Leppotone

In the future (a couple months from now), all will travel on bicycle, dodging the last remaining autos as the tribes battle for precious petrol.



--your radio friend, Bat Guano

I got the bicycle fever, yo. Next to friends/family and music, riding my bike is tied with eating food as to what gives me most enjoyment in life. Riding gives me a good feeling. Sure, some of it is that exercise makes you feel good but I also really like getting from one place to another quickly without using a car. I love haulin ass on my bike. Living where I am now, there's no point in me driving a car regularly. It's flat, not very sprawled and very safe at night. I haven't driven to work since August 2006 which is a pretty liberating feeling for me. I feel like I accomplish something when I work on my bike. If my bike got stolen, I'd be extremely bummed. I heart bikes.

Dingey, I've been meaning to ask how your new wheels are turning?

and in fact, I just took it into the shop to get it outfitted with baskets today so I can use it for even more stuff!  AND when i was parking the bike outside the shop, I got hit up by a Gazette reporter who's writing an article on Bike To Work week.  I totally gave him an earful.  I'm with you, Tim.  I get kinda mad when I have to get in the car these days.  It feels restrictive and wasteful. I like the cool breeze in my hairs, yo! I like to hear them birdies sing, and to be able to notice things like this along the way:

How much is a bike these days??????

Depends on what you want.    If you're not picky, Wal/K/Meijer/mart bikes around $125.00 - 150.00 new.  Garage sale 10-35 bucks(will probably need some work).  Freecycle fixer-upper = free, but then you got to fix it up. Also check craigslist and ask around.

I got my 1964 vintage Schwinn at the Paw Paw Goodwill for $6 but since then I have put about $100 into it.  I tried to sell the Ram's Horn handlebars that came on it but nobody bit so I think I will put them back on it.   It's a very nice downtown cruiser.

You nailed it Dingey. I also love seeing things I wouildn't ordinarily from the view of a car. You really do se a lot more.

Samantha,

I've been collecting bikes from freecycle in the hopes of putting together a home-built recumbent bike that will give me a more comfortable ride... read that  'Oh my aching back'.  Through my travels I have acquired a Huffy 26" 18-speed mens mountain bike that may suit your needs(If you don't mind riding a man's bike).  It has a broken pedal, but I may be able to fix that with some bmx pedals off of another donor bike.  I've not yet taken a close look at the shifter & break cables but at first glance they didn't look too bad.  It--like all junk bikes--will probably need a new chain (10-15 bucks) and the bearings should get cleaned and re-packed.  I got it free but will have about 10 bucks worth of gas into it by the time I could bring it into Kalamazoo, so that's what I'd be asking.  If you wanted me to clean & re-grease/pack the bearings I could do that for around 20 bucks, if you're handy you can do it yourself and save $10 bucks.  Just a thought.

Also, I have an interesting Huffman "Huffy" woman's 26" vintage cruiser-type bike from I'm guessing the 60's or early 70's, it looks sort-of like this:  http://i126.photobucket.com/albums/p105/xddorox/Canon009.jpg  but all white with red pinstripes, and a square-er shaped chain gaurd.  This bike is cool but needs a lot done to it.  It will need a new chain (10-15bucks) the bearings need to be cleaned & re-packed, The tires are dry-rot from being so old, so that will mean the inner-tubes also need replacing (tires are around $12 ea, tubes around $5 ea.)  There is rust but it could clean up to be nicer, not a show bike for sure.  The frame is a bit heavy and it has only 2 speeds: Go & Stop... er, yeah 1-speed but the rims seem solid, sprockets have some wear but should go for a bit.  It would be the perfect bike to cruise around town with the likes of Herb.  Again I have around 10 bucks of gas into getting it, so that's what I'd want.  You'd be into it for about $50 in additional parts + labor (bike shops charge $40 per hour, I would be 1/2 that, you can do it for less :)  ).

Let me know if anyone is interested and I'll get proper pics.  I also have some other womens mountain bikes and kids bmx size bikes in various stages of disrepair, same deal.   I can use any of these for my project bike, but if someone is wanting a bike I'll just use something else.

 *edit* now that I think about it, I used the little car to get these, so I think I only have more like $5 in gas invested.... get thee pedaling!

Now that I live downtown, and gas being what it is, I have given a little thought to buying a bike.  The cons are is I know nothing about bike repair, so I would have to buy a brand new one, and I havent been on a bike since I was 12 so I am not sure I would even know what to do.

It's like riding a bike... you will know what to do.

Bike repair is easy to learn, you are smart, you can do it.  I could re-build most of a bike when I was 12.  Growing up rural and being the 3rd kid out of 4 meant that I didn't always have a new bike to ride, plus being sorta stupid like putting sharp rocks and broken glass at the end of jumps to make it more interesting took its toll on our bikes.  We always had cheap department store bikes and something would inevitably break, you'd go behind the shed and see what could be scrapped from the junk bikes to get you going again.  Seriously, you only need a few simple tools to do most everything, 1adjustable crescent wrenche, a large pair of channel-locks, a set of allen wrenches(metric or american depending), straight blade and/or phillips skrewdriver(depending on what's on your bike).  I had the benefit of having a bicycle 4-h experience early on, but you have the benefit of the internet with instructables on nearly any subject bike related.  Plus you have friends who will help you out.  There's nothing wrong with buying a new bike, but be warned that if you buy an el-cheapo dept. store bike it will start falling apart in a month of leisurly riding (regular non-trained schmos put the bikes together and are encouraged to put them together as fast as possible by management), then you will be forced to learn these simple tasks anyway or pay 40-dollars pr/hour at a bike shop.  Really, it's easy to learn.  You can do it.  Garage sales can be the most awesome places to score a good 2nd-hand bike.  Can I get a witness?  who got the trek... tales I need tales

I got a trek but got it new.  My prostate falls asleep after riding it for 30 minutes.  Maybe I should get a seat.

Samantha: I always see many bikes at thrift stores (Nu Way, esp.) and garage sales for super cheap. So cheap, in fact, that you could just buy a new used bike every summer, if they don't last til the next summer. Spend the winter tinkering on the busted one, figuring out how to fix bikes. My last garage-sale bike was an old 3-speed cruiser. Five whole dollars of bike! I didn't ride it to death, but it never did die, and I only had to put air in the tires when I first got it. People just wanna get rid of old bikes, so I suggest, esp. now that you're downtown and in neighborhood garage-sales territory, that you get the Gazette or look at the MLive.com classifieds and cruise the garage sales for a couple of weekends. You'll probably score a bike soon. I almost always see adult-sized, newer (mountain-style) bikes at Nu Way. (P.S. I had/have the same issue with not having ridden a bike for a hundred years or so and am still intimidated by riding in traffic. But what I've learned is, like everything else, if you force yourself to do it, you'll get comfortable with it eventually. I still don't do hills, though, which sucks, because I have to go downhill to get farther than my front door!)

Angie is totally right, you can always go the "good enough" route with a cheap bike.  They are meant to be 'disposable' bikes, but with good maintanance they'll last a lot longer.   I'm putting a new chain on my wife's vintage huffy because a rusty chain will eat away at a sprocket.  However, if the chain is not too rusty I'd just clean it up and use it on a cheap department store bike, most of our bikes are 'good enough' in one way or another.   But the chain on my wife's bike is so rusted that you can almost hold it out strait like a stick, the sprocket set is still good, so it's worth the 10 bucks to invest in something better.  Most bike sources say you should replace the ball bearings when you re-build a hub, but I just clean them and re-pack with new grease and say 'good enough'.   The other cool thing about a garage sale bike is that if it gets stolen you won't be too sad as you don't have a lot into it.

Check this guy out for great how-to videos on bike repair:  http://www.instructables.com/id/Lubricating-Your-Chain/

He's not super exciting, but he is easy to follow

I have been looking for some to complete the build on my '67. Please email me!! seanphills@yahoo.com Thanks!!

- Sean

Yo OMFG,

Do you have any tips on spoke replacement and truing? I got another flat on my bike tire while riding my mid 80s Schwinn World Tourist due to a spoke puncturing the innertube. I put a sturdy wheel on it a few years ago. I hate to say it but I think it's not the bike for me to ride. I would like to fix the spoke though so I can learn how to do that.

With other bike I've been keeping the back tire inflated to maximum pressure which has helped. Last night I hit the same pothole that caused a blowout a few moths ago and I did not pop the innertube.

I'm keeping my eyes peeled for a used one speed cruiser to replace my weekend ride.

I'd like to think I know something about bikes, but to be truthful all I really know is how to break them and then make them sortof work again for casual riding.  The last time I spent serious time on a bike was about 17 years ago when I was still dating my wife, my car was broken beyond imediate repair $$$ and she let me borrow her Myata 10-speed for the summer.  I was in the best shape of my life that summer riding from my appartment on Portage and Walnut (now Triangle World gay "book" store) to Carlos Murphys (Now TGI Fridays).  I was nearly hit at least 2 times, broke the crank on the bike (which was from the bike shop) and bent a rim... Oh, I bought a cheap-@$$ rack that the bolts came loos on and it swung down behind me and dragged along for a bit putting a hole in my freebie tote bag from the wmu bookstore.  I did not have a bankone fanny pack but I was nearly just as bad of a tightwad, but man could I crack wallnuts with my ass cheeks that summer, nobody wanted to eat them after that though...

I've been enjoying reading the Bike of Doom blog lately: http://www.bikeofdoom.com/ where-in-which the author chronicles his adventures in commuting on a pos dept store bike.  He was having difficulty with breaking spokes and ended up replacing the rear wheel with a more substantial one that could hold up better to his size.  Maybe this would help.  Also, I just heard the trick of plucking your spokes to hear the tone they make and tuning them to the same pitch so that they have equal tension, perhaps that could help.  I saw a good link on truing  a while back, I'll try to find it.  The guy at Breakaway showed me the basic idea of truing a wheel when I was in the shop getting my 10-speed crank fixed way back when, I still think it was rather decent of them.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3q9DmHLl7g&feature=related

This guy is awesome, although a bit on the monotone side for my liking.  Notice how he is truing the wheel with the tire removed.  I have read that when you try to true the wheel with the tire on you end up truing the tire which still leaves the wheel out of alignment.  Me, I don't care about a little wheel wobble, I think it shakes my ass seductively as I pedal.  

Also, I put an add on my local freecycle www.freecycle.org and have gotten a few 'parts' bikes which are nice for ...well ... parts.  People have been very generous because the price of fixing up a bike often rivals just buying another cheap bike, unless you get several parts bikes and pull the best from them and recycle the rest.  You could do that even in an appartment environment w/limited space, just strip the good parts and recycle what you know you won't use, maybe keep a spare junk frame behind a washer down in the laundry room, if it gets stolen, big deal, it was free.

sheesh I need to read better.  Tim, you may have gotten a replacement spoke that was too long or that one got to tight.   If it's the rear, which I think it is, the spokes might be slightly different sizes due to the dish of the rear wheel, the side with the gears being a shorter distance from hub to rim. If you hit a pothole and the wheel may now be out of round which could make your spoke too long. I have an old 3-speed that has a nasty bend in the rim, I think also from a pothole, no amount of truing will ever fix that bend/dent.  Someday maybe I'll get another rim from a donor bike and re-lace the 3-speed hub into it, or I may try to straiten it out in the vice with a sledge hammer, but for now I have my wife's huffy completely dissassembled and getting ready for painting.  Potholes suck. 

Thanks for the info OMFG. I'm glad you mentioned bending the rim because I bet I did that. I'll give it a closer look see this afternoon. A lot of the side streets around here are paved with a concrete like material. When that material starts breaking up it can be nasty on bikes. It'll break up in larger chunks of rubble so not only are there nasty potholes, you have to watch out for sizable chunks of concrete.

--your radio friend, Bat Guano

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eCdIe0wdvU&feature=related

http://www.geocities.com/bigpolishjimmy/huffy_camaro.html

I got my bike back last Saturday, and they shined up the handlebars and fenders, but not the rims. Maybe that will be this afternoon's OCD activity.... Do you have to use WD40 or something?

Also, I need a basket. A big wire one.

I read that you could just use plain water along with the aluminum foil, although I had wd-40 right next to me so I used that instead.  I think I actually liked the scotch-brite pad w/soapy water better for the rims, but it does take a fair bit of elbow grease.  It is a job best done on a slightly breezy day, sitting comfortably out back listening to the birds.