Team Lope Tyre Clubbe

almost as happy as actually having a miller high life right in my greazy paw. CHECK IT.

So, we’re finally biting the bullet and moving from our sweet, sweet loft in SF to a quiet, wooded part of Marin, in order to provide young weeZ with a safer, quieter, more pleasant place to grow. Our loft is filled with sharp edges and splintering materials and vertical hangars and deaths. So, with a heavy heart and copious optimisms, we are moving to a duplex right on the side of one of my bigger bike routes, very near my office. The bike commute thusly gets truncated from over an hour (across SF, through the Presidio, over the Golden Gate, and into Marin, with wind and wet and SUVs) to a tenth of that. One positive is being able to very casually ride to work on non-storm days, 5 days a week if desired. In shorts and a collared shirt over more functional cycling gear if I wish. I can noodle, I can mash, I can run errands, I can go home at lunch, I can spy on nannies, etc.

Going (the return home, technically)

Today I tested the commute at lunch, to meet a contractor about filling in a deathtrap in the rear deck.

The times were pretty good considering I was having some asthma, there was a HUGE amount of gusty gusts, and I started off right after eating. Factor in a lot less of some of that, and i bet the times can come down by another 30s-60s. Factor UP that I was riding my road bike and big gearing it, and that’s the fastest I can ride, most of the fixies will be somewhat slower. Still, according to my calculations, that’s a nice ride.

Coming (the ride to work, technically)

See, the thing we have about not wearing a uniform for riding, here at Team Lope (you don’t have to be in all spandex to ride a road bike, or in tight jeans to ride a fixie, unless you WANT to)… it follows that the same rules apply at the wrongRoom(tm)…

http://bicyclegirls.blox.pl/2009/08/Gosia.html

Poor Joe. His 718cyclery shop made the BSNYC blog again. You could say BS put the screws to his nipples, but that would be telling. It was, as usual, an awesome skewer. Any press is good press, Joe!

http://bikesnobnyc.blogspot.com/2009/09 … -your.html

This is the second time we’ve seen her here in the TLBG section…

Actually, if I read his comments on DA correctly, this is both his sweet, sweet ride and his lady love. According to my calculations, that would make Bumariffin’s garage the center of the universe.

http://bumariffin.deviantart.com/

Sometimes there’s a woman who is more smokin than the color of her rim, so much so that you look away and then can’t even remember what that rim LOOKED like, despite it being R3-approved.

http://jnsnp.wordpress.com/2009/09/04/j … -vs-jnsnp/

Step A: be awesome
Step 2: be nimble
Step D: be 1903

Easy!

http://jnsnp.wordpress.com/2009/08/30/cool/

I wish someone would design an alphabet based on bike parts, then inject it with so much awesome it burst from the page and lacerated my face with radness.

Oh wait! Emma Webb did.

i spent a good portion of saturday furiously working in the shop to organize all my sensitive shit, and it’s starting to really come along. this is the overview of the first of the major pieces of the project.

i’m a pretty organized dude by nature, and while mah shit was definitely more streamlined than a lot of other people’s, it still had major defects. i had parts scattered all over the fucking place in bins and baskets and boxes, and my tools were organized with "regular" tools on one pegboard and bike-specific tools on another. this worked for a little while, but i was becoming buried in parts and started to realize that i had a lot of uncompressed space on both pegboards, so i came up with a plan that i think will give me more room and better, easier access to anything i need when i’m down there.

the plan is to have all my PARTS on the larger of the two pegboards, and all the TOOLS, both "regular" and bike-specific, on the other. tools have a lot of overlap, so there’s really no way to easily specify between "regular" and bike-specific. and by putting parts up and out, it forces me to recognize the shit i have that i have no use for, and it empties out the aforementioned bins and baskets and boxes for other means of storage.

so here’s phase I, the parts wall…

(01) seats
(02) seat guts, for putting modern seats on vintage posts
(03) seatpost clamps, both modern and vintage
(04) seatposts, both modern and vintage
(05) pedals (track and SPD), cages, and straps
(06) hubs
(07) skewers
(08) track/BMX cranks
(09) track cog
(10) cables and cable housings (derailleur and brake)
(11) bottom brackets
(12) chains
(13) grips (BMX)
(14) handlebars (track, road, BMX, riser, moustache)
(15) stem shim (1-1/8" stem to 1" steerer tube)
(16) stems (quill, threadless, adjustable)
(17) forks (650, 20" lowrider)
(18) headsets (threaded and threadless)
(19) brake levers (name it, i have it)
(20) accessories (bottle cages, streamers, bell, fork crown rack)
(21) other (one-piece cranks, old chainwheels, old cassettes)

you’ll note that i’ve tried to keep related stuff near itself — seats are next to seatposts and seat guts and seatpost clamps, for instance. forks are near headsets and stems and bars. and so on. but there’s some breaks, even in that formula that need to be smoothed out.

and overall, there have already been, and will continue to be, further streamlinifications. i have some old brakes up there now, and i’ve taken down the one-piece cranks, added a stem, reorganized the accessories, et cetera, et cetera. but this is the general idea.

it’s gonna make my life so much easier when i’m in the shop and i’m fucking STOKED on it.

and this, only phase ONE!

Lung sent this over a few days ago, sort of as a sacrificial offering like the movie Dragonslayer, on account of the fact that hits about 33 of my aesthetic and conceptual preferences at once.

The village is saved!

http://charikichi.tumblr.com/post/18995 … hic-brazil