decline, heart rate, power, derailleur setting, cadence, wind speed, path completed, expected future path, heart rate, power, and pace.” Apparently, you could even use voice commands to control the iPhone at the heart of the system. Neato.

Already we’ve seen similar things from Nike, and it’s pretty common to use applications like Strava to track things like training rides and sort through your own data, and I can certainly understand the value of affordable performance tracking equipment for athletes, but beyond that, I’m missing the point. It’s always been the social aspects of these types of systems that puzzle me the most. While I admire anyone’s intense training schedule, I’ll take your word for it, thanks. My desire to know details about other people’s bicycle riding stats falls somewhere below the dietary requirements of zoo-bred lemurs and high fashion. Checking in on someone else’s shared social mileage and elevation gain combines all the joy of seeing photos of what people had for lunch with the pure glee of math. I really like to know people are out riding bikes, but a general sense is all I need to be happy about it. When it comes to detailed stats, my attention wanes. Sorry, but if I wasn’t with you, I just don’t give a shit that you rode your bike. Unless you captured some gnarly video, got hit by an antelope, or both.

My obvious concern, then, is that we let technology do for our bicycles what ubiquitous digital cameras and camcorders have done for our ability to actually see stuff. Once your ride is completely and utterly wired and you’re finally–gloriously–monitoring everything from incline to chamois moisture level to temperature in your Gu packets, will you still remember to enjoy riding your bike? Like taking a picture instead of looking, wiring something that’s inherently fun has the potential to make it a lot less fun.

Maybe once we have the technology to monitor the girl in a t-shirt blowing past your rigged out Starship Enterprise bike on her beat up single-speed and disappearing off into the distance, and convert that event into Siri’s haunting and faltering voice commanding you to “get your fat Fred ass up on the pedals,” I’ll start to understand the appeal.

High-tech DIY

Bikes Comments Off

Mar 052012

Demon Frameworks' Co-winner of 'Best Road Bike' at NAHBS

While virtually the entire bike industry is on the way to Taiwan for the Taipei International Cycle Show, a very different group of guys capable of making bicycles all by themselves and growing considerably more interesting facial hair has just wrapped up another successful North American Handmade Bicycle Show. The contrast between the two shows is pretty striking and says something about the diversity of the bike industry. That seven dollar mass-produced kids’ bikes can exist under the same general umbrella as high-priced labors of love like Tom Warmerdam’s incredible Demon Frameworks bikes (above) seems somehow much more shocking than Bugattis and Dacias both being considered “cars.” We’re some diverse folk.

The trademark advantage of hand-built bikes over the big production brands is usually an emphasis on artistry and detail, unique aesthetic traits, while the big guys tend to own technology. Don’t get me wrong: Crumpton and company are doing some stunning things with carbon fiber, but the big guns naturally tend to be the innovators when it comes to materials and engineering. That’s because they’ve built companies geared toward selling enough product to raise capital that gets reinvested in new technology. While you can argue (convincingly) that they often waste that development money solving problems that don’t exist, or making all new problems, the big guys are driving the industry forward, and generally they get the job done and continue to improve bikes. Unfortunately, very little of this technological development goes on entirely within their walls.

Right now, the reality is that if you want bicycle technology, it’s impossible to avoid outsourcing production, especially to Taiwan or China, where bike manufacturing is–frankly–far more advanced and serious a business than it is in most other countries, including the U.S. More unfortunate is the fact that a small number of factories in Taiwan and China produce the majority of product like carbon fiber bicycle frames. Again, if they’re the best at it, more power to them but at some point (that most of you have no doubt noticed we’ve already reached) you begin to lose diversity from one mass-produced bike brand to another. For companies that haven’t even bothered to employ engineers and designers, you also cede design control, which means your marketing department can’t even distinguish your products from the competitions’ products. I know of multiple U.S. bike brands who are essentially shells for their respective Chinese factories, and it shows in their product bullet points. “High-modulus carbon fiber” is probably still the funniest, except for “ultra-high-modulus carbon fiber,” which is even funnier. There are bike companies in the U.S., for instance, that could not–for a million bucks–explain why their frames are shaped the way they are–I mean other than for “vertical compliance” and “torsional stiffness.”

I think it’d be really great if that wasn’t the case.

To be sure, some of the people at Handmade are choosing frame shapes based solely on what looks cool, which isn’t a particularly scientific approach, but at least the same person welding or bonding is the one making the call. And I think this has room to improve drastically over the next ten years.

Design and development innovations like 3D printing and Solidworks (which is surprisingly easy to use for thinking up designs and testing them, given how ridiculously powerful it is) are good signs, and suggest we might yet have a future in which, say, a small component manufacturer could design a viable suspension fork. Sure, the technology necessary to really empower more of us to make interesting and legitimate products is still probably a decade away (if it happens at all), but I’m hopeful. Given all the recent focus on the “new normal” American economy and the decline of the manufacturing jobs that created our middle-class, I think the best chance we have of becoming a leader in manufacturing in the future may come from high-tech DIY. We’re not there yet, and maybe we never will be, but how wonderful would it be to see a Hand Built show that included more complex technology? How great would it be for guys like Frank the Welder to be able to design and produce bikes using at least some of the same production technology as Specialized or Trek? Some interesting ideas tend to always find their way out into the world. The technology necessary to make that happen for bicycle is only getting better. What’s the future equivalent of Keith Bontrager’s dumpster diving? I’m hoping it’s out there.

Older Entries Newer Entries