Sometimes bicycles just accumulate without any rhyme or reason. In my case, I started with TBBITW (my Trek 1000), which served me well for about two decades by itself, but then was extended into an xtracycle and made even better. ~15,000 miles of long distance riding later I started doing organized randonneuring and started to find places where it wasn't TBBITW (it didn't climb very enthusiastically, which is a big problem in PNW randonneuring) so I bought a second machine for randonneuring and took it's place. #2 started as a 650b machine, but the selection of 650b tires at the time sucked and I converted it to 700c. About this time the bike nerds I knew started getting the fat tire disease and I discovered TBTITW (the best tires in the world, aka the 700x28c Resist Nomad), so I spent a couple hundred dollars on a used frame + components + Nomad 45s to build #3; a 700c fat-for-me bike (#3 didn't last very long; I used it with tires of various sizes for a while, but it always felt like climbing up into the cab of a truck to ride it)
Around this same time, I built bicycles for my sweetie (Murray Baja; it's amazing how much nicer a gaspipe frame rides when you strip all the extra heavy components off and make it into a 650b machine. She spent $5 for it, and I put maybe $350 -- the SON28 was most of this -- into making it better) and children (Kogswell P/R for the eldest, and a tiny Shiromoto tri frame for the youngest) and poking around at these two 650b machines rekindled my itch for 650b, so when I had a chance to get a free GT Talera frame I used it and ended up with a 650b disc Sweet Fixie(tm) as my #4. I passed a free pile on the way home from the store one afternoon and picked up #5 -- a SE draft gaspipe frame -- which got a pair of practice wheels stuffed under it to make a 3-speed project bike. A third-hand Ahearne frame passed through my hands around then, and #3 was scrapped to provide parts to test it out (pretty frame, planed like it was going out of style, but slow and too tall for me) before I flipped the frame to someone in Alaska. Sometime between the Sweet Fixie(tm) and the the Ahearne's transit of my clutter I'd pulled the Trek 1000 frame out of my xtracycle when the DS chainstay had started to debond because of the lever action of countless heavily loaded trips back home from shopping, but one day (after I'd built a set of disc-specific wheels for the GT) I looked at the Trek 1000 frame, the old 650b rims from the GT's original wheelset, and decided that instead of these pieces lying around separately they'd do well together (and the lack of leverage + chain would keep the DS chainstay from further debonding) and with a pair of T2BTITW (the second best tires in the world; the 650x32b Hutchinson Confrerie des 650) it would give me a nice randonneuring bike again. And then I found a wrecked (t-boned by a truck and with the rear triangle bent all to pieces) Trek 820 frame in size tiny that I grabbed for brazing practice and, after impulsively building it up with spare parts and riding it on a 200k loop realized that all of my previous bicycles suffered from being too tall and short for me. I improved it by throwing away the threaded fork, then cutting off the rear triangle and brazing on a new one, then rode it almost exclusively for a year until I was right hooked (killing the fork, bending but not breaking the rear triangle, and breaking my left shoulder) and had to sideline it for the handmade from that I'd made as a copy of it but without mountain HT/ST geometry or super-heavy tubing. So 6 machines (the handmade frame had the ST fail at the BB and I'm building a replacement frame while I can still get True Temper tubing), all part of an interative process to work out the most comfortable fit, and all (except the xtracycle) basically the same sort of machine give or take 6-8 gears or a coaster hub. #1 Trek 1000, xtracycled #2 Soma Speedster, 650b->700c #3 Schwinn Crisscross, then Ahearne, then SE draft #4 GT Talera, 650b disc sweet fixie #5 Trek 1000, dextracycled & 650b #6 Mountainhack (Trek 820+Orc) 650b So many things needed to come together to get from #1 to #6 that I don't know what I could have done to streamline the process. And it's not as if 1-5 are horrible machine, but they basically have no resale value for anything other than parts, and those parts are easier to find when they're attached to a functional bicycle. -david parsons On Friday, April 7, 2017 at 4:26:01 PM UTC-7, LeahFoy wrote: > > I'm in the minority here in that I'm a bike minimalist. I've got TBBITW > (The Best Bike in the World), a 2012 55cm Betty Foy. My husband has a 52 > Clem H, in case I need a back-up bike. I've admired the other mixtes > Rivendell has to offer - oh, how I love them! - but I don't NEED them. I > use my bike to get around the neighborhood and haul the boys' things to > school, the park, etc. and this bike just works. In my 30s I have decided > greed is a very unattractive quality that I saw in myself. I figured greed > was something worth guarding my heart against, and I decided the antidote > is contentment + gratitude. So, I'm savoring my rides on my pretty blue > bike with the red lug hearts, though I reserve the right to change it up > every now and again with a new bag. I think it's a pretty good compromise! > > I almost didn't write this because I worried some of the N+1 crowd may > take offense (please don't! I'm talking only about me, not you!) but then I > saw The Wheelhouse posted something excellent on their new blog and I > thought it captured my sentiments pretty well. And pictured is a Rivendell > Sam Hillborne - swoon! > > So, if anyone is on the fence wondering if they need another, here's proof > you can be happy as a gopher in new dirt with just one bike. Grin. > > https://www.thewheelhouse.bike/blogs/the-wheelhouse-blog > > Leah, who means well and hopes you will see it that way too, Las Vegas, NV > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "RBW Owners Bunch" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to rbw-owners-bunch+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to rbw-owners-bunch@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/rbw-owners-bunch. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
