Team Lope Tyre Clubbe

so i took my first trip with a coupled bike and wanted to offer thoughts, suggestions, and a general idea of what it’s like to do so.

the bottom line? HEAVEN. there’s nothing like checking a bike into the belly of a plane and not being charged any more for it than you would be for any item that you check. some airlines still allow you to check your first bag for free. most do not. i paid $25 on virgin america to check it, each way. but the upside, and the whole point of coupling a bike in the first place, is that whether or not your particular airline charges you for checking bags, they ALWAYS charge you for checking a bike in a bike-sized box. most airlines have a specific charge for bikes, and many will hit you with an oversized/overweight fee first, then tack on their bike fee. in the end, if you travel with a bike-sized box, you’re in for at LEAST $125 each way, and in many instances, nearly $200.

fuck a whole lotta that.

: : :

first of all, packing the bike…

THOUGHTS / it’s a little nerve wracking to know that you’re about to smash your bike into a box and trust it to the airline baggage handlers. those people are fucking savages and you know it’s gonna get thrown around like rip torn tossing wrenches at the "dodgeball" crew. but you gotta get over that. it is what it is and you’re gonna have a bike with you, so get ready.

SUGGESTIONS / in order to pad the setup so nothing scratched anything else, i went ghetto — i layered soft duffel bags between all the pieces. (the above picture is not the actual padded load photo, it’s just there as an example of what you’re gonna be doing.) this is suboptimal for several reasons. one, it adds a lot of weight. two, it saddles you with three extra (empty) bags to deal with on the other side of your flight. and if you’re going to be unpacking and riding from the airport to your destination, this is not going to work. i was not doing that for a few reasons, which is why i had this freedom. on the other hand, it gives you extra places to secure your tools and lock and the errant loose parts of the bike that are floating around in there. so you choose for yourself, but here are my thoughts on future applications of packing…

/ get some pipe padding at the hardware stoe and custom cut it yourself to wrap the tubes of your frame/fork. ALL the tubes.
/ put all the loose bits into their own bags, or a bag of their own. these parts are : pedals, handlebar, seatpost/seat, pedals, chain.
/ pack all your tools and your lock and your pump in the bag with the bike. i did this and it was great because it kept everything together in one place, and it also kept the shit out of my carry-on, which would have inevitably raised suspicions.

: : :

travel…

THOUGHTS / ok, the bag is heavy. there’s no way around it. you’ve got a whole bike in there, as well as a pump, a sack of tools, a u-lock, and any other number of heavy elements that you may have thrown in. so get ready. virgin even put a "heavy" tag on the bag (though they didn’t charge me for an overweight piece of luggage, which was awesome.) and that’s where the first difficulty of the bag comes into play. i’m six feet tall and i had to carry it with my arm bent, holding it up off the ground. and that’s not easy on the shoulders. the alternate method is to use the backpack straps (which my particular bag has), but i only suggest that if you really love the feel of an axle digging into your spine.

SUGGESTIONS / i suggest finding some way to ease your load when you’re carrying this, no matter what. i certainly will be doing this. some thoughts for methodology…

/ figure out a way to get wheels onto the bottom of the bag (mod a skateboard or a caster dolly)
/ figure out a way to extraPad the surface that would go against your back while using the backpack straps.
/ fashion some sort of shoulder/handstrap combo. so the end result would be that there’s a strap crossing over from your alternate shoulder and then a handle midway down the outside face that allows you to hold and take some pressure off the shoulder that’s bearing the weight.

: : :

storage at your destination…

THOUGHTS / there’s something really, REALLY awesome about waking up in the morning in a hotel and seeing a bike in your room. i mean it’s fucking thrilling. it’s also an instant conversation starter in the hotel elevator and lobby. however, while i find it hard to believe that a hotel would deny you the liberty of keeping it in your room, it might happen. in that instance, i have to imagine they’d let you keep it in the hotel garage. one thing i do know, from WR, is that some hotels will make you take the service elevator if you have a bike. my hotel did not, which was great.

SUGGESTIONS / this is the one thing that is gonna cause you the most frustration if the hotel has special rules or whatever, so my only suggestion is…

/ call first. just tell your hotel that you’ll have a bicycle with you and ask. do they require that you take the service elevator? do they require that you keep it in the hotel garage? is there security in that garage? does it cost money to park a bike in their garage? do they have bike racks out front that a doorman has an eye on? just tell them your deal and figure it out with them. you’re the customer and the hospitality industry is notoriously willing to make your stay with them as easy as possible, so i really don’t anticipate much pushback on the whole thing, you’ll just need to figure it out together.

: : :

in the end, i HIGHLY recommend getting yourself a coupled bike and taking it with you wherever you go. it’s almost prohibitively expensive, but if you can swing the cost to do it, you’ll make that cost back up in just a few round trips. and it’s absolutely delightful to view a city that’s not your own from the cockpit of YOUR sled. rentals are fine, but let’s be honest — they’re not. they’re always big and heavy, laden down with map holders and handlebar bags, and you’re branded with "BLAZING SADDLES" or whatever. sub-optimal. your own bike is your own bike. you’ve built it to your specs, you’ve made it look the way you want it to, it’s just … better.

This is not generally my cup of bike. However, the price point is $800, no typo, for an aluminum commuter with full disc braking. I recently priced a fork, disc brake, rotors, shifter set-up as a possibility for my baby bikery, and let me tell you, you might as well buy this bike, strip the NUCLEAR TRIGGER YELLOW/ORANGE brake setup for your build, and sell the rest, and stay in the green.

http://urbanvelo.org/marin-lombard/

Don’t know what they’re selling. Don’t care.
Blissing out.

http://rekord.ee/workshop/

via Prolly

Favorite detail on this guy: those sweet brass thumb buttons for the (guh, electronic) Dura Ace shifting system. SO COOL.

http://fireflybicycles.com/1587 via Prolly

It may seem, form these reports, that the builds just fly together. And for the most part, they really do. But sometimes, you discover that your whatsit doesn’t fit the dimension of the thisnthat, or that something is stripped, or breaks, or frankly, you just didn’t account for something.

Sometimes though, it’s all about pilot error.

Example A: Mechanical Fail

I have a pipe cutter, and have used it on a number of steerers. It wasn’t particularly dull, not enough that I would think the blade needed replacement. But it DID fail: the binder bolt grip stripped, and the roller pins that hold the opposing side of the pipe started to shift. That’s all mechanical, and dodgy, but happens. The pilot error comes from doing the steerer cutting at 2am after the baby had you up, and doing this in a dim bike shoppe in an exhausted state. That’s how you, in a few short seconds, scribe a huge swath of the steerer like a drunkard attempting to manually tap a screw, so to speak. I actually was just conferring with my boss about the terminology for threading, male vs female, tapping vs, threading, and he said ‘threads on a male member’ to which I cried out ‘I’ll show you threads on a male member like you’ve never SEEN!’ to which I got silence.

So, in comes the brand new pipe cutter a few days later. Bigger, beefier, ready to correct that mistake. I spent about ten minutes with some sandpaper to smooth out the damage that I did, and i *think* i took care of it, though we won’t know for a few thousand miles, right. Anyway, the best part: the new cutter lobbed the steerer off in about 5 seconds. The old one was always a lengthly, time consuming job, leading me to believe it was either defective or weak saucery.

Example B: Sequencing Fail

So from day one I was all excited to use my Walnut Portage Strap on the coupler bike. It’s even visible in my color mock-ups. So one night I went down, again late, exhausted, etc, and slapped it on the bike, just to see how it was going to look.

YEAH. The portage strap is longer than the coupler insertion point. So, it would be holding the coupled parts together. NICE WORK.

Fortunately, I noticed this before I began sewing the seat tube segment, and fortunately again, it worked out just as well on the new Wrongbike, so yay.

Anyway, I’m nothing if not honest about dumb mistakes…

What the hell, two year old daughter? What the HELL!

"Bike-SICKLE!!"

What the hell?

I guess this is for those fixie hauls up Mt. Ventoux… I never DID catch that guy’s gearing.

This is like a hazy, boozy fantasy bike grrl pic… it’s like Sunday afternoon AND Saturday night at the same time.

http://phxed.tumblr.com/post/6714092593

At the time these photographs were taken, I built up Carpetbagger, the Coupled travel bike, almost entirely over the course of an evening, stopping as seen above, with only a steerer tube cut, brake stringing and chain away from ride-out.

When I went to install the headset, I had some trouble because the home-brew headset cup press I made was mere centimeters too short. It drove me nuts trying to finagle it, so I eventually put it down and took it in to Tam Bikes, where MASH’s Dylan pressed them for me quick-snap. Actually, he admitted there was some difficulty with them, but he got it up IN there.

Back home, I dropped the bottom bracket in that night and built up the bike as you see it above. A note about that: I’m using a Sugino 75 kit that rode to LA as part of Team Hype’s Magnus’ Cinelli X MASH build. He kept it in pretty good shape, so I took it off his hands when he was liquidating before leaving for Japan, at the same time Team Lope pal Ryan was grabbing his frame. The Sugino 75 cranks can use a conventional sealed BB but he had a nice 75-stamped cup and cone and I took that too. Unlike the cup and cone BB’s I restored on Wrongbike and Ye Blacke Death, this wasn’t thirty or forty years old. I won’t say the others weren’t smooth, but this was like butter. The crankset and BB are noticeably lighter than the Messengers I used on several other bikes. I’d love to compare them to my Dura Ace cranks on Villain. Frankly, the specs are out there. But as someone who counts pizzas, not grams, it’s unusual for me to worry about weight on a build. But since Carpetbagger is intended to be a travel bike, I wanted it light, and so the rims and the cranks, my two heavier components usually, are much lighter here.

Side note: when I was up on the deck trying not to lose headset parts or let my daughter get all greeeeeazzy with her probing digits, I noticed some damage to the frame. Now, I will admit that at one point she waltzed over and drop kicked it onto the BBQ. But I think that accounts for a to-steel scratch on the seat tube. However, there’s a dent in the top tube and another lower on the seat tube, both under paint. Frankly, I think my pwdercoater isn’t very gentle. Remember, same crew that warped Wrongbike’s forks until they were about 14mm too narrow!
But forewarned is forearmed.

Again, another unfortunate defect: a powdercoating fail on the head tube! Fortunately, the scratch on the seat tube and the fail onthe head tube would ultimately be covered by custom vinyl, and the dents? Well, realistically, this is all just new-build glamor consideration. Once the bike is packed and shipped a few times, I’ll be amazed it there’s any paint LEFT on it. Travel bikes don’t stay pretty for long, even protected by tube insulation.

I like her choice of ride locations too. Looks like you could decapitate yourself pretty easily. DO MAH OWN STUNTEDS!

http://sexycyclists.tumblr.com/post/663 … -urbanbixi