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.