Inside

So I went up to LincolnWoods for a little while a couple weeks back, the day before the snow. I am completely out of shape for mountain biking! I wrecked twice on easy stuff, and once on a hard section. I sort of forgot that newly fallen dry leaves are a zero traction surface. Sure, that's my excuse... My skills atrophied in the months I was away from actual challenging riding. Short of some stuff in Arcadia, there just isn't anything like Lincoln in the southern part of the state.

I think I only rode for 45 minutes or so, but I was shot... my lungs were burning. It was fun, though. I had a grin on my face the whole time, until the check engine light came on in my car on the way home... Gonna need to do something about that. That'll teach me to drive my car to go bicycling...

I set myself up with an indoor trainer yesterday, so hopefully I'll have better fitness by the time the ice goes away from the woods. I took my first indoor "ride" today, and it's definitely a workout. More sustained effort than outside, where you can coast. It's pretty boring though, so good tunes or a DVD or something are definitely in order.

Project SST is underway

The project to turn my old mountain bike into a singlespeed has officially begun. I spent my spare time during the last week stripping off the old shifters, grips, brakes (that didn't work anyway) and levers, deraileurs, cogset, and cables. That was the easy part. Disassembly is free. While I was at it I cleaned and regreased the hubs. I'll also need to replace the crankset and BB, but I haven't been able to bring myself to actually do that part yet. It seems the idea of keeping the bike rideable during this process has been abandoned, but I don't feel so bad. I've got a couple other rigs to ride, and the parts I took off were either shot or sucked to begin with.

Now that the bike is broken down, it has been put back in the corner of my "shop" for a little while. No further progress can be made without parts, but that'll have to wait for some money. I'm excited, though, to see an old bike on its way to new life...

And now for something totally different...

Check out some cool, wooden surfboards, made here in the Northeast.

http://www.grainsurfboards.com

Time + humidity= sux

So my mountain bike spent a great deal of time by itself over the last few months. What's worse, it spent time by itself in a humid basement... Today I thought I would lube the chain, check the pressure in the fork, check tire pressures, all in anticipation of actually riding this weekend. I gave the brake levers a sqeeze and the front one worked... The rear (an Avid cable disc brake) didn't. I took a look at the cable, it's shot. Nice and rusty. Turns out steel expands when it rusts... who knew. I did, but that's not the point. Having discovered this shocking evidence of poor maintenance, I kept looking. To my relief, nothing else was really wrong, except for a frozen link in the chain. Damn! Here's the problem, though. Now I'm thinking about all the stuff I want to fix up on the bike. New brake cables? Screw that, I should put some Juicy's on there! Headset is a little rumbley, why not upgrade the fork while I'm at it? Huh, the left side pedal axle is messed up. It still spins, but it's days are numbered... and these cranks are hammered. See how easy it is? Suddenly I may as well pick up that long travel trail bike (mmmm, Nomad...) I've been thinking about.

Yeah, with all my spare money. I calculated the money I'm saving by commuting on my road rig, turns out it's a whopping $60 a year. That's not why I do it, but it's also not going to pay for a new mountain rig...

Back to the City

Soon I will be starting a new job in Providence. I'm excited about this development because it means I'll once again be a productive member of society, in sharp contrast to my two (and a half) years as a poor graduate student. A job in the city means I'll be moving out of Narragansett and back to Providence. This, in turn, means I'll be able to ride my bicycle for transportation and that (finally!) means I'll have a reason to finish my single speed project.

The patient is a 1990 Trek 830 mountain bike. I got the bike when I was in high school, it gave me my introduction to mountain biking. It's currently set up in more or less stock form. I replaced the headset, bottom bracket, and crankset a couple years ago, along with the seat. To turn it into a single speed urban transport rig I'll need to do some more work. First, the crankset sucks and will need to be replaced again. I don't feel bad because I only spent $15 on it. The bottom bracket spindle is way too long, so it'll need to be replaced too. I'll excise the derailleurs, but it has integrated shifters and brake levers. I'm not sure how I'll deal with that. There are a bunch of other little issues like that. My goal is to spend as little money as possible, so I'll probably end up slowly but surely making changes to the bike. It works now as a 21 speed bike, so the idea is to keep it rideable all the way through the conversion.

Living near the beach has been fun because I've been able to surf and ride often. Moving to Providence will mean less surfing, but hopefully more riding...

Cash money

Apologies, once again, for the intermittent writing.

Yesterday, for the first time since Hurricane Katrina swept through the Gulf Coast, gasoline prices fell below three dollars a gallon. This price reduction helps me because I have been commuting to Newport this summer. There's no bike access to the Jamestown or Newport bridges, so I've been at the mercy of Nature's whims and the resultant increases in fuel costs. Yikes, that's a loaded sentence if ever there was one... Anyway, our noble senator, the Honorable Lincoln Chaffee, has secured several million dollars (it's in the transportation bill that went through a month ago) to create bike access on the Jamestown bridge. It's a start, but the results will obviously take time, and I'd be suprised if the Jamestown NIMBY's let this just slide right through. I don't want those heathen bastards riding their bikes right onto my island! The point of all this is that I can't ride my bike to work, and as a result I've been really smacked by the expensive gas.

Lately my road rig has been plagued by gremlins. More accurately, it has been repeatedly plagued by one, very specific gremlin. The spoke nipples on my front wheel have been exploding. The spoke doesn't break, rather the nipple snaps off right where it passes through the grommet on the rim. It has happened four times in the last month, I haven't noticed any connection to hitting bumps or anything else for that matter. Upon closer inspection of the nipples themselves (uh huh huh, nipples...), I noticed they are corroding, as though they have been exposed to salt water. Ah ha! This is a possibility since I rode all last winter on wet roads, and also road often on Ocean Road, exposed to salt spray. The repair is easy, but it's annoying and it has caused me to lose confidence in my front wheel. It's radially spoked, so when a nipple breaks the wheel goes waaaay out of true and sometimes won't even fit in the brakes. I suppose I should motivate to just change out all the nipples...