Racks on the Ave

I rode up University Avenue yesterday in Seattle. I was hoping to get some photos of my favorite rack loaded up with many bikes.

It had been raining pretty good earlier in the day, so there weren't a lot of bikes around.

Friday Run-Around

I had planned to take a bunch of pictures today and I failed.

The one I really wish I had was a picture of Joe up at Spoke n Jo installing my headset and cutting my steerer tube (not in that order). Joe rules. What a great thing: a bike shop that opens at 6 AM. I was out of there by 7. Thanks Joe!

After Joe's. I got home just in time to ride to school with Maddie and Liza. After about a week of riding with no training wheels, Maddie is just a pro now.
Then off to the Friday ride. Jason and I hooked up for the Temple Road loop. It was hot. Aside from the fact that both of us went down on this ride... with no serious injuries, the ride was fun. Pat also joined us for the first part. He bailed after the climb up Lehman, which was quite sporting. You know, compared to bailing out before the Lehman climb.

Sucky rack at a convenience store on Starr road.

Dig those tires! So perfect!

I was able to squeeze in a couple more components on the new bike in a 1/2 hour that I had before running a bunch of bikes for P2P. That's another shot I wish I would've taken. We're getting quite the pile.

The final shot I wish I would've taken was a picture of Mike, Beth, and Liza as we enjoyed a snack and a beer downtown. Riding through the 75F night after a day in the 100's is a nice way to end the day.

FBC tomorrow night. Swamp at 8pm.

Lacing Wheels on the Clock

I work from home. Yesterday, I had an hour-and-a-half conference call from 10:30-noon. Normally, I'd eat lunch during the call, but yesterday I decided to lace up a couple wheels.

I sort of had to walk through the ethical implications of building a bike wheel while on a conference call.

Here's what I came up with: I'm paid to think and talk when I'm on a conference call. Eating lunch, trimming my nails, picking my nose... I do these things all the time and none of them get in the way of thinking and talking.


The most mentally taxing part of lacing up a wheel is making sure the key spoke is right. (And to try and line up the label on the hub so it's readable through the spoke hole. But that's a nice-to-have, aesthetic feature that I only do because of my respect for Sheldon.) Once the key spoke is in the right place, the brain is on auto-pilot for the rest of the lacing.

So I finished lacing two wheels. Hopefully I can get them trued/tensioned tonight. The first one has the label on the hub lining up, since I started it before the call. I couldn't line up the other one on auto-pilot.

The wheels are for a new bike. More on that later.

The Rack Pics

As promised, I have more pictures of the Plum Tree rack.

Here's one:

Click the picture to go to a Picasa directory with more pictures in it.


In that directory, you'll also see pics of our hanging out up at my dad's place last weekend. He lives on the Kettle River. Which is my all time favorite river. And a perfect century from our house to his, door-to-door.


I see a weekender event in the future where a big pile of friends ride up to his place and camp on the lawn overlooking the river for the weekend. Kids and SO's to follow by car.


He's right in between Sherman and Boulder passes too. So there's great logging roads to explore and great climbs to enjoy.


Next summer. Hold me to it.

Plum Tree Rack

A couple weeks ago, I showed a picture of a purple rack in one of my posts.

I kept meaning to come back and talk about that beauty. So here's the story.

That rack was built by local artist Hazen Audel and it now lives at Maddie's preschool, Plum Tree.

The point of the rack is more to serve as a place to lean your bike, than it is for locking up bikes. A growing number of families at the preschool are biking more. Many bike set ups include a trailer or a trail-a-bike, or other cumbersome kid hauling solution. These types of bike trains are hard to park and often the kickstands on bikes don't hold up with a trailer.

Plum Tree doesn't have a suitable spot to lean such bike contraptions, so the school got this rack for leaning. Although, when I picked Maddie up last Friday, a parent had locked their bike to the rack. So you can lock too.

I need to take more pictures with a better camera to do this rack justice. It's really neat and pretty. It's powder coated dark blue and is sponged with purple. Hazen thought that as it weathered, the kids would have fun sponging it with different colors of paint. There are little animals carved into a big plate of 1/2 inch steel. He said it was cut with water jets? Does that make sense?

There's also a cool little cut-out of a bike in there. I think the point of that is to inform people that it's ok to lean bikes up against it.

I will take more pics this week.

In the meantime, if you want to see it up close, you can check it out at 20th and Sherman.

I'm filing this under "sucky racks" so that it is easily found in the future. This is clearly not a sucky rack.

Another Reason To Go to an Indians Game

Yes, that's a Ute hiding in the shadows

I am not a sports guy. Seriously, I could care less who wins any basketball, football, or baseball game. I don't really care who wins the Tour either. When my buddy Taylor was racing the other day, I really wanted him to win, but frankly, the fascination with major league sports in this country weirds me out.

All that said: I LOVE going to Spokane Indian's baseball games. It's a great family summer time thing. The games are high scoring, the beer is cheap, and all the seats are great, especially the cheap-o ones on the 1st base outfield side.

In addition, the club has a sweet new (secondary) logo, with Salish words in it. That's just cool.

Now the ball park has a new bike rack. The rack was made with the recycled hunks of steel tubing that resulted from the remodel during the off season. And the rack is a good design.

Go to a game. Here's the schedule.

Full disclosure: I got a free Indians coffee cup for my ad-hoc-bike-rack-consulting service. So I guess that officially makes me a shill. I was determined not to take anything in return for going out there and agreeing that the place they had picked for the rack was a good place. But -- the mug, with the Salish language logo on it -- was more than I could say no to.

Some Stuff

The Fuji Turd is done. If you're in Spokane and you want this frame, let me know. It'll go to the first person that wants it.

There are two conditions: you must build it up and ride it in the next month or so -- no hording (why would you want to?); and secondly, when you're done with it, you must give the frame away with the same conditions.

Comes as shown: with a post, front u-brake, and a poorly adjusted headset. Fits 2.3" knobbies (barley), has horizontal dropouts spaced at 135mm.

Party on Turd, you have served me well.

Maddie has conquered the monkey bars. She goes forwards and backwards. She's really proud of that, but for some reason, she won't let me photo her, so I have to be stealthy.

Sucky rack at Sacred Heart. I have followed a few commuters to Sacred Heart. Apparently the hospital has great facilities for employees, but I can't find a bike rack by the Womens/Surgery center.
And sweet new racks at the Rocket on 42nd. These are really "leaners," which is all they need up there, since cyclists go and sip on a beer or coffee and can watch their bikes. Nice use of plumbing pipes and fittings to make a cheap rack that is more effective than 90% of all other bike racks in town.

I laced up a wheel tonight. Thanks Sheldon for your straight-forward directions. I've only built a dozen or so wheels, but when I do, I use Sheldon's method. It's easy.

I'm tired and pissy since it looks like the wrong dust cap came with the hub, which means at least a 4-5 day delay in getting the bike on the road. Errg. I wish there was a LBS that totally rocked the internally geared hub deal.

I'll true and tension the wheel sometime this weekend. The hub is a SRAM S7. It's going to go on my 520, along with some swept back bars, a chain guard, and some more rackage. The point is to build a good townie/porteur. It's even going to have platform pedals.

Phone Pics

I pretty much take all my photos now with my phone. It's convenient because I don't have to haul yet another trinket with me, but sometimes the pictures just suck. Especially low light and snow pics.

I took this photo at about 6:30 am on Friday morning. It's out there by Avista on Upriver Drive. The still river with the red sun rise and the clear coldness was really pretty. You'd never know it by looking at this turd of a picture.

Same deal here: I took this pictures at about 6:30 this morning. I was cutting the first tracks down Madison. I love this time of day, before the rest of the city wakes up on a Saturday morning. Even though the snow is driving me bonkers, it was really pretty out this morning... but a bright clear morning would've been nice too.

I think this is Sucky Bike Rack #5. This is up by Lincoln Heights at the South Side Dr's clinic place on SE Blvd. This sign is literally the only post on the property to lock up to. This clinic is across from Hastings, where a couple folks emailed/commented about the absolute worse bike rack of all time. I went looking for it, hoping to get a photo, but I didn't see it. Maybe they got wise and would rather have no rack than a record-holding sucky one.

The final picture here: the Magnolia street I-90 overpass. I use this a lot. I go to Vien Dong's a couple times a month, and I enjoy riding around the East Sprague/Cheif Gary neighborhoods. To get down there, I go through the South Perry neighborhood and cut through the windy trail through Liberty Park and then over this pedestrian bridge.

Sucky Bike Racks: #2 and #3

Sucky Bike Rack #2

You see this rack everywhere. I think it's so popular because organizations that must have racks like the looks of this one. It's just kind of neat looking.

I picture some low-level bureaucrat being handed a book or maybe being pointed to a website with some instructions, "according to corporate policy 1-3B-L6, 'Cheap amenities to add to building projects that portray perception that our org is green,' you must pick out one of these bike racks for the front of the new store." To a non-cyclist this one is a no brainer. It's just so swoopy.

While not as bad as Sucky Rack #1, it is still mostly silly. That rack takes up a sizable footprint and I think you'd be lucky to lock up more than 4 bikes. Again, the designer didn't think about front racks or fork-mounted lights. And actually, the light I have mounted atop my bars here must be minded or it will go crunch as you pass the wheel under the arch. You can see the clearance in the picture above.

At least I can lock up with the U-lock on this bike. If I was riding my Trek with the giant front rack, I'd have to lock up to the outside bar of this rack. So you must ride a bike that fits the designer's idea of what a proper bike should be.

Sucky Rack #3 - That is such a depressing picture. And it's not just the rack.

This one is so bad that I feel mean for even having it here. It's like bullying someone with Down Syndrome. But, here goes.

This rack design is straight out of the 70's. It's great, if:

• your bike has a kickstand or you're running 20" or smaller wheels. Otherwise the wheel holders are intended to sort of "hold" your wheel. If you have any kind of weight on your bike, it won't stand up. And the wheel is unnecessarily stressed (laterally) by the weight of the bike leaning against the rack -- this is nitpicky, but it's unnecessary and lateral durability is the Achilles heel of wheel strength.


• your front wheel is attached to your bike with bolts (For the youngsters: in the old days you attached your wheels to your bike with a strange thing called a solid axle. This "solid axle" ran through the hub like a normal hollow axle, but instead of quick release, it had big nuts on it that you would tighten. This came in very handy when you locked your bike to this rack, since all you had to do was run your plastic-wrapped chain through the front wheel and your WHOLE bike was secured.)


• you use a chain or cable to lock your bike. I think the only way to make a U-lock work with this would be to lay the bike down just so and hook the front wheel/frame to the rack. I should've tried that.


• you like to block 1/2 the walkway with your bike, thereby engendering even more bike-love from car people that already think you're a freak for riding your bike to the store.

This rack is outside Super 1 on the south hill. Here's how I ended up locking:

Once again, the shape of that cart holder is eerily similar to the simplest and most effective rack design in all of human history:

Sucky Bike Racks: #1

Sucky Rack #1

Most bike racks suck. This fact is one of those maddeningly frustrating little things in life. How can so many people screw up such a simple tool? And why do so many places buy them? This is first in a series of sucky racks and why they suck.

The rack in the picture above is at city hall. There are also a couple in front of Madeline's and in front of Macy's. I've seen these at other places too.

Like every other cyclist I know with a U-lock, when I lock my bike, I pass the lock through the front wheel and the frame and lock it to the bike rack. I would say that's a pretty standard method.

It's hard to illustrate with a picture, so you'll have to take my word for it: if your bike has a large front rack, then adequately locking your bike to this silly rack with a U lock is impossible.

You can't get the bike in where it's supposed to go, so you're forced to lock to outside of the rack, where there's a HUGE tube that is gong the wrong way/angle for the U-lock to wrap around, even if you try raising the bike off the ground. I do believe it is practically impossible. (Ok, for the impractical, I could tilt my bike to about 85 degrees to get the angle right for locking to the big tube, putting a bunch of stress on my front spokes and raising the rear wheel off the ground about 4 feet. So it's not *strictly* impossible.)

Observe:

The root issue here of course, is a common design problem. The person designing the rack has an extremely limited understanding of the problem they are trying to solve. Or, the designer is making a conscious decision to produce a rack that is incompatible with certain bikes. The designer made this rack for bikes that fall into a certain height range and with no front racks. There are likely other non-standard bikes that might have issues with this rack (recumbents, smallish folders, etc).

I should also note that I smashed an E6 light (that was mounted on my fork) on this rack about a year ago. I busted it and had to get a new lens for it. ($35?) I'll take some of that blame, but the rack requires that you push the bike into it in order to use the smaller diameter tubes for locking. The designer had not likely seen any lights on a bike except for handlebar mounted blinkies, so the "push in" requirement was not an issue.

This wouldn't drive me insane if designing a useful rack was a hard problem. But it's not. I can't think of (nor have a seen) a better design for a bike rack than this one:

If it's more involved than that simple design, it's over engineered.

For what it's worth, here's how I ended up locking my bike:

Note that the railing here has a strikingly similar design to the simple rack noted above.

Oh yeah. And if the piss poor design of Sucky Rack #1 isn't enough to make you crazy, here's a cherry for the top:

Yes, that's a big American flag on there. And yes, those tiny words at the bottom say "Made in Canada." I don't care where it's made, but it's obvious that the intention here is to make you think, at glance, that this is American-made. That is sleeze. Even if it was a great rack, I wouldn't buy it for that reason alone.