Utopia Deferred...1

Okay, so, after dragging my ass for a couple weeks, my Salsa Casseroll frame and fork are on their less-than-merry little way back to Bloomington, Minneapolis, without benefit of Santa’s sled. Dropped off the spavined frame on a Sunday two weeks ago at Revolution Cycles² in Clarendon, only to get a call the following Monday morning asking for an invoice as proof of purchase. Dug up the invoice, delivered it later that week, then got another call later saying the fork was required. Sunday morning, I removed the crown race from the fork, tossed the fork into my Chrome Ivan, and pedaled over to Revolution to reunite torso and forelimbs one last time.

I’m hopeful for a full replacement, but this may be empty optimism. It appears there’s a very small indentation on the down tube that is bisected by the crack, which may or may not have been the genesis of the fissure. It’s so small and smooth that I’m inclined to believe it’s a crimp caused by the folding in of the tube edges against one another as the tube failed for whatever reason. That, or a very small, very soft stone leaped up somewhere sometime and left a very powerful impression. I’ve had the frame for about a year, but I didn’t ride it much until the Cross-check dropout broke sometime back in May. The Casseroll has maybe five months of daily riding on it. I’d put the mileage figure at just over 2K, with all of it on asphalt, save a lone 25 mile jaunt on the C&O Canal Trail. A curb-drop every now and then was the closest I came to ever riding that bike hard and I don't believe it saw even a single winter ride...bizarre.

So the frame and fork are on holiday travel, and I’m left to wonder what the outcome will be. It's all in Salsa's hands, now. If the decision goes in my favor, I’ll be singing their praises to anyone who will listen. If it goes against me, I’ll be looking for a frame and fork from another manufacturer. Regardless, I’ll report the outcome on this very blog. Stay tuned...

1. With apolgies to the late French social theorist Jean Baudrillard.
2. The fine blokes at Revolution Cycles in Clarendon have been nothing short of fantastic during this process. Thanks, gents!

Long Division...

I'm not your villain,
not your adversary,
I'm not your reason
to crack and divide.
tt's long division,
crack and divide.
—Fugazi, "Long Division"

Sometimes a creaking bottom bracket isn't a creaking bottom bracket.

You begin to understand this, to believe it, yesterday, on the morning commute, when a faint creaking sound suddenly interrupts the gap between songs on the Shuffle, in the interlude between, say, "Heart and Soul" and "Twenty-Four Hours". It happens when you stand and deliver, particularly on climbs. At first, you dismiss it as simply a rogue pack buckle banging idly against a seat stay. You ride on, hard, fast, passing other riders and staying past them, dropping curbs to advantage. The creaking continues.

A little over halfway to work, the sound is persistent enough that you pull over to inspect the cranks and chainring. Everything checks out fine. You hop back on the bike and pursue the rider who passed you while you were stopped. The sound continues and you dismiss it as the meaningless moaning of friction, the settling in of unsettled parts, feckless frottage between formerly friendly surfaces. In other words, a creaking bottom bracket.

You arrive at work and the work day passes.

The next morning, same damn scenario, all the way up until about a mile into the ride home, when you've had enough. You execute a couple of low trackstand hops just to see if everything will hold together under moderate force, to approach an unknown threshold—dammit, if something's going to give, it's going to give under your terms. The post-hop creaking is louder, worse. Something has changed. You look down at the bike between your legs and notice a dagger of missing paint crossing the down tube some six inches below its junction with the head tube. Uh oh.

Sometimes a creaking bottom bracket isn't a creaking bottom bracket.

Sometimes a creaking bottom bracket is a crack running more than half way around your down tube. And sometimes the creak isn't a creak, but a death knell. And this death knell tells you your beloved bike has gone the way of all things.*

You decide to ride it out and keep on eye on it as you do. What choice do you have? You ride gently, gingerly, as delicately as you can when the bike is a fixed gear and the juju against further damage, against a new set of sparkling, synthetic teeth—the luxury of coasting—isn't an option. The frame holds up, but the protests continue.

Halfway home, in the gloaming of a chilly fall evening, just after the deck-bridge, with its uneven planks over which your tires resound like the thumping of a rickety old roller-coaster, you stop to look closely at the damage, to analyze the entropy (the whole ordeal a quiet reminder of your own mortality; a crack is developing somewhere in you right this minute. Yessiree, old boy, keep playing, but know that I'm here, following the script. And though we all know what happens in the dark denouement, only I know how it happens). Lo and behold, the adolescent crack has grown into a full-blown adult. The bit of good steel between fissure ends is retreating, succumbing. A half-inch margin of safety is all that's left before all bets are off.

You walk it out, past Key Bridge and the artificial glow that floats like a halo over Georgetown, up the hill along Route 29 through Rosslyn. Riders pass, as silent as their shadows, red taillights pulsing like alien semaphores. One asks if you are okay, and the bitterness subsides, just a little, just enough. The march is slow, and the damn bike creaks at every fissure in the sidewalk. It's terminal now, this crack, as if it were ever anything else, and its slow, circular creep is nothing less than a fatal metastasis, irreversible, the triumph of evil over good.

You stop at Whole Foods to grab dinner and some compensatory beer, a Russian Imperial Stout (one of which you're enjoying right now). Ten minutes later, limping along Wilson Boulevard, you give in, capitulate, crack, like the frame of the bike you pull along beside you. Into the back of a cab van goes the spavined Salsa, and less than three miles and seven dollars later you're home.

You've got a Bianchi, a nice full-on Italian job—a geared bike (said with a sneer)—all set to go. You've got a Cross-check and the pieces to make it mobile laying about. You'll get to work tomorrow on two wheels, no worries. The streak will continue.

Sometimes too many bikes is just enough.


*I plan to contact Salsa about getting a replacement frame under warranty. This frame is less than a year old and I've ridden it for about half that time; I haven't abused it by any stretch of the imagination, though I have been commuting on it every day for several months. I'll post here about my experiences, for what it's worth. Damn! I'm bummed. I really like this frame!

Fillet-brazed Phoenix...

...and a bow to some Belgians.

Picked up my frame a week ago from Tom. Damn, he did one helluva nice job setting up my Cross-check with new dropouts and rack spools. The quality and craftsmanship this guy brings to his work are unrivaled. Have a look at the pix and you'll see what I mean—the added bits appear to have grown right out of the frame. Top-notch, period. Tom seems to be the type of builder who treats each frame—be it a custom build or a repair job—as if it belonged to him, and the expertise and attention to detail shine through in the finished work. Can't wait to rebuild the Beast and get it back in the line-up.

After settling up with Tom, I managed to work in a short ride down to Fell's Point, along with biking demi-legend and semi-local man about town, David Blum, who met me at Palermo's shop near Baltimore.

Once there, we hit a food joint whose grill was down ("WTF?" you ask...yeah, me, too), but which managed to keep a steady stream of locally-famous Resurrection Ale flowing into our glasses. We chatted a while with a drunk and demented drifter, a Texas ex-pat, who sat down at our table to smoke, drawing us deeper and deeper into his personal padded cell with every adjective he uttered, before presenting us with a rambling handwritten manifesto of sorts that he swore was "it". Sadly, it wasn't. We wished him luck, settled up, then pedaled over historic cobblestones [injured shoulder and wrist telling me in painful (re)morse code¹ that it's not quite time] to a quiet little placed called Max's. Those of you cursed with a grotesquely overdeveloped (i.e., highly compensatory; more Athena than Priapus, get it?) cerebrum will be quick to imagine what took place within this hallowed establishment. For the rest of you, here it is, plain and simple: beer flowed, bullshit followed; both of the highest order.

Good times, Dave, thanks.

Speaking of life, beer, the escape from the former via the latter, and bikes, don't forget to mark your social calendar for the Third Annual Bootlegger's Bliss event, tentatively scheduled for Satyrday, November 1st, of this very same year. New artwork, new pint glasses, same old sots. More details to follow soon. Get brewing!

(This post unknowingly inspired by the fine folks of Brewery Het Anker, makers of Gouden Carolus Hopsinjoor, the boldly bitter, bottle-fermented, beatific Belgian blond ale pot-de-fer that fired the neurons on a crooked trajectory from axon to dendrite to more or less get this post written. I salute you, oh faux friars from a faraway land...keep up the good work.)


1. (* - *) (* * -) (* *   *) (- * -) and (* *   * *) (*   *) (* * -), to be exact (American Morse Code).

Cross-Check Cosmesis...

Tom—cold-steel craftsman over at the eponymous Palermo Bicycles—has been hard at work on the comparatively unglamorous job of replacing the dropouts on my vintage Cross-Check.

With a new addition to his family, plenty of new frame orders (the guy makes some beautiful bikes!), and my add-on request for rack spool braze-ons¹, time has been short at the one-man, Baltimore-based operation. But the frame repair is now nearing completion. Finish-filing and sanding are done, and a coat of paint is the only task left before the frame is ready for pick-up². Timing is right; I need a change from the bent-over riding position of the more refined Casseroll, which is a bit more delicate over the oft-times pothole plagued streets of DC on the daily commute. Not to mention, the impending cooler weather means plenty of overnighter opportunities hovering on the horizon, and the Cross-Check is ideal for that kind of thing.

Tom ran into a bit of a snag during the repair process. Seems the dropouts Surly uses are Campy knockoffs—inexpensive copies of the Italian bits that still get the job done, but on a budget. Tom wasn't able to locate replacement knockoffs, so he went one better and procured some genuine Campagnolo parts, at no extra charge. Nice.

If you're on the prowl for a custom road or cross bike, or if you have a fractured frame that needs a little lovin', check out Tom's work and be impressed.



Photo credits: Tom Palermo.

1. These are standard features on new model Cross-Checks. They dispense with the need for the pipe-hanger set-up when attaching a pannier rack to the seat-stays.

2. Pix of the finished repair coming soon.

All's Weld that Ends Weld...

Okay, braze is the proper word here. Let me have my fun.

Tom Palermo of Palermo Bicycles (Baltimore, MD) has agreed to breathe new life into my old and disabled Cross-check. On a suggestion from the Outlaw, I recently shot an email to Tom and explained the otherwise grim situation. Tom replied within minutes, outlining a detailed plan of attack and quoting me a very reasonable figure for his services. The idea is to hack off the old dropouts at the chain- and seat-stay ends—a process that necessarily eliminates the original “dome ends” of the stays (fine with me, I think they’re an ugly style anyway)—prep the inside of the tube ends to ensure a good, clean, solid fitting (oxides kill), then brass-braze the new dropouts in place.

That’s the process, in a nutshell. With regard to the shape of the stay ends, I expect the result will be something like what’s shown in the pic above (minus the fancy "arrow" file-work on the dropout slot), which I pinched from the Palermo Bicycles flickr page. Of course, the new bits will likely be Campy-style knock-offs; the one pictured is a very nice Paragon Machine Works product.

The downside to all of this? Well, it’s not a downside, really, given that I’d have to scrap the frame if this option were not available to me: the dropouts will either be rattle-can flat black or raw, my choice. Regardless, once I have the repaired frame, I plan to tape off the stays and rattle-can the dropouts gloss black to match the fork. But let’s be honest, when your frame is “bean green” to begin with, it’s hard to pretend that esthetics are important. Function is paramount here.

Over the weekend, I dropped off the frame with Dave B. (thanks, man!) in Towson prior to biking into Baltimore to hit Max’s Taphouse. It appears Dave plans to deliver the frame to the shop this afternoon. Won't be long after that. And good thing, too. It's randonneuring season and I have a nice Tubus Cargo rack that's itching to get nasty with some panniers!

Death of a Surly...

Crack Kills!

Alas, the Beast—this Beast, my Beast¹—is no more. My Cross-check has checked out, given up the ghost, bought the farm, bit the dust, kicked the bucket, taken a dirt nap, shuffled off this mortal coil, run down the curtain, joined the choir invisible, cashed in its chips, hung up its spoon, had its ticket punched, sung its chant du cygne, earned its wings, gone tits up.

It is finished.

Damn, so many fine memories (*sniff*). Life is short—remember to hug your bike and tell it every day how much you love and appreciate it.

All right, maudlin sniveling and pathetic anthropomorphism aside, I did indeed love that bike. Over the course of three and a half years and some 18,000+ miles, it put out tirelessly, responding to rider and road and, yes, trail input like a, well, like the well-oiled machine it was. Ever so faithful to this prowling eye, so forgiving of my occasional infidelity, it rolled on proudly, almost haughtily, knowing all the while that however much I strayed, I'd always return to it. As dear to me in its many ways, it was, as Annabel Lee was to Edgar,¹ as Beatrice was to Dante¹, as Laureen was to Petrarch,¹ as Henriette was to Giacomo, hell, as a young Rimbaud was to Verlaine (though not in that way).

Okay, it was only a bike. But...

For two years running, it carried my ass and a pack or panniers into work almost² every weekday, indifferent to rain and sleet and snow and ice.

It toured the full length of the C&O Canal once, and revisited huge swatches of same, including two overnighters to Harper's Ferry and back, and half again as many White's Ferry Loops.

It was my girl for the Outlaw’s Dirt-track Date, graciously overcoming rocks and roots and logs and gravel with a sort of quiet dignity that discreetly masked my clumsy off-road fixie riding skills, and suffered with me through two 1903 Adventure Rides by the same host.

Years ago, when it was young, it endured an embarrassing “mystery” endo at the hands of its drunken owner and hobbled away with one smooth, shapely leg forever pushed in awkwardly toward the other at the pelvis, twisted irremediably (the replacement fork was black, and cost me a third of the price of the original frame and fork). You always hurt the ones you love.

It bounced back from a run-in with a DC cab with nary a scratch in the early hours of a Friday morning last December, when I recklessly, wantonly, heartlessly let my mind stray beneath the burden of too many beers, shuttling me safely home in the aftermath, as blind in its trust as I was in the intersection.

Like a cold-metal mistress, it tolerated my assignations, mere dalliances really, with other bikes—the prissy Casseroll, the lascivious Eros—and always, always welcomed me back, moustache bars reaching out as if to embrace me in forgiveness.

And it died. Today. Died a gear-virgin, fixed from cradle to grave, died quietly, unceremoniously, in the suburbs, on the Custis Trail, in the morning, while on a ride into work, for fuck's sake.

Farewell, my first fixie, my loyal friend. You will be missed...

"Rock-star tongue" action pic by Sir David Blum, Esq., illustrator par excellence, skilled rider, and all around good-natured gentleman.

1. With apologies to one Vladimir Nabokov, whose masterpiece Lolita juiced the muse, so to speak, for the footnoted bits in this little requiem. When you read a book four times, things begin to stick.

2. I say "almost" here because on some of those days, I rode another bike.