By Yokota Fritz
The 2010 North American Handmade Bicycle Show finished up Sunday in Richmond, Virginia with an announcement for next year's show location (Austin, Texas) and a prize presentation for "Best Of" show bikes.
By Yokota Fritz
After five years, I've finally converted Cyclelicious over from Blogger to Wordpress. Things are more or less functional now, but it may take a little time for the RSS feeds to get updated. Unless you're one of the small handful of people who still subscribe to my original feed, you shouldn't need to change anything. The correct feed is at at Feedburner/Cyclelicious. If you don't see your Cyclelicious feed updated over the next couple of days, you'll know you need to change things around.
By Yokota Fritz
I'm having a lot of fun trying the Urbana Bike bicycle. I hope to have an initial review on Commute By Bike in the next day or two.
Those ultra fat 2.6 inch tires on the Urbana suggest to me that they might "float" wonderfully on the snow, and Urbana confirmed for me that the tire was designed with the year round, all weather commuter in mind. Urbana is based in Montreal, Quebec, and Montreal this time of year means snow.
I want to test this out, but we don't exactly have an abundance of snow in Santa Cruz. I tried a reasonable analog: Beach Sand. Conditions this last weekend were 70 degrees and sunny at the beach, a perfect opportunity to test these tires.
As you can see, the blue waters of Monterey Bay look very inviting. Furthermore, the tire "floats" over the sand just fine. I didn't photograph myself on the dry, less compact sand away from the water because I was more concerned about keeping in control, but I can still ride and control the bike in the soft sand.
Unfortunately, for my return trip home, I discovered another type of float these tires excel at - the tires are too fat to fit into the tire slot on bus bike racks, so they sit right on top of the slot!
The bus driver won't let me mount the bike like this, but I eventually found a solution to this problem. If I deflate the tires partially down to about 10 PSI (recommended minimum is 20 PSI), I can jam the tires into place. They're wedged in pretty good, so some effort is required to pull them back out at your destination.
At 10 PSI, these balloon tires are still ridable, though you risk pinching the tube on curbs and bumps and the front tire squirms like crazy. You also need noticeably more effort to make the bike go with the tires so squishy.
If you frequently bring your bike on the bus, you might consider swapping out to a skinnier tire. The Nid De Poule tires otherwise perform surprisingly well, with good rolling resistance and superior shock absorption because of their big air volume.
I discovered another cool feature in Santa Cruz last weekend -- a pair of pedestrians crossed against the light directly in front of me, so I squeezed brakes and the rear tire emitted a satisfyingly loud heart stopping screech. The walkers yelped in fear and clutched their chests in response as they jumped back to the sidewalk. I really hate the idea of generating fear like a car, but I have to admit to a certain visceral satisfaction when I saw the look of terror on their faces. I'll repent of that later.
If you want the Nid De Poule, you have to buy the bike from Urbana -- it's not available for sale individually. Steve tells me, though, that Schwalbe's Fat Frank tire might be similar.
NAHBS 2010 photos, news and updates
NAHBS 2010 photos
Cyclelicious 2.0
A little worried about this guy
What do you expect will happen? He seems unconcerned from what I've read. The NYT article says the warrant is only applicable in France.
=v= Just your average everyday doping-the-B-sample-only Pennsylvania Dutch international cyberhacker.
What does that mean "tragically stupid" ?
Fat tires and float
Boy, that bus driver must have hated your guts when you were snapping those photos.
Plenty of snow on the trails here in DC if you'd like to send it East for some more testing!
@Adam - This is at the bus depot, so nobody's waiting as I snap photos and move the bike around.
@Kevin - :-)
Another thing that works is mounting an airhorn on the handlebars with a front-mounted waterbottle cage (they are about the same size). Just hit the button on top and it sounds louder than a car horn.
@Michael - I have an Airzounds, but it's faster and more effective to just brake. I would've hit 'em if I reached for the horn.
Yelling is faster, and understood better. I have ten years' practice projecting my 'teacher voice'. The bell is for people deserving politeness; lungs are for tools.
The Fat Franks on my Big Dummy don't fit in the bus racks either...
Bike ride with Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn
Permalink: NAHBS 2010 photos, news and updates
