steveblock.com

The current list of people coming to KC on Friday appears to be Sam Wong, Ben Janke, and Andy Buck, and there are rumors of Sam Miller as well. It’s going to be an awesome weekend.

steve :: Jan.14.2007 :: Kansas City :: 11 Comments »

First update of 2007, sorry for the delay. If you TLDR me I will de-friend.

This one’s about the bike that I bought on EBay, received just before Christmas, and now ride to work. A while back I started looking at the Kansas City Craigslist site every day. I was keeping an eye out for an older road bike that I could clean up and get working wonderfully again. I had sort of decided that those new, gorgeous, awesome, fancy, expensive road bikes were great but maybe were not what I was really looking for.

Anyways, one day I ran across a bike that looked pretty decent. I didn’t buy it, but the guy posting it mentioned something about it being a good candidate for conversion to a “fixie.” At the time I didn’t know what that was, so I looked it up (yay for the internet). I found out that a fixie or fixed or fixed gear conversion or whatever you want to call it is a bike whose drive train has been simplified down to a direct connection between the pedals and the rear wheel. If the pedals are turning, so is the wheel, and vice versa.

This seemed sort of stupid but I was intrigued anyways, so I talked to my friend Boyd about it. He’d ridden fixed bikes before, and he was like “dude go for it.” I kept looking at Craigslist, but this time I was looking for a good candidate for conversion. I think I was sort of at the point where I’d done all kinds of biking and was looking for something new. I mean, I’ve done the whole mountain biking thing, the bike commuting thing (yay college), long distance road biking (yay RAGBRAI), and long distance idiocy (heavy suspension mountain bike 80+ miles in a day).

For whatever reason there are very few bikes on Craigslist here in KC. While I waited for the right one to appear I went to a local independent bike store downtown (Acme, it is awesome) and talked to the lady there for a while. They had all the parts I needed for a conversion, or even just to buy a converted bike outright. Then she showed me a new bike they had, the Redline 9-2-5. It’s a commuter bike, single speed freewheel or single speed fixed, depending on which way the rear wheel is installed. Had fenders and a chain guard, mustache handlebars, and was made of steel. It was definitely a bike for riding, and not for looking pretty. All the same, it did look pretty.

They wanted $600 for it, and I wasn’t ready to buy, but I was intrigued. Big time. Two days later I hit Buy it Now on an EBay auction for one. $400 shipped. OK, whatever. I can handle $400. A week and some later I get the bike, put it together, and promptly drive home for Christmas with the bike on top of my car.

On the Saturday before Christmas I took the bike out for a “short ride” that turned into a ride from my parents’ house at the south end of Ames to Stomping Grounds in Campustown. After having coffee and chatting with Jess, Kyle, and Kandice I realized it was about 4 and I needed to hurry home before it got dark (no lights, minimal reflectors, no helmet, etc). I made it home just as the sun was going down, made a 10 mile day after not riding at all for almost a year, and I was pretty much jelly after that.

For Christmas I got a headlight and taillight, and a floor pump that can handle the funky presta valves on the new bike. I started riding it to work shortly after I got back from break, and have now ridden it to work about 8 times since Christmas. It’s just about as fast as driving, is a better workout, and on the nicer mornings is just plain more enjoyable than driving. The only thing I don’t like is overheating for 20 minutes or so after I get from the cool outside to the warm inside of my building, but I can live with that.

steve :: Jan.13.2007 :: Fun and Games, Kansas City :: 26 Comments »