Another Outside Column Already?!?

Yes, that's right, the ink was barely dry on the last one when this appeared:

Do I like that bikes are environmentally friendly?  Yes.  Would I still ride if every time I threw a leg over a bikes some unseen organism went extinct forever?  Probably also yes, I'm not gonna lie.  (But don't worry, that only happens if you ride a carbon fiber bike.)

And with that, I'm gonna go throw a leg over a bike now and I advise you to do the same. 

XOXO,



--Tan Tenovo

New Outside Column, Same Old Creaking Sound...

Firstly, here's my latest column for Outside, which is about dooring:

As you may or may not know, it's generally the publication and not the writer who comes up with the headline, and that's the case here.  Of course I'm perfectly fine with this headline (it's certainly better than "Start Hitting Cyclists With Your Car Door" ), though my original headline was something along the lines of "You Can Learn Everything You Need To Know About Americans By The Way They Open Their Car Doors," which might give you a slightly better idea of what I was going for here.  (And what I was going for, in case it's still not clear, is that Americans are selfish assholes.)

Secondly, remember how I said I was battling a creak on the SS Renovo?  Well, someone suggested replacing the current skewer with a Shimano one, which is excellent advice.  Indeed, I've silenced more than one creaky bicycle over the years by ditching crappy open cam skewers in favor of the superior Shimano/Campagnolo-style ones, but I was so busy obsessing over cracks and bottom brackets and so forth that I hadn't thought to employ that tactic here.  So this morning I swapped skewers and headed out for a ride, and guess what?

It's still creaking like a floorboard when you're trying not to wake the baby.

So I stopped next to a pair of inebriated Lime bikes and commenced futzing:

I even attempted to snug up the bolts that hold the dropouts together (and not for the first time):

But to no avail.

Next I'll just swap wheels, and the only reason I haven't already is because the Renovo is my only 11-speed bike so in order to switch wheels I also have to switch cassettes--not to mention brake pads because of the crabon rims.

Still, I can't get past those cracks, which you can see here:

And here:

And also am I crazy or is it spreading over here?

Or, who knows, it seems like there's all kinds of places where this frame could make noise:

Honestly I absolutely love the way this bike rides, but this is no way to live, and if I can't figure out what's causing the creaking soon I may have to "retire" it.

Somebody fetch me my artisanal axe...

"Do You Have Any Idea Who I Am???"

It was a beautiful, warm, clear autumn morning after two days of rain, and so I headed out for an easy spin to Central Park astride my Milwaukee:

As you can see, it's still sporting the cheap and not terribly comfortable plastic saddle I threw on there for a rainy race some months back.  Also, I've got strap-on fenders instead of proper ones, and the state of my handlebar tape is nothing short of disgraceful:

Hey, whaddya want?  Given my sundry life responsibilities it's either fix the thing or ride it, and until something falls off of it I'm going to opt for the latter.

Anyway, once I'd dispatched the kids to their various institutions I rolled on down to Central Park, where they're still breaking down all the equipment from the marathon this past Sunday.  Then I headed toward home to resume the fulfillment of my aforementioned responsibilities, whereupon I encountered two velocipedists stopped at the side of the path.  One had incurred a flat tire, the other had happened along and stopped to assist him, and neither had the full complement of tools to rectify the situation.

Like a surgeon preparing his instruments I unfurled my tool roll and got to work, and within minutes I had the unfortunate cyclist ready to resume his ride to work.  He was profuse in his gratitude, which I accepted with deep humility, though as I resumed my own ride I reflected deeply on what a wonderful person I am.

Of course, having given a stranger my spare tube (did I mention I'm a wonderful person?), I now needed to re-stock my own stores, and so I popped into a nearby bike shop.  A staff member greeted me and wheeled my bike into a rack, and in the process of doing so applied downward pressure on the bicycle and made the following announcement:

"You need more air in your tires."

I was stunned.  That anyone might insinuate--much less declare outright--that I, the world's greatest living cycling writer, was running either more or less than the precise optimal amount of pressure in my tires was audacity of the worst kind.  I felt like Jeff Bezos would if the Hyundai salesperson said, "I'd love to sell you this Elantra, but we're gonna have to run a credit check first."  Reeling, I searched my brain for the correct response.  Do I ignore the remark?  Do I make light of the situation?  Do I walk out without saying a thing and then return a week later with the complete works of Jan Heine?  After some deliberation I opted for #2, though sarcasm can be a tricky note to strike with a stranger and I'm sure I just came off like a douchebag.

Anyway, once I had my tubes I embarked upon the final leg of my journey homeward.  If you're wondering what pressure I was in fact running I'll never tell, but I can assure you I curated it expertly, taking into account the width of my tires, the road conditions (particularly the preponderance of wet leaves), the ambient temperature, and what I'd had for breakfast that morning.

Now if you'll excuse me I have to order some back issues of Bicycle Quarterly to send to the bike shop.

Vote Oily, Vote Often

It's Election Day down here in Canada's Tortured Subconscious, so I'm off to the polls:

Then I'll be spending the rest of the day parenting because there's no school today.

So I'll see you when I see you, and not a moment sooner.

In the meantime, Peter Flax has the Fred-osphere all in a tizzy because last week he wrote a story for CyclingTips about how he doesn't wear a helmet:

It's a good story, though the editor, Caley Fretz, did his best to undermine it with this ridiculous disclaimer:

Most of us at CyclingTips wear helmets most of the time. I wear one whenever I kit up for a ride. They’re pretty comfortable these days, and I don’t see any reason not too, even after reading the story below. For some of our readers, helmets are mandated by law, and of course, we don’t want anyone to break the law.

To be frank, I wasn’t sure if it was a perspective we wanted on the site. We have multiple writers on staff who credit helmets with saving their lives, or at least preventing far more severe injury. I’m glad they were wearing helmets, and I’ll continue to wear mine.

He and I had some words over it last week:

Good article from @Pflax1 , cowardly disclaimer from @CaleyFretz :https://t.co/ZwksJb76Ux pic.twitter.com/WzqligOEMZ

— Bike Snob NYC (@bikesnobnyc) November 1, 2018

Fretz seemed to feel that publishing the story at all is prima facie evidence that he is not in fact cowardly, but I think introducing anything with a 200-word disclaimer about what you think is wrong with it--whether it's an article about helmets or your spouse--indicates a deficiency in the spinal department.  (And please note I'm not calling Caley Fretz a coward *in general,* I'm just calling him an editorial coward.  I have no reason to believe that, if confronted with a wild animal while cycling, he wouldn't strip down to nothing except his bibs and his helmet and fight it to the death.)

I also think that the Fred set is one degree away from the "Avid Cyclist" set inasmuch as their attitudes are holding the riding of bicycles back.  Remember, for example, when Red Kite Prayer said California cyclists shouldn't fight a mandatory helmet law?  Because I do.

Anyway, you know what to do today, and make sure to wear your voting helmet.

Yours and so forth,



--Tan Tenovo

You Better Knock On Wood

It's been quite a week of bicycle maintenance so far here at BSNYC/RTMS/Tan Tenovo, LLC headquarters.  Yesterday of course I tackled the brakes on my WorkCycles, and today I went a few rounds with the Renovo Aerowood.  See, there's nothing quite as exquisite as riding amid the brilliant foliage of fall on an artisanally-hewn wooden Fred Chariot:

That is unless that Fred Chariot is creaking like a haunted pirate ship on the high seas, which is what the Renovo has been doing lately.  I'd already snugged up the seat mast to no avail (It had been the source of some creaking in the past), so this morning I moved onto the bottom bracket, hoping maybe it was a simple matter of snugging up the cups.  First I removed the cranks and made sure they were tight (they were), then I gave the whole bike a quasi-thorough going-over, even going so far as to adjust the bearing preload on the rear hub.  (They're crabon and they're like two grand, but they don't seem to hold an adjustment.)  Finally I buttoned everything back up and went for a ride, and I was hopeful until I hit the first hill and...


It's a lot easier to inspect a bike under the brilliant rays of the autumn sun than it is under the energy-saving lighting fixtures in my basement, so that's what I did.  And here's what I fixated on:

See?

Yes, I realize it's in shadow, but what you're looking at is a split in the wood where the left chainstay is bolted and bonded to the rear dropout.  Remember how I said early on I found some cosmetic cracks in the bike?  Well that's one of them, and here's what it looked like back in November 2017 when I first discovered it:

The short version is Renovo were going to build me a whole new frame and send it to me, but I declined as it hardly seemed worth the effort.  Here's what Ken from Renovo had to say at the time:

The chain stay is both bonded and bolted to the dropout, shouldn't be a problem. If the gap changes in width or you see other changes we'll get you a replacement immediately. If that happened on a customer's bike we would replace it immediately, as we were prepared to do for you. In any event it won't catastrophically fail.

Anyway, now Renovo is Re-no more, so I'm not going to follow up with them, and while I can't tell from the photos if it's in fact gotten worse it is a bit more vexing in light of this new creaking I can't seem to track down.  I suppose I'll go through the usual steps of swapping wheels and pedals and so forth, but even if this crack isn't the culprit I can't help wondering what else might be going on deep in the bowels of this ship.  Or, for all I know it's temperature-related--maybe the bike swells up in the summer when it's hot, but then it contracts when it's cold and the fittings start wriggling around a little bit, hence the creak suddenly manifesting itself in autumn.  Or maybe it's unreasonable to expect a quiet wooden bike, just in the same way it's unreasonable to expect a quiet wooden staircase. Or maybe it's just termites.

Clearly I need to consult with an arborist.

Or, you know, ride a bike made out of metal.

Them's The Brakes (Do You See What I Did There?)

I was going to get all kids of stuff done today.  However, as I took my younger son to school this morning the braking on the WorkCycles (Magura hydraulic rim brakes) was simply too bad to ignore.  (Believe me, I've been doing my best to ignore it for months, but when both levers are bottoming out on the grips you cross that line between "sub-optimal braking" and "bad parenting.")

"No problem," I figured.  "I'll just change the brake pads."  Indeed, I already had a set of fresh brake pads ready to go, and in theory installing them was a simple matter of popping the old ones out and snapping the new ones in.  Just listen to this German man explain it to you:


The thing is, on the WorkCycles, it's not quite so straightforward.  See, the great thing about this bike is that it has fenders, skirt guards, a full chainguard, an internally geared hub...  What all that stuff means is that the bike can spend most of its life outside, and also that you can hop on it without having to worry about your pant cuffs or whatever.

The bad part, however, is that half that shit has to come off because you have to remove the wheels to replace the pads.

Still, I was feeling optimistic as I rolled the bike into the basement:

Indeed, the front brake was easy, since the only extra steps I had to perform to remove the front wheel were to move the front light out of the way of the brake's quick release, and to unplug the light's wire from the hub.

The back brake was another story.  I've removed the rear wheel on the WorkCycles a number of times now, and every time I have it's been a pain in the ass.  No doubt my own ineptitude has a lot to do with it, but even so there's no getting around the fact that you've got to undo a lot of shit--even with the handy removable dropout:

There's the axle nuts, and the dropout bolts, and the chain tensioners, and the chain guard, and the cable for the hub gear...  By the time I was actually able to access the brake pads I was pretty pissed off, and I reinstalled the rear wheel with the impatience and contempt of a cop shoving a perp into the back seat of a squad car.  Oh, also, the chain tensioners are directional.  See how the axle nut washer has a little tab that fits into a slot in the tensioner?

Well, if you flip the tensioner the slot's on the wrong side and you can't tighten down the axle nut:

Pretty much every time I remove the wheel on this bike I put the non-drive tensioner on there backwards, realize it when I'm just about done, and have to undo everything to put it back on the right way.

Anyway, two hours later and the bike finally stops like a dog outside of a veterinarian's office, but there goes half my day:

For some reason I insist on doing all my own bike work, but if I had any sense I'd just bring the WorkCycles to a shop.  In fact, I'd probably have given up long ago, except I have this (no doubt totally unfounded) fear that the shops in New York won't be sufficiently smug to service this bicycle.  Or else I'd move somewhere with a garage where I could set up a workshop, in which case at least I'd be able to spread out and take the time to do the job right.  Oh how I dream of hanging my tools on a wall instead of having to dig them out of a tiny storage space like a toddler rummaging through a toy chest every time I want to use them...

(Image stolen from Park Tool website)

Then again, if I moved somewhere with a garage I'd be in the suburbs, in which case might as well ditch the WorkCycles altogether and say "Fuck it, I'm leasing a Hyundai."

Anyway, at least I don't have to worry about it until the brake pads wear out again.

Rigid In My Thinking

Further to my recent Outside column about the joys of voluminous tires, I see that a new suspension fork has hit the market with great fanfare:

Now I should begin by saying there's certainly lots of room for improvement as far as suspension forks.  I should also say James Huang knows his stuff, so if he says this fork addresses many of those shortcomings I'm inclined to believe him.  Nevertheless, as a cloyingly smug rigid bike enthusiast it's hard not to read stuff like this and wonder, "Why?"

“On every telescopic fork, when you come into a corner, you want stability. But what happens is that you weight the front of the bike, the fork dives, you get less mechanical trail, and the bike gets less stable. We humans have learned, over 120 years of riding telescopic forks, to just deal with it. The brain is good at just making it work.

“But I wanted to know what happens if you make it more stable? Is it worse? Does it not make any difference at all? Or is it super better? So I designed a device to answer that question. It was this crazy-ass test mule, a big Terminator-looking thing that weighed 7 1/2 pounds (3.4kg). I built it up, bolted it up, and went for a ride in the middle of January 2014. I got two corners into it and was like, this is way better.”

Sounds like he's managed to invent something that handles nearly as well as a rigid fork with high-volume tires.

Then there's the price:

As groundbreaking as the Message clearly is, my guess is that Trust may still have a tough time getting people to buy into the idea. For one, it may offer some genuinely tangible performance benefits but it also comes with an outrageous price tag of US$2,700. That obviously leaves an awful lot of room to expand downmarket with a less-expensive version, but for now, it’s only deep-pocketed buyers who will even consider this.

I strongly disagree, and in all sincerity I think $2,700 is way too cheap.  Two grand is the going rate for a wheelset these days, and the most expensive telescoping forks are already well over $1,000.  Why not just price the thing at $5,000?  Not only will the Mountain Freds gladly pay it, but they'll be more likely to pay it because with a price like that it's gotta mean business.

Anyway, hopefully this fork takes off and they have to start designing bikes around it, which will make pretty much every mountain bike currently out there obsolete.

As for me, I've been reveling in smugness recently by riding a bike that lacks not only suspension but also derailleurs:

I know I said I love the plus-sized tires--and believe me I do--but I also love flicking around a light, singlespeed bicycle with "skinny" tires:

Actually, it's not even that light, but after riding the Jones it feels like it weighs like fifteen pounds.

It's been just over seven years since I first took delivery of my artisanal handmade Engin, and while commissioning an expensive bicycle that can't be shifted may seem no different than paying $2,700 for a suspension fork that works almost as well as a rigid one, I congratulate myself for doing so every time I ride it.  I'd been a fan of Drew's bikes (check out his Instagram by the way) since I went down to Philly with some friends years ago to check out his workshop, I'd never had a custom bike, I wanted one because I was a newly-minted author and celebrity bike blogger, and here's why a singlespeed made the most sense for me.  For one thing, I have the most fun on them because they bring me back to my BMX-and-tube-sock days:

(© Danny Weiss)

For another, while you can put together a pretty sweet singlespeed mountain bike for cheap, most of the frames are suspension-corrected and/or designed to be run with or without gears or just generally funky because they're for people putting together their sixth or seventh bike out of stuff from their parts bin.  I, however, wanted a nice, clean, rigid, purpose-built singlespeed, and the way to get that was to go custom.  Sure, you can't tell from my shitty zoomed-in photo, but you don't get awesome rocker dropouts like that on a Surly:

Instead you get something like this:

And that's in no way meant as an insult to Surly, who I applaud for their versatility.  But I wanted a really nice singlespeed, not a giant adapter, and so Engin it was.

Then there was obsolescence.  No velocipede is more obsolescence-prone than the mountain bike.  Suspension; frame spacing; drivetrains...all of these things are way different now than they were just seven years ago.  However, it's hard to imagine a time when I won't be able to find the necessary parts for this thing, and geometry fads aside, an awesome-handling bike is an awesome-handling bike.  Best of all, since it's designed not to use gears or suspension it was already "obsolete" the moment Drew finished welding it, so what do I have to worry about anyway?

In any case, the joy one gets from material things is always fleeting.  Nevertheless, thus far my rationale for commissioning this bike has been borne out, and I'm also glad I got in the queue when I did because now he only builds in titanium and on a limited basis and probably wouldn't even give me the time of day.  Really, if you think about it, my ordering this bike was like getting in on the Google IPO.  (Assuming someone would give me like $25K for it right now, that is.)

Wonder how it would ride with one of those Trust forks...