Name That Bike

Sorta like Name That Tune, but with less to go on:


It's a 700c lugged hybrid or touring frame with a unicrown fork, cantilever studs, semi-horizontal dropouts and an early Shimano LX silver drivetrain. That dark blue band on the top tube is its original medium blue.

Any idea who made it? Where it came from? Chimayo Backroads or Backroads Chimayo? I asked the Google and came up dry. More pics to come...

Hacking the Torch

A need came up on short notice a couple of weeks back to go someplace about an hour before sunup with the Trucker. Since most of the route was not lit, I decided this would be a good job for the dynamo wheel and Inoled 2 watt LED lamp from my Cross Check. Easy enough to move the wheel over, since they share the same rim diameter and width. I didn't really feel like using the Inofix mount to put it on the stem, and the Nitto front rack has an eyelet for a light anyway. The question was, how to attach the Inoled bracket?


There it was, right there in the parts bin. An extra downtube stop. (Not this one, one just like it.)


Turns out the adjuster threads are M5, just like the eyelet on the rack. Had to washer it out a bit to get the angle correct.


Then another M5 cap screw through from the back...


and a Nyloc nut on the front.

Then it was off to the races the next morning with the Inoled and a Planet Bike Beamer blinkie out front and two PB blinkies on the back. Madison is pretty quiet at 5:45 a.m. and dark too. I'd say the light was adequate for everything but fast descents. I rode through the Arboretum, which is pitch black, and it enabled me to see the deer in the road in plenty of time not to hit them.

Autumning Apart

In the final days of 2006, I set an arbitrary goal of riding a total of 3650 miles this year. So here we are on day 290 of 2007, and I'm 2950 miles into it, with November and December still to come. The math here dictates an average of 300 miles per month for both, which has not happened before. I find myself awkwardly rooting for global warming.

I also promised myself I wouldn't compare my mileage total with others', but Doug is over 6K, and Tex is at just under 2K. Guess that would put me somewhere in the middle if this were a representative sample, but I think I may just go back to not comparing.

On another, far more bizarre note, I saw my first three-wheeled, plug-in electric car on my way home tonight:


In general, I think electric cars are an okay idea, but I'm still not sure quite what to make of it. I'm leaning toward Bike Snob NYC's claim that cars this size should occupy a spot exactly one notch below bikes in the vehicular pecking order:

It is small. It is inexpensive. It gets excellent gas mileage. [volt mileage, or whatever] We’re supposed to admire it for these qualities. I don’t. As cyclists we’ve been bossed around by cars for too long. And like the Yorkshire terrier at the dog run who after constantly being terrorized by Rottweilers finally gets a chance to hump a Chihuahua, here at long last is a car we can intimidate and dominate. This car has a shorter wheelbase than a recumbent, the same passenger capacity as a tandem, and a curb weight lower than most people’s Rivendells.

This one is from Zapworld, which, as far as I can tell, is a toy company. I can hardly wait.

Dissolution

When I was a kid, my dad was a part-time antique dealer, so I ended up at a lot of auctions, including farm auctions. They were part treasure hunt, part social event and part occupation and I very much like going to auctions to this day. Funny that I never spent a lot of time thinking about who the sellers were.

Another thing I did as a kid was go to my aunt and uncle's dairy farm out in the Driftless (roughly 42°38'38.72"N, 89°53'36.99"W for you cartographic geeks.) I got to spend a week or two there each of a couple three consecutive summers, went along quite a few times with my dad when he'd go bowhunting on my uncle's land and of course spent a few Christmases and 4ths there too. I even did an overnight ride to the farm in the summer of 2005. It was a place that gave me an appreciation for what rural life, and family farming in particular, were about.

Well, the two crossed paths last Saturday.

The farm was originally settled in the late 19th century by my uncle's family, and he and his sister inherited it when their parents died in the 1990s. Both my uncle and my aunt (my dad's sister) worked the farm from the time they were married in 1968 until they stopped milking back in the late 90's. My uncle's knees and heart wouldn't tolerate the long hours and the stooping any more. They kept beef cattle and rented out land until a couple of months ago when my uncle's sister, as allowed by a provision in their parents' will, prompted them to either buy her share or sell. They couldn't afford to buy her half.

Their children—my cousins—all have regular jobs and live in urban areas, and none of them were much interested in taking over the farming operation or buying the place. This is not an indictment of my cousins. I think all of them have been able to read, as well or better than most of us, the writing on the wall with regard to what's happened to the family farm as an institution. To inherit one is to commit slow-motion financial suicide. The joke among small-time farmers goes like this:

Q: "How long do you plan to keep farming?"
A: "Oh, I suppose, until the money runs out."

I could comment on how or why this has been allowed to happen, but I think Wendell Berry has done it better in his books The Unsettling of America and What Are People For?, both of which I recommend. I could also comment on how we should be aware of where our food comes from, but there are also lots of localists and foodies, especially around here, that could do so more eloquently.

What was most interesting for me was seeing the auction process from the seller's side. All day I found myself hoping for higher prices instead of more bargains. All day I wondered where all the work, all the knowledge, all time and all the worry that went into that family farm were off to as it's implements were paid for and loaded onto conveyances headed in all different directions. I wonder, sometimes, how we've allowed the tradition and practice of something so basic as growing food to be so easily handed over to entropy.

The number of Americans engaged in the occupation of farming is at about 2 percent of our total population, and continues to decline. We continue to allow agriculture to be taken over by smaller and smaller numbers of larger and larger operations, whereupon it becomes agribusiness. Those large operations are dependant on fossil fuel inputs and a vast fossil-fuel-powered transportation network, all of which is very sensitive to fluctuations in fossil fuel prices. Maybe I'm just in a sour mood, but the trend in prices at the grocery store suggest that we may be headed in a direction we will sooner or later regret.

Bike the Barns Ride Reports

Apparently I wasn't the only one to go on blog this ride. More can be found at Newsomi, happy stuff and cardano. MACSAC's page has more too, including links to some local newspaper coverage.

10-4, Good Buddy!

I've been meaning to write a little about my most-used bicycle, a 2004 Surly Long Haul Trucker. This is their full-on touring bike, and I was one of the first kids on my block to have one when it was introduced. Mine is a 60cm, which is the second-largest made. I have yet to do any overnight tours on it, but have used it for quite a few long day rides (like this one and this one) and a whole lot of commuting. It probably has about 5000 miles on it by now. More photos over in a Flickr set.

This is the second Surly I've bought as a frameset and built up as a mutt. It's got Specialized Dirt Drop bars (which I suspect are Nittos, but don't know for sure) and bar-end shifters, older Shimano medium-profile cantis, a forged XT crankset (salvaged from a bike my neighbor pulled out of Starkweather Creek), and the wheels from my 2001 Bianchi Volpe. That's a Brooks B17 standard from the days when Nashbar was closing them out at $50.

The racks are a couple of Nittos: an M12 on the front and a Campee (pictured without its lowriders) on the back. I also have a couple of Blackburn braze-on lowriders for the front, but I don't use them unless I'm carrying front panniers. I must confess that the M12 is mostly for decoration so far. Lately I've been using a Nitto uplift and Carradice longflap for commuting. Kind of a nice change from panniers.

This is one of my all-time favorite bikes. Surly got a lot of stuff right, even if some of it is borrowed from the design of the Rivendell Atlantis. It's a plush ride, noticeably slower steering than the Cross Check, rides great no-handed and bombs downhill like it's on rails. All the braze-ons a person could want plus the spare spoke holder. It's a little clunkier than my sport-touring Trek and it's prone to stiking pedals on the pavement in tight turns, but those are things one might well expect from a tourer.

Hoping to do a sub-24-hour-overnight or similar camping trip later this month. I'm thinking maybe Blue Mound or New Glarus Woods. I've got the itch.

Q3 2007 Report

Here we go again with the Quarterly: July 1 to September 30. (More sense can be made of this whole thing by checking out Q1 and Q2 first.)

Cycling:
2750 year to date, which makes it 1138 for this quarter. This is about as much as I have ever ridden in a 90-day period. Did four rides of more than sixty miles, blogged three of them here, here, and here. The other was the Wall of Death ride up to Roxbury tavern for blueberry pancakes on September 22 or so:


And on the return trip, the peloton could sense that I was gaining...


but never did let me catch them.

At the end of August there was also the 40-miler when I found the chain, the only other memorable moment of which was riding through this flooded parking lot to get onto a trail (click for big):


I also brought some lumber home from the lumberyard to build a shelf in the basement, but hey, seen one picture of an Xtracycle with lumber on it, you've seen 'em all.

Still trying to sell my albatross too, so if you know anybody who's looking.

And Trek held some international convention of dealers at the Monona Terrace here in Madison, for which they brought in a whole lotta bikes:


A whole lotta, lotta bikes. Those are all Trek Limes, the ones with the Shimano Coasting group. After these photos were taken, the dealers were invited to ride them a few blocks over to a kickball game. Or something. The whole thing might have had something to do with the new One World, Two Wheels thing that Trek started recently, though for this event the Trekkies were wearing t-shirts that had "Project µ" logos on them. Google is ominously silent on this one, so go figure.


No idea what ultimately happened to all those bikes.

Gardening

This was more difficult. A long dry spell in July (the Drought) was followed by a long wet spell in August (the Monsoon Season), which made gardening rather more difficult than the earlier part of the season. I'll also be losing my current community garden plot to a municipal construction project next season and starting over in a new location. This does not do wonders for one's motivation.

On the bright side, I am nearly done with the volunteer hours for my Master Gardener certification. I'm particularly taken with Arboriculture, which is a shame because I don't like to climb trees like our arborist did when he came in early September to trim up our 60-foot tall Catalpa tree. I found this to be really interesting, but not my cup of tea.

I planted lots of sneezy stuff like borage to benefit our ailing bee friends.



Resolutions
2. Retrofit your home for energy conservation.Insulating the last third of the outside of the foundation is well underway. Should be finished by the end of the month. Insulating the inside should happen over the winter. Hopefully will have time to insulate the attic a little more, and I think we'll caulk its hatch shut with removable caulk for this winter.

The CF bulbs and the new refrigerator have cut our electricity consumption from an average of just under 300 KWH per month to just over 200 KWH per month. Our new front-load washer and dryer should cut that further and save us a whole lot of water. We'll know more by Q4.

3. Cut back on your gasoline consumption.We upped our average monthly mileage, but we will still fall short of 5 digits for the year. The missus has been sticking pretty well to the cycling for all trips under 4 miles. As a family, it's not that unusual for us to be the only ones to show up for events on bikes, but that will change.

I'd like to comment on more, but I'm really tired of typing right now. The next post should return us to our regularly scheduled bikegeekery.

Early Big Dummy Reviews

There have been a couple of early Big Dummy ride reports coming out of Interbike. Here are a couple, one each from Commute By Bike (their photo above), Bikehugger and Speedgoat. All pretty positive.

Ordered mine late last week. Expected delilvery date: January 15, 2008.

Update 01-05-2008 More Big Dummy news here.

Update 03-06-2008 Part one of my review.

Update 05-21-2008 Part two of my review.

Road Find: Someone's Chain

Yeah, I know, seriously though. Back at the beginning of September I was on a ride and found this laying in the road just east of County road MM on Goodland Park road. At first I thought it was another snake. One can only speculate about how it got there or why it was left there. For those of you keeping score, it was a single-speed KMC Z chain.

Bike the Barns

The end of September is a pretty chancy time of year to hold a cycling event here in Wisconsin. Yesterday, the organizers of the inaugural Bike the Barns ride hit the jackpot. Started out in the 60's and ended up with a high of 76; cloudy in the morning to overcast, to sunny in the late afternoon.

This was my second organized ride of the year, a benefit for the Madison Area's Community Supported Agriculture Coalition, and the most unusual I've ever been on:

Tour Dane County's beautiful farm country and visit three Community Supported Agriculture farms. Your ride will be fueled with gourmet local food, including breakfast, snacks, and a three-course lunch [...]

How could one resist?

I took a bunch of pictures and have posted a group over on my Flickr page, so I'll just include a couple here. A map of the entire route is available at Map My Ride.

The Start

The ride started at Troy Gardens on the north side of Madison. Having uncharacteristically gotten ready the night before, I rolled out of bed at the crack of 6:45 a.m., threw a leg over the bike and made the 4-mile hop over to the start. Upon my arrival, I dropped off the pledge checks I had collected for MACSAC's Partner Shares Program and headed over to the breakfast spread (pictured above.) Coffee, hardrolls, croissants, hard-boiled eggs and apples. Ate a bit of everything and stashed a couple of apples in my pocketses for the road. Then we had a brief talk from the organizers and an introduction to the support riders:


The Guy in the middle with the blue cap and glasses is Jonny Kendziera, proprietor of Jonny Cycles, and the redheaded guy on the right is Ahren Rogers of Folk Bicycles. Both are accomplished Madison bicycle builders, and along with all of the other volunteers whose names I don't know, gave very generously of their time.

Ran into quite a few people I knew and chatted until about half nine.


Next up was a tour of the Troy Community Farm and CSA. This is a 5-acre parcel that feeds over a hundred families here in Madison, all but 5 of which pick up their shares market-style (as opposed to having boxes delivered) once a week. There was a heavy dew on the grass, and I would later regret how wet my shoes got.

Westward

Between 8:30 and 9 a.m., the 350 riders started west. I had run into a friend at breakfast, so we rode together and it was good to catch up on old times. Our first stop was to help a fellow rider with a flat tire about 2 miles out. Fortunately, I had a spare tube, so I popped it into the tire and pumped it up, leaving its capable owner to put it back on the bike and get underway on his own. After leaving Madison, we covered about 15 miles of busy county roads, most of which fortunately had paved shoulders. Now near the back of the pack, our first official stop was the Dreamfarm, a small organic CSA near Cross Plains. On the menu was goat cheese on crackers. Delightful, but not enough. Down went the first stashed apple. Certainly a lovely place though, with plenty of goats and chickens.


And here are some of the chickens in action. They live in the little white coops, adjoined by penned-in areas where they feed. When the flora is exhausted in one area, the're moved to a place where it has recovered. You can see the pattern here on the far side of this little valley: Recovering foliage on the left, brown exhausted foliage in the middle, freshly moved enclosure on the right.


It's 11 a.m., and my feet are still wet. Yes, those are Subaru socks.

Vermont Valley

Next stop, the Vermont Valley Community Farm for lunch. This is a CSA that several of my coworkers belong to and I think it's one of the earliest in the area. A few riders had arrived before us.


And there was quite a chow line, but it was worth every minute of the wait.


For those of you keeping score, that's beef brisket, roasted squash, lettuce salad, sauerkraut, pickled beets with blue cheese dressing, fresh hardroll and rhubarb bar for desert. All organic and served on a ceramic plate. One of the things I liked about this event is that they used as little disposible stuff as was practical. Many thanks again to the Underground Food Collective and the volunteers that made this happen. It was unforgettable.

South, East and Back Home

After a brief look at the farm and a refill of the water bottles, it was time to get back on the road. Just under halfway, we rode south and climbed out of the valley. Plenty of hills for the return trip:


Pretty country out there. (click for big)


There was less traffic between Dreamfarm and Highway 78, but we were still overtaken by a milk truck or two.


Our last stop was the Primrose Community Farm, another small CSA just west of Madison. The gourmet chocolate had run out, but there was plenty of tasty passionfruit lemonade left, thanks to Pamplemousse Preserves. Stretched a tight hamstring and then pushed on for home.

At about the 50-mile mark, we entered the Madison metropolitan area and faced a long stretch of urban riding. I don't mind urban riding, but it made up close to a third of the total for this one. The route wasn't well marked for out-of-towners, and about halfway through the UW campus we ran into a trio from Rochester, Minnesota who looked pretty lost. I offered to lead them, and they took me up on the offer, following a winding native's route across the isthmus, through Maple Bluff and back to Troy Gardens. I heard little but "I never would have figured this out" for the remaining 8 miles.

Then I rode home. 72 miles total for a 60-mile ride.