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.
3 comments:
Cool-- I'm filing a patent on chocolate coated bacon right away!
Tarik, "my Bridgestone Picnica"...?!? Pix please...you've been holding out on us! BTW, props to your folks on the Bike Friday fixie present!
Damn, one of my "wish I still had it" bikes is my old Picnica. And you've got one. Totally superfluous now that you have a Friday (actually that was part of the flawed thinking that led to my current lowly Picnicaless state). But nonetheless, you really don't need that Picnica. You should send it off to some smaller, turtleish fellow. Really, I can help you out.
Kent
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