Bikes – Page 4 – CanooterValve

Trial by Water, and One of the Places I Work

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Oct 262012

Any thought I had of making it through a Portland winter without getting soaked to the core were quickly dispelled on my thirteen mile ride home last Tuesday. The rain started in earnest about a quarter mile from work and varied little the whole way home, allowing me to achieve that unique sensation of feet literally suspended and floating inside my shoes. Big thumbs up to the Showers Pass Elite 2.0 Jacket, though. Glad I bought local on that one.

Speaking of local, BRAIN was in town recently and included a stop at our brick and mortar store, and a little conversation with The Main Man about that store (which shall remain nameless, lest Google insert its ads here on my blog ’cause of something I did, thereby causing a rift in my personal space time continuum). It’s complicated.

They also mentioned Velotech, the parent company. Check out the article if you’ve ever wondered what I do for (part of) a living. There are some other great projects, of course (I’m involved in many things, not even counting my performance enhancing drug, bovine growth hormone powdered shake, and pro peloton bullying enterprise and the skate shoes I sew myself from the pelts of roadkill to sell on Etsy) but Velotech’s the day job. Reading about it in BRAIN’s article probably won’t shed any light on what the company actually is, but it’ll at least put you confusion at exactly the same level as that of my friends and immediate family. Just what is Velotech? Even though of us who work there only know that our jobs seem to involve bicycles.

Have to give a shout out to The Main Man for working an Amazon throat punch into the interview. If there’s one thing that brings all of us together–ecomm bike shops and brick and mortars alike–it’s hating on Amazon and what they’re doing to the bike industry and countless others. Jay is always on point, throwing elbows like a boss. Add his mega-nerd programming skilz, and yes sir, I will go into battle with this dude. Even against the dark, unstoppable armies of Amazon. Let them may rain hell fire down on us. After a winter commuting in Portland, fire from the sky is starting to seem like a good time.

$32,500

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Oct 242012

I don’t get it.

No, seriously. It’s easy to make fun of UBC’s $32,500 fixed gear bike because it’s ridiculous. But it’s also fascinating that a company would choose to put what’s apparently mammoth levels of materials technology into a fixed gear bike, and that it would do the rounds on sites like FastCompany.com without anybody really talking about what it’s supposed to do so well.

What’s it supposed to do?

Selling the Drama

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Oct 232012

At this point the seemingly endless descent of Lance Armstrong’s character has started to seem a little overwrought. Hardly two minutes consecutive go by without Undead Armstrong staggering back across the world stage, fueled by lord only knows what and strung together with money and rubber bracelets. Most people in the cycling world have long since passed the “acceptance” stage and are ready for Armstrong to just please go away.

But Lance just doesn’t roll like that.

Increasingly, what’s become apparent in all the rush to strip Armstrong of his titles and place in cycling’s history is that here we have an individual who does not go gently into that good night.

No, this is far from over, and the real speculation now isn’t whether Armstrong will disappear from the world stage, but rather how famous he’ll continue to be. Just think of the many upcoming story lines we have to look forward to.

Claiming to Be Broke
Finding Jesus
Reality TV

In fact, the more we see of the post-bullshit Lance Armstrong, the more we realize this is an individual who’d be willing to bring down his entire Livestrong organization, before becoming an obscure and forgotten man.

Why? Because Lance Armstrong’s kind of a psychopath, and, as a very interesting article on Salon.com recently pointed out, psychopaths have a way of taking over.

You should check out the article itself, but one short interpretation suggests that, among other things, psychopaths are simply willing to say and do things that are way beyond the pale, in order to get what they want. They make dime store narcissists and megalomaniacs look downright self-deprecating. Armstrong is one of those guys.

Case in point: he could have made a hell of an effort to save Livestrong by putting as much daylight as possible between himself and the organization. But that never happened, and it never happened for one reason: because Livestrong is all about Lance Armstrong.

It’s why some supporters are asking for their money back and calling the entire organization into question. Livestrong shouldn’t have had to repudiate Armstrong’s actions; he should have distanced himself from the organization completely the minute he became a liability.

But he didn’t. In fact, I don’t recall hearing an apology anywhere in there from Armstrong. At the very least, he owes a dozen personal ones, but all total, he owes many millions more.

Repurposing

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Oct 222012

I’ve long been fascinated with the interesting world that is the fine line between fashion and bicycle manufacturing. Some pretty interesting business models exist there, including yet another shit-bike configurator I discovered yesterday. This one’s German, which means the site selling you $150 bikes for $1000 is clean and slick. You can choose your very own shit saddle and shit stem and shit bar, allowing you to create the ultimate personalized colorway on your ultimate personalized shit bike.

But I’m awarding the lifetime achievement award for turd polishing to SohoFixed.com. From what I can tell, their business model should be the envy of every shop rat and struggling store owner in the world.

Check out the dumpster salvaged bike up top. Apparently, that particular bike was just sold by SohoFixed.com for about $800 U.S., approximately $683.23 more than it was worth. Based on the general condition of components in the detail photos, it’s pretty clear these bikes are being built with used parts. But I suspect SohoFixed had gone even bigger than most when it comes to rebranding shit bikes as high fashion. Free Wal-Mart quality frameset? Check. Parts from the “$10 or Less” bin at the local bike shop? Check. Bike mechanics? Not so fast, there, big spender. Something about the way the bikes are looking–and that’s cleaned up for the photo shoot, mind you–suggests SohoFixed.com might have achieved the ultimate level of shit bike rebranding. Could it be true? Could they have chosen to avoid even the expense of hiring those costly “bicycle technicians” to assemble their bikes?

We can’t be sure, but creating artisanal, one-off custom bicycles out of salvaged parts and then having them assembled by people who’ve never installed a saddle onto a seatpost before no doubt yields a more solid bottom-line for both the company and customer.

I can’t claim to understand how it’s possible for a company to pull something like this off, but more power to them. If the market in London can sustain a business that sells shit bikes at a premium, they might as well be allowed to have at it. And as long as the customer knows what he or she’s getting is willfully pays this much for a second-hand bike, it’s probably a win overall. These things would’ve just ended up in landfills. Now they’re bound for the trendy lofts of the irresponsibly wealthy, which I’m all for making the landfill of the 21st Century.

Pre-Halloween Danzig Update

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Oct 192012

But enough of my yakkin’ about other stuff. I may have found a way to make Danzig even simpler. I can’t quit you, Solidworks.

After a brief (like seven minute) and tempestuous relationship with a linkage arrangement that’d put the rear shock directly in line with the seat tube (sort of tucked inside an oversized seat tube-esque channel or something), I started experimenting with lower shock positions. The whole story is right up there, in all those blue lines (along with some other interesting blue line stuff I can’t go into right now).

Why do I do this to myself? Tough to say. But if the shock could be mounted low enough, I’d be able to take a lot of metal and machining out of the upper rocker. Now I’m sort of obsessed with trying to make it happen.

Somebody really needs to take my laptop away.

Foundations are Not People

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Oct 182012

After a bit of confusion wherein companies scrambled to do the math, trying to figure out if abandoning Lance Armstrong meant advocating cancer or something, Nike and now Trek have finally turned their back on Armstrong.

While it was certainly wise of all companies involved to verify the douchbaggery of Mr. Armstrong before taking action, there still seemed to be a delayed reaction when it came to severing ties.

If anything, it took former teammate of Armstrong, Paul Willerton, and a small group of protestors showing up at Nike’s corporate office in Beaverton, Oregon to help corporate America separate Armstrong from Livestrong. Cyclingnews.com quoted Willerton as saying:

To be fair to athletics we have to look at Lance the person and the athlete and deal with that, without letting everyone say the magic word and pull that cancer cloak over it. I feel that they are mutually exclusive, that just because you support one doesn’t mean that you have to support the other. Nike could make a strong move right now by dumping Lance Armstrong, even if they still need to continue paying LAF.”

And so they did. Nearly all of the sponsors are gone.

More complicated is the relationship Armstrong has among cancer survivors around the world, for whom his status as both a hero and a source of hope is very real. The most disturbing aspect of Armstrong’s fall for grace may be the debilitating effect it has on some of his most dedicated fans–cancer survivors every bit as impressive as Armstrong, but people who found in him a sense of not just hope, but community.

As Steve Madden, former editor of Bicycling pretty eloquently explained, there was a lot of inertia to just accepting Armstrong for years, pinching our noses harder and harder the more the situation seemed to stink, because, well, there was a good cause going on.

But really it’s time to take Lance as his word. I’d always thought he seemed like an OK enough guy–um, doping and cheating and lying and apparently threatening aside–except for the false modesty. To be sure, everything Lance was always Lance, and everything Livestrong was always Lance. And he, more than anyone, took great pains to make sure it stayed that way.

But now it can’t. If there’s a moral to this story, it has little to do with doping and honesty and sports, and everything to do with the Problem of Celebrity. It’s unfortunate that we tend to need somebody like the mythical, imaginary Lance Armstrong. There seemed to be a sense of weightlessness over the past few weeks, as the Livestrong network collectively pondered an existence without Lance at the center of the universe. I was particularly disgusted by Livestrong ads running on Facebook that were very conspicuously worded to combine strong ideas of “support” and “standing up for” with relatively vague objects of that support. The obvious effect was of rallying behind Lance.

Make no mistake, for all the good it did, Livestrong was also a tool in Armstrong’s campaign of deceit and self-promotion. The real question was could it exist without him.

For now looks like it can–thanks to a whole lot of amazing people who might never be celebrities, but who are ultimately far better individuals than Lance Armstrong.

The New Abnormal

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Oct 162012

Rain has finally settled in to Portland. I celebrated by overcooking a turn riding in to work this morning and sliding up to, but not quite into, a homeless guy’s tent. Only a little road rash on my left side. The bike seems to be OK, too, with the exception of one of my precious few remaining ancient Selle Italia SLK non-gel saddles. Down to only three of those, and now one’s a little frayed around the edges. Drat.

Anyway, yesterday I apologized to bike designer Helio Ascari after he sent over some photos of the actual bikes he’s designed (I’d originally questioned their existence.) They’re very pretty bikes. Still, I tend to think of bike designers as people who invent things–from tuning geometry for certain ride characteristics to creating completely original two-wheeled things.

Josh Bechtel is that kind of guy. Like his wild Bicymple or not, you have to recognize he’s made something. Difficult as it is to bring some new creation kicking and screaming into the world, people like Josh deserve a hell of a lot of credit for trying to make that happen.

Apology Monday

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Oct 152012

I took a break from Canootervalve last Friday. Sorry about that. My parents are in town from across the country and we had no fewer than three birthdays to celebrate. Part animal that I am, I spent most of their time here with the laptop on the lap, tapping away at any number of jobs that just never seem to sleep.

While I’m handing out apologies, I also owe one to Helio Ascari, model, nephew of Formula One Champion, and–it turns out–bicycle designer. A while back, I’d kicked Helio in the nards a little over a Wall Street Journal article about his bicycle designs. In fairness to me, in the article, Helio is riding a Pashley Gov’nur, lending an air of confusion to the proceedings.

Turns out, Mr. Ascari really does design bicycles. And they’re actually pretty bitchin’ for high-fashion bespokey bikes–especially the fixed gear.

Better still, Helio’s working with bike builder Gary Mathis out of Ashland, Oregon. I don’t know Gary, but his fashion sense seems decidedly more “I’m the guy who welds.”

So I apologize to Helio. Pretty cool looking bikes.

Design-wise, though, I’m thinking I need to celebrate some hard-core bike nerds this week. Engineering types. That’s on my mind a lot right now, and there’s a new character on the scene that’s done some pretty cool stuff.

The First Sign

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Oct 112012

Everything else was prologue. Today’s the day the seven went away.

Quick story, then I’m back to suspension design.

A few years back, my company took a strange phone call. We were an ecommerce bike shop, so every phone call was strange, but this one came from a friend of Floyd Landis. This friend knew my head of sales and customer service and felt compelled to call him up and inform him that Lance was fucked and that shit was about to get real. Evidence was going to surface by the pound. Game over.

Any friend of Floyd around this time must have been living a pretty strange life. This was around the time Landis was starting to get pretty fucking weird, so after the phone call and some sharing of its theme, we all just shook our heads.

Poor crazy Floyd, was the general consensus. I don’t think a single person in the room believed Armstrong was innocent; we just believed Floyd’s already messy existence was about to get a lot messier if he tangled with Lance.

And then today, this. It took a village, including Dave Zabriskie, quoted in the New York Times as “serenading Johan Bruyneel, the longtime team manager, with a song about EPO, to the tune of Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Purple Haze.'”

EPO all in my veins; Lately things just don’t seem the same; Actin’ funny, but I don’t know why; ’Scuse me while I pass this guy.

Is “goofy” one of the eight stages of grief? If so, I think it comes right before “acceptance.”

As yet unresolved, from what I can tell, is some serious house cleaning at the UCI.

High Axle Blues

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Oct 102012

Back in Danzig mode with a vengeance. Or a small grudge. Or just some constipation and a headache. Either way, all free time diverts to some design work I have to be doing right now. As in “at this moment, instead of doing this.”

But this round of design revisions has me remembering the original reasoning behind the placement of the lower pivots, and there’s a brief, half-assed kind of story around that.

I’d dissected the work Steve Domahidy and company had done on Niner’s CVA suspension. See, a 29er has an axle that sits above the center of the bottom bracket, unlike a 26-inch wheel bike–those have axles that are almost in line with the bottom bracket center. From a full-suspension standpoint, a 29er is basically a 26-inch wheel bike that’s already halfway through its travel. Makes it tough to get any real travel out of them, as all early 29ers FS designs realized.

By dropping the lower link below the bottom bracket shell, Niner was able to drastically reposition the center of curvature of their rear axle path. The whole arc has to be mellower with a 29er, in order to leave you room for any actual travel. Incidentally, this is one of the reasons single-pivot 29ers have their pivots further forward–often in front of the bottom bracket.

It was trying to figure out how to accommodate the bottom bracket drop (higher axles) that got me thinking about a lower link that sat in line but tracked along the chain’s path, moving with it. That position, a little radical compared to everything else that’s been done, allows for a lot of axle path options for bikes with bigger wheels while still keeping the whole system very tight and compact.

It’ll be interesting to see what tracking along the chainline even as the suspension moves will do for the ride of the bike, though. Smart people have suggested this is a very good thing, and it certainly looks that way to me, too. Tape a laser pointer to the lower rocker on Danzig and it’ll stay pointing to the place your chain makes contact with our cassette all the way through the first two-thirds of travel. Sure, it’s affected by which exact gear combination you’re in, but much less so than a lot of other systems out there.

Back to work.

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