I am an absolute pansy when it comes to winter riding.
Sure, I commute by bike year-round, but c'mon. My commute is one stinkin' mile each way. If the weather's bad enough that I can't ride a bike one mile, I shouldn't be going to work. Heck, if it's too bad to actually pedal, I can always just lower the saddle and Fred Flinstone the mile to work like I'm on a gigantic scooter.
When it comes to "fun" (non-commuting) rides, my good bike goes up on the hamster wheel pretty early in the winter... which inspires the eternal indoor cyclist's quest: How not to bore oneself to death upon the off-season torture device? Enter those wacky newfangled "smart" phones: music, TV, the Internets, games, all in the palm of your hand. With the increased popularity of GPS and bike computer apps, there are even a bunch of doo-dads designed specifically to hold a phone on your bars within view.
But me, I'm cheap, and I often see ready-made solutions as an affront to my bodging tendencies. So when I wanted to prop my pocket internets on the handlebars of my indoor suffering machine, I got some of these:
Basically, big ol' hunks of wire dipped in very thick, grippy textured rubber. Bend them, shape them, any way you want them, as long as you love them, it's all right. I crafted one into this:
Don't get it yet? Imagine that this plastic small-parts box is some sort of electronic entertainment device:
I tried putting my phone in there and using a mirror so it could take a self-portrait, but the thing took one look at itself, developed self-awareness, and now it refuses to open the pod bay doors.
The resulting mount has a tiny bit of jiggle, but it works great. I can adjust the angle with a bit of bending, and the phone shows no sign of ejecting. And since the giant twisty-tie things come in a two-pack, I have one more to play with -- it certainly looks like it has potential for many more interesting hacks, from accessory installation to the world's wackiest chainstay protector.
HUGE, MASSIVE, PLEASE-READ-THIS DISCLAIMER: This may not be a recommended use of this particular product. Please do not hold me or the folks at Nite-Ize responsible if your phone leaps to its death on a concrete floor. And I would NOT even THINK of using this on a real-world outdoor ride, both because I don't look at screens during real-world rides and because I can almost guarantee that use on an actual road would result in phone suicide.
A while back, fellow blogger/virtual pal bikelovejones posted a very poignant (at least for this ex-wrench) discussion of how it feels to leave the bike-fixing business. Maybe if you've never turned a wrench for a living, it won't make a dent, but it warmed at least one cockle of my otherwise cold, dead heart.
I'm nowhere near the mechanic that blj is -- my tenure was only six years, intermittently spread among four shops -- but I still feel that pang. I can dribble a wheel,too, and my favorite shop apron (a long denim one with Schwinn embroidery) still hangs in the garage near my Park stand, crusted with the same nostalgic stains and smells blj describes. Mine was sent to me as a gift (along with some other shop memorabilia, including the annoying disco CD we used to play all the time) by my boss after he decided to close the last shop where I'd worked, and when I pulled it from the box, I was overcome by the same sadness. I'd long since become a "grown up" with a "real job" (whatever those things mean), but I missed being a mechanic. And now, 12 years later, some part of me still does.
Still, I've moved on for the most part (only took 12 years!), so in the spirit of helping blj do the same, here's my Advice for Former Grease Monkeys:
- GET GOOD TOOLS: If you're still a cyclist (and good luck getting THAT monkey off your back), then you're still going to have bikes to fix, and you should stock your workshop right. You may think that a cheap pedal wrench is "good enough for a home shop" and that the heft of a real PW-3 is overkill that will only make you sad. Wrong. Having the right tool in your hand will put you in mechanic autopilot mode where the tool is just an extension of your hand, while having a flimsy piece of crap will only remind you that you aren't a "real" mechanic any more.
- THAT MEANS A WORKSTAND, TOO: This is a corollary to the previous point, but it's worth a stand-alone (no pun intended). If you've never known any better, you can get away with shelf brackets, hooks slung from the rafters, or any number of other mono-buttocked wrenching solutions. But if you've done time on a real stand with a real clamp, there's no going back. Maybe you don't need a stand on a 120-pound steel base, but find something that will give you that "shop experience" while you work.
- GIVE YOUR BIKES A BREAK: At some point, you will find yourself swapping shifters, brakes, cranks, bar tape, spoke nipples, and pretty much everything else on your own bike because a) you're bored, and b) you have the parts. Fight the urge. Your own bikes will eventually bore you. The fun of shop wrenching is the variety of things you get to work on. Endless mechanical onanism won't scratch that itch. When you find yourself saying, "I could equalize the wear on my pedal bearings if I rebuilt the left pedal with the balls from the right pedal and vice versa," put the wrenches down and go for a walk.
- BECOME THE NEIGHBORHOOD BIKE FIXER: This is how you scratch that "variety" itch. Get known among friends and neighbors as the person who can fix bikes. You'll have a great time, your friends will have happy bikes, everybody wins. I have a hard time convincing my friends that they don't have to pay me to work on their bikes -- I really, honestly, no-foolin' LOVE to do it. An evening in the garage, chatting with pals, getting greasy, perhaps consuming an adult beverage or two... what's better than that? If people insist on paying you back, bike-fixer-uppering is a great skill to barter. I can go through most of the Spring without paying for coffee or those adult beverages mentioned above thanks to preseason tune-ups.
If you've never wrenched for a living, you probably find this mildly ridiculous. It's just a job, right? But it's also a hard habit to break. So if there's an ex-mechanic in your life, find out what sort of beverages they prefer (adult or otherwise), and give that person an excuse to keep their tetanus shots up to date. You won't regret it.
Mine appears to be October and November.
Sure, I could have built up a knobby-tired blog and participated in the increasingly popular sport of blogocross, but then I'd need to invest in a second pit blog and a bunch of spare keyboards for muddy blog posts, dry-conditions blog posts, etc. Plus, it's hard to think of something to write with all those people ringing cowbells in your ears and handing you beers after every paragraph.
So, I napped out November, completely neglecting to immortalize my 40th (eh, what's that, sonny?) birthday on the 8th, which came and went with the "meh" it deserved. My inability/unwillingness to compulsively log miles this year prevents me from knowing if I reached my '40,000 lifetime miles by 40" goal (if I had to guess, I'd say "not even close"). But hey, it's all good.
The main reason I shut down in November is that this is the time of year I start to bore myself, never mind my reader(s). Other than my thrill-free commute and hamster-wheel torture in the garage, I really haven't been riding. Equipment-wise, this is the time of year I start to get whiny and unsatisfied with the stuff that was perfectly fine last month, and who wants to read about that?
I do have a bit of a mechanical challenge in the queue, however -- a problematic clunk in the bottom bracket area of my Raleigh Clubman. I've whittled down the variables (with thanks to some even more mechanically minded pals) to the bottom bracket itself, and have a replacement en route. Once that arrives, I'll do a how-to on newfangled Shimano external BB installation for my retro-grouchy readership. Plus, if I can find a cheap source for the (relatively common) cartridge bearings in said bottom brackets, I'll try to resurrect the old one with punches and hammers and brute force.
Thanks again for your patience. Your next bill will be pro-rated to reflect the interruption in service.
The daily driver that takes me from The Cycle World Headquarters to my top-secret day job has been under attack by an accessory thief lately. So far, I've lost a very old Planet Bike headlight and mounting bracket (not a huge loss, other than the four Eneloop rechargeables contained within) and had multiple attempts made on my Planet Bike Superflash taillights (thwarted by well-placed zip-ties).
In the ever-escalating war, I stumbled into perhaps the most overbuilt flashlight-mount-cum-bike-headlight ever conceived. The first key component is an LED-based flashlight like the one I first mentioned in my old headlight shootout. You don't necessarily need the same flashlight, but the key is to find one using that case design ("form factor", I think it's called). For example, here's one on Amazon (and as usual, if you go buy it, I get a cut -- at least in theory, since no one's ever bought anything off one of my links yet):
The key is that the main body of the light needs to be very close to 1 1/8" in diameter. Next up, you need a stem for a 1 1/8" threadless steerer with a handlebar clamp compatible with your current bars. Oh, and those current bars need enough clamping space on them for another stem. See where I'm going here? Clamp the flashlight into the stem as if it's a steerer tube, clamp the stem to your bars alongside your current stem, and you get this:
One insanely stable, difficult to remove headlight mount. I happened to have a very stubby, upjutting stem lying about, but any old angle or extension will do. I also would have preferred running the stem hanging down from the bars, but I had some cable interference issues there.
The obvious comparison is the Twofish Flashlight Mount
(hey, look, another Amazon link). I've used this, and found it unsatisfactory -- no matter how hard I cinched the Velcro, there was too much jiggling for my taste. Obviously, the stem is 100% jiggle-free. A stem is more expensive, so I probably wouldn't buy one just to do this, but since I already have a pile of them, it was a no-cost experiment for me.
In my old headlight shootout post linked above, you can see that I did basically the same thing using two hose clamps turned 90 degrees to each other plus some rubber shims. That was a decidedly cheaper (and equally stable) approach, but I'd run out of hose clamps and didn't want to make a dash to the hardware store. The stem looks nicer, too -- more elegant, less hacked.
Of course, the day after I hooked this up, the headlight-thieving jerk unscrewed the lens from my flashlight and took it -- not sure what he hoped to do with it other than annoy me, but if that was the goal, mission accomplished. I've since resorted to easily-removable lights that I can take with me during the day, but I thought that this hack deserved to live on in Web-based infamy.
