Folding Bike shop in Santa Fe

Update 10/31/06: At some point over the summer the folding shop shut down


Santa Fe is becoming a nice little bike town. There are lots of nice on and offroad rides and, in addition to a number of decent bike shops, there are two "quirky" shops that are fun to visit. One is Mellow Velo, quite close to the plaza in Santa Fe, and is now the hipster single speed, messenger bag, wool stuff, old cool parts shop, they sell on line through toeclip.com. And even neater and more niche is Santa Fe Bikes and Gallery.

They specialize in folding bikes, original and repro lithographs and absurdly cheap brooks stuff. They do over half of their business on the web, but it is fun to see a million folding bikes all lined up:

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A moulton space frame in the small pic leaning on an original lithograph of a bicycle advertisement, array of folders from dahon to brompton to bridgestone/moulton to others in the bigun


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Bromptons, bike friday and repro posters



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At least five wheelsizes in the small pics, 14" on my bridgestone picnica, 16" brompto sizing, 451 on the bike friday, and I think there are 12", 406, 17" Moulton, and 26" in the heap of bikes on the left.


They stock a blinding array of innertubes for folders. Gene, the fellow working there, was really friendly and knowledgable. If you are in the area, it is well worth the trip. Sadly I found out that my brilliant adjustable wheelbase folding bike idea is already exists:


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Crap, I call prior art, I swear I have a circa 2001 notebook with this design in it. Anyhow, Giatex makes these, they look cool as you can adjust the bike to have a 1' wheelbase. This probably existed way before my idea and at least I can test ride one now to see if the idea is stupid or not, instead of building it... I also "invented" the banana guard in 1996 or so, but thought it was too stupid to patent. I was even going to use 6 sigma style statistics to make sure my banana protector would fit 99plus percent of all bananas in the market.
Ah well, I guess I have learned my lesson, nothing is too stupid to patent. Chocolate covered bacon here I come.

We're a Raleigh Family, We're a Raleigh Family

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Me and my Raleigh Twenty and Elena and her Raleigh Sprite. She found it in an arroyo a number of years ago and fixed it up a bit. It had probably the worst, most untunable 10 speed drivetrain I have ever come across, so I ditched and built up some 27" alloy rims on a sturmy archer AW hub. So now it is a low geared three speed and she commutes on it fairly regularly when the weather is above freezing. It is pretty nice as it has the longest seat tube on a mixte type frame I have ever seen. Works well for her height.

Rock the socks

Yep, Bishop wants to ride some tall socks in races.
See above. The guy above rocking knee high wool socks for a 30 mile hot as crap mtb race in soccorro. But knowing bishop's roadie tendencies, I will still be impressed if he rolls up to the start of any Colorado road race in knee highs. Major props if he goes for old school baseball stirrups. Just saying...

Bike Friday

I got a fixie bike friday from my parents as a "thankgodheisreallydonewithschool" present. Thanks mom and dad. It is very cool. I will take better pics later this week when it goes to cali for the first time. I have been on 1 trip with it, to knoxville. And if all goes well it will hit Santa Barbara, NJ-Maine, Italy and Knoxville again in the next couple of months. Woo.

More detail on why, how and what it is specced like later, but for now look at the pics. It is less than 20 minutes from pic one to the end. About 25 minutes with both fenders on with pedals. The case weighs about 45 pounds with bike, tools, bike shoes, fenders, saddlebag etc.

Heavy old hub shootout

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Collection of heavy hubs, from right to left:
Bendix redband kickback (triple red band) 3lbs 9oz
Bendex one speed coaster (one redband) 2lb 4oz
Sturmey Archer AW 1970 (no spindle-chain thingy): 2lbs 8oz
Shimano coaster hub (missing circlip) 1lb 13oz

The bendix kickback makes me smile when I heft it. It truly is a mighty hub...

Mountain Bikey in Los Alamos

Hmm,

for some reason I am unmotivated to put up a race report for my 3-flat impaired single speed race in the wind besmirched Soccorro last week. So for the time being:


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Thats elena and I on the mesa tip past the rodeo grounds.
Here is the hazards of biking through the burn zone:


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Burnt ponderosa pines down on the trail are ubiquitous after the winds, which are frequent in the spring.


Me about to get zero air:


I can get a bit of air, but then I taco my wheels, so I usually speed hop the bumps. See me getting subliminal air in this 32MB .avi video here (anyone got any recommendations on freeware avi editors, so I can cut vids down and put in totally rocking soundtracks by Tool or Journey?). I may get a 24" bmx cruiser or some sort of Specialized P1 type jumping mbike to further explore my air-Tarik tendencies.

Road Riding Los Alamos Style

As good as the off road riding and running is here, the road riding is limited, spectacular, but limited. There are essentially 3 reasonable rides under thirty miles The 27 mile bandelier loop, an out and back out to the Valles Caldera and beyond, or the grunt up 2000 feet in 4 miles up the ski hill followed by a fast descent on horrifyingly bad roads. Longer rides usually involve riding off the mesa entirely and then back up on not so much fun roads.

The bandelier loop is one of the best rides I have ever done. The map and elevation profile are here. I more or less live at the beginning of the elevation profile. There is about 2000 feet of climbing in the loop ranging from 6300 to 7800 feet in altitude. It gets too familiar at times, but when you have not done it in a while it is breathtaking.

I did a quick loop with my friend Dina last weekend. She went from being a very timid cyclist to a super strong power rider/triathlete in a year. Here are some pics.

Me and Dina climbing out of Ancho canyon, the lowest spot on the loop. See the giant radio antenna in the back? That is how the Gov't controls major league baseball, now you know:

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Here is another view toward the end of the loop looking out from twisty roads in white rock to the mountains over los alamos:

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Metric Roadfind

Ah, the rare yet beautiful metric roadfind.

I think I have only found 2 or 3 metric roadfinds in the past, a broken 10mm Mercedes Benz box wrench, a beautiful snap on short combo wrench in the practically-as-useless-as-english 18mm size and this:



a 15mm Stanley socket. Sort of useful for the odd 15mm crank bolt too! Found near the Aquatic center on canyon, site of many other roadfinds in los alamos, such as the superball and the right angle scale in two parts.

My tool box is filled with 3/8" sockets and combo wrenches that I have found awheel, but it is a rare bird to find a metric thingy calling your name while on the road.

More cat/bike stuff tomorrow, the new camera takes good video and macro so far so I have lots of good stuff to show you, races and rides and other.

Anyone know how to scan X-rays effectively, if so, I have a treat (not me ma, a cat.)

typical profile of end user ugg boots

I really enjoy having a stat tracker on my site. I use Sitemeter as it is free, but it is limited a bit to only showing the last 100 visitors. As my readership eeks upward to about 40-50 peeps a day (mmmmmmm, 40 to 50 delicious sugar covered peeps each day..) uh, I only can review a couple of days at a time.

The tracker generally gives me location of visitor, ISP, mac or PC, Explorer v. Safari v. Firefox, pages visited, entry page, out click and my favorite, referral pages. As I dribble randomly about many topics from cats, to bikes, to drugs, to weather to other things, I get random word combinations that allow people searching for things I really don't talk about to find my site. Recent unrelated google search results that have led people to Moscaline:

"sidehack crashes" from a combination of my cat co-pilot post and my hincapie crash post
"Big Rack Chinese Girls" gets surely dissapointed web surfers to a post about bicycle racks on chinese bikes.
and my all time random favorite:
"typical profile of end user ugg boots" by someperson from austrailia, no doubt garnered from this post where I mention L.A. Ugg wearers as an american fashion oddity similar to white jacket wearing chinese women. But really, my blog has nothing to do with that, yet some guy where water is all backwards in the toilet, now has read at least a tiny bit of my blog.

Site tracking tells me, for example, if I really wanted to make money, I would figure out how to sell Trek Soho bikes as I get at least 10 hits a week for people looking for reviews of said bike because I reviewed the Trek Soho Coffee Mug. Trek peoples, send me a bike, I will review it and then we can share the profits from me being the number one google hit for your bike. See? marketing synergy awaits.

As an aside, does anyone else think "Showtime Synergy!" everytime some wannaB-school marketing hack uses the word synergy? Truly outrageous!

Ok, where was I? Erm, in conclusion, if you have a blog, get some sort of sitetracker. It makes it all worthwhile.

Hincapie Roubaix Crash

Somehow through a mispelling ("Robaix"), my blog is getting hella hits for people looking for the Hincapie crash info. I think I am number one in the google search for
"hincapie robaix". Right on, riches will soon follow, you can't BUY that kind of publicity.

Check it out Hincapie Crashing in Paris-Roubaix from OLN's site, which may or may not be up for eternety.

Ouch. Pretty good that he did not stack immediately upon the steerer snapping off. Looks like he had at least a couple of seconds of no-hands and no bar riding, followed by no hands, no bars and one foot, before he rolls off road a bit and pile drivers over the bars. Ouch, broken shoulder, surgery and a 6-10 weeks on the trainer probably. A bit similar (too similar?) to Hincapie going into the ditch in Robaix in 2002 while a very young Boonen, then riding for Hincapie's postal team, rode on to his first podium placing in a classic.

Hinky was NOT riding a carbon steerer, it was an aluminum one. See here for the cyclingnews preview on Hinky's bike. Much has been made over Trek not giving the guy the right equipment, why not a steel one? It is all a canard, there were probably plenty of people riding carbon steerers and carbon wheels, and other even more dodgy equipment. George crashed earlier in the race, probably damaging the bike a bit and then it failed later. Bad luck, probably should have changed bikes, but they did not, although they allegedly were planning on it (under the heading "Trek to examine Hincapie's Fork"). Same could have happened with a steel or carbon fork, really. If you have a crash initiated crack that is hidden it is free to go to failure undetected. Al, Carbon or Steel the final bit of the steer tube cracking will be catastrophic and then you have Hincapie crashing in a ditch again.

I love the end of the video showing Boonen going absolutely nuts on the front after Hincapie crashed. Think he was a bit worried about Hincapie? Maybe that is why he had no juice left in the final miles when cancellara and hoste attacked? With no teamates left, maybe he wanted to get rid of the other sprinter with Paris-Roubaix skills and hope for a bunch gallop on the velodrome.

Boonen was rewarded with a DQ enhanced second place, but in reality, Discovery finally turned the tables on Quickstep putting Hoste in second and Gusev in fourth ahead of Boonen's preDQ fifth. It was a wild wild race, and probably would have been even wilder with Hincapie still in the mix.

Crashes, cobbles and bad luck are what make Paris Robaix one of the most exciting races on the calendar. You must be stronk like ox and lucky to boot to get it done.
To quote the Disco team's mechanic, "The cobbles do not discriminate". Although they do seem to love them the Boonen.

Chinese Alleys and Bikes

Todd from Cleverchimp continues his tale of going to China to get parts made for his company. Part 5 of his Beijing trip has a nice video of biking through a Hutong (alleyway). A nice companion to the excellent Peter Hessler article in the New Yorker called Hutong Karma, not online anywhere, in the 2/13-20/2006 issue. The NY'er article and Todd's experiences seem very inline with what I saw in China for the brief time I was there last year.

Check the video here. Good stuff.

Even more Tyler and more Doping and Baseball!

Hey! A whole passel of links for you on doping in baseball and in Tyler Hamilton.

Pretty fun stuff, and now I get to see my Google ads go from biking, back to growth hormones, steroids and 1GF-1 and maybe interferon and interleukin too? Who knows. Previous doping entries by me at the end of the column.

Anyhow, all around spectacular writer Malcom Gladwell weighs in on the Barry Bonds steroid hoopla on his blog. Currently relevant posts are first here and followup here. Ok, I am a bit suprised, he is more "traditional" than I would have expected, saying something must be done to "save" the record book. Bah, I say, the record books are borderline bunk anyhow. Without integration in the first half of the 1900's and the fact that athletes probably have been doping in one way or another since WW2 at least, there is no way to go back to a clean baseline... Anyhow, he does espouse using forensic economists to look at the probability of records being clean. Which is an interesting approach.

Go read his blog for a cleaner description than mine, but the bottom line is that records must be inline with previous human performance and specifically that athlete's performance. Things like FloJo's unbelievable sprint times or Bond's magical performance improvement in his late thirties are so improbable statistically that they are completely suspect to the point that they do not count.

Good thinking, but I really think this needs to be used as a marker for increased scrutiny and testing and maybe investigation by detectives. Remember, the smart dopers who are caught are often caught by the police or by someone ratting them out. Maybe we actually need doping detectives with WADA to go deep undercover to find out what the heck they are on and get tests developed in conjuction with action against crooked doctors/researchers who are getting the crap in the pipeline. A bit too police state for my tastes, but if it was well organized with smart people like, say, Don Caitlin (read the outside article on his biomarker idea for catching the dopers here) instead of credibilityless reactionaries like Dick Pound, then maybe it would be good thing?

On to Tyler, since my last post there was a bit of a to-do with the UCI sending a nastygram to USA cycling asking why suspended racers were racing with UCI pro racers, see this for the news, and this for a summary of the hoo-ha.

Finally is a nice post on a fast x-c skiier's blog on why being a nice guy does not mean that you are not doping on the sly. Click over toNathan Schultz's take on it. Anyhow an ineresting prespective on it followed by 115 comments of the religious war about whether tyler is guilty or not. Celebrity commenters include Haven Hamilton (tylers wife) and journalists Joe Lindsay and Stuart Stevens buried there amidst the flame war. Funny stuff, really, it is complete removed from the facts though.

Anyhow, like I have said before, I think he was guilty, got caught and served his time and I hope he finds a ride somewhere before 2006 is out so we can see him in the late fall classics.

Previous posts on doping:

On the IGF-1

Tyler riding in a race

Huge post on Tyler getting suspended with lots of doping links

Early post on the dealy

Back to the regularly scheduled bicycle moronothon tommorrow with much less psuedojournalism.

Anyone still reading?

From the comments

Rarely do I get comments, occasionally the rare comment has a link.
Often these links are fruitful. Whats with the rest of youse? Using MLB supplied sattelite based internet tracking devices I know more than JimG, Mark, Ray and my cousins read this site. Anyhow...

Via comment, my cousin's husband's roomate's swedish vacation photos, a nice city bike:

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Also via comment from billC a week or so back, for the few remaining cat readers of the blog:
Cats in Sinks, just like it sounds a billion pictures of cats in sinks. Why do you mock me internet? Why?
and

Kitten War not exactly like it sounds, go elsewhere if you want kitten death matches, this is a cute contest.

Taos Signs

Headed up to taos last weekend for a bit of celebration following the completion of the big burrito.

Anytime the words Curios and Cocktails are in neon, it must be a good place:

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Not quite as elaborate, but also nice to look at:

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Bonus picture of small headsize port in the hotel room door:

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Wink256 is my co-pilot

After seeing the Kitty Adventures journal by artist Seonna Hong I was inspired:


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Inspired to make one of Elena's many cats as my co-pilot. After multiple attempts it seemed that Wink256, my best feline friend and archnemisis, was the only one who had the guts to do what it took. Here I am, calming the fat one before the ride:

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Now on and about the yard we go:

click for magnificent losalamooosan landscape with barn, tree and ski hill.

All safe and sound on return?:


Aye aye captain!:

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Now all I have to do is rig up some sort of feline sidehack and, of course, an appropriate cat helmet and we are good to go.

The cat conveyence device is my Raleigh twenty.

Ronde Van Knoxville

Yikes, Boonen and quickstep worked the Discovery boys over again at the Flanders hootenany. Instead of Quickstep's picture perfect teamwork delivering uberstud (getting his strength from the armadillo in his trousers... well, just click here and here for the photographic evidence) Boonen to the line victorious, Leif Hoste attacked on his own, perhaps to the surprise of the only guy in the final group who might (might that is) been able to pip boonen in a sprint. Having Hinky doing teamwork and then sprinting for third should not have been an option in discovery's plans. Bah...

My worst nightmare for the upcoming paris robaix is that hincapie-hoste-hammond for discovery were pitted against Boonen-Bettini-Bozatto (for alliteration's sake) for quickstep over the last few bits and quickstep take advantage of discovery team infighting and sweep the podium. At least with Hammond out for a week or so following his crash at flanders, there is one less possible podium seeker amongst Hincapie's flock. Bah indeed. Hopefully the discovery team can figure it out, they have the Ghent-Whelgem on Wednesday followed by the big cobbled enchilada on sunday. if quickstep wins all three I will be mighty depressed.

Anyhow, last week in knoxville, my buddy G and I took to the south knoxville Ronde-like course on fixies and he worked me over but good. A reprise of a memorably brutal fixie ride with Mark and G back in ought four, just before I left knoxie. 30 miles of the brown road loop ending with the beautious Burnetts Creek Road and lots of mini walls, rr crossings, one lane roads and the like, perfect for a hard hard fixed gear workout or the best of south knoxville in one ride. Paved singletrack it is, mmmm good stuff. Probably my first ride over 20 miles in 6 months, but no bonk and my legs were good enough for an evening ride 10 miles over to the shop for a couple beers.

Calling me down to their watery graves

One of the nicest things about riding in knoxville is the third creek greenway. A twisty strip of asphalt wending its way through a riparian zone, an urban oasis sandwiched between railroad tracks, old neighborhoods and crumbling industry. A healthy dose of hobo singletrack leaves and joins the paved path at frequent intervals. While I am generally no fan of cycling on mixed use paths, this one is special.

Particularly pleasant is riding the path at night. There usually is just enough ambient light to guide your way as the path morphs into a shimmery silver strip through the forest. However, it can be slightly disquieting. As you crest a small hill and drop into the low spots on the trail next to the creek that gives the path its name, the temperature drops noticebly. Then you hear it: the call of the peepers. From the swamp on either side a cacophony of calls emits, growing to a deafening crescendo.

As you ride along the peepers on either side grow quiet as you pass until you are enveloped in a rolling enclosure of brief silence between frog cries. But woe be the traveller who stops on their way. At first you are in a temporary silence between the far off peeps, but slowly the nearby frogs, sensing your stillness, begin to call out to you. Impelling you to follow them into their stagnant inches of dank swamp. The call is irresistable to some and many a weary nomad has been called to their watery grave by the siren cry of the peepers.