Continuing in the vein of bike obsession...

I finally picked up my brand new bike this week and have been poking around on it like a child obsessed with a new toy. Which, I guess in a way is not an analogy but rather just accurately describing what I actually am. I picked out every component on this bike but made the (wise) choice to let ABE Cycles assemble them into a functioning bicycle. So this poking around has given me hands-on access to all the stuff I’d been equally obsessing about online for months. You ask: But what has caused me to actually write about this on the internet and reveal myself for the geek I am to the world at large? I respond: one particular part is so impressive in its elegance, so beautiful in its engineering design, and so cool in its... coolness that I am compelled like a trekkie to a convention; some supernatural force drives me to share my feelings.

And what, exactly, has caused this inspiration in me? Well, a seatpost.

In my mind, a seatpost has always looked like this:

from www.amazon.com

Right, what else could a seat post do than just... post? It doesn’t seem like there’s exactly room for the elegance or beauty in this metal stick that I so pretentiously prattled on about above. This is simple enough, you stick that in the bike, clamp it down in the frame, then get another clamp that squeezes the frame on your saddle and attaches the whole thing to the top end of the post. That top clamp generally works in the manner described by Sheldon Brown:

Older (and cheap newer) bicycles use seatposts that are basically a length or steel or aluminum pipe, which narrows down at the top. A separate saddle clamp fits on to the narrow... section of the seatpost. There is a bolt running crosswise through the clamp, which holds a set of special-shaped washers to the rails of the saddle's undercarriage. When one of the nuts on this bolt is loosened, it becomes possible to slide the rails back and forth and to adjust the tilt of the saddle.Some of these special washers have serrations which help maintain the angle of the saddle. It is very important to tighten the nuts securely so the saddle will not act as a rocking chair. If it does slip, the serrations will get worn down, and you will be unable to secure the saddle without buying a new saddle clamp.

The clamp looks something like this (with very little variation between all the types I’ve seen)

from www.wallbike.com

My Peugeot definitely fits into that category of being an older bicycle. Here is a shot of the Peug’ with the Brooks saddle from Swook. While the saddle is not cheap, it is still attached with one of these clamp systems.

My problem with these seat posts has always been, as Sheldon Brown alludes to, the tightening of that top clamp enough to prevent the seat from tilting back or forth when the full weight of a person is pudgin’ around on the bike. If you over-tighten the bolts on the seat clamp you risk either stripping the bolt (like I’ve done before) or deforming the clamp (like I’ve done before). But if you don’t tighten it enough when you sit on it, it might seem fine until you hit your first bump and you go crashing on the seat and you suddenly find yourself pointing upward as if the seat is preparing to launch you off the bike. Furthermore, if you wanted to adjust the angle you’d have to loosen that bolt to where the teeth could disengage each other but by the very nature of the teeth you had specific points of where they’d engage and where they’d be in contact. So you had specific angles that you were forced into using.

Suffice to say, these clamps were always a necessary evil and something I just put up with. Because repairs of my bike always involved buying/repairing old parts, I never even suspected that bike engineers were designing new techniques of seat attachment.

Enter Nitto, stage right.

Nitto is a bike parts maker from Japan and they specialize in badass, beautiful, steel parts that are meant to last forever and work well the whole time. Not to risk sounding like a Nitto fanboy, but when spec’ing my bike I tried to get as many Nitto parts as the budget would allow; one choice that has shown to be sound was on this seat post that I’ve taken so long to actually talk about. Here is a shot of the Nitto seatpost from the Rivendell website:

If this gem of manufacturing isn’t immediately blowing you away with its features, trust me that I will exhaust you with the specifics. Let me point out a few things: 1) the single bolt on the underside 2) the curve of the top end of the post itself (where it says Nitto65) 3) those smooth grooves on the clamping part.

What Nitto has done here is reduce all the struggle and annoyance from the old clamp into a single bolt that allows complete freedom in angle and location of the saddle in conjunction with ease of attainment of those positions. When you loosen that single bolt with a single allen wrench (singularly), you can slide that clamp along the curved topside which produces a tilt in the seat. This is a bit like an analog record sounding so nice next to the digital teeth on the old style clamps. Then, if the seat is too far forward or backward you only have to (gasp!) slide the seat backward or forward to compensate! While that was always possible, theoretically, with an old clamp I had never actually witnessed it in practice. The way those things had to be manhandled and shimmied into place would put such a preload on the clamp that it would never slide along the saddle’s frame. Never. If my old seat was kind of, sort of close to OK I would be thankful and just deal with any other discomfort the angle/location provided.

The Soma with seat clamp:

With this new design (did Nitto invent it or just perfect it? I don’t know and don’t wish to know because I just want to love Nitto unconditionally and mythify their manufacturing in my mind) I have adjusted my seat every night when I get home. If there is even the slightest hint at discomfort I have the peace of mind knowing that a change in angle and position is no longer a struggle. Unscrew, slide and title, screw together, try out the new arrangement. It is, to say the least, fantastic.

Somewhere in a fluorescent-light filled cubicle in some dark building in Japan there is a designer receiving a little jolt of appreciation and inspiration. He is receiving my nerdwave transmissions. The nerdwave transmissions, if you are curious, are a certain type of low-frequency, high-energy wave that emanates from the mind of someone over-educated and under-stimulated. They can only be picked up by others of that ilk. It is how graduate students, scientists, etc. communicate; like dolphins. Nerdy dolphins.

I am going absolutely bonkers waiting for my new bike to get built. I don’t know how many different flickr bike photostreams, Soma Bike blogs, the parts for sale on rivbike.com or velo-orange.com I’ve looked through repeatedly recently... but... it’s a lot. I am going to share some of the stuff that I think would make for an excellent commuter/city/townie bike.

First off, a front rack with basket to me is the most convenient for quick loads. For men’s bikes in the US, the top tube on the bike forces us to mount and dismount by swinging our leg back behind the seat and over the rear tire. With a large basket or load there, that movement is hindered. I have never tried this with a low-lying basket but when I’ve stuck old milk crates on my bike’s rear rack I’ve always had problems. Therefore, once again, I say that a front rack with basket is ideal. As such, when I get the funds I do believe I will be picking up the beauty you see there. It is a Gamoh FR-1from, of course, Japan. What isn’t quite apparent in the detail of that photo is the extra nice feature of a bottle opener on the front of the basket. Sweet!

In the meantime, I picked up a Pletscher mousetrap rack which I will fit with a Wald basket (seen as a rear basket in this photo - which is something I will try in the future as an addendum to my first point above (furthermore, is it coincidence that both photos (Wald and Gamoh) happen to be a Soma Buena Vista bike?)). This will be my makeshift rack-basket for the front of my bike which will be assembled via high-tech twist-ties. Also are you impressed with the Inception-inspired TRIPLE PARENTHETICAL embedded in that sentence? I’m pretty proud of it.

Oh, as for the bike itself, the frame and fork are going to be the exquisitely nice looking ivory Double Cross from Soma. I’m planning on some red-maroon tape to cover the length of my Albatross handlebars and I think that’ll look nice next to the ivory colored frame. Ok, I’ll stop here for now because if I don’t I might end up writing about bike stuff for another hour or two. And since Cindy is waking up from her nap I’ll probably need to help fetch some dinner soon.

Adios muchachos.

Last Wednesday I successfully defended my Master’s thesis and officially completed the last requirement for my Master’s degree. The thesis and defense had been completely consuming my time and attention, allowing my mind to only occasionally drift onto the future. Now that I’ve climbed up over that wall, I have this clear view of the breezy ocean and palm trees bending to arch over my path ahead. I am in the process of finding a place to live in LA which means I am free to daydream about a new life in a new city. Better, worse, or the same, my lips smack at the thought of delicious, lush new experiences. It also helps that UCLA, the morning of my thesis defense, emailed me extending their financially helping hand with more grants and fellowships. This has all but erased that nagging worry at how I was actually going to afford living in the second largest city in the US. Cindy and I drive up tomorrow morning to look at some apartments and rooms for rent in the area around UCLA. I am confident we will find something that I can enjoy.

Half the fun of having a bike is having someone to ride around with when the weather is begging you to go out in the evening. it’s no good to ride around when the person next to you has to walk or responds: “umm no... i’ll drive there and meet you” when you bring up the idea of riding to 4th ave to catch the sunset.

Therefore: I will build Cindy a bike and give it to her as her belated birthday present. Since this is also the first time I’m going to brave a bottom-up bike build I’m also going to track the process in a new section called Projects. Occasionally I get these wild hares to build something and i’ll store all my write-ups in the same place and then provide the details to the world at large.

Things are just about done on here. I am mostly satisfied with the results and will try not to tamper with it for at least a few months.