Being seen on the road is important. Cars weigh more than cyclists and it is likely not to end well for the cyclist if there is a collision. As I wrote in my 7 Non-Bike Products Essential for Bike Commuting post, it takes 16 batteries to power all of the lights I use on a night commute.
While in Washington D.C. recently I stumbled upon a bike that definitely caught my eye -
It took me a minute to figure out what I think is going on with this. The sunglasses in question have lights at the end of the temple pieces. I think they are probably meant more for runners to use at night, but this hacker seems to have tied the glasses to the back to serve the purpose of a rear light.
This is an interesting interpretation of "I wear my sunglasses at night."
It is hard to follow general bike news these days without reading about passionate opinions related to bike lanes. For the most part, when bike lanes are added it seems to anger a large number of people who complain that the bike lanes cause more problems than they solve. Passionate individuals will write editorials to complain or make YouTube vidoes that garner over 4 million hits to make a humorous point.
The way most bike lanes are set up in NYC makes them very unappealing to ride in. Just the other day I passed this great example of what you are most likely to see if you spend anytime trying to actually use a bike lane. It might be hard to decipher everything exactly so an explanation is posted below the picture -
There is a delivery truck that I guess was trying to respect the bike lane by parking in traffic (black truck). If a cyclist did want to utilize the lane it would be a tight fit. The hazard lights were on and the black truck was stopped, causing the guy in the white truck to try to get around him which in turn pissed all the drivers in the other lanes off off who honked at him thus causing uncomfortable amounts of noise for pedestrians. Oh, and you can see that the guy in the white truck blocked cross traffic (the light is red) so there are a bunch of pissed off drivers wanting to cross honking their horns as well.
A police officer on a horse is in the bike lane issuing a citation to the delivery truck (see the light blue helmet of the officer). Meanwhile the delivery guy is sitting on a keg of beer in the bike lane.
Sadly, it is very difficult to ride in a bike lane for more than two blocks at a time in NYC without some sort of hazard like this and when you do ride in the bike lane there is a constant stream of pedestrians darting out unexpectedly from the gaps in between the cars to jay walk. Taking all of this into account, I find it more appealing to ride in traffic most of the time, especially because I can go fast enough not to interrupt traffic.
There are different ways to respond to motorists that do not respect bike lanes and reader Erik sent along an interesting tactic used by a mayor in Lithuania.
A word of advice: The next time you're cruising the streets of Vilnius, Lithuania in your luxury ride and are suddenly beset by the urge for a cup of kvass and/or a slice of honey cake, don't just pull over and leave your vehicle illegally parked in a bike lane. Seriously. Mayor Arturas Zuokas and, we imagine, Lithuanian cyclists, aren't amused by such antics.
While some municipalities might be content to leave tickets on the windshields of bike-lane blocking scofflaws, the good mayor recently realized owners with Mercedes-Benz, Ferrari, and Rolls-Royce keys in their pocket not be dissuaded by such minor punitive action, so he decided a better parking enforcement tool might just be an armored personnel carrier.
You see the result to start, but watch the whole video for the details.
If readers out there have bike lane pictures, stories, commentary, etc. feel free to email us.
When I mentioned that I spotted a bamboo bike back in early June I was contacted by several people with bamboo bike experience. One of the people that contacted me was a free-lance radio reporter and podcast producer based in NYC who covers the DIY scene for NPR. If you are interested you can listen to Jon Kalish's DIY stories for NPR at http://jonkalish.tumblr.com.
All of the text below is credited to Jon.
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On a cool weekday morning in the Fall of 2009 I accompanied two of the guys who were running Brooklyn's Bamboo Bike Studio on a bamboo harvest in a dense grove near New Brunswick, N.J. Justin Aguinaldo and Sean Murray told me to bring my small Japanese pull saw for the outing. Aguinaldo used a caliper to find bamboo stems that were the right thickness. When he found stems the right size, he tapped the bamboo to make sure it wasn't too soft.
"If the bamboo's too watery, it's not as dense and it's not as strong," Aguinaldo explained.
At the time Aguinaldo made his living as a bicycle messenger. Murray was a former schoolteacher whose voice mail greeting used to note of the fact that he was living the dream of making bikes with his friends. Murray found bamboo patches by reading online gardening forums. Apparently, a lot of people start growing bamboo as a decorative plant — but then it gets out of hand.
"There's a kind of urgency brought on by the protests of their neighbors," Murray said.
The two bamboo bike makers cut the green bamboo stems in 3-foot and 5-foot lengths and fill the trunk of their small sedan before heading back to their bike studio in Brooklyn. The studio no longer harvests bamboo itself and instead buys dried bamboo from a supplier. But it was big fun cutting that stuff down in the wild.
I made a bike last fall and it was two full days being mostly on your feet for close to 12 hours a day. My advice to anyone who decides to shell out $932 to build a bike is wear clothes you don't mind trashing. You inevitably get epoxy on your jeans and they're just not the same.
The bike's joints are wrapped in a stringy, ribbon-like carbon fiber that soaks up the epoxy. It looks like it's held together with black electrical tape after the epoxy dries overnight. You spend much of the second day filing the "lugs" smooth. Craig Calfee, the pioneer of bamboo bike-making and high-end custom bike maker outside of Santa Cruz, California, wraps his joints in hemp. You got that right: hemp joints!!!
Marty Odlin, co-founder of the Bamboo Bike Studio, says: "Everyone who leaves the studio says, 'Wow, my bike is my favorite object now.' They have such a connection to this thing that came together under their own hands. They may not come here to have that connection to their bicycle, but that's what they leave with."
"There is a concern that bamboo bikes become this fad," he says. "And we could sell a whole bunch of them for a whole lot of money to a whole bunch of people very quickly and then nothing after that, right? It becomes a fad and dies out. We feel like we're building something with more enduring value than that."
The bikes themselves really last; Odlin and his two partners have all ridden thousands of miles on New York City streets on their bamboo frames.
The Bamboo Bike Studio has drawn amateur bike builders from as far away as California and England. Alexis Mills, a bicycle messenger in Ottawa, and his 61-year-old mother, a doctor, came to Brooklyn and made bikes.
Back in Canada, Mills quickly found that people who ride around on bamboo bikes get a lot of questions about their wheels.
"The ride itself is really smooth," Mills says. "It eats up a lot of the vibrations of the road. I wondered if it might be too flexible or too mushy, but it's not. It's really nice to ride."
There is now a Bamboo Bike Studio up and running in San Francisco under the able stewardship of Justin Aguinaldo, who grew up in Mendocino County in Northern California. Piper Alldredge, who had been running the San Francisco space, is now back in New York running the Brooklyn studio. They also sell kits to make a bamboo bike on your own but my guess is that the kits are best put together by someone wth major DIY chops. The Brooklyn space is now offering the opportunity to assemble your own bike with a steel frame.
One the of the most simple yet neglected forms of bike maintenance is chain lubrication. Coating your chain occasionally with a lubricant has to be the easiest of all bike tasks yet I am amazed at the number of squeaky bikes I pass on a daily basis.
This is probably enough to make any novice leave the store without buying anything and return home to coat their chain with the can of WD-40 they have on the shelf back in the garage - exactly what you should not do as described by the Bicycle Tutor.
As far as the consequences, well no matter what you slather your chain with, if you are not careful you can coat your clothing with a substance that is not likely to come out. And if you get a rear flat or your chain comes off the necessary maintenance can result in hands covered in grime - which is why I tie a sock to my bike, insert hand and problem solved.
But what if you did not have to worry about lubing your chain because you had no chain at all? We recently were contacted by the folks over at Belt Drive Bike. The goal is to achieve a smooth, quiet, and grease free ride with the use of a belt and internal hub.
iPhone-ophiles will surely be interested because the belt drive has its very own iPhone app. The following accompanied the email we received:
Tuning your belt drive bike just became a lot more fun, thanks to the new Carbon Drive Bicycle Calculator from Gates. Just pluck your belt like a guitar string, and then use the microphone of your iPhone to adjust the frequency / tension.
The app is designed to help you tune your belt drive bike for key parameters, such as tension, speed ratio, center distance, belt length, sprocket size, and mounting options. With the addition of the catalog, which is included with the app, you are also able to compare one bike with another. You can find bikes to compare on beltdrivebike.com as well as additional information about the app. (www.beltdrivebike.com/iphone-app)
Having ridden with a chain my entire life I would be curious to hear from mechanics who have thoughts on the concept of a belt as well as those that might have personal experience. Those with opinions or experience please feel free comment or email us. And if you have a favorite lube for your chain feel free to chime in on that topic as well.
I always am fascinated by those that find an alternate or second use for a common item. Probably the most common example is the addition of a bottle opener to an item. But then again, what can't be used as a bottle opener? Rarely does a month seem to pass when I do not see a bottle opener incorporated into another product. Take a 686 Belt I own; not only does it have a bottle opener, it also has both a flat head and Phillips screw driver, and 8/10/11mm wrench.
It allows for spoke and various bolt adjustments, and of course has a bottle opener as well. And if you get a flat? Well they created a card that is also a patch.
Supremely cool in my opinion. If you have run into a common product that has been modified to serve a bike related purpose, feel free to comment or email us. And if you have created your own, even better!
How sweet would it be to ride through a patch of glass and not worry about a flat? There are many sharp objects that can ruin a good ride in the streets of NYC. It is always a bummer when I realize a sharp object has stabbed through my tire and punctured my tube. But what if you had a tube that could take a sharp object in and allow you to keep riding?
Reader Gray contacted us and has an interesting story about a bike he bought with tires meant to be puncture resistant. All text and pictures credited to Gray.
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I recently bought an old road bike and found that the vale stems were missing yet the tires seemed to be inflated; on closer inspection the previous owner had somehow stuffed nearly solid rubber tubing inside. The ride was a bit soft thus I removed the rear, so far the only one I was able to get out, I do feel that you would never need to replace it until the tire wore out.
However that is where the problem may come in; the difficulty of changing a worn out tire and getting it back on. I feel that I may need to cut off the front tire when it does come time but only time will tell.
#1- This shows that the tires were fit 'professionally' with a puncture proof material.
#2- Here is the puncture proof tubing; it amounts to a thick rubber tube of approximately 4 inches around but really it would depend on the tire size that you would like to fit it to this came off a 26" and 1 3/8 wheel.
#3- Shows that the tubing is hollow and does give some when one is on the bike. I tired to puncture it just to see how tough the stuff was and I was unable to stab anything I had through it.
#4- Just insert the tubing into tire and do as you would a normal inner tube; no worries about pinches or being careful and you will need to force it on with all your might as well as any levers you have handy.
A word of caution is that it is very difficult to get the tubing in and on the rim you have no space to spare as you do when you deflate a tube as likewise when trying to change tires it is nearly impossible to remove because the tubing takes up so much space without much give. The ride is somewhat softer than a normal inner tube but if you are in a place with a lot glass in the streets or other tire puncturing devices then this is a suitable option.
While wandering the streets lately in search of sustenance I ran into a couple of fender hacks. The streets of NYC are just plain nasty. Each summer the city smells like baked dog pee. Last weekend the heat index was like 112 and oh was the smell of the city disgusting.
I am all in favor of pets, but I am not sure I am in favor of 283,000 dogs peeing and doing their business all over the Manhattan sidewalks. Dog ownership makes me think back to business lectures in college about externalities. For those who slept through business or never took it, an externality is:
. . . a cost or benefit, not transmitted through prices,incurred by a party who did not agree to the action causing the cost or benefit.
I am sure 283,000 dogs have an economic benefit in the city, but they do not have an olfactory benefit. If you possess the sense of smell, the cost of mass dog ownership is quite real in NYC.
So I ride with fenders because when it rains the city is basically once giant puddle of refuse. Dog pee, antifreeze, oil, gas, coffee, etc. The last thing I want is that soup getting all over me. Some people in the city do use fenders that are primarily meant for mountain biking and do not provide "full" coverage. An example is below above the tire, but notice the fender at the end of the arrow -
It is similar to the rear fender, but jammed in to the area between the tire and seat post tube to help deflect NYC soup.
A short time later I saw this one -
With this one I am not sure if the fender in question was designed for this purpose, or if it is a rear or front fender being repositioned. Those more knowledgeable of mountain bike equipment feel free to chime in.
Every now and then individuals or companies send along products for us to review or put to use. We appreciate this and recently the following items have arrived in my mailbox -
Thank you to those that have sent the items and I will work them into posts soon. It has been a busy summer so my reviews have been slightly delayed. If you are an individual or company that wants to collaborate with us, feel free to contact us.
Biking can mixed with a lot of other great things, like music. My favorite musician of all time is a hacker. Eddie Van Halen was not satisfied with standard guitars so he hacked his own. One day I have thought about painting a bike like his iconic hacked Frankenstrat. Of course Eddie chose to sue Nike for desiging a shoe with a similar theme so maybe I should just continue to randomly cover my bike in stickers.
While I pretty much mangle music on my electric guitar, reader Brian is part of a band that plays real music, and the band is really into bikes. Brian sent along the following -
I play upright bass in the Americana band, The Steel Wheels. We embark on a musical cycling tour every year and this year is approx. 550 miles, 11 days, and 10 shows pulling all our own gear, merchandise, clothes, etc. without a support vehicle.
Our friends at Tree Fort Bikes suggested I send you in my mods to my Burley Flatbed trailer so that I can pull my upright bass around.
Sometimes those interested in hacking and DIY projects get a bad name. The particular name I am thinking about is "cheapskate." In my opinion, just because you do not want to buy an off the shelf product does not make you cheap. Hacking can give you a sense of accomplishment, allow for the expression of creativity, and put unused goods into service.
Reader Alex sent along a hack that is half DIY and half off of the shelf. He uses the word cheapskate, but I'll use the word frugal =)
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I wanted a canvas seat bag like I've seen on the nice fancy commuter bikes. Like any cheapskate, I didn't want to shell our the cheese for one so I found a $12 military bay on EBAY. It was the right size as well as canvas and even black.
Originally I thought I would modify it to hang from the seat somehow. It turns out with a simple piece of Velcro holding the straps together, I can hang the bag right off the back of my seat. Easy on and off. I can stow a lock and much more. And when the bike is locked up, I can just take the bag with me.
