Striking the balance

I’ve been commuting to school and work since I was like 10 years old. Having somehow internalized somehow that the warming state of the world (and thus enshittification of the planet) rests somehow more on my shoulders than everyone else, I make it a mission to ride my bike to work sometimes to try to burn less gas.

The whole thing is pretty farcical because my drive is roughly one-fifth the duration of the average person in the nearest major city and I often rideshare with my girlfriend since we live and work in the same place. Well, I mean, we both live in the same place and work at the same place but work isn’t home.

But maybe I just enjoy getting out into the fresh morning day, feeling the satisfaction of getting more exercise by the time I get to work than most of my coworkers will all week. By the time I get to work the blood is already flowing so I don’t have to walk around telling everyone how tired I am and how it’s so hard to get going this morning. Those things I just do so people don’t get mad at me for not being less tired than them.

Holy crap, I should really edit this so it’s less confusing.

The Point

Whatever bike is my commuter bike gets a ton of miles put on it, and it gets locked up properly so hopefully the chance of theft becomes pretty negligible. The previous (slash current) ride is a Rocky Mountain Fusion, size large, but it only has wimpy little 26" tires. I love the bike but I’ve been feeling a bit like an elephant on a rollerskate and wanted to move up in the world.

And ohhhh shit! It finally happened – I found someone selling a bike nice enough for me to be seen on while I commute to work at a price that didn’t break the bank (whatever that means)! So everyone, please say hello to the new whip, tentatively named Speck:

But there’s the catch: the bike is a little bit broke. The seller was very clear about it, which I appreciate. He seemed a bit hesitant to describe how it happened, but based on the fact that there was a pinch flat in the tire I am pretty sure he just smashed it into a curb and got fed up with it and just decided to sell. Most likely just a silly little accident, that resulted in some damage:

When he described the damage on his Kijiji ad (I’m not linking to them, deal with it) I thought the thing was basically going to be unrideable and that finding a rim, lacing it up and getting it into shape was going to be a possible all-winter project. Boy is my face red! I took an adjustable wrench to it and smoothed out the worst of it and now you can barely see it.

Luckily I’m a relatively light guy and I plan to use the bike mainly for commuting, not for constantly smashing off rocks. Even with the way it is now, I will be a little bit nervous for a while that the rim will suddenly give out and the rubber bead will get blown out by the tube leaving me to walk most of the way too/from work/home, probably in the rain (since the good Lord knows I appreciate some jerkiness from him).

Sweet Highlights

This is more of an entry-level bike and I eventually plan to swap out parts as I break them for things that are a bit nicer. But waste not, want not so here are some of the super sexy parts that came affixed to her.

Ugh, coil forks. The heavier, don’t-really-workier cousin of the air fork. They’re cheaper and that’s what mattered here, but I look forward to offloading this bad boy into a charity bin and sticking some Fox 40s (or something less stupid) on it eventually. If you look at that picture above showing the whole bike, the dude I got it from ripped all the Suntour decnals off it so now there’s just this bad-ass blacked out fork up front. Neat.

It always drives me nuts that shifters exist that show you what gear you’re in. There is very likely a certain demographic out there that thinks it’s really great that they can just look at their hands as they ride along and it tells them what gear they’re in.

I am not a part of that demographic and their very existence makes me angry.

I kid, I kid. But how useless is this? I mean, I can understand at the back there’s like, 15 gears and it’s hard to remember which one you’re in. But at the front there are two. If it seems easy to pedal, you’re probably in 1. If it’s hard to pedal, you’re probably in 2. I’m going to be glad to see this idiot get removed. Sometime in the next while I’ll find someone getting rid of a 38-tooth narrow-wide chainring for cheap and I’ll convert it to a 1x and eliminate my possible gear-related bafflement that way.

Sorry that that picture is like a mile tall if you’re looking at this in a browser. But.. ..what the hell? The kid I bought this from was a nice guy and I don’t want to put him down, but like.. ..how? Why? You can see at the bottom of the picture that you can just flip that lever to loosen the clamp and then unwind the screw if it’s still not moving easily.

I get it, everyone is in a different place mechanically and this is completely cosmetic. For some reason it makes me smile, picturing all the grunting and groaning and gnashing of teeth to do something that could have been so much easier.

The one thing I changed

I’m actually really pumped about this one since it aggressifies the whole look of the bike:

The stem is that piece that goes from the top of the frame to the handlebars. I made two minor modifications to this and it makes me happy.

1. See those two little rings above the stem? They used to be underneath it. This lowers the handlebars by a couple of centimeters.
2. I flipped the stem itself upside down. If you look closely, it bends slightly downwards as it goes from the frame-side to the handlebars. This used to be a slight upward bend. This lowers the handlebars a few millimeters.

Combined, those changes make it so the rider (Hi!) is pulled slightly more forwards and down, resulting in a more hunched-over riding position. If you go and Duckduckgo xc race bikes, you’ll see that many of them will share this general layout.

The more hunched-over position will do two things:

1. It will pull your weight forward so that the front wheel is more apt to stay on the ground during steep climbs, and
2. It will cause the upper body to be a bit lower, decreasing aerodynamic drag (you’re an aerodynamic drag).

I’m mostly concerned with the second point, because I am really, really fast. Also headwinds somehow occur 95% of the time while riding despite the improbability of this happening. So the lower I am, the faster I go, the quicker I can have a Coke Zero and start watching television when I get home.

[Aside: that’s why everyone is always in a rush to get everywhere, right?]

Things I Won’t Miss on Kijiji

A lot of ads on Kijiji are dogshit. I don’t plan on reselling this bike right away because I would like to ride it because I like riding bikes. But if I was planning on selling this bike right away, here’s an example of what I would not do:

Doesn’t that make you just yearn for it? Doesn’t this just shout, “this item has been well cared-for and doesn’t smell like stale beer!” NO, IT DOESN’T. Just a picture like this knocks $100 off the price I am willing to pay. No, wait, even better, it knocks 15% off the price I am willing to pay. If I thought about it longer and did some math I could come up with a pretty good function that we could plot showing how much less I would be willing to pay based on the badness of the picture and the price and other variables but then I have less time left for watching TV so screw it.

Here’s a good example of a useless photo for selling a bike:

Again, I get it – not everyone is a bikes power-nerd. Probably fewer than one millionth of all people can tell the difference between an Eagle drivetrain and a singlespeeder without being walked through it. But aside from now being able to assume that the tires are GROU[*]D CON7 (or similar) and that is has disc brakes and doesn’t appear to be boost-compatible and isn’t a singlespeeder and is grey there isn’t a lot to learn here.

Lots of people are pretty good about ad photos and they seem to pick up that the drivetrain and the brakes are pretty important but the seat colour, less so. I’ll get over it, I just need to go for a bike ride and clear my head – hey cool, this thing is paying for itself already!

That’s it for another edition of I-updated-my-blog-you’d-better-appreciate-it. Finally just got to go do some dishes and then I can finally watch some damned television. I hope you have enjoyed this quick exploration of the new thing I bought off the internet/IRL as much as I have enjoyed bringing it to you. To help with this comparison, it was about a 7/10 on my end. So I hope you enjoyed it 7/10 based on whatever overall vibe you have.

Don’t forget to not bother following me on facebook or on instagram or whatever and don’t mash that Like button because there isn’t one because it’s assumed or you wouldn’t be here I don’t need your validation this is a passion project.

Chow.