My New Year's Promise for 2008 was to ride my bikes farther than I drive our car.
Mileage totals, 30 November: Biking, 4608 km, 2864 miles Driving, 6080 km, 3779 miles
This doesn't look so good. In order to reach my goal I'd need to bike 50 km a day every day up to the end of the year and not use the car at all -- to pick up a Christmas tree or buy food or bring a carload of equipment to the electron storage ring for a study.
Even so, its been an interesting year. I started taking bike maintenance seriously -- it's a lot more fun to ride when your bike's in shape. I discovered that you can do without a car pretty well most of the time. The kids bike to school and we bike to work, and most of the trips to get groceries are by bike.
There are times when it is hard to do without a car though. We visit my wife's Aunt a few times a year, she's in her 80s and lives alone. We drove up to Stockholm to see my wife's parents this summer, and that one trip was 25% of our annual use. And sometimes I can't avoid driving to work -- doing this once is worth two weeks of biking, since most of the distance of the commute is by train.
In fact, most of the time when I drive I am not alone in the car. Like we were four to Stockholm, so I should subtract 1500 km * (1 - 0.25) = 1125 km. Similar trips to see Aunt give credit of 500 km. If I wanted to I could add some bike miles since I've noticed that most of the time I am biking into the wind, not to mention bonus kilometers for heavy driving mist, frozen slush and full body splashes from light duty trucks.
Adjusted mileage totals, 30 November: Biking, 4608 km, 2864 miles Driving, 4455 km, 2769 miles
Our family took a vacation in Holland last week. Some of us vacationed anyway as the Swedish schools were having fall break. I was officially on duty and gave some lectures at the University of Utrecht, and spent what time I could with my family. We stayed at a youth hostel in the countryside and rented bikes to get around. My camera went on strike so all I have to show you is these fuzzy cell phone photos.
Here's one of the University buildings. Colors are popular in Holland. The plastic trays they used at the airport to X-Ray your pocket change used this same combination.
Holland is a cyclist's paradise. Every road has a bike lane. The Dutch favor an upright cycling posture, as I imagine the handlebar-moustached Sturmey Archer himself rode.
Here is a canal in Utrecht, a beautiful city. Back in the day merchants would load their goods out of barges through these doors, and then sell them through the shop at street level.
Utrecht has one of the best post offices I have seen in a long time. Public buildings like this (train stations also catch my eye) are a high water mark of civilization. We don't seem to be building things like this anymore?
We hung out in the countryside, biked into Utrecht and one day took the train in to Amsterdam. After our walk through central Amsterdam I can only conclude that the favorite native sons are not Rembrandt, Escher or Vermeer but Marley and Guevara. I carried our younger son on my shoulders and we sang Twinkle Twinkle Little Star at the tops of our lungs through the streets of the red light district on our way from Rembrandt's house (worth the trip) to the train station. Yes they have women in the windows. You can smell wacky weed and the shops sell hash lollipops. I don't think much of what was going on registered with either of our sons, I imagine their innocence protects them. When we sing Twinkle Twinkle, in the last line, 'How I wonder what you are', you have to say the 'are' like a pirate would, 'Arrrgh'.
I don't know if you can see this so well but it is a triple-decker bicycle parking ramp, located outside the central station in Amsterdam.
At no time did I see any land that was more than two feet above the waterline. The waterline is easy to find because there are ditches, canals and rivers everywhere. Somebody explained that they have discovered how to make a watertight lining so some new houses are built with basements, but the problem is that these houses can float up out of the ground. The countryside is lousy with mallards.
All these Minneapolis cycling types are twittering about the Xtracycle, a device that mounts into the rear of the frame and lengthens an ordinary bike, allowing you to carry things like lumber or four bags of groceries.
I also have a high tech device that allows me to carry four bags of groceries using an ordinary bicycle; it's called a bungee cord. It works like this. Put a big bag of groceries in the manbasket (this bag had four large milk cartons, yoghurt, potatoes). Pass the bungee through the handles of the three other bags twice and tie in a square knot. Finally, set these bags on top of the first bag. Ready to ride.
Igor Kenk, owner of The Bicycle Clinic, was arrested for bike theft and was eventually found to have 2,396 stolen bicycles. Kenk had stashed the bikes in 10 garages he rented around town, and in his house. The police also found cocaine, crack cocaine and about 15 pounds of marijuana.
There are different theories about what Kenk planned to do with the bikes. Some say he was hoarding bikes to prepare for a severe oil shortage. Kenk had a scrap metal dealer's license, so he may have been waiting for another spike in metals prices before melting down the bikes.
Kenk lived in a rented house in Yorkville, a nice suburb of Toronto, with his partner Jeanie Chung, a concert pianist. Chung faces charges for possession of stolen goods and drugs, and turned herself in after returning from performances in Banff.
You see, my dear wife complains sometimes about all the bikes I have been collecting (I am up to 3, but one of them is in a different country), and now she is afraid I will end up like this. I said, If I'm going to end up like that you'd better start practicing, it's a long way to Banff.
The bicycle is the most efficient machine ever created: Converting calories into gas, a bicycle gets the equivalent of three thousand miles per gallon. -Bill Strickland
Cycling is like church. Many attend, but few understand. -Jim Burlant
I rode my restored racing bike to the store this afternoon. When I came out with the groceries a distinguished man wearing spectacles said that he had been admiring my bike. He particularly liked the basket and asked me where I bought it. Now I know some of you think real men don't put baskets on their bikes but I'd take a basket over a pannier any day-- backpack and groceries fit, and it doesn't get ripped, frayed, faded or dirty. I take three big bags of groceries back with me-- one in the basket and two tied together with twine, hanging one on each side of the basket like saddle bags. Just listen to that word pannier, French for basket! Foof.
This afternoon I got the chain rings reassembled and the crank arms remounted, and this evening I cleaned the front deraillleur, oiled the cables and put the wheels on.
Here are some 'before' pictures. I just got back from the first ride, and a very good ride it was. The bike is light and fast, straight and silent, everything I was hoping it would be.
I need to adjust the rear brake and replace the chain-- the new gears are arguing with the old stretched chain. And finish touch up paint. And true the rear wheel a tad-- need to read up on that.
I take the train to work and usually I use the time to read or write on my computer, and one or two days a week I sit with my buddy Anders. He thought this photo of the new freewheel/gear cluster looked like an Escher drawing.
So I was griping about all the things I have to do and Anders says, you should really just schedule a meeting with yourself, then you could get some work done. And if someone asks to meet you, you can wisely check your calendar and say you have a meeting, or you can say, well, I'll have to move this other meeting. So I booked a meeting with myself Friday morning and actually got a lot done.
The cycle rebuild is going pretty well-- maybe it'll be done inside of a week. I managed to scrub the chain rings in the kitchen sink this morning without getting caught.
The pedal crank arms are held in place by 15 mm bolts recessed inside a threaded hole with a 21 mm diameter. Normal 15 mm socket wrench heads have an outer diameter of 22 mm, so they won't fit, and you can't get enough purchase on the bolt trying to squeeze in a crescent wrench straight on. I asked in a bike shop and they said they could special order a tool for me for a small fortune. No thanks I said. So this morning I took a millimeter off the outside diameter of the socket head with a grinding wheel, took it into the workshop and got the crank arms off in no time.
Left to do: Clean and repack pedal bearings and headset, finish touch up painting, remount wheels, clean chain, rewrap handlebars, road test.
Upon inspection, everything looks to be in terrible condition. I am amazed the bike worked. It will be equally amazing if it works when I am finished rebuilding because I haven't done this sort of thing before. I am learning as I go. Your advice is welcome.
Something gnarly happened to the hub. A section of the inner freewheel seems to have cracked off in an apocalyptic event leaving deep craters in the axle spacer. If you look at the picture you'll see that the inner wheel where the pin spanner should mount is cracked. I didn't see any future for this freewheel and decided to simply cut it off. A hacksaw got me nowhere so I got out the angle grinder. If you're using an angle grinder and not having fun then you have stepped off the golden path, my friend.
I could look at old parts like this all day. If I fixed bikes for a living I probably wouldn't feel like this.
The old grease was a mixture of Mississippi mud, grit and goose crap. Cleaned it out. Here are the bearings sitting in new grease, like plums in a Christmas pudding.
So, I decided that I needed a bike to fix up, to go along with my Glenn's New Complete Bicycle Manual. Nothing against internal gears, I use them every day, but my new bike needed to have derailleur gears (and fenders, and drop handlebars and a package rack). I found an add on the internet advertising a 'Japanese Racer', went to have a look and ended up with this bike:
The story is that one of Sweden's leading decathalonists rode the bike from Italy to Stockholm. Shortly thereafter he went to a competition in Brazil and passed away. Then the bike sat in a garage for 30 years. Do you believe it? I did.
The bike has a Sun Tour alpha 3000 derailleur. I just finished cleaning the dirt out of the pulleys-- this dirt took me back to my childhood, except back then I didn't clean it out.
It's an 18-speed.
I removed the 70s-era generator and lamps since I believe in batteries. The full renovation will include new tubes and tires, a new seat and handlebar tape, and a full tune-up and lube.
My commuting bike has hard gears. The bike has a 4-speed Shimano hub, fenders, straight handlebars, rack and basket on the back. I would always be in first gear, and only sometimes make it to second. Never third or fourth. And then I read Sheldon Brown's essay on gear shifting. I couldn't write it better than he does, so I won't try. This article inspired me to change the gear on the rear wheel from an 18 tooth to a 20 tooth gear. This change turned out to be pretty simple and it makes all the difference-- I am now using all four speeds and zipping up hills and against the wind, basket filled with books, papers and a computer. The twenty tooth gear cost less than a gallon of gas.
Buoyed by this experience I decided to take on the three speed hub (Shimano Inter 3) on F's bike. He's been complaining about the resistance, and the coasting click sound was really loud. He said it felt like the brake was always on-- poor guy bikes 2.5 km to school every morning. If you lifted the rear of the bike and spun the wheel it would go around once, maybe twice. So, I took the hub apart, laying the nuts and retaining rings on a paper towel in sequential order, and rinsed out everything I could find using chain cleaner. The grease in the hub was amazingly dirty. Re-greased everything inside and out and put it together again. It is a minor miracle that the hub still worked after this, and better than before.
Today I will take apart the headset on my Copenhagen bike.
One thing I like about biking is that it puts you right in the middle of energy efficiency. I just put a speedometer on my bike and you can see it right there on the display. On a little hill I might reach 20 mph, and on a good hill, 25 or more. Against the wind on my way home uphill I am fighting to keep my speed at 8 mph. Sometimes when the light turns green I will sprint out ahead of a car and see how long I can hold it. If things go well, maybe about half a block, but the cars always win. Me, on a featherweight cycle held up on 1/16" spokes, gets beat by a superheavyweight automobile belching yards and sections of exhaust. There's a lot of talk about environmentally friendly cars, and about how you can change your driving style to save fuel, but the basic fact is that the fuel economy of vehicles is dirt-poor. Today's Ford F150 pickup truck gets the same mileage as a Model T, and if you drive green (avoid jackrabbit starts!), it doesn't change the fact that it takes a lot of fuel to roll around in that huge metal box.
Just ran across this graph showing the price of coal.
Milk carton joke. Why does the cow have a bell? The horns don't work.
As you may know my New Year's resolution was to bike farther than I drive a car this year. Over the weekend I twirled my pencil and figured out that up to now I have biked slightly farther than I have driven, 1254 km for the bike and 1240 km for the car. Then I had to drive to work yesterday to move some equipment and go to a meeting, and ended up with an additional 200 km on the odometer. Its going to take a few weeks of pushing pedals to make up for this one day. Cars just go so far you know, and so easily. As usual my wife and kids are way ahead of me-- they take their bikes everywhere. I think I should get a mileage discount for the times I am driving them.
Copenhagen Cycle Chic notes that women in Copenhagen with a certain brand of Italian shoe always ride old Rayleigh 3-speeds. I can report seeing many of these bikes on the road being ridden by fashionable women on their way to work.
We had a green Christmas this year and a somewhat white Easter. My in-laws were visiting, and I could spend spare moments reading Glenn's New Complete Bicycle Manual. This book has answered all my questions and I give it five stars out of five. Equipped with new and useful facts I set to work on our family's four bicycles. It took three and a half days and many rags to adjust cups and cones, clean chains, replace brake pads and lubricate everything in sight. I remodeled the workroom a few months ago for bikes and can report that I wish I had more space. I finished my weekend bike repair jag by putting new training wheels and a new inner tube on A's bike.
While going through my own bike I found that the grease in the front bearing was so dirty and dry that I could lift it out with tweezers. Glenn's allowed me to disassemble the bearing, clean it, pack with grease, replace bearings and adjust the cones to give a smooth ride. I chickened out and did NOT replace the lubricant in my Shimano Nexus Inter4 internal gear hub, after reading in Glenn's and Sheldon Brown's Most Excellent Bike Mechanics Website that the two main reasons for failure in these otherwise sturdy and dependable hubs are people who take them apart, and people who use the wrong lubricant. I am hoping that by cleaning the filth off the external cable levers and by cleaning the cables that the hub will work better in cold weather, like we'll be having this next week; the winds are in retrograde giving us Arctic air from Siberia.
You can learn a lot about a person by cleaning and adjusting their bike. For example the weekend's project confirmed my suspicions that my wife spends more time riding off-road, through dirt, sand and leaves, than our 11-year old son.
Today is our 18th wedding anniversary. It was an unusually early and warm spring that year, as our best man can attest. Today I gave my wife a miniature orchid (she has so many orchids that there's no space for a normal sized one) and some roses, and she gave me a bicycle computer, which I have always wanted but would never buy for myself.
While talking with my in-laws, I figured out how to build a lego car driven by a battery and motor. I excused myself and built this:
It was an instant hit with the kids. We also got some time to play with the electronics experiment kit and build a telegraph and an electrical motor (see below). My son sent a message in Morse code: 'Can I play computer games?' 'Eat your food' I replied.
My New Year's resolution for 2008 is to ride bike farther than I drive car. Here's the stats so far:
Car: 625 miles Bike: 510 miles (Train: about 3000 miles)
What put me in the red is that I had to drive to work three days with lab equipment, 45 miles each way. But my goal is still within reach, I just have to keep the car in the garage and the bike between my legs. And the weather is looking up.
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In May there is a 'Ride your bike to work' competition and we are recruiting velocophiles for our team, The Flying Aerosols. I didn't make the name. My role is to organize a bike-fix rally where a few of us will bring tools and rags and adjust chains and seats and spokes, and then we'll go for a ride. They have a competition to see which team bikes the farthesetand there is a lottery-- last year I won some color pencils.
I'm from Minnesota and moved to Lund Sweden a few years ago. I teach chemistry at a University in Denmark and get to work by bike and train. We have two kids.
