Really neat thread, haven't had time to read all of the responses, but my own thinking has been meandering along this path recently. I'm relatively young (29) but have been cycling seriously for 11 or 12 years. I'd always considered myself relatively faithful to my bikes, not turning them over that often, and having a fairly deep relationship with them. But recently, I was considering my stable, and realized that all of my bikes were less than 1.5 years old, which surprised me. As the Talking Heads song goes, it was a "How did I get here??" moment. Read on...
I might be unique in that the steel all-rounder thing has been been part of my cycling identity from the beginning. I started cycling as a teenager in massachusetts, mainly on summer "Overland" trips (multi-week outdoor adventure trips for teenagers, run by a company in Western MA). My first tour was with them, from Seattle to San Francisco in 1999, on a used Trek 720 hybrid I had bought for the purpose. I was so dorky as a kid I thought hybrids were cool.... I generally recognized the beginning of my "serious" cycling life as 2001-2002, when I decided to do Overland's hardest tour, the coast-to-coast "American Challenge," and bought a Trek 520 for the purpose. As training I started riding it the 8 miles to high school every day. I loved it! Again, I like the idea of the touring bike: a road bike with drop bars, but beefier, something that wasn't afraid to be loaded up or abused. The tour was awesome, a big defining moment in my young life, and I've been riding pretty much continuously since. I even took college as an opportunity to move to NorCal (Berkeley), where I can pretty much ride year round, and I've stuck around ever since then. At college I started out riding with the college's racing team, just to learn the local routes, but found them too fast to hang with really and didn't really like the competitive, jock atmosphere of the whole thing. At the same time I started thinking about a second "beater" bike that I could use for getting around campus and urban riding, and that's when fixed gears entered my life. Yep, I was a fixie kid, even rode brakeless for a couple of stupid months. However, fixed gears also turned me on to Sheldon Brown, with who's help I learned how to convert fixed gears and generally started taking care of my own bikes. Sheldon was also how I discovered Rivendell and the Bridgestone mentality. The first Rivendell I thought was super cool was his fixed gear Ram; around the same time I also saw a picture of the prototype Quickbeam and was pretty enamored. However, being a college student ever affording one seemed a very far off proposition. Meanwhile, I focused on old steel bikes, converting them to fixed gear and riding them all over Berkeley. I still had the Trek 520 but was less into it because it had gears. Eventually, it too got rebuilt as a Fixed/SS with a white ENO eccentric hub, and I proceeded to ride that all over the Bay Area, even took it touring/backpacking around Europe one summer. My senior year I bought some Moustache bars from Riv to try out on the Trek and got a copy of the Reader and the old print catalog (the one with Mark on the cover), and reading those it was really when I became a real Riv enthusiast. It was a cool time...Grant had just gotten Tektro to make the Silver 55-73 brake and was bringing out the Homer, and they were selling the second run of orange Quickbeams, which I still totally lusted after, the first Bombadils were in prototype stage. Post college, working and earning a bit but not a lot of money, I wanted something a bit more roadie but still fixed gear and high handlebars, so I bought a Salsa Casseroll kind of poor man's combination Ram/ Quickbeam with a dingle fixed/SS drivetrain. I rode that for a long time, continuing my habit of epic climbs on a single gear bike. The Trek got rebuilt as a gearie all-rounder, again with flared drop bars, but up real high on a steerer extender and hi-rise stem. It rode great but looked totally weird. Through this all I also had an old Schwinn World Sport frame as a beater townie fixed gear with North Road bars that I had built in college, which rode awesome, and turned me onto the idea that upright bars can be fun, but I still had a lot of latent racerism or drop bar snobbery as well. Along in there I went to grad school at UC Davis and moved to Sacramento, which for those not familiar with California geography, is in the pancake-flat central valley. I commuted the ~16 miles from Sacramento to Davis a lot, probably the peak of my mileage came somewhere along in those years. Along the way I got a bee in my bonnet that I hadn't really figured out the bike fit thing, which kicked off a period of experimentation the last 4 years or so that I'm still in. I sold the faithful fixed gear beater to buy an older, REALLY BIG (66cm) Takara touring bike that had been listed on craigslist as a "poor man's Atlantis." It rode and fit great as I bought it, with Technomic stem, Nitto 115 bars, half step + granny gearing. But, being a compulsive tinkerer, I couldn't leave well enough alone and it got a fixed gear drivetrain, woodchipper bars, and a porteur rack. It seemed like a good idea at the time but it was awful...I rode it like that for a couple of years but wasn't really excited about it. After that, I converted the fixed gear Casseroll to full on gearie road bike with downtube shifters, and that setup was really good function wise. I still hadn't figured out the fit thing though....my seat kept moving backwards, bought a couple of Nitto "Wayback" posts, which seemed to make me a bit more balanced but then the handlebars were too far away.... Around the same time, really missing my old upright barred fixed gear beater, my then-fiance-now-wife convinced me it'd be okay to go all the way and buy a Rivendell with upright bars to replace it. They were blowing out the last of the SimpleOnes at the time, so I thought I'd get one of those. Vince wasn't convinced (hah!) that the largest simpleone (62cm) would fit my ~96cm pbh properly, so he went in the back, and brought down a NOS Orange 64cm Quickbeam frame from the rafters. I was instantly sold, having lusted after those bikes since they came out. Still on a grad student budget, I had to pay for it on layaway, and it took me 7 or 8 months to pay for it and all of the parts I needed for it. During the same time we got married, and moved back to Berkeley together. I had been increasingly depressed with the academic life I was pursuing at graduate school and had been working in a bike shop part time in Davis, and got hooked up at a new bike shop opening up in Berkeley when I moved down here. Decided to commit to that instead of academia right around the time I finally got the Quickbeam built up. In fact, I rode it to the meeting with my grad school advisor to tell him that I was quitting, and in an ironic twist he is also a Riv enthusiast and owns a Betty. For the past couple of years I've been grooving on the upright bars thing, both in my own bikes and at the bike shop, where we specialized in practical everyday bikes and cargo bikes. The Quickbeam had Bullmoose bars, traditional flat bars, and then has had Bosco Bullmoose bars for the last year or so. After finding some cracks in the old faithful Trek's headtube it was replaced with a Surly Long Haul Trucker frame, sized like my Quickbeam (64cm) and setup with Albatross bars, B17, Marks Rack, L'il Loafer in front, old NS Country Bag in back, etc. to make a very Riv-ish all-rounder. At the same time, working in shops and working on a huge variety of bicycles has softened my Riv/iBob snobbery. I've always appreciated the simplicity and solidness of threadless headsets; index shifting works pretty well too. In fact, I just sold my only drop bar bike, the Casseroll, to buy my most technologically advanced bike I've ever owned, a Raleigh Talus 29 comp hardtail mtb with alu. frame, air suspension fork, hydro brakes, rapidfire shifters, etc. It works really well, but disc brakes are definitely a bit fiddly for my tastes. These days I'm feeling open to a lot of things, no longer convinced that I know better than a lot of bike designers. I still like steel and I always tend towards simplicity over complexity. I'll probably always have a steel fixed gear in my stable. On Friday, February 28, 2014 9:13:47 AM UTC-8, jinxed wrote: > > Over the last couple weeks I have been fortunate to get out and ride each > of the bikes in my stable. This offered some really surprising comparisons > and conflicted some of my previous thoughts on each bike. My bikes are USA > made and they're all steel, and I'm attached to all of them. They also > happen to be different wheel sizes. 26" Riv AR, 650b OAC Rambler, 29" Spot > MTB, and 700c Cross/race. > > My biking trajectory was BMX - MTB - Cross - Road - and now is some sort > of hybrid of all those. I was a staunch opponent of 29er and clung to 26" > adamantly until I finally gave up and tried the larger wheel size. I had to > eat a lot of crow when I enjoyed it. Since then I've never gone back to 26" > off road, but still held on to romantic praise for it. > > CX was just a natural offshoot of MTB when trying to ride on the road. > Although I raced road bikes, I much preferred riding them in the dirt. My > ultimate ride is a fast swoopy twisty turny jaunt through wooded > singletrack on a CX bike. It's what my bike dreams are made of. > > My first Rivendell was also my first 650b and it felt like a bridge > between the MTB and CX. It seemed to be the true all round that perfectly > fit the way I wanted to ride, and more importantly where I have the most > access to ride. I have several dirt trails I prefer riding on, but I must > take pavement to get there. I think the best aspect of the Rivendell line > in it's entirety is that they do well in many types of terrain. Obviously > age and life circumstances affect how and where I ride, but I find much > more enjoyment out of the exploration type of riding I'm doing now. I > attribute much of that to this list and the ideals behind the bike designs. > > This brings me to my recent riding. If I had ranked my bikes based on > mental attachment, it would have been AR, CX, 650b, 29er. But after riding > them all back to back I realized my enjoyment of the ride of those bikes is > a different sequence: 650b, CX, 29er, AR. > > I'm surprised I prefer larger diameter wheels, because I refuse to admit > 26" is dead! But if I were to choose, 650 is the smallest platform I'd go > to. > -- 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 http://groups.google.com/group/rbw-owners-bunch. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
