I Blame Kent

That's Kent the Mountain Turtle of Kent's Bike Blog fame. Last Wednesday, he taunted the flat tire gods with this hubris-encrusted (and conveniently decontextualized by yours truly) bit of prose: "I've had zero issues with these tires. None. No flats."

The following day, the flat tire gods paid him back with a screw through the tire. But Kent, dagnabit, you've caused a great disturbance in The Force.

Exhibit A: Monday morning, I rolled the bike out into an unseasonably cool morning. Maybe I should have felt my bionic leg tightening up ever so slightly in the cold. But I didn't. So when I tried to swing it over the saddle, I didn't get enough altitude, slamming my knee into the saddle and leaving a lovely knot of a bruise.

Exhibit B: That same Monday morning commute. I'm rolling into downtown, minding my own business, when the driver of a Toyota Yaris completely ignores my blazing sprint (go ahead, snicker, I know you want to) and pulls out in front of me. I missed him with room to spare, but it was more adrenaline than a geezer who can't even get his leg over the saddle really needs. Of course, a Yaris has the curb weight of our tandem, so I probably would have done more damage to it than it would have done to me.

Exhibit C: Monday night, headed home. I'm demonstrating that blazing sprint again (really? another snicker? don't have it out of your system yet?). Spot a pothole, swerve, and enjoy one brief smirk of victory before I stuff both wheels into pothole #2 hiding behind the first one. My bell rings, my water bottle ejects, but the bike stays up... just long enough for the pinch flat to empty my rear tire.

Kent, you have to make this right. Here's my proposal:

1. Drive a few dozen nails through a piece of wood.
2. Lay that piece of wood in your garage/driveway/street/whatever, pointy side up.
3. Ride your bike back and forth over that bed of nails until your tubes are Swiss-cheesed.
4. Spend the next several hours patching those tubes as penance.

It's the least you can do.


(For those who have yet to figure out that I distill Pure Essence of Sarcasm, I consider Kent a Good Pal of the Interwebs, and my tongue is jammed firmly in my cheek. Heck, it was Kent that inspired me to start this blog in the first place, so you can thank -- or blame -- him for the fact that I'm prattling here today.)

Is Your Protection Wearing Protection?

Regular readers (and a couple irregular ones) will know that my big dream in starting and maintaining this blog (other than just having a place to listen to myself talk) was to someday be graced by gifts from the Schwag Gods. I imagined that once bicycle manufacturers saw my dazzling prose and my rapt audience of dozens, free carbon and titanium bits would come tumbling from the Great Brown Truck like manna from heaven.

So far, that hasn't really panned out. But I'm proud -- nay, thrilled -- nay again, ecstatic -- to announce that The Cycle has finally dipped its toe into the Fountain of Schwag. Thanks to the generosity (and perhaps the questionable marketing savvy) of inventor/do-it-yourselfer Blake Mills from San Francisco, CA, I've spent the last week testing The Helmet Lock.

Okay, so what's a helmet lock? Pretty simple, really -- it's a twist of steel cable run in a figure eight through a too-big-to-fit-through-a-helmet-vent hunk of metal and crimped at the end, with the whole works coated in a plasticky/rubbery stuff to protect whatever it comes into contact with. (There's also a well-placed URL that can't be missed when the product's in use... a practice that I find distasteful when TrekSpecializedGiantCannondale do it to wretched excess, but it works in this application.) To whit...

(quarter not included)

The idea is that you shove the fat cable loop through a vent in your helmet from the inside out, run your bike lock through the loop, and the central metal hunk (a fat nut, actually) can't be pulled through the vent, preventing evil-doers from waltzing off with your helmet -- and taunting them Nelson Muntz-style with the name of the product that's just thwarted them: "Haw haw, you're a failed miscreant!"

I confess, I have never been one to lock up my helmet with my bike. I have an irrational fear that a drunk, a dog, or -- horror of horrors -- a drunk dog will mistake my crash protection as some kind of styrofoam public urinal and anoint it with a golden shower. But, in the interest of journalism, I've been putting The Helmet Lock through its paces for over a week now. Impressions...

• It's easy to use. Blake provides handy instructions with all sorts of caveats about how challenging it can be to juggle your bike, your lock, and your Helmet Locked-helmet, but I found that he doth protest too much. Just run the loop through your lid, start your usual lockup routine, and sling the loop over your lock before you close it up. Maybe it's tougher with a cable lock, but with my U-lock, I thought it was a piece of cake -- and this is from someone who likes to choreograph his lockup like a triathlete going through a transition.
• Choose your vent carefully. My "beater" commute helmet (a not-terribly-expensive Bell from a few years back) has a few vents that allow the fat nut to slide right through, defeating the purpose of The Helmet Lock pretty handily. Since an expensive helmet (presumably one you'd be more interested in protecting) probably has even bigger vents, this is definitely something to keep in mind. Still, there are at least a half-dozen vents on that same beater helmet that work just fine, so I imagine you'd be able to find a small enough vent on about any helmet you choose. For example, my "fancy" helmet (a newer and more expensive Giro) batted a thousand, preventing nut pull-through at every orifice (Yeesh, that sounds bad. Let's move on, shall we?)
• People will ask you about it. If you hang with "utility" bikers (who don't carry their helmets around in custom hard cases and display them proudly on a spotlit tchotchke shelf), they'll be impressed. Nobody (myself included) realizes that helmet-wrangling is a problem until they see this simple, elegant solution. Then, they have that forehead-slapping "Why didn't I think of that?" moment.
• Light, cheap, strong: Pick all three. Very few things in bikedom get to contradict the original "pick two" dictum from former-human-turned-Trek-brand Keith Bontrager. The Helmet Lock pulls it off. It's forgettably light in a bag or hanging off the bike somewhere but more than strong enough for the intended purpose (because how much is a thief going to work for a stinkin' -- in my case quite literally -- helmet, anyway?) And at $13 for one or $20 for two (because it's nice to share), I'd call it cheap... er, inexpensive.

The bottom line: If you don't like carting your helmet around with you but don't feel safe just hanging it off the bike, this little gidget is what you didn't know you were looking for. Someday, the helmet manufacturers will wise up and put some kind of integrated cable loop into their commuter lids (unlike the bizarre collection of accessories -- earmuffs?!? -- available on Bell's supposedly-commuter-marketed Metro) just for lockup purposes. Until that day comes, we can thank Blake for The Helmet Lock.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I think I just saw a tipsy Doberman headed toward the bike rack...

Apology To An Anonymous Mechanic

It was the early 90s, before I'd ever done a stint with a wrench in my hand. My headset had been loosening up badly ever since my hometown shop installed a new suspension fork. I hand-tightened the thing AGAIN (remember, kids, steerers had things called threads in those days) and rode it to one of the shops in the town where I was going to college.

The mechanic there correctly diagnosed that the steerer tube was cut too long. And he proposed the correct solution: Add a headset spacer to take up the slack.

But I was a perfectionist, and I absolutely could not believe that the incompetent mechanic at my hometown shop would foist such lousy work on me. I refused the headset spacer on principle and rode off with my headset clunking. Nose off, face spited.

Next time I was back home, I took the bike back to the shop where the fork was installed and pitched a minor hissy fit about the problem. The shop owner proposed the correct solution (again), a headset spacer. But I wasn't hearing it. So, to shut me up, the shop owner promised to have the steerer cut shorter.

Then, things turned uglier. That poor mechanic overdid it and took off too much steerer. The shop owner -- dreading the second hissy fit that he was sure would follow -- ordered a new steerer and made the mechanic pay for it. Now that I think about it, he may have needed to order a whole new set of uppers: steerer, crown, and stanchions. Or maybe parts weren't available for that cheap fork and he needed to order a whole new fork. Whatever it cost, that mechanic (probably making $3.85 an hour) had to eat it.

All because I refused a headset spacer.

Dude, whoever you are and wherever you are now, I am so sorry.

From Our Marketing Department

I want to pause for a moment of (surprising) frankness and non-snarkitude from yours truly, Jason, everything-in-chief here at The Cycle.

I'm changing the ads on this blog, removing the Google-inserted spam that used to live over there to the right and replacing it with ads from the Amazon Associates program. In a nutshell, if I'm babbling about a bike product here that happens to be available from Amazon, the program lets me make a link to the Amazon listing for that product. If you follow my link and end up buying the product, I get a little kickback in Amazon bucks. Same goes with that little Amazon box over there -- if you see something neat in there and buy it via the link on this site, Amazon scratches my back a little.

A couple things that will NOT happen as a result of this change: One, I will NOT start blowing smoke and giving glowing reviews of products sold by Amazon in a misguided attempt to wet my beak. If I like it, you'll know it. If I don't like it, you'll know that too. Simple as that, and in the words of famous cyclist David Byrne, "same as it ever was." Two, I will NOT limit my reviews to stuff that's available from Amazon. It's a big cycling world out there, and I'm interested in a huge cross-section of it, from the established big boys and girls to the inspired garage tinkerers. If you ever think I'm breaking these rules, please call me on it. I spent years as a paid shill, so I have enough bad karma in that regard already.

As always, thanks for reading, thanks for commenting, and if you happen to click through a link, make a purchase, and send a couple bucks my way, thanks for that support too.