My Bikes

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I seem to have collected a startling number of bikes. Not as bad as some, mind you, but more than most.

I've got the following:

Road bike (Bianchi Volpe)
Single speed (Mike Flanigan Special)
City bike (Raleigh Sports)
Foul-weather commuter (Updated Raleigh 3-speed)
Winter beater (Miyata 210)
Mountain bike (GT Outpost)

My Road Bike

My Volpe

My main road bike is a 2001 Bianchi Volpe. It's essentially a cyclecross/commuting/touring frame and a mixture of road and hybrid/mountain parts. This one is fairly stock, with a couple of additions:

Home-built weelset with Shimano Ultegra hubs and Mavic Open Pro rims (not in above picture)
Specialized BG Sport saddle
Cateye clyclometer
Blackburn cross rack

I use this bike mainly for commuting to work, and for long road rides. It's a great bike, with a strong, comfortable frame and strong wheels. (I can take it off-road for short stretches without worrying about bending a rim. On one ill-advised day last January, I took this bike out on the ice.)

My Single-Speed

This is a one-off single-speed built by Mike Flanigan (a founding member of Independent Fabrication) from spare tubing. He built a 54cm single-speed road/track frame, and then fitted it with parts he had lying around. I picked it up at Broadway Bike for a song, installed road bars (and cross-levers), and changed the front chainring to give it more managable gearing.

It's an absolutely beautiful bike, by far the lightest bike I own, very quick and nimble on its feet. At some point I want to build up a rear wheel with a flip-flop hub for it.

My City Bike

I use a 1962 Raleigh Sports 3-speed around town. I love this bike! I bought it last year at the Lars Andersen bike show, and have since become something of a 3-speed zealot. About the only things I've added to it are new brake cables, new chain, new (19-tooth) rear cog, a beer basket for the handlebars, and a pair of Continental Top Touring 2000 tires (which are a little pricey, but excellent all-around tires; I run them on the wide wheelset for my Volpe, too). It's a great bike around town--easy to ride, simple to maintain, strong and reliable. I use this bike more often than the Bianchi, especially for errands around town. I've even ridden it to work a couple of times.

Raleigh on the Minuteman Trail

They really had the right idea when they designed and built these things: build a simple, bullet-proof, easy to maintain vehicle for the masses, something that'll get people to work, to the pub, and safely home again. It's got a fairly lazy frame geometry, which makes it very easy to ride (even after you've had a couple). You can shift gears at a standstill (something you can't do with a deurelleur bike), allowing you to pick the right gear at a stoplight. All the shifting parts are inside a protective shell, away from the weather.

They're finally beginning to come out with modern city bikes: SRAM and Shimano both make a 7-speed internal-gear hub. That, combined with a modern steel frame, modern alloy rims, fenders and cantelever brakes make for a great modern interpretation of Raleigh's Every Bike. Bike as Transportation, instead of Bike as Marketing Ploy.

My Foul-Weather Commuter/Winter Beater and All-Around Bike

Smasher Special

This bike started out as a very rough 1972 Raleigh Sports, but I've completely rebuilt and upgraded it. The rear hub comes from yet another Raleigh (with the 3-speed hub internals completely overhauled), but all the other parts are new or unique to this bike, including front and rear rims, front hub, bottom bracket, cranks, brakes, fork, headset, fenders, bars and saddle. This is my foul-weather Raleigh.

A complete account of its building is here. Basically this was the bike which taught me everything I didn't already know about building up a bike from scratch.

Since building this bike up, it has become one of my favorites, and happily takes on anything and everything I throw at it. It's great in the rain, it's great in the snow, it takes punishing bumps without a hiccup, I can park it anywhere without worrying about it. It's a bomber.

My Winter Beater

Bird riding my miyata

My old Miyata road bike (a mid-1980s 210) was a nice bike, originally set up as a touring bike (with triple-butted tubing, wide wheel clearance and cantlever brakes), and made a great platform for a beater.

new 6-speed freewheel

Last fall I converted it to a winter beater, with upright bars, thumb shifters and fenders. I also upgraded the old, worn-out 5-speed freewheel to a new 6-speed freewheel.

It's a great setup--very smooth and reliable, and the thumb shifters mean there's no twiddling with index shifting (the kind of shifting on most modern bikes--where there's a click position for each gear). It's kind of a poor-man's cross bike. The frame is a hair too big for me (I think it's around a 56cm, when I should be closer to a 54 or 55), but it's fine. I used this bike throughout the winter (when there wasn't snow or black ice on the streets), but it's down in the basement during the summers; I use the Raleigh instead during the nice months.

My Mountain Bike

I have a black 1992 GT Outpost; it's an entry-level mountain bike which I bought new as my main ride in San Francisco (from Valencia Cyclery, perhaps the best local bike shop in the entire universe). I put slick road tires on it and used it as my regular ride until I bought the Miyata second-hand in 1998 or so. It is bone stock, except for a rear quick-release axle (which I bought after I bent the original solid bolt-on axle) and a Blackburn rack.

I don't use this bike very much anymore; I took it out trail riding a few times last summer (and it perfomed reasonably well), but it's not really right for what I would want to use it for. I keep thinking it would be cool to get a new mountain bike (and I keep looking at the Fisher Tassajara and Hoo Koo e Koo), but I'm not really aching for a new mountain bike.

Other Bikes

I've got a couple of other bikes, too, including a weird folding Fuji mountain bike (which is on standy as an Emergency Escape Vehicle at my parents' place), and all sorts of spare parts for other projects.

Why So Many?

Why not? No one bike is the perfect ride for all occasions, and anyway, it's great fun to have so many to choose from. There's something kind of subversive about it, but I can't quite put my finger on what it is. Perhaps it's the idea that I don't have to register any of them, and can still have the luxury of picking and choosing the day's ride.

And it's a hell of a lot cheaper than a car collection.

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