Ride Lugged

Slate has an article with reviews of various bike locks. Good stuff if you are in the market for a lock, otherwise it’s super boring. I also can’t believe that the street cuff didn’t make the cut. F that, I’m more of a fan of real handcuffs anyway.

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METHODOLOGY

1) Security (20 possible points): To see how the locks would hold up in street conditions, I locked them around the frame of a very obsolete bike and around a steel handrail outside my apartment. I attempted to break through each lock with each of the tools, and did my best not to damage the bike. Busted locks received a maximum security score of 10.

2) Portability/Ease of Use (10 possible points): Even if a lock is unbreakable, is it practical? Cyclists usually transport U-locks with mounting brackets attached to the bike frame, in bags, or, if the locks are small enough, in their pockets. Locking chains are carried in bags or worn around the waist or over the shoulder. I took each lock for a ride and evaluated how difficult it was to carry and lock up.

3) Value (based on this formula): If a less-expensive lock can do the job, it deserves some recognition. To calculate value, I used the following formula: Add up the previous two scores, multiply by 10, and then divide by cost. I added one extra-credit point for every thousand dollars of free anti-theft coverage the company provides for a year after purchase. (Be sure to read the fine print and register with the proper documents; if you don’t, you aren’t covered.)

to all: starmer, myself, and maybe others (ryan?) are going on a nite ride in the frederick watershed on friday nite. lets say we’re gunna start @ 7.30. it will be a semi fast paced ride, as we’re supposed to be training ect. needless to say, there will probally be beer to be had in frederick post ride. if you want to come, email me for details on where to meet. address in next para.

on sunday, @ 11am, we’re gunna meet at say… corys old house, just cause everyone knows where it is. park on the street though. (for directions to corys house for those who dont know, email me- johnson(at)ridelugged(dot)com

from there we’re gunna jam as many bikes as possible into as few cars as possible and drive to south mtn creamery, near middletown. a 20-30 mile causal ride will ensue, stopping half way @ a park to eat, and finishing @ south mtn creamery, where you outta bring some dollars to eat some ice cream.

yes there will be a spoke card.

bone if you cant make it, we can mail yer card. nick, i only have one stamp, so you have to come in person to get yer card. not really.

starmer: you should switch all yer parts over and use this as a shake down, short ride.

rob and christine: bring yo bling. (i’ll have some shellaced cork tape for you to try out by then)

-Johnson

Here’s a few pics I took at Bike Jam: Baltimore this weekend. Gary was there too, just hanging out like it was in his backyard, which it sorta was.

Closest I’ve ever been to pro-level road racing action. Only saw one crash for as short of a course as it was.

Suffice it to say, there were no lugged bikes there.

More Bike Jam content at my friend Garret’s blog: here and here

Just saw this…

Track bikes that look like 80’s BMX freestyle bikes

I’m not sure what to think….anyone?

Gun Bluing a Bicycle Frame

We had a discussion on the ramble about bluing a bike frame. After further research gun bluing a frame doesn’t sound like a great idea. The major downside to this is, “All blued parts still need to be properly oiled to prevent rust.” So I guess it could get kind of gross and you might not want to touch your frame and then touch anything else. Like the guy said in the bike forums link you could probably clear coat once you’ve blued the frame but in my opinion that kind of defeats the purpose. Either way this could probably go under the category of things to do to a bike if you want to waste a lot of time with up keep.

Unfortunately I can’t find anything on the web about gun browning (cory?). Supposedly it’s a similar process to bluing but you use urine and it makes the steel turn a brown color. Can anyone find something to support of this claim? I’m thinking it’s bullshit.

Sotheby’s is selling a table made of crappy old parts that Casey rides, for a few bills.

Check it out. Make your own. Sell it on Ebay

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If you haven’t seen it already, here’s the venerable Brooks’ Company ad for the B-18 women’s saddle (that I covet): http://www.brooksengland.com/press/2006_01/new_products/MadeInDowningStreet.pdf

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So I found some Irish guy on the interwebs that just moved to Prague too and mountain bikes.
We both were kinda looking for folks to ride with in a kind of passive way. We emailed back and forth a couple of times and settled for a Sunday afternoon ride. He was desperately in search of dirt after finding the long paved and busy trails around here. He claimed to only have brought his jump bike to Prague, but seemed willing to do just about any ride. So a 1pm meeting in the center of Prague…

(On a side note: Since our chauffeur from yesterday didn’t get to work or ride, Verča had suggested that they should go ride out of Prague somewhere while Mark and I headed off. Anyway, she got a call at about 10am but we were being lazy and didn’t want to answer. About 10:20 she listened to his message that they were meeting at 11. She was sure she couldn’t make it in time. I stuck my foot in her butt and told her to hurry up and get ready. By the time I had tightened her cranks from yesterday and put her bike in the car she was ready, and at 10:59 I kicked her out of the car about 350m from the prearranged meeting point. Not to see her again for 9 1/2 hours: read her story about Posazavska, when I kick her butt a bit more and make her type it!)

Where were we?
Oh yeah. The Irish guy, named Mark, right.
We rolled south to the Točna area I am beginning to frequent. We explored a bit and skirted a city golf course on some more urban singletrack and doubletrack along the river, avoiding a good 3km of tourist clogged asphalt. Score! Then we took the same route up to the airfield as I did last time with Verča. At the top we found the airfield full with up to 3 gliders in the air at one time and a couple of tugboat planes on the ground. It was a beautiful day; 85 degrees and clear blue skies, with a few puffy white clouds. Our direction/route was a repeat of the last with Verča, save some more exploring. Near the other side of the airfield, on a hunch, I took us up a big doubletrack.

We found more nice swoopy singletrack then all of a sudden I was confronted with what looked like a nice shore-style bridge. I slowed to inspect it a bit, when I saw that it was actually a big-ass gap jump over a ravine. We apparently found the local downhill spot. It was a super rad flowing section 750m long of dirt jump, berm, step, and gap jumps. Very well maintained. Very well built. Cool.

We rode up to the top of it which was strangely enough on a marked touristic trail. And had a great view back to the city below across the airport. We took a breather and watched a plane take off with a glider, haul it up, then come back down for a smooth landing on the grass runway. You could see people biking along trails a km and a half away. Rather pretty actually. A couple of normal not overly sportive 18ish year old girls rode by (not talking on cell phones, or shopping for shoes, or anything) on 10 year old clanging mountainbikes, and Mark and I took bets on whether or not they would drop in to the jump trail. Sadly enough they stayed on the doubletrack.

So we dropped in and rolled through the nice flowy and bermed options with a couple of very little jumps to make us feel good. We hit more flowing singletrack before heading south to the gravel-y knifeback trail and then looped back. We found a new section of singletrack with a nice fast descent and a 8in log to jump. I went to bronco over it when I quickly found out that my left lock-on grip was a bit loose. So I used about 60 of 85mm of the Reba, as I just barely got the front tire off the ground. The rear did it’s job fine and all was well. We zipped past the airfield again and descended back to the river along the trail I rode up on the Gerber a week or so ago. A few more trees have been cleared, and I had a blast doing little wheelie drops off the bridges and hips. There was another skinny and I tried but fell off a bit; and in the interest of my health decided to head on (after Mark made some comment about whether either of us knew the 911 number here. Would either of us be able to talk to someone on the phone in Czech, if we had to? Hmm, doubtful!)

Back along the bike trail by the river, we grabbed an ice cream at a trailside stand, and watched the silly rollerblading Czechs go by. Finally we headed back north along the east side river path watching the scenery of scantily clad women rollerblading and biking. We both talked about riding slowly, yet pedaled hard and pounded on the little hills. Mark talked about having lost a bunch of fitness but rocked it on a 35+ pound DMR steel jump bike with Profile cranks on a 1×9 setup. I hope he doesn’t get too fit, otherwise I won’t be able to ride with him!

We split and headed home and will probably ride again soon, maybe even a week-day afternoon.

Thats all for now,
check back soon.

-Cory

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Verča has some friends from a local shop that she doesn’t go to much anymore. One guy Pavel would call every once in a while to see if she wanted to go ride but she almost never could go.

So he called this week.
Apparently, the Czech national downhill championship is in Krupka u Teplic next week-end (May26-27), a town in the small mountain range between the Czech Republic and Eastern Germany. There is one lift that serves the area, but it takes about 25 minutes and $5 to get to the top. Pavel had hired a box truck driver and was going to shuttle people to the top in about 20 minutes for less than $2, looking to make some cash over the week-end with everyone pre-riding the course. So he was driving up there to work and offered to give us a ride so we could try biking on some of the cross country trails from there.

We rode 5km to his house across town on Saturday morning and loaded up. He drives a late model Skoda “jetta” wagon that fit our bikes in the back with a split rear seat. An hour and a half and we were at the base of the hill where he was to meet his driver at 11am for the first shuttle. We loaded up again (so we didn’t have to pedal to the top to start riding) with 3 downhillers (1 with a rohloff) and a couple on cheap touring bikes for the first shuttle of the day. A bumpy 20 minutes to the top and we unloaded. Talking to Pavel it appears that the truck driver wasn’t down with shuttling people in his truck too, and must have assumed he was only going to carry bikes.

So 90 minutes of a drive and some degree of planning and Pavel was at the downhill with no bike and no truck driver to make him money and we were off for a nice cross country ride (my first ever in the true sense.) He told us to go have a nice ride and even directed us where to go (which btw was in the wrong direction from what he thought.) He would hang out catch some sun and drink a beer or two. So at 11:30 we were off, leaving our chauffeur at Komáří hůrka, the top of the ski lift.

We headed across a nice promising farm field doubletrack east on a red striped trail (we thought west, but the sun was high and it was actually hard to tell.) It was pretty and there were grazing cows so it felt homey. Unfortunately the trail quickly turned to a paved trail then road. We thought we were almost on the German border and were looking for the next town after which we would find a crossing. We went through a town called Adolfov (sounds close to Germany, right?) and were on singletrack again. It was then we realized that after 6km that we hadn’t gone the way we intended to. A quick check at the map and we were OK, and actually on the eastward option we had suggested. We had a nice ride on mostly doubletrack with some nice single track for the next 20km, then came to a town called Tisá close to the border set against a backdrop of a long cliff of black rock. The trail got crazy steep and pedestrian, so we took a little road detour around and hooked up with a yellow striped trail on the other side (read: top) of the cliffs, and headed again towards the border. We zipped down a gravelly fireroad past a couple slew of walking tourists of indistinguishable nationality (btw, they call anyone here walking/strolling/hiking for pleasure tourists), through some more rock outcrops to a cool little inn and tavern. Unfortunately it was a couple hundred meters too far, so we huffed it back up the hill, caught our turn and were at the border.

A sign in Czech that read something along the lines of ‘Caution Border Ahead” greeted us as well as a makeshift telephone pole fence a couple of feet off the ground. It didn’t look too imposing; and I saw no sign telling me not to go there, so we ventured our way along the trail and into Germany. About 150m down the trail there was a guardtower/duckblind made of pine tree trunks, and no paramilitary, so off we went on the German section.

2 things about the German trails. They were all either paved or gravel and therefore sucked, and the signs measured distance not in km but in hours it takes to walk, so again pretty useless and sucky. After 3 1/2 hours, I mean 10km, on the blazed asphalt path we decided to take a venture on some dotted line on the map. Again the trail wound up being a farm path, this time made of fist sized gravel. We made it back to pavement and had to climb some annoying paved road. It was all pretty, don’t get me wrong. While the paved road rolled over just to the north of the top, of course our path went to the summit directly. At this point Verča cursed Germany, I agreed and we decided to ride in this country no more today.

We made a beeline for the border (or again, suspected border you know if the authorities and what not…) The paved then dirt trail ended about 200m from the tree line in a field where we found a row of nicely cut stones with their respective C’s for česka and D’s for deutsch. Back safely in the Czech republic we headed quickly south to our starting point. We were tired, and hot after baking in the 80 degree sun all day and hungry now that it was after 4pm. We fought mostly pavement for the 15km ride back to our start, and a nasty headwind. As we approached the top of the ski lift we realized that we would get to ride to the bottom. We took the last turn on a green trail before the top of the lift.

A screaming fireroad downhill turned into a couple quick steep singletracks up. More screaming fireroad and we dumped into some picturesque hillside town. We rolled down the street a bit, then along an urban singletrack between peoples back yard and a train track with some nice rolling sections and a berm or two. Then back at the car Pavel was relaxing and listening to music after a day of sunning himself. Loaded back up and we headed for Prague. We gave him a little extra money for gas and thanked him for the lift.

Then we headed home for dinner and to relax.
5 1/2 hours, probably 75-85km (still no computer)

Horizontal hussy, beef curtains, break dance pants, whatever you call her….now you must pay homage to the newest steed in our shed… I present to you…the Castro Valley. Quite frankly the finest year ever made…I consider it the last year ever made.

How dorky am I that I’m exicted that my wife and I ride the same frame/fork…?

Now we just have to get her a Brooks saddle and some m324 shimano pedals…I’m gonna bring
home some Pasela Tour gaurds for it tomorrow. I had to put the Mungo bars on upside down to get her upright enough to be comfy. It makes the levers feel wierd, and I initially wanted to mount them under the bar…but whatever, it’s a work in progress. It’s due for another shakedown cruise to figure some more stuff out. She’s stoked so far though!