Omaha!

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So, whilst traveling on tour with Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks, I ended up in Omaha with a day off before election day and a show there on election day. I wasn't crazy about missing election day in Chicago, what with it likely to be "an historic event" and all (That phrase has really been flying around this last couple of weeks, I can't help but put it in quotation marks. English teachers must be excited as I reckon there aren't a lot of good everyday examples of the "h" exception to usage of "and."). However, I decided to make the best of it and see if I could find a bike and get some exercise. We were staying just north of the downtown "Old Market" area, right near this big Qwest Arena thing. Lots of new construction, warehouse conversions, etc. up here. I looked up area bike shops and found Olympic Cycles and gave them a call about renting a bike. At first the guy seemed like it wasn't going to happen, I was asking about a road bike and he said they only had 2 bikes to rent, a mountain bike and a sort of cruiser bike and one of them was already out. I was getting ready to blow it off when I heard him listening to someone off phone and then he said "Actually we have one old road bike to rent." I told him I was tall and he said that it was about 25 inches. I told him I'd be right over!

So, I got a ride over there from my fellow crew member Mark who along with his wife Julie, who grew up in Omaha, were out looking at places to live and preparing to move there. The shop was a nice funky old storefront affair. It said "since 1973" on the door, and I thought "this is the place for me!" Turned out the bike was a great old Raleigh Competition GS touring bike, Reynolds 531 tubing, full Campy 10-speed setup. It was one of the owner, Larry's personal bikes he'd brought in for another random tall guy rental request he'd had the week before. I rode it around the block and then got setup with a bike map and I was on my way.

I basically descended from the shop all the way back down to the riverfront where we were staying. The Raleigh was really fast! It was so fun and incredible to be riding in a strange town on a strange bike. I went back to the hotel and just got changed and looked at the map. Julie had mentioned how Omaha had their own new "bridge to nowhere" (so to speak), a hike and bike bridge over the river to Council Bluffs, Iowa. On the map I could see a lot of riverfront bike paths, so I headed over there.

Well, the Bob Kerry Pedestrian Bridge is definitely a bridge to somewhere to me (and I imagine to many others who might want to stay fit, or actually even get to work by bike or on foot over the river without having to brave one of the numerous auto bridges full of freeway speed traffic. It's funny how controversial it is to spend money on a bridge that can't have cars driving over it. No price is too high, it seems, to support automobile mobility, while Amtrak funding, public transit funding and any sort of really comprehensive system of paths for bikes, peds, etc. is considered some sort of socialist handout. GROAN!!!!

Anyway, there were several miles of great paved bike paths around the river here. I rode about 12 miles that late afternoon until dusk fell. Took a couple of crappy phone pics below on the aforementioned bridge. It has a great view of the city and in spite of just opening (I believe) several days before, it already had a good amount of both foot and bike traffic on it.

The next day, election day, I went out again and rode for about 20 more miles or so before bringing the bike back to Olympic and getting to work. Our night at the Slowdown turned out to be a great night anyway, the venue was really nice and they had the election situation pretty well sorted out with a large projector TV setup and plenty of good internet access, etc. I watched the scene in Grant Park back home, looking for my wife and friends on the TV. Anyway, a big shout out to Olympic Cycles for hooking me up!

Loose ends

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Figured I'd clear out some long neglected cycling odds and ends while I'm sitting here.

First up, here's a pretty awesome bike cozy I saw outside Feed restaurant in Chicago a couple of weeks back. Check out that tricky knitting action at the headtube!! Nice work!





Next up, I had the funny experience the last Friday in September past of being caught in traffic as a Critical Mass ride rode right past me in the opposite direction. Ironically, I was going to pick up my wife who'd gotten a flat on her bike!

It looked REAL fun. I was jealous. The riders were generally all in a really festive mood and shouting out greetings to the drivers that weren't really any kind of snarky stuff, just "happy Friday" and that sort of thing. That didn't stop some drivers from eventually going nearly postal over the perhaps 10-minute delay, trying to jump the sidewalk and get to the nearest turnoff street. There are some psycho people out there in cars man. Where are they going, to their mother's heart surgery?! Somehow I doubt it, but the shouting and cursing and honking persist nonetheless. C'est la vie (la guerre?).

Here are some pics of that:





There were probably 300+ riders in my poor math, it took a good 10 minutes of fairly constant flow for them all to get past. Nice one people!

Paramount update

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I have finally managed to get the Paramount together! Here is the rest of the saga, as it were:

Whilst in the middle of putting the pieces together for this Paramount conversion underway in my last post, I stumbled across a guy on craigslist (who happened to live right in my neighborhood) was selling a mid-90s Look 171 road bike. There was this picture of it:


but the part of the post that caught my attention was about it having a full Dura-Ace group on it and it was going for $250!!! I snapped it up! The seller was at first saying in the ad (per picture above) "I'll try and find the wheels" or something to that effect. He did indeed find the quite nice Mavic/Shimano Dura-Ace wheels as well, so this ended up being a complete bike in need of a little light TLC. The Look frame is a carbon frame with aluminum lugs. The whole bike weighed something like 16.5 lbs. Unfortunately, it was a 56cm frame, so it wasn't going to be a complete bike for me, but I put all the Dura-Ace stuff on the Paramount! It's a 7700 group, for those keeping score, really nice stuff worth significantly more than the entire bike's cost. Hooray for craigslist (again)! I am now going to build this frame back up with my mix of Shimano 600 and 105 parts. It will still be a really nice ride. I'm going to either try and have the missus check out riding it as a more serious road bike ride, or if she's not terribly into it, I can just resell it this spring.

There was an irritating learning curve during this parts raid though. I installed and used the STI levers, but without a front derailleur as I was waiting on a braze-on derailleur clamp to come in to mount the DA derailleur. I took the bike up to Madison and rode it as an 8 speed for the weekend a few weeks back. It was really nice and fun. The DA brakes are really like a whole new experience in stopping. I even manually shifted the front ring once! It's not that bad for those trying to simplify their setups. Anyway, when this clamp came in, I put the derailleur on and was futzing around with setting it up when I just f-ed up the front ring shifter. DOH!!! I didn't realize that the derailleur had a sticky spot from sitting around for so long and was trying to shift it when it was already shifted and, long story short, I bent this little sort of cable stop part of the casting in the lever and it was ruined! I ended up having to poke around for a couple of weeks on ebay before finding a reasonable price on a similar vintage. Apparently they were a little later and I must have not been the first person to do this as the one I bought had a totally different, reinforced construction at the same spot I bent. I finally just got this thing on, lubed up the derailleur and got it all sorted out. It's really nice!!! I had been riding this Centurion I picked up a couple of months back (I haven't even written about that one!), and I would think "this is a pretty nice ride" but I got back on the Paramount and it was like being on a cloud comparatively!

I did this last tweaking on a little 2 day furlough from the tour I am on right now (live sound engineer), and I spent my full day off just riding all over the city running errands, etc. Went about 23 miles maybe altogether, nice fall riding day. However, at the VERY end of the day while turning onto my own street, I caught a pedal on the pavement and just threw myself for a big wipeout! CRAP!!! Quelle embarrasing! I was alright more or less. I poked some ugly little holes in my shorts where my keys ended up between my thigh and the ground in my pocket, bruised my leg there, kind of shocked my wrist and got a few little scuffs. The bike was more or less fine, it took a little hole in the seat, a nice newish $10 Fuji I got off a guy on CL as well. I'll have to doublecheck it when I get back.

Anway, that's the saga! I can't wait to get back home for hopefully a handful more of nice days before things go full winter. It's incredible right now, high 60s, early 70s. I'm in Omaha, NE today on the tour and next I'll tell the story of my nice day off in Omaha that I'm in the midst of.

It's nice to post right now. Something to do besides obsess about the election!! I need it!

I'm not a good blogger...

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...because you need to probably post more than once every 5 or 6 weeks really if you expect anyone to stay even sort of interested. Perhaps I'll get back on a streak.

Many bike-y things have happened. I've been doing loads of work on my Paramount changing it over to a pretty nice road bike setup. The process went something like this:

I got a pair of Shimano 105 STI shifters for it and tried for a while to get some different used wheel sets that would work for this conversion. After learning a few hard lessons about Shimano compatibility and vintage (though I was able to find homes for the wheels that did not work fortunately), I just got a new set of Mavic CXP21 wheels with Ultegra 6600 hubs on a sort of end-of-summer sale. Nice wheels! I got a second (small) chainring for the Shimano 600 cranks that the bike already had on it and started setting it up. I got this setup more or less happening sans front derailleur as the 600 derailleur I swapped out from the Trek 660 I had a while back stripped at the cable clamp bolt upon installation. So I just fastened that cable under the bottle cage boss on the seattube and went on my merry way for the time being. Other bits include a set of Easton ergo drop bars and a nice Fuji saddle ($10 on craigslist!) Went on a pretty fun ride with the bike in this stage one Sunday afternoon. It went like this:

-3200 W Belmont to the lakefront by way of Diversey.
-Lakeshore path to the top, brief rest and the photo below at the turnaround
-Lakeshore path south to Grand Ave
-Grand to Milwaukee back up to Wicker Park

Here I met my friend Matt for a light lunch and beers before heading back home. It was a nice 20-ish mile ride and I loved the new bike setup.

Here's a pic:


The saga continues though. More soon...

shooz

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I have taken the plunge and gotten a pair of clipless cycling shoes. My biz partner has been a full-time bike shoes guy for some years now and after a while his and a few other friends' dedication to wearing them got my interest piqued.

After poking around in a couple of bike shops and then doing a couple hours of web reading, I settled on these shoes:



They had them in stock at the Kozy's bike shop over on Milwaukee Avenue by me here for a good price, so I was able to go over and give them a tryout. I settled on these because they were allegedly pretty flexible and had a recessed cleat. They seem to be positioned as an "indoor/spinning" cycle shoe, but they seem pretty terrific.

Oh, I forgot about the other thing that made it easy to take the plunge. It was that my bike had already come with these Shimano pedals that are quite functional for normal riding, but made it pretty easy to make the switch:



The great thing about these pedals is that I can still ride with normal shoes quite comfortably.

I have to say that I'm loving being clipped in (clipless, clipped in, the terminology gets kind of confusing). I rode toe clips for a little while recently and though I got the same good feeling of being able to do a full rotation with some sort of power. However, with toe clips I also had a handful of ridiculous incidents of my shoe lace across the face of my shoe hanging up on some little protrusion on the cleat and pulling up to a stop only to comically slowly fall over on the ground. So, the shoes are definitely better in terms of being easy to unclip (unlock?) yourself from them. If you set them up a bit loose, it's a piece of cake.

I think it feels easier on my old man right knee, which would mostly feel pretty stiff when I first started riding in the morning. Now I don't really feel any discomfort in the morning or any other time for that matter.

Bike Porn

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Here is the site of Ray Dobbins, a serious bike tweaker/restorer with some of the nicest "fashion photography" of bicycles I've seen. His concentration is on 70s and 80s Italian bikes, but he's also got a gorgeous 50th Anniversary Paramount in there. It's overwhelming! Nice stuff Ray.

He also has a nice primer on aluminum polishing that is making me start looking for a bench buffer! Additionally, there are good tips on paint touch-up and other minutiae for the restorer.

grab bag

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Here are a few funny cycling loose ends:

A quality ride my wife spotted yesterday downtown. Keepin' it real! (Now she wants one like this!)



Also, here is a guy juggling machetes downtown on a 10' tall unicycle. Go man, go!