Fat Bikes and Grip Studs

 

pic source: fat-bike.com

As much as I am happy and excited about Mutant Winter III, there is another winter cycling solution I am interested in. Fat Bikes. These are bikes that are designed for use on snow or sand or generally ugly terrain, characterized by crazy wide rims and very wide and usually rather soft tires. Good examples of the most popular are the Salsa Mukluk and the Surly Pugsley.

The reason I'm interested is that I could ride the unplowed and icy MUPs in London Ontario on one of these wonderful mutant-by-design bicycles. Studded skinny or even MTB tires aren't good enough to handle them; I have tried. The thing is, crazy wide rims and tires require crazy wide forks and crazy everything else. Crazy is expensive, especially when 1 in 1000 cyclists* will really want and actually pay for one. To give you an idea, searching ebay.ca for "surly pugsley" or "salsa mukluk" doesn't even yield any results featuring full bikes... $300 rims, etc, but no bikes.

I don't have the money to buy one of these things. A Pugsley sells for about $1700 on REI. A Mukluk runs about the same. I started looking into building one, but quickly realized that even the parts and tires put these things out of reach for me right now.

One nice thing I discovered while looking into building one of these monsters was gripstuds.com. There have always been DIY methods of studding bike tires, but I've never really believed that hardware store screws would hold up very well. Grip Studs fill the gap nicely. They are expensive, but with these you could stud any tire you wanted with high quality studs rather than trying to find a finished product like I have so far.

I think I'm gonna go talk to the people at First Cycleworks... they seem to enjoy building mutant cycles more than most other shops in town and I'm hoping they might have some useful and doable fat bike advice for me. Wish me luck!

Yer Pal,

R A N T W I C K

* That statistic is based on nothing tangible. The 1000 could as easily be 500 or 10000. The author of this blog is thinking you'll get the idea whether number is accurate or not.

Cycling in Traffic: Irrational Fears

If the title of this post drew you in because you care about Vehicular Cycling or Cycle Driving or any of those crazy notions about roads being shared without special paint or lanes or infrastructure, you are in for a real disappointment, despite the fact that bikes and roads and cars are nowhere near mutually exclusive. This post is about my stupid brain and its totally unfounded, irrational fears:

Since I have not been buried in concrete, you can expect to see another post here soon. Have an excellent weekend!

Yer Pal,

R A N T W I C K

Childish Again

I have posted in the past about bringing clothing that belonged to my children (socks, underpants) into work instead of my own stuff. Those incidents were accidental. Now I have started taking their stuff on purpose...

 

 

 

 My Left Foot - no, not that My Left Foot; My Left Foot.

 

Allow me to explain. If you have children who play organized soccer, you may well have found yourself with a rather large supply of soccer socks, your children having been issued them in year after year of playing. Strangely, those soccer socks, although intended for the children, are usually big enough to fit me quite nicely. I wear them under my long work pants, of course. They are comfortable, breathe very well and are a nice dark black colour. They even feel good on my legs, like girdles for my calves!

 

Hey, wait just one damn minute... have I started wearing black knee-high support hose? Crap! They're just my kids' soccer socks, dammit! I swear!

 

 

I will not be this now, at the age of 43. No way. Maybe later. Maybe.

 

 

 

Forget that, man. Those socks are going back into the kids' clothes. As far as you know, anyway.

 

 

Yer Pal, R A N T W I C K