Bicycling

Bicycle Sunday


Because on Friday’s we are now riding our single bikes instead of the the tandem, on Sunday we have started riding the double instead of the old usual single bikes. The photo above was taken to answer a question I’ve gotten several times at work in the last couple months since Donna retired. Both by the people who thought I still rode it to work on my own and by those who are just plain curious.

Question: “How hard is it to ride that bike with no one on the back?”
Answer: “Not that hard at all.”

It really didn’t feel that much different than my single bike. It weighs a couple pounds more, so up and down hills would be different and pulling a u-turn takes just a bit more room.

Bicycle Friday

The bike riding to work on Fridays continues even if only one of us actually rides all the way to the Valve Store. In the morning Donna rides to the halfway point and turns around and heads home on a different route and I continue on pedaling our old standard route to ASCO. At the end of my work day I saddle up and Donna meets me right across the street from the plant having ridden the standard route to within the last tenth of a mile. There is really no reason for her to cross the busiest road on the route only to have cross back 10 minutes later.

People are so used to us riding the tandem in together that you might be surprised to learn how many people wonder how the whole thing works now when I tell them she rides halfway in with me in the morning. “Does she have to walk back home?” “What’s it like to ride that bike with no one on the back seat?” “Ohhh, you have other bikes…”

This morning when a cubicle1 neighbor said, “I didn’t think you were here.”

“It’s Friday,” I reply, “I bike rode in.”

“Oh, I didn’t notice the bike.”

“That’s because it is half as long as the tandem,” I tell him eliciting a chuckle.

This got us talking about cycling and as it turns out he was into mountain biking about the same time as we were back in the middle 1990s. I wonder if we ever crossed paths as we talked of riding some of the same local trails and we both even had ridden the Tsali Trail up in western North Carolina. But I don’t think we were at the same places at the same time because even though it was 20 years ago Donna and I would have been hard to forget. Among all the usual pick up trucks, jeeps, SUVs and big cars, it was hard to miss a Miata with 2 mountain bikes mounted on the trunk at trail head parking areas.

Lick Fork Lake Trailhead

Karma, Fate or Random Chance?

This is not the first time that the Bob Jackson bicycle has been supplanted by a Bianchi.

When Donna and I came to Aiken in 1989 we each had our touring bikes originally purchased somewhere around 1980. Donna’s was the original Takara 970 and mine was the Takara 990, except for the replacement Bob Jackson frame. After we joined the Aiken Bicycle Club we both got to riding a lot more and greater distances. The Takara/Bob Jacksons were just fine. Besides the Saturday & Sunday club rides we were also commuting back and forth to work 3 or 4 times a week. Me being a glutton for punishment used to try to also ride in the Tuesday & Thursday evening bike store rides.

The bike store rides were 25 miles or so out and back from the shop and while there were a few other Aiken Bike Club riders there were also a few of the local triathletes and hammerheads. Needless to say these were very quick rides and while I could hang a while with the pack eventually somewhere around the turn-around point I would find myself spit out the back. One of the real strong riders who was about my size offered to sell me his Giant Cadex carbon fiber machine because he was going to upgrade to something nicer. It looked remarkably like this and served me well for about 3 years before I sold it to help finance a couple of Bridgestone mountain bikes for Donna and I.

The Bob Jackson soldiered on as my ride-to-work and Sunday fun ride mount until I got the bug to get another road bike for the Saturday longer rides. This time I lucked into a nice bike2 for a nice price from a fellow ABC member Big Clint3 who was going to update his machine. Big Clint loved the Bianchi mystique, his next bike was also going to be one too, but he hated the Celeste color as much as I do and he had had the bike painted silver and purple.

This time when I needed another used bike to replace the Bob Jackson, another Bianchi fell into my lap.

Replaced by a Bianchi Brava

Bianchi Brava

Found a replacement for the Bob Jackson touring bike that is suitable for commuting to work with. It was sitting right there for sale on the floor at Cyclesport. I noticed it when I first found out about the broken frame, but initially dismissed it because the price seemed like more than I wanted to spend.

After a search for a new frame on Craigslist turned up nothing within 100 miles, I headed to eBay where I got a couple of close matches. One was a complete 25″ Takara touring frame. This was an emotional favorite because an early 80’s 25″ Takara is the origin of the Bob Jackson touring bike. All the components on Bob came from this bike after I had to buy a new frame because of a crash (an interesting story for another day.) But the $200 frame lacked several key frame braze-ons it required to make it suitable for the task.

The second was a $100 (+$60 for shipping) 63cm Raleigh. It had the bare minimum of correct braze-ons for mounting racks, etc. and it was in Brian’s favorite color – blue. It was lacking a headset though, so that additional cost made it comparable to the Takara. But all Bob’s componentry is set up for a 27″ wheels making brakes and wheel fitment a very real issue on a frame designed for 700C wheels. Plus the pretty blue paint is not original, so has this been repaired for some reason or just painted to freshen it up?

Neither of these options were ideal. Even if I did buy one of them I still had to add the cost of bike shop labor to transfer parts from one frame to the next, plus any modifications needed, to the original eBay cost. The Bianchi sitting on the shop floor, was nearly perfect, its frame was one size smaller than perfect at 61cm, but it had all the correct braze-ons needed for front and rear racks (even the ones on the front forks that Bob didn’t.) So I made a low-ball offer to start the negotiations. Much to my surprise it was accepted.4

Now I kind of wish I had taken a picture of the bike in its as purchased state, because what you see above looks vastly different than that. Do you see the color of the lettering on the frame? That is called Bianchi Green or Italian Sky Blue or just Celeste, and is the traditional color of Bianchi bicycles. The bike was swimming in that color, the clipless pedals, the seat, the handle bar tape and even the sidewall of the tires where that color. I guess if you are a Bianchi purist you would have liked it, but to me it reminded me of the Splash Green color that came on Miatas in 2003 which I despised.

Requiem For Bob

When Donna retired she said that the only thing she was going to miss was riding the bike to work on Friday. We decided that seeing as we couldn’t ride the tandem, I would ride a my single bike and she would ride her single bike with me half way and turn around. She would then come back in the afternoon and meet me near the Valve Store, that way she’d get in 1-1/2 bike trips to my one.

Trouble is my regular single bike is a lightweight club racer, not a commuter, so there is no way to mount any of the racks on it that would allow me to transport my clothes and lunch to work. One way to go about it would be to take all the stuff I need at work on Friday by car on Thursday night, then retrieve it by car later Friday evening or Saturday morning. But we used to be so proud about riding to work on Friday because often times we wouldn’t even use the car at all that day, now with this option we would be making two car trips to ASCO to support one bike trip there.

Several years ago when I got the Bianchi road bike we stripped a few of the parts off of the Bob Jackson framed touring bike to upgrade Donna’s touring bike and hung ol’ Bob upside down from hooks in the garage. My idea was to get my old touring bike down and take it and the various other parts, that may have come off it originally or may have come off Donna’s touring bike or may have came off some other random old bike, down to Cyclesport and let Shareen work her magic. If it needed something, and we figured it would, she could source it and fix up my old friend.

Turns out it needed new tires and tubes, a 42 tooth front chain ring, a set of brake calipers, new cables and some handlebar tape. We got it back a few weeks ago and I mounted the front and rear racks, strapped on the front panniers off the tandem and my new trunk bag for my lunch. I took it out for a shakedown cruise around the neighborhood it felt good. The weekend before the first planned ride to work, Donna and I went for a usual Sunday morning Ridgecrest breakfast ride. The clip-less pedals were tighter than on my club racer and there was a slight creaking coming from up front somewhere, but other than that the bike felt like a pair of sturdy well broken-in shoes – comfortable, familiar and ready to go anywhere. When we got home I loosened the screws on the pedals and tightened down one of the front racks mounting screws.

That Friday on the way to work the creaking was still there. On the way home it was little louder. The sound was most evident when standing on the pedals climbing one of the small hills on the route and seemed to coming from the handle bars. When I got home I loosened the stem and pulled it out of the frame, cleaned it off and coated with a little grease, because this could be the source of the sound. I then took the front rack off entirely and went for a ride around the block. The creak was still there when I rocked the bike by pressing down on the left side of the handlebar and lifting the right. So now I’m a little worried about the creaking because the handle bars are original to the bike (which was bought new in 1981!) and after 36 years of life/use they might be suffering from metal fatigue.

Figured I should take it to a professional for a second opinion, so back to Shareen at Cyclesport. Dropped it off late on Tuesday evening. On Wednesday when I called her after work, she said she pulled the handlebars out of the stem and lubed that too, another known creak creator, and neither part looked like there were cracks in them, but the sound was still there. I told her I’d be down to get the bike. When I got there she said, “I found where the noise is coming from.” I said, “Great.” She said, “Noooo, not really.” “See that scratch on the head tube?” “Yeah,” I say, “I noticed that, along with all the other paint imperfections on a 30+ year-old bike.” “Well, that’s no scratch,” she takes a box cutter blade, lines it up with the scratch and proceeds to push it in about a 1/16″ of an inch, “that’s a crack.” It starts at the front, angles up and follows the outline of the lug, ending about 2/3rds of the way around the head tube. Crap.

Oh That Worked Out Well…

On Thursday night we packed up in preparation for riding the tandem to work, but we knew, however, that it was an iffy proposition. The weather folks were predicting a decent chance of a couple of hours of rain in the morning. If it happened early enough, we might ride if the road wasn’t too wet. If it happened late enough, we would ride before the rain ride and everything would be dry by quitting time.

When the alarm went off at 5:00 AM I went and checked the radar on the computer. And while my calculations from watching the current loop and their future cast predicted that the narrow visible line of thunderstorm would arrive after we were inside at work, we both agreed it was too close to risk. The last thing we needed was to get soaked a mile from work and have not only our cycling clothes get wet, but the work clothes we were going to change into as well. We went back to bed.

When the alarm went off again at 5:30 we got up and unpacked everything, got dressed, made our hot beverages and headed into work where we had our pre-staged breakfast waiting for us. About a mile from work the first large raindrop hit the windshield. The amount of those big drops increased in reverse proportion exponentially as we got closer to work. By the time we pulled into the parking lot it was a full on deluge. It was coming down so heavy that we opted to forgo parking in our usual far left corner spot and get one a lot closer to the door. In spite of cutting our distance to walk in by two-thirds and having a large golf umbrella, we still got soaked from the knees down and merely damp below the waist.

Lets recap, we got up at 5:30 and left the house at 6:00 to arrive at work at 6:15 and get really wet. If we had bike ridden, the time line would have went like this, up at 5:00, out the door at 5:30 getting to work at around 6:00, or about 10 minutes ahead of the rain. So, to avoid getting wet, we adjusted our schedule just enough to cause us to get wet.

Awwww Mom!

Even though this morning’s temperature was borderline freezing, Donna and I still bike rode over to our usual Sunday breakfast spot, Ridgecrest Coffee Bar for a panini. We were the only folks in the place until we were just about finished and a family of five came through the front door.

It was a man and woman probably around 30-years old, two boy kids maybe 5 & 6 and a infant in one of those car seats with a basket handle. The parents had on puffy vests, car seat infant was under a blanket, but the kids were just in flannel shirts. As the group approached the counter, the younger of the two kids, noticing the sliding window behind it, said, with as much exasperation as a person that age can muster, “They have a drive-thru!”

I’m not sure whether his annoyance was because he had to get out of the car and walk 15 feet to the door (in the cold) or because this was the first time in his life he had ever been in a restaurant that had a drive-thru and and they hadn’t used it.