Past bikes - bike #12

This one is a real chestnut. It's a 1990 Bridgestone MB2. I bought it as frame/fork/hs at Recycled Cycles for $20. It has the distinction of being my longest-lasting frameset. It has survived many a purge.

First, I nerdified it by making it an cheapish SUV version of a Riv bike. Parts on there came from bike #10.5 -- one of the many that will go mostly undocumented. It was a Novara given to me by a buddy.

I think I may have built it up as a mountain bike too at some point, but I can't find evidence of that. Most of the MB2's life with me was spent as the front part of an Xtracycle. Which ruled. Then buddy Jon borrowed it for about 3 years.

After the bike came back from Jon, I stripped it down and asked Glen to replace the rear dropouts with horizonatals. Since then, this bike has served as either the winter work horse bike or the big BMX bike.

This is the setup that makes me want an ultralight version of this bike: super thin-wall OS tubing, a bit steeper headtube, 26" wheels, hydro discs, and carbon forks like this:

Fun.

Past Bikes - bike #11

By Spring 2004, we had moved back to Spokane. I had spent about a year on the iBOB list and was pretty into the idea of an XO1. About the same time I connected (virtually) with a guy named Alex Wetmore through the iBOB list. I can't remember how we discovered this, but it turned out that this Wetmore guy and I had worked on the same team at "a large software company in Redmond" for the past few years.

Weird.

Anyway. He had an XO1 that had been crushed and repaired, coupled, and repainted that he wanted to sell. I bought it. And it was too small.

I built it up with moustache bars and really wanted it to work. I took my first long ride on this bike. I rode to Colville on it.

Specialized Armadillo tires. WORST TIRES EVER. I rode them for one ride.
This is actually when the bike was built up as a single speed with an ENO hub. It was the second wheel I built. I didn't have a tensionometer. I bombed down Bernard/Grove for my first ride. By the time I got to Sprague and Washington, the rear wheel was wobbling all over the place. All the spokes had loosened up.

Eventually, Liza ended up riding it and it fit her well. Then she started riding something else and we ended up selling it. I regret that. It's ironic, since Liza's current bike, which she loves, is an XO1.

An interesting, but typical thing happened at about this time in my bike life. The iBOB/Riv thing really sucked me into an online world that was fascinating to me. I learned a bunch quickly -- a lot of it, in retrospect, turned out to be dogmatic belief, as so much bike stuff is. But what I found myself doing was getting into fetish mode. You see this all the time with online communities and with bike stuff, it gets crazy quickly. I began to seek out the next perfect bike. Over the next handful of "Past Bikes" you'll see a bunch of bikes -- all basically the same, with slight variations. It's sort of embarrassing. But I was at a point where I spent more time thinking, seeking, onlining, and building bikes than I did riding them.

Here's the pre-blog post on the XO1.

I still love the idea of the XO1 (a true road bike with 26" tires)  and if I found a 55cm one for cheap, I'd have a hard time not buying it.

space

Past bikes - bike #10

Grant would be proud.

Bike #10 was a Schwinn Paramount mountain bike. It was the "PDG" series, some which were lugged and made in Japan (mine) and others that were TIG'd and made in Taiwan.

This was a great bike. I bought it from Recycled Cycles and it was set up with all original components: mid-90's XT everything. Nice stuff.

It was about 2003 or maybe 2004. I bought this bike right before we moved back to Spokane. I was spending a lot of time reading iBOB, which leads to Rivendell. This was a good segue into cycling as an adult in that it didn't push me into the "you must race to be serious" adult rider. I still think the most "serious" of cyclists are those that ride day in and day out through all weather.

And I see with way too much frequency, adults coming back to cycling and immediately being sold the "race lite" schtick. And I think it mostly sucks, cause a lot of that race-derived stuff takes a lot of fun out of cycling for some people (not all!). The *only* reason cycling works for me as long-term thing is that it's just friggin fun.

Off the box...

Anyway -- Petersen got in my head, as he does. And so as soon as I got this Paramount, I tore the bars off it and put some Albatross bars on it. His holiness, GP, is not the only one to blame for this -- I really had some wrist and and numb finger issues from my cross-state tour that made me afraid of straight bars.

So, the Paramount became my daily commuter when I moved to Spokane.

Yes, that's a Softride. I still think they're rad. So there.

Then I got Bike # 11 (wait for it...), which became my commuter, and the Paramount was turned into my first single speed mountain bike. And for that it ruled. Though I was still around 240 pounds, so I had pretty limited range on that thing. But in theory it ruled. And in practice it did rule. I rediscovered the HD trails on this bike and was thankful. Verily.

Here's my pre-blog webpage on the Paramount.

Past bikes - bike #9

Good lord. This is painful to look at. Almost (but not quite) as bad as seeing my senior picture.

 In 2003, my interest in riding began turning into an obsession. I had been riding that crap Giant mountain bike and I was sticking to a diet that I invented and I lost like 30 pounds in a couple months. I was into the biking part. I was still smoking too much, but that would cease soon.

I rode my mountain bike to work a couple times. I was totally sick of driving and hated the bookends of my workdays which involved sitting in my truck in gridlock traffic and smoking. It just sucked. I was about 40 minutes to work and about an hour on the way home. Ugh.

So my commute consisted of bussing my bike for about 15 miles and then riding for about 10 miles. This took me about 1.5 hours each way. So I wasn't saving any time, but the what was the shittiest part of my day became one of the highlights -- even when it was raining, which was frequently.

So, I wanted a more suitable bike. I also wanted a bike I could tour on. My plan was to do the Iron Horse trail across Washington in the summer of 2003.

I went to my LBS (a mere 15 miles away in Woodinville) and he set me up with a Giant touring bike. I asked him to swap out the drops for mountain bars and I was golden. I look at that bike now and just see failure. It's your basic big-bike maker "touring" bike: with huge road racing gearing (but with a triple!), no room for serious rubber, and silly ass compact frame.

But at the time, it was amazing. My first commute to work on that bike was night and day difference from the turdy crappy-shocked mountain bike I had been lumping to work on.

I ended up taking the Giant on the cross state tour. It was my first tour. Here's my pre-blog post on it. And the first for the other two guys that were with me. I think that's a great way to do a first tour. It was super fun and it was super hard. The stuff that was hard about it (flats, broken spoke, stupid long days, not enough water, etc) is all stuff now that is obvious. I guess screwing everything up is what makes it obvious.

Anyway, the Giant was not a great bike. The disc brakes were awful, the ridiculously narrow 32 mm tires (supporting 250 pound me + way too much gear, all loaded in the back) were not up to the task of the rocky and sandy paths of the trail on the east side of the state. It was ridiculously undersized. And the turd-ass aluminum frame was not too "forgiving" as the bike mags say.

Right after the tour, when my hands went numb from having no options -- I put some mustache bars on the bike. I remember thinking I liked them. Or wanting to like them. Most people that try mustache bars seem to go through this: they're freaking cool looking and on paper they seem perfect. But they just don't work for non-trivial distances.

At this point I had discovered Bridgestone and the iBOB list. Things just went haywire from there. This bike was short for my world. I had my hopes pinned on an XO-1.

I ended up bringing this Giant to Recycled Cycles, where they gave me either $600 or $800 store credit. Back then, before Ebay really took off,  Recycled Cycles had great stuff.

More on that for Bike #10 and #12.

Past bikes - bikes #7 and #8

My biggest (and only) bikeless gap was between about 1997 and 1998.

In 1998 I got a fancy job and wanted to commute to work. So I bought a Diamond Back road bike. I remember knowing nothing about a road bike, but I think I felt some brand loyalty to Diamond Back, which I look at now as pretty misguided: both the concept of brand loyalty, and especially to a bike like Diamond Back.

Anyway. It was $400. It sucked. I think I commuted to work on it twice. It was uncomfortable in all ways, had tiny narrow wheels, and I can't remember anything good about it.

Then it sat until I sold it a year or so later when I bought Bike #8: a Giant mountain bike. With shocks.

This bike ruined me for shocks for years and years. What a miserable turd.

It sat for a year or two in my garage as I gained tons of weight and stressed out at work.

By the time I started really riding it, I weighed about 300 pounds. I rode it every morning at 5:30 am for about 6 months. In my memory, it seemed like it was pissing down rain every single morning. I really enjoyed these rides in the dark rain. As sort of miserable as they were, they reminded me why I dug riding bikes and being outside and how stupid my daily life had become: all cooped up in my car ride to my office at work. These early morning rides slowly transformed me into a cyclist. At some point, on one of these early morning rides, I decided to start commuting the 25 or so miles to work so that I could attempt a cross-state tour.

That's what led to Bike #9....

Past bikes - bike #6

Diamond Back Apex: Pretty much your basic 1993 entry-level mountain bike. With funny bull-like curved bars (think bar-ends but with a nice bend). I was a freshman in college and of course I had a new shiny credit card. So I bought my roommate and me brand new mountain bikes. Whooop!

I bought them at North Division Bikes. From Michael. He doesn't remember.

Historical note: there was a bike shop on 2nd and Lincoln called, I think "Bike Works," with a funny looking Bridgestone called an XO-1 as I was hunting for a bike. It was expensive and weird. But I did buy Jobst Brandt's wheel book there, which was mostly beyond me.

Anyway the Apex was my bike all through college. My main memory of this bike was the daily ritual when I got home from school at about 2pm. I'd fire up. Pound a beer or two. Then attempt the straight-down way off the bluff from Brownes Addition to the creek below. About twice a week I'd ride the river trail out to Bowl and Pitcher. Then waiting tables or cooking at about 5PM. Then beers/homework, then bed. Great schedule.

Me. 1994?
On the mighty Apex.
Quite possibly the poorest quality picture I've ever put on this blog.

After college, this bike went with me to Portland, where I lived with friends for about 6 months. Then when we all moved to Seattle, this bike took up a non-insignificant portion of our "living room" in our shared 1 bedroom apartment on Capital Hill. When I eventually moved back to Spokane, this bike came with me and was promptly ripped off from the backyard of a friend's house.

Most memorable wreck: charging around the corner on the rocky/shale-infested/sharp-basalt section of the west approach to the B&P bridge. As I came around the corner, barely in control, a little kid emerged. As much as I wanted to mow him down, my better instincts sent me off the trail: bouncing off the pointy rocks down the side of the hill. I hurt everywhere and I dented the chain stay verily. So I was a bit annoyed when the dad gave me the stink eye as he picked up his son and marched away. That section happens to be a "no bike zone" now. Sorry?

Past bikes: Bike #5

I just have to figure out a way to live with the fact that I am not going to spend a bunch of time digging for old bike pictures. Which sucks in a way. Because I know I have pictures of Bikes #4 and #5 somewhere. But freg it.

Bike #5 I bought in my senior year of high school. I got it from Two-Wheel Transit back when it was up on 29th Ave (next to where Miller's Hardware is now). I'd like to think I bought it from Paul Main, but I don't know that for sure. But I'm going with it.

It was a Giant ATX 760. Yellow (second only to white as the perfect mountain bike color). Shimano STX 7 speed.  I think it was about $500. Which was big money. By this time, I was working at Patsy Clark's restaurant and making big money... about $4/hour? Five-hunred bucks is a lot of prep-cooking, salad-making, and Sunday-brunching.

My buddies dropped me off at the bike shop to pick up the bike. They were driving down 29th while I attempted to keep up with them. I don't remember exactly what the hey I was doing, but I'm pretty sure I tried to bunny hop the median in front of (what is now) 5 guys burger place. I totally shit the bed and flopped over my bars. I don't remember much, except that as I opened my eyes, the back wheel of my buddy's car was rolling by about 4 inches from my face.

A buddy at school (Lucus) had also just gotten a mountain bike. We were both taking PE as seniors because we didn't take it when we were supposed to when we were sophomores. I think that was slightly demoralizing. We started skipping PE on a regular basis and riding the river trail instead. Back then, the river trail cut up into a cement factory, then dropped down a wonderful old bit of lush double-track to where the mega-church housing development is today. By the end of the year, we were both looking at failing grades in PE, which would've blocked our graduation. We fessed up to our PE teacher that we were skipping to ride, so it should count. He sort of bought it. He said if we could run for two hours straight in the gym, he'd pass us. Running sucks. But we both passed.

I ended up taking that bike to Germany. I went there to live with my sister in Bavaria during my first year of college. College had turned out to be kind of a bummer. I couldn't find a lot of "mountain biking" per se in the general area, but I enjoyed tooling around the country side and visiting other little villages. This was especially fruitful in the summer months, when just about every little village I rode through had some kind of beer-related festival happening. The area we were in was around Nuremburg, which, aside from beer, is also known for it's super amazing bad-ass bratwursts, unlike ANY bratwursts I've ever found here. What a great country.

I sold the ATX 760 to an American Army dude for about what I paid for it. I needed the money for a plane ticket home.

Past bikes: Bike #4

Dang it. I kept putting this post off in the hopes that I'd go dig through a bunch of pictures to find an old photo of Bike #4. Then I would scan it and then this would be such a better post.

But there are a lot of bikes to cover and if I don't just keep plowing ahead, I'll never get them done.

Bike #4 was a light-weight Nishiki. I don't remember what model it was, but I can tell you for 100% certianitudity that it was not volume import. And here's how I know that.

The family two doors down from my childhood home were bike commuters. Bonafide. This is the 80's in Spokane. The dad (Mr. N) taught chemistry at GU. Maybe it was math. I think his wife taught there too. Man I don't know. But they were all stinking geniuses and still are. In fact the folks across the street from them were also geniuses (the S's). I mean this -- I could go on with a bunch of examples but I'll choose one. Mr and Mrs N's youngest boy (Mike) was a friend to me. He loved to shoot hoops in his driveway. One time I sat there with my fancy new calculator watch and called out huge sums which he instantly provided the answers for. Long division with huge numbers took him longer, but he'd do them. So, apparently, my family didn't get the "your kids have to be geniuses to live on this block" memo when they bought the house.

Ok. Mike also commuted. He basically went straight from grade school, spend like 1/2 a year in high school, then went to college. I think he was a grad student at Yale by the time he was about 18. He rode everywhere too. His dad was always tinkering with fancy Japanese bikes. In fact, the first real mountain bike I ever saw was Mike's dad's bike that he built up in about 1983 or so.

I was whinging one day about not having a rad bike. I was in about 7th grade by this time and I wanted a 10-speed. He mentioned that his dad had a Nishiki he'd sell me for $135.

That was a lot of money and my parents couldn't swing it. In fact, I wouldn't even think of asking them. So I got a paper route for exactly 9 months. Every month, I gave a chunk of money to Mike.

That Nishiki rocked. It had toe-clips, down tube shifters, and was crazy light and fast. I'm sure it was all Suntour (mix of cyclone and superbe?) Man it ruled. I took my first ride on the Hangman loop with bike. I explored West Plains. And I generally got around a lot faster on that bike. I learned that taking the Nishiki off the jumps I'd taken on my BMX was a whole different ball game. One of my favorite parts of the day was riding home from junior high (Sac) to hit a fast little trail with a drop in Manito Park.

I also started dreaming about a cross country tour while flipping through the pages of Nashbar, when it was a rad little printed magazine.

I had that bike through high school and into college. Lame ending for that one. I'm sort of ashamed to say -- when I moved out of an apartment in Browns Addition, I stashed the disassembled bike into the back of a crawlspace so I wouldn't have to deal with it. By this point, I was all mountain bike and the old childish ten speed didn't hold much interest for me. Lame.

Past bikes: Bike #3

Bike #3, I'm pretty sure was my unicycle. I don't remember where I got it. But I rode it for about a year.

I could get around fine on it, but I never got to the point where I could jump curbs or do tricky stuff, or even consider some of the mountain bike unicycling the youngin's are doing today.

At this point, I was riding my BMX everywhere: to school, to friends' houses. My parents worked and they never drove me anywhere, so the BMX was a great thing.

Liza hauled my arse up the vertical route from downtown again today.
I don't care much for that route.

I also enjoyed skateboarding down big hills. My neighbors had a restless dog, of the type, vizsla, who was all muscle and couldn't run enough. He loved to pull me on the skateboard. He made that funny hacky sound until we upgraded his collar to one of those harness deals. That worked well. Until I couldn't avoid a squished pine cone in the road. That was not a nose-impact event, but it was some good skin loss on my right arm and shoulder, and one of my calves. Verily.


My unicycle was ripped off. Who steals a unicycle?

Past bikes: #2

I don't remember what happened to Bike #1, but by the time we moved to Spokane in 1979 it was gone.

My sister Betsy had a bike. I must have had something.  But I don't remember. I do remember  Bike #2 though. And how I got it.

My mom sent Betsy and me to the store to get something. When we got back, we walked in the door and right in the middle of the living room was Bike #2. My mom and step-dad were smiling ear-to-ear: "Isn't it great Johnny?! Don't you love it."

Of course I did. I was blown away. It had mag wheels. It was red and yellow for god's sake. What was not to love?

And of course I wasn't paying attention to Betsy, who, apparently was standing there sort of quiet and glum. My parents were definitely paying attention to Betsy, because they were saying, "Isn't it great Bets? We sold your bike to buy Johnny a new one. Isn't that something?"

I still wasn't paying attention to Betsy. But to hear my parents tell it, she was welling up at this point: tears and such.

Me, Ryan. I was awesome.

Our house was built in 1907, so stuff was always in disrepair. As usual, the toilet was "running." My step-dad, Marty said to Bets, "That damn toilet. Betsy, will you go tickle the toilet -- it's running again."

Betsy ran out of the room in a silent, about-to-burst, fist-clenched rage.

I finally noticed Betsy when I heard a scream out of the bathroom.

My parents had bought her a bonafide 10-speed bike and had it set up in the bathroom. It was a step-through lugged Nishiki with straight-gauge 4130. I know that because I've seen a million of them since.

Nice. And true to my mother's game, well-played as always. It wasn't enough to buy new bikes for the kids. There had to be twist. A bit of fun to be had.

I ripped it up on Bike #2. I was no Tom Canning, who was our local crazy kid who jumped off anything. But I learned how to bunny-hop, kickout, and take minor jumps on Bike #2. It was pretty awesome to me. Though by BMX standards it was lacking in the singularly rad feature of not having a freewheel. Coaster brakes (or any brake for that matter) were for babies.

My best accident was when I did the board-on-the-block jump. I was on my buddy's wheel as he launched off the jump and the board jiggled a bit. As my front wheel cleared the end of the board, I watched for one split second as the board jiggled off the brick and my rear wheel hit the cinder block, pitching me over the bars and onto my face for that sweet nose impact taste once again.

I remember thinking that this was it for me. I limped home to die and as my mom cleaned me up, she found a small twig sticking out of a wound in my belly. She pulled it out and white pus-funked blood came with it. That was pretty cool. But I was sore for a few days.

Past bikes #1

Buddy Stine has just informed me that she's going to attempt to document all of the bikes she's owned. She's going to be writing about them over the next 30 days. She suggested I do the same. Actually, she sort of challenged me to.

But as we know, I'm a coward when it comes to challenges. Also, my memory is awful. And I've had a ridiculous number of bikes, especially in the last 10 years or so. For me to successfully complete this challenge would really highlight my non-trivial wanker gearheadness in an uncomfortably intense way.

Anyway. Let's start with number 1 and go from there shall we?


Before number 1 were a few number 0's. Trikes and Big Wheels and such. Everyone (every single one) in the 70's rolled on a Big Wheel for a while, usually until they cracked open the plastic wheel with the "brake" on it. Righteous man. If you don't know the butt pain resulting from jumping your Big Wheel off a board laid across some bricks, many times, then you missed out.

Anyway. Number 1 was a Raleigh BMX purchased in a Las Vegas toy store. My parents were divorced. My sister and I lived with my mom who was broke. The old man wasn't into child support, unless you include the 40 gallon plastic drum of brown rice dropped off on the front porch one fall afternoon in 1976.


But what the old man lacked in direct cash support he made up for in toys, speed, and adventure. So my sister and I flew down to LV where (in true divorced-parent, guilt-induced spending)  the first place we went was a giant toy store where we could each pick out anything we wanted.
At first I tried to talk dad into buying me a chopper bike, because it seemed so cool. He agreed, but convinced me to get the BMX bike by appealing to my stated desire to "do jumps," which in retrospect, was probably an attempt by me to appeal to my perception of what he would want me to like. Whoa.

I don't know of any pictures of this bike, but I was about 6 when I got it. My dad shipped it up to Washington at the end of our stay. I remember exploring Cheney with that bike with my buddy Justin. I remember riding off an "eyebrow" in a farm field west of town, where I fell about 10 feet, right onto my face. That sucked. Thinking about it makes me just nearly taste that impact-to-nose flavor that is so painfully distinct to nose injuries.
I had that bike until I was about 10m when I got bike #2. More on that tomorrow maybe.