My New Web Comic: Biseekell

I've started "drawing" a little web comic that's part XKCD and part Yehuda Moon. I'm calling it "Biseekell" after the way I used to pronounce bicycle when I was learning to talk. Since I haven't really advanced in terms of my drawing skills since then, I figured it was appropriate. I have three strips up now, and hope to be adding new ones each week. I don't have a publishing schedule yet, but I'll try to get at least one posted per week.

Biseekell

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Digitized Catalogues at the National Cycle Library (UK)

WARNING: Clicking on the links below will almost certainly lead to sleeplessness, extreme feelings of envy and/or desire, and potential loss of marriage.

Doing some research on Phillips today, I found myself checking in with the website of the British National Cycling Collection. It has been a while since I visited, and to my great surprise and delight, I found that they've digitized much more of their library than they had previously. Of particular note are the scanned catalogues, which provide an excellent reference for period restorations of many British-built bicycles.

Although it doesn't add much to my knowledge of my Raleigh-built 1955 Huffy, the image below of the "genuine" Raleigh equivalent (the Sports Light Roadster) is kind of neat to have as a reference. Now, if only we could still order from these catalogues...

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Sweet Ride: The Bicycle Art of Christopher Koelle

I have a pretty hard and fast policy on not doing commercial posts of any kind, but I also really like to promote the work of independent artists doing interesting work. I mentioned Kara Ginther's hand-carved Brooks saddles briefly in another post recently, so I wanted to give a little blog time to Christopher Koelle, too, especially since his work may be of particular interest to readers of this blog. From his Etsy profile:

My name is Christopher Koelle and I love drawing people with bicycles, especially from the early days of cycling.

The original Sweet Ride art zine sparked in me an ongoing fascination with the history of travel and roads, from the Good Roads Movement of Horatio Earle to the epic, sprawling interstate highways we love and hate today. Sweet Ride is now just the beginning of a progressively larger ongoing body of work about these histories.

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Mobile Museum of Material Culture

Artist Kara Ginther has been on the Interwebs a lot lately. You might have seen her hand-carving on leather saddles at To Be, Inspired, or BoingBoing, or Chic Cyclists. While her leatherwork has been getting most of the attention (and rightfully so), I'd also like to mention that Kara has a very neat side project going called the Mobile Museum of Material Culture, which as you can see from the photo above, is powered by an old tandem.

Kara and the MMMC are touring about the Madison, Wisconsin area this fall, so if you're in the area, check out their schedule, and if you're not, see her Flickr set.

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Bicycles in the Kibbutz

Our friend Yanek of bicyclog in Israel has just posted a lovely photo essay of bicycles on a kibbutz.

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New Blog: Bike San Diego

Calling all San Diego bicycle bloggers, riders, shop owners, advocates, enthusiasts, and anyone with an interest in sustainable urban development! A small group of San Diego bicycle bloggers has just launched a new site called, appropriately, Bike San Diego. Drawing inspiration from sites such as BikePortland and Streetsblog, the primary mission of Bike San Diego is simple: to provide a one-stop source for bicycle-related news, events, and advocacy in America's Finest City. This is an all-volunteer effort at citizen journalism by and for bicycle riders in metro San Diego and San Diego County.

BikeSD.org is in pre-launch status right now; the site is up and content is flowing, but the editors are accepting suggestions from the community as the site takes shape. This is your site, riders of San Diego, be the change you would like to see in the world and help us provide content that is relevant to you! Please send your comments, suggestions and tips by filling out the Contact Us form at BikeSD.org.

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Blog Love: The Mixte Gallery

Boy, it has been a while since I did a blog love feature. What better way to get back into it than by promoting a new blog by an OBB reader. The Mixte Gallery, run by our friend Doohickie, delivers what it promises, and it needs your mixtes; or photos of them, at least. Not sure what a mixte is?

PHOTO: Lovely Bicycle!

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There, I Fixed It

Just came across the blog There, I Fixed It, which seems to be some sort of cousin to FAIL Blog. In any case, I thought my readers might appreciate some of the "fixes" that people come up with. I like this one. Fire bicycle. Very clever.

I recently wrote a post at The World Awheel that's sort of relevant to the idea of creative solutions to problems, which readers here might also find interesting.

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Gallery of Old Bicycling Images

The Chicago Tribune has put up a sweet little gallery of bicycles and bicycling from its archives.

What she's really saying: "Son of a bitch, this thing weighs a ton!"

LINK

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Change Your Life, Read This Blog!

First, I'm way behind on blogging this week. I've got an article manuscript revision due tomorrow that I've been trying to finish, so most of my attention has been on that. I'm also behind on responding to emails, so if you've emailed me this week, I'll get back to you soon.

Second, friends of the OBB, Adrienne Johnson and meligrosa (of Bikes & The City) have teamed up to start a new blog called Change Your Life, Ride a Bike! Their new endeavor will feature reader-submitted stories and photos about how riding a bicycle has changed people's lives. My own submission is here. There's also a Flickr group, which will serve as a photo pool for the blog.

I'm very happy to help promote CYLRAB!  Here's their call for submissions:

We look forward to sharing our stories, and even more, to hearing yours! Please, please, please send us your bike of change and life stories! Why do you ride? Where has riding taken you? How do you tackle the challenges of where you live to keep riding? Did you meet your spouse on a bike? Did you use one to get away after sneaking out of the house at night? Share your adventure with the rest of us.

I know some of my readers have stories to share, so visit Change Your Life, Ride a Bike! and give others the benefit of your experience.

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Just What I Need

Another way to waste time online. This looks like it's been around for a while, but I'm usually behind the curve on these sorts of things, so I just found out about it. It's a fun little tool you can use to create a mockup of your perfect bike. There aren't as many options for configuration as I would ideally like, and the color on the fork in the mockup above doesn't match the frame, but you can at least get an idea of how a project might turn out. I tried to get close to what I hope the Mundo fixed-gear project will look like when finished (still a long way off--the stuck seat post is still posing problems, but I'll get it). It's less useful for old bike restorations than for all-custom projects, but it's still fun to play around with.

Pedal ID from Pedalmafia

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Sure Folly

I've opened up another blog, called The World Awheel, which is going to be a catch-all for the thoughts, ideas, ramblings, and other bike-related detritus that floats around in my brain most of the time, and which don't fit on the OBB. It's going to be a very sporadic beast, I think, but will perhaps be of interest to my readers here. Give it a look from time to time, and don't be afraid to leave a comment. 

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Online Museum of Tradesman's Delivery Bikes

Just found this beautiful site, definitely worth a look.

Museum of Tradesman's Delivery Bikes

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Schwinn Resources

Now that I'm working on another Schwinn (we have two now, my wife's 1977 Suburban and this one), I'm taking them a bit more seriously. I'm not sure why, but I haven't always been the biggest fan of Schwinns. Now that I've spent some time with this one, I'm really coming to appreciate their quality and style--especially the quality.

So, here are some links I've been collecting over the last couple of days. Please suggest more in the comments if you have them. There is a real community of Schwinn fanatics out there ("enthusiasts" doesn't seem like a strong enough word!), and I know a lot of visitors end up here at the OBB looking for Schwinn stuff. The few posts I've done on my wife's Suburban are by far the most visited.

Eventually, I'll create a dedicated section of links in the sidebar for Schwinn resources. Until then, here are a few good ones. I get the feeling I'm just scratching the surface here, so please give me more!

Schwinn Serial Numbers

Schwinn Forums

Schwinn Lightweight Data Book

By the way, I keep accidentally typing "Scwhinn", so if you catch one that I haven't corrected, do let me know, since it will affect how people find what they're looking for on my blog.

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New York Bicycle Cop, ca. 1900

Ticketing the driver of one of the new-fangled automobiles.

Is it me, or is the guy on the bike at left laughing just a bit?

New York in Black and White Gallery @ Tom Fletcher's New York Architecture

Via Neatorama.

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Down Townies Ride #1 Redux

By popular demand, here are some more photos of last Sunday's Down Townies ride to the Hillcrest farmer's market here in SD. First two are mine, the rest were taken by SD Bike Commuter Forums member IHeartMyBeard. Link to full set is here (scroll down a bit for the post). I'm in waaay more of these than I was aware of at the time. Yeesh.

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DIY Battle Cries

I've recently come across several manifestoes, creeds, resolutions, etc. that all express some key elements of the DIY ethic in very articulate, succinct, and often humorous ways. The OBB is all about working on old bikes (or any bikes) yourself, so I thought readers might be interested in them. I don't agree with all of them, but most are pretty much right-on. Maybe I'll write one specifically for old bikes someday. Until then, enjoy these:

Mister Jalopy's Maker's Bill of Rights

Platform 21's Repair Manifesto

Bre Pettis' Cult of Done Manifesto

On a related note, see this post at GOOD about a DIY bike shop in Leipzig, Germany. Very cool idea!

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Down Townies Ride #1

The Columbia's rear fender & wheel in the foreground, another rider's lovely Raleigh with panniers in background.

Today was the first of a series of local Sunday slow rides in the tradition of European casual touring. The weekly Down Townies ride is organized through San Diego Bike Commuter Forums, an online discussion forum put together by the owner of a local shop. This week was the Hillcrest Farmers' Market, one of the largest (if not the largest) local markets. I put an old front basket on the Columbia (since the Huffeigh grocery bike isn't ready yet) and went along to get some groceries.

The ride was lovely, winding quietly through some of the city's old craftsman neighborhoods, some new friends were made, and the market was bustling. It was a fantastic warm, sunny morning, and the company was great. We had probably 20-ish riders, and all were great ambassadors for transportational, errand-type cycling. The quantity of bells was really remarkable--moving through some intersections, the whole group "chimed in," creating a beautiful cacophony. I'm excited for the next ride, and hope to make these ride reports a weekly thing. I'm not too good at them, I'm afraid, but I'll try. 

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How to Fix a Bent Seat Stay

I am now officially hard-core. Or at least medium-core. The Mundo's right seat stay was bent when I bought it, the result of a rear rack being affixed to it, and evidently getting whacked at some point while the thing was in the previous owner's shed. It was almost a deal-breaker for me, but I figured I'd see what I could do. In researching how to fix such a problem, I happened upon Dave Moulton's Bike Blog. Former frame builder and interwebs bike guru, Moulton has all kinds of helpful articles on all kinds of topics. Just so happens, he had one on this.

Mind you, this only works with *steel frame* bicycles (see how I emphasized that?), which are more flexible than carbon fiber, aluminum, etc. and can be bent back into shape (within reason) without loss of structural integrity. So anyway, go read the article, then come back here and check out the pictures below. Go ahead, I'll wait.

So here's my setup:

Instead of wood blocks, which I didn't have in the right size, I used a couple of landscaping bricks with (very dirty) towels over them for padding. I also put supports under the head tube and bottom bracket so the frame wouldn't wobble around. I used a piece of 1" wooden dowel, cut to size, as the spacer between the dropouts. You can see that the bent stay is on the bottom, ready for my foot.

Then, as Moulton says, I stood on the stay where it was bent. But either I'm too light, or this frame is too strong, because it did not bend as easily as Moulton suggested it would. In fact, after several tries, and some adjustments to the spacing of blocks, I ended up having to stand on it with 230 lbs. of force (my own 180, holding 50 lbs. worth of weights). After several attempts, during each of which the stay straightened a wee little bit, it came out straight enough to my satisfaction.

Actually, it still seems a tiny bit skewed to me, and I'm not sure if this is just my mind playing tricks, or if it needs a little more. Looking at the photo below, what do you think? (it's the right one). The alignment checks out with the string test, which Moulton also recommends.

Now I just need to get the seat post unstuck. Any suggestions on that? Besides heating it with a torch? I'm not averse to that, it's just that that seems to be the main suggestion for various stuck things, so I'm saying it now to get it out of the way. Oh, and penetrating oil, I know about that, too. Anything else?

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Blog Love: SixtyOneSixty

Since I've started thinking about my custom fixie project, I've been inspired by the lovely blog SixtyOneSixty, out of Australia, which features single speed, custom, and vintage bikes. The photos are lovely, there's a real sense of artistry in the bikes, and some of the finds are pretty unique. Check it out, spend some time looking around, you won't be sorry.

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