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.
