Mid-August, second one in August because there was no July Blahg
OH! Just last night we got samples of a nearly ready production SILVER front derailer. For me and most of us here, this is SUPER thrilling. I've been riding an early prototype for 4 months and have shifted it many hundreds of times, and it feels great, as good as it can feel or shift. We put this one one, and after Will test-rode it, he said, "You can shift from the small to the big ring so smoothly that it's like the middle ring isn't even there." I re-tested it and felt the same. This small-to-big shift isn't important, as shifts go; you'll never have to shift that much up that fast. But I think it suggests that something is going on good with the cage design.
Big fan of T-9 here.
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I'm not uptight about symmetry, tidiness, normalcy, expectedness, box-stockness, or nail polish touch-ups or decorations as the whim hits. I think it's fun, not a shame, to mess around with bikes, and Antonio thinks so to, and is ahead of me on many counts. A year ago or so he found these M4 threaded brass bolts with big knurled knobs and didn't do anything with them until today, when he did this to my Charlie. It takes the place of the wingbolts that come with the levers, and I'm not ready to switch all of my BES bikes to this rig, but I'm keeping it on this Charlie. It gives you (me) another option on how to shift, second image below, and doesn't interfere with the normal way.
Wool and brass. Come on! How fantastic can bike insanity ridiculousness get? I call it insane and ridiculous in as part of my predictive preemptive protection plan. The combined look of the felted wool and the knurled brass will disturb some people and should have come with a trigger warning, but
If you need to tighten the lever, it's 10 percent easier than tightening the normal wing-bolt, and you can do it in half the time—one second instead of two. You COULD mark the face with a cross or clock numbers or just a single symbol at 12:00 so you can tell at a glance whether you even need to. The knurled brass under my thumb makes me want to maintain that contact longer than necessary, and this finger-thumb position, even without shifting, is totally acceptable.
I know you think I'm losing it, but the POINT is that modern bicycles are extremely boring and predictable and all the same, and YOUR bike doesn't have to be. When you ride every day every day every day, you tend to loosen up and welcome and find ways to create these details and quirks on your bike. Antonio found the brass bolts online; I'll ask him to find the source, but anybody with a machine shop could make them. I doubt there's a patent. But then what? It's no business opportunity.
The donut is brass, we get them from McMaster-Carr, and sell them here. They're one of those "unnecessary brass appointments" that tend to sweep the bicycle world, and where's the harm? We get them from McMaster-Carr.
Here are the specs for the other. Imagine them in copper, aluminum, bronze, titanium...I don't know where Antonio found these, but he's had them a year and just put them on my bike yesterday.
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Here's a new helmet. A friend is getting one, it has some EPS in it, but the site is vague about what else it has that is softer and guards against Alzheimers-producing concussions better than EPS does. It seems to have two-stage protection.
It uses the old woodpecker skulls technology, and they're not the first to try to monetize nature. When my buddy gets it I'll know more. It's $375, so I'm not going to get one for educational purposes.
The whole business of body protection, whether it's ibuprofen or bike helmets, is I guess like any business that is torn between sincerely wanting to help and sincerely needing to be profitable. It takes a lot to make a commercial product, and in the case of helmets you need molds for the shell and insides--that could be $40,000 right there. And testing machinery and all that may entail. You need straps. And then you look at the market and current supppliers and see that all these big and sometimes small companies, and so you go to China for it all, and a Chinese maker is going to demand payment up front and its MOQ (minimum order quantity) will be 20,000 helmets or so, and then essentially you'll have just another EPS helmet like everybody else, and the U.S. bicycle market is really in bad shape these years
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In 2007 Gary Boulanger interviewed me for the then-young Bike Radar. Gary worked for us for a while, had his own bike company for a few years (GAANSARI), worked for Ritchey for a while, is a great writer, is hilarious, and he just sent me this, which I'd forgotten about. If you read it you'll see that none of my opinions have changed. It seems like yesterday. The mystery wheel size is 603 (mm), the nominal tire and rim diameter. It wasn't dumb then and it wouldn't be dumb now, but it's a reach still, and we have other fish to fry.
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It's BSNYC. Yes, Eben likes our bikes, I'm glad of it, but that's not the point here or ever. He writes better than anybody else and what nobody else can or does, and it is hilarious and entertaining and educational, and I read it every morning before the NYT.
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If you need to tighten the lever, it's 10 percent easier than tightening the normal wing-bolt, and you can do it in 1/2 the time. Of course, that means one second instead of two, so there's only so much raving one can do about that.
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lkjljlkjlj
Amazing catalog, the art, illustrations, layout, everything.
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Two catalogs that turned me all around were the 1972 Chouinard (now Patagonia) catalog, and the mid-'70s Rivendell Mountain Works catalogs. Both. They've been my models ever since, and entirely due to my writing, our catalogs have not measured up.
Here are some example pages. I still have them:
Page one of 3 or 4 on the Rivendell Mountain Works tent:
Pages 2 and 3 of the '72 Chouinard catalog, which essentially scolded and educated the climbing community on the importance of not wrecking rocks...and had good gear for climbing.
I think the description is great and I know it's accurage. I bought a pair used and here I am in Yosemite on the top of, I don't know, maybe Middle Cathedral Rock? I still have and SHOOT that Olympus OM-1 camera. Our MUSA Baggies are inspired by these corduroy knickers. I had the long ones, and our Baggies are long. That's why. My sweater is all wool, so there.
These weeks we are working on a 2027 catalog. It will be paper, probably color—although the internet has made color paper catalogs less necessary—and I'm all over the map about the style and quality of the graphics that I want in it. It won't be as consistent as the Sears, Chouinard, or RMW catalogs, but it's not because it doesn't have the hours into it.
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OK.
G