When I bought it off of Craigslist, I was confused about the Kabuki's age because it had high-end components from the mid 1980s, including a Specialized "Flag" triple crankset, Phil touring hubs, and a Shimano Deore rear derailleur. The Gran Compe center-pull brakes seem to be the only original equipment. Obviously, someone had really enjoyed this bike and had invested a lot of time and money into it.

It also came to me with swept back handlebars, thumb shifters, and a funky touring seat. Right away, I swapped these out for a wide set of touring bullhorns, an 80's Brooks Professional saddle, and some Suntour stem mounted power shifters. I resisted the urge to convert to fixed gear, thinking that it'd be nice to have a bike better suited for longer rides.

At first, I thought its 25" frame was too big for me, but I quickly learned that the other bikes I had been riding were actually too small. ​ Large vintage bikes are a lot larger than today's large sized bikes and the seatpost is usually shorter, too. Call me a large frame convert.

I rode the bike all through the summer and fall of 2018, including during the second half of the Powderhorn 24, when I was glad to stop riding fixed gear after 70 miles. When the snows came, I hung the Kabuki up in my garage, taking the pedals off so I wouldn't be tempted to ride in the snow.

When I rode it again for the first time this spring, tho, it felt kinda sluggish, especially compared to my spry Juvela. I blamed the tires, but with 27" wheels, my tire selection was extremely limited. I had tried last year running some Panaracer Paselas, but I kept getting flats, including a sidewall blowout on my first ride. I ended up replacing them with some $12 cheapies.

The 80's Araya single-wall rims were also showing their age. They're pretty heavy and not very strong. More than that, tho, I wanted a bike built more for comfort that I could take on the occasional longer ride--maybe ride my first century or more. A bike that could handle gravel roads and potholes with a minimum of bone jarring.

So, I rebuilt the wheels with new Alex double-walled rims. The Phil hubs are still buttery smooth, so all I had to do was polish them and set to work lacing my new wheels. 

Lacing wheels is kinda fun. Very putsy, but fun. The hardest part is measuring everything and ordering the right length spokes. I used two different online spoke calculators to make sure I got the right results. Then, building the wheel is mostly just following a pattern and slowly working around the wheel to make the rim true and the spokes tight.

I chose 35mm Clement Ush tires, which can handle both pavement and gravel and run at 40-60psi. They still need tubes, which is fine with me--I'm not really sold on the whole tubeless thing.

I also cut down some old alloy drops bars to make some new bullhorns which are narrower than what I rode with last year. I really want the same bar and braking setup on all my road bikes so I won't have to think twice about how to stop. I thought briefly about using actual drop bars, but I really don't like them. No one ever rides in the drops and braking power is a lot less when riding on the hoods. 

On my first ride, I was surprised at how much faster the bike felt. I rode the Gateway Trail all the way out to the North Saint Paul snowman. Even at 60psi, I feel like I'm going as fast as I do with 120psi Gatorskins on my fixed gear bikes except I don't feel every single bump.

I will say, though, that I still kind of prefer riding fixed for most things. Thinking about gears and shifting seems to interrupt my mind, making the ride a little bit less relaxing. I seem to prefer less thinking and more pedaling. Nonetheless, I think I'll be riding my Kabuki quite a lot this year, especially for longer rides. At 45 years old, it's good for many many more years.

So, when my Trek 500 died this past December, I needed a new bike frame quick. Except, in the way of bicycles, I ended up buying two. I've already mentioned my new '83 Trek 600, which I outfitted as a bad weather bike with fenders and sealed components. It performed remarkably throughout the ice and snow choked weeks of January, February and March, dropping me only once on a partially frozen puddle on the Midtown Greenway a couple of weeks ago. Not bad!

But I also bought another frame, a 1973 Juvela Special, made in Switzerland by Mondia. And I'm kind of, well, liking it a lot. 
​
It's kind of a princess, tho, with a Campagnolo headset, bottom bracket, and seat post, none of which is very well sealed against the elements. It'll always be a fair weather ride.

It's built with the same Reynolds 531 steel as my Trek 600, but something about it makes it feel like it just wants to burn up the road. For one thing, it's got a long 63cm top tube, which really stretches me out and activates more core muscles than my other bikes. ​It also feels very light and responsive. Whippy.

The Juvela is basically a Mondia Special with a simpler paint job. They were imported by Montrose Bike Shop near Los Angeles; indeed, mine bears a Montrose decal. I bought the frame from a seller in Bozeman, Montana who was willing to keep most of the Campy components that I wouldn't be needing.

I'm sure plenty of restoration purists would object to turning such a fine bicycle into a fixie, but I regret it not at all. Truly, it's a joy to ride in fixed gear. Expect another post about that someday if you can bear it.

I built it up with a vintage Suzue track hub in back and a Shimano hub in front, both of which are laced to Weinmann rims with 25c Gatorskin tires. I chopped some alloy drop bars to make bullhorns (another gauche move) and added Dia Compe centerpull brakes. (Centerpulls are fussy to install but they will stop you fast. My favorite vintage brakes.)

The drivetrain has a 16t Surly cog and an old steel 44t BMX chainwheel bolted to a vintage Sugino Super Maxy crankset. (When I bought the chainwheel at Mr Michaels, they asked me if I was going to use it for a picture frame. I think they charged me $2 for it.) With a fixed gear, I like not having to worry about bending my chainwheel and a few extra ounces for steel is well worth it.

Ridiculously, the Campagnolo Nuovo Record seatpost has its two bolts on top, right under the saddle. It allows you to adjust the seat to the exact angle you want, but you have to wiggle a wrench down under the seat to reach the bolts. Luckily, my mother in law got me a Brooks cambium saddle for Christmas with a handy pressure relief hole that lets me get at the bolts from the top.

The only really tricky thing was the bottom bracket. I learned while I was riding through South Minneapolis that the Campy spindle was incompatible with my Japanese crankset. You learn this when your crank starts to fall off. For some reason Europe, Japan, and US disagreed for a long time about how these things should be built. I really didn't want to spend $200+ on a compatible Campy set.

Online forums suggested that Mondia used either Swiss or goofy French threading on their bottom brackets, meaning that the fixed cup threads may or may not be threaded in the opposite direction of every other bike in the world. Velo Orange makes a sealed French threaded BB, so I ordered one up for $60 and, well, if the Juvela's threading is French, its fixed cup is on there really, really tight. Or, it's actually Swiss threaded, which is the opposite of French but has the same weird threads per inch and I was probably just tightening the cup the whole time. Who knows? In any case, no one seems to make new Swiss bottom brackets.

In the end, I used the hollow spindle I pulled from my Trek 600 along with some new bearings and hey presto! it works great. I'll need to open it up and repack it every once in a while.

I'm glad I figured it out because, as I mentioned, I really like this bike. The other day, I caught a glimpse of it parked at our store out of the corner of my eye and thought, "Oh wow, that's a cool bike...Oh, hey, that's my bike!" The pleasures of a slow middle-aged mind.

The ride went from White Bear Lake to Saint Croix Falls. The first day was exhausting, but that evening I was kind of amazed I'd just ridden 50 miles. (It was my personal one day distance record all the way up until the Powderhorn 24 this past summer.) We ate spaghetti and slept on the floor of the St Croix Falls High School gym.

On the second day, I cut through some grass and hit a boulder. One of the support team riders stopped to true my wheel and said, "You know, if you're going to go on rides like this, you should really get a better bike." I was shocked. It had never really occurred to me that there were "better bikes".  I resented the idea that my Santa Fe wasn't good enough.

His offhand comment had a pretty sizable impact. I never rode another MS event and didn't roll on another group ride until I found Joyful Riders in 2017.  My bikes have always been pretty cheap and my riding mostly solo or with my kids. A lot of commuting, always valuing the utility of biking over the sport or the aesthetics.  It's not that I'm cheap--well I am kinda--I just never had the desire for a top of the line high performance ride. 

Have I been holding a grudge for 35 years? Maybe a little. And maybe it's time to learn to let it go. Objectively, the Santa Fe was kind of a crappy bike. Hopefully, I've learned to be careful about what I say to enthusiastic young riders.

In 1983 or thereabouts, my Santa Fe met its end when I crashed into the rear quarter panel of an AMC Pacer. I flew over the car, flipping head over heels. I'm pretty sure it was the nerdiest possible way to wreck a bike.  (Another lesson learned: don't ride on sidewalks.)

The bike shop in Osseo said the Santa Fe wasn't worth repairing, so my parents helped me buy a low end Raleigh which served me well all the way through high school. Today, I'm still riding old 70s and 80s 10-speeds. So are my kids. 

Thanks to my Mom and Dad for finding these old pics and scanning them for me.

So, when my '85 Trek ripped in half last month, I lost my main ride and needed a replacement ASAP. Naturally, I ended up with two new  bikes. (I understand this is a common problem for bike people. N+1 is almost always the answer.)  I'm still getting to know both of them, but here's the first--a 1983 Trek 600. 

This was my first ebay buy--I wasn't patient enough to find the right size bike locally. It still shocks me that a world class 35 year old bike costs less than a crappy new department store bike. A lot less if you're willing to cobble it together with used parts yourself. 

Made in Wisoconsin, the 600 has basically the same "sport" geometry as the 500, although I think the chainstays are just a little longer. It's made with Reynolds 531 steel instead of 501-- technically an upgrade, but I can't really feel much of a difference.  In '83, the downtube shifters were clamped on instead of brazed like they were in '85, so the downtube shouldn't have any weak spots.

I built it up to be fixed gear, of course, using a lot of parts from my old Trek. I added fenders and picked up some cheap bullhorns and cork tape at Mr Michael Recycles Bicycles, a true St. Paul treasure. I'm in there all the time scrounging parts. 

The wheelset is from the 500, but the tires are brand new 28c Gatorskins that I picked up locally for a song. The crankset I salvaged from another old Trek I'll be building up to sell. The pedals have straps instead of clips, which I kind of like. The gear ratio is 42 x 16 instead of 44 x 16, but because it has 165mm cranks instead of 170mm and slightly larger tires, the overall gain ratio is almost exactly the same. Math!

I think this will be my new daily ride. My other new whip, well...for some reason it seems to be just a little too special and possibly temperamental. More on that later. 

When this bike was made, I was tooling around on my first ten speed, a Huffy Sante Fe, which is hardly collectible. These vintage Treks are quite collectible, tho. Many now live in storage or on display and aren't used much. I plan to put plenty of miles on this Trek in all kinds of weather. ​After all, bikes were made to be ridden.

I bought a lovely red Schwinn Super LeTour 12.2 last summer for $50, thinking I’d fix it up and flip it. Built by Panasonic in Japan in 1976, this bike was near the top of Schwinn’s lineup with a double-butted chromoly frame.

But as soon as I got it home, I discovered the aluminun seatpost was well and truly stuck. Any ungreased alloy seatpost will chemically bond to a steel frame over time and this one wasn’t budging.

The internet offers multple solutions. Flooding the seat tube with penetrating oil didn’t help. So, I cut post 1” above the frame to cut the post out with a hacksaw, but the walls of the post were too thick for the hacksaw blade to enter. The next methods would be even more extreme, involving dry ice or, failing that, caustic lye. I gave up and set the whole thing aside.

Until today, a cold day in Minnesota’s January. It’s been around 5-15 degrees for a day or two now, so I thought this might be the LeTour’s big chance to get unstuck.

Aluminum expands and contracts more than steel due to changes in temperature. So, when it’s really cold the post will be just a little smaller than it was last summer. I clamped the seatpost in my vice, applied a little heat to the outside of the seat tube, and turned the whole frame. It creaked, it groaned, and it gave way. Sucess! Now I can put this great bike back together and get it rolling again. Thanks, winter!

A few months ago, a neighbor posted to our marvelously salty Hamline Midway FB group that someone had dumped an old bike trailer filled with garbage and half-burned firewood in the alley behind her garage.

Now, our neighborhood has endured no small measure of dissention about garbage collection and dumping while St. Paul transitioned to city-wide trash collection. It’s mostly an agree-to-disagree kind of thing at this point but when this trailer was dumped emotions were still running high. Comments on the post were already heating up when I volunteered to pick up the trailer, garbage and all, much to our neighbor’s relief. 

It turned out to be an InStep trailer in fine condition except for all the fabric, which all smelled like smoked dog poop. I stripped it down to the frame, then made a wood base from an old pine Lundia shelf which used to hold toys in our store and had previously served in a local Pier 1 store. The fabric sides are made out of canvas Bananagram swag bags we got from a vendor at a game store conference.

After a couple hours work and $0 spent, the Bananwagon is complete. Possibly my finest work of creative reuse in 2018.

A year ago, my friend Troy got me interested in fixed gear bikes. At the time, I was riding my old Gary Fisher Aquila, a fine mountain bike that I bought over 20 years ago, bar ends and all. Honestly, I didn't take care of my Aquila like it deserved. We didn't have a garage and it spent a long time sitting out in the elements. 

By the time I got back into biking last year, the Aquila's seat post was permanently seized and it's shifters were shot. I converted it to a single speed with a chain tensioner and put on studded tires for winter. It was a beast, but the more I got into riding my fixed gear road bikes, the more I wished that the Aquila had horizontal dropouts so that it could be fixed, too. 

I remember that the late great Sheldon Brown wrote that a fixed gear mountain bike would be the ultimate winter ride, so I started looking for an early version from the mid-eighties that would have horizontal dropouts. (Looking again for the quote today, it seems that Sheldon said no such thing. He may have thought it, tho...?)

Last summer, I finally found my bike, a 1987 Schwinn Mirada in flamingo pink--a mid-range bike from Schwinn's early Mountain Bike lineup. It's got a CroMo frame, but it's still heavy as a tank. 26" wheels, no suspension to crap out--perfect for my purposes. It cost me $40.

With a vintage road bike, fixed gear conversions are pretty easy because you can always buy a 700c flip flop track wheels and pop them in. All you've got to worry about is chainline and maybe the reach of the brakes. But with 26" wheels, it seems that fixed gear wheels simply don't exist. I finally found one on some obscure Google store, but when it arrived it turned out to be 650b, the wrong size altogether. So, I took that wheel apart and relaced the hub to an old Weinmann "Great Wall" rim. 

I added a new stem, fixie flat bars, and studded tires. At first, I thought the old Schwinn canti brakes would do the trick, but they turned out to be super crappy. I fussed with them forever but they never stayed in alignment and were prone to failure at critical moments. So, the Mirada now has new Tektro v-brakes. We're good to go.

Then it snowed! I can tell you that the Mirada is a great ride on packed ice and snow. It's a surefooted beast. No one would say that the Mirada was ever a top of the line ride, but as a winter beater battling snow, ice, and salt it really is the best. Honestly, Sheldon was right, even though he didn't say it--a fixed gear mountain bike really is the ultimate winter ride. 

This past Winter, I picked up a vintage Trek frame from a local framebuilder who was moving out of state. He gave it to me free, saying that it had been in his basement for years and was given to him by a friend who had attempted a single speed conversion but never got any farther than grinding all the brazings  off.

Looking up the serial number, I learned it was a 1985 Trek 500, made in Wisconsin with Reynolds 501 steel. My plan was to fix it up and sell it.

As soon as the weather got warm enough, I painted it along with another project I was working on, an early 80's Bridgestone Kabuki. I gave it two coats of primer, four coats of brush on Rustoleum, and and a few coats of clearcoat. I gave it a new fork,  some chopped down old Bontrager mountain bike flat bars, mismatched Tektro and Shimano 105 brakes, mismatched cranks, and a fixed gear drivetrain. You couldn't really tell it was a Trek unless you looked at the custom investment cast lugs. It looked pretty generic, but the first time I rode it it felt special. It was springy, lithe, and fast. It was more fun to ride than any other bike I'd ever ridden. And I had built it.  I was keeping it.

I rode it all over town for seven months. We grabbed a lot of bike tags together, from Eden Prairie to North Saint Paul. Like, a lot of tags ;) . We raced in the Powderhorn 24.  One time, I hit a curb near the U of M and went over the handlebars, but that was ok. I just kept biking through summer and into fall. Although I had planned to ride my backup fixie through the winter, I kept riding the Trek, giving it an occasional shower to wash the gunk off.

But last week,  I started feeling a weird wiggle. I thought the rear hub might be too loose, so I took off the rear wheel and tightened it. But on my next ride to work, it still felt weird. It was the Saturday before Christmas, our busiest work day of the year, so I decided to look into it after Christmas and rebuild the hub if necessary. 

Leaving work that day, I rolled down off the curb and was preparing to accelerate into Grand Avenue ahead of an oncoming car half a block away. I hauled up on the handlebars to get some power and the bike literally ripped in half. The down tube sheared a few inches below the head tube and the top tube bent back into the shape of a croissant.

It is a weird thing about biking that we tend to become emotionally attached to our bikes. They 're just machines, after all, but they're also extensions of ourselves and and expression of who we are. And they've shared unnumbered adventures with us. My Trek 500 wasn't my only bike, but it was my favorite. And it's sudden loss was devastating in a way that could only be helped by finding a new frame as soon as possible (sorry, family, for my 36 hour obsession earlier this week...)

I can see why the frame failed the way it did. There was a dent in the tube there where I think the previous owner had ground off too much metal removing the downtube shifter bosses. Looking back, you can see the flaw was there all along.

I've been told that it's possible to repair a frame like this, but after talking to Erik at Peacock Groove, who was kind enough to fix a different frame for me last spring, it was clear that finding another comparable frame would be a lot cheaper than fixing this one. And so, a new frame is on it's way. (Hopefully that'll be another post.) Perhaps I'll hang the broken frame on the wall, but I'll probably recycle it. Whether it's vintage or new, the purpose of a bicycle is to ride it. They may not last forever, but it certainly is worthwhile to ride every last mile out of them. And that's what we did.