the wheels on the bike go round and round....

It's been a bikey 24 hours. Last night I took the crapbag yellow bike to Freewheel because its headset was totally shot, and in fact was SO loose -- how loose was it? -- it was SO loose that when I did the loose-headset test, the one where you squeeze your front brake and rock the bike back and forth, the fork actually moved. Visibly. Now, I wasn't actually sure if it was physically possible for a headset to be THAT loose, even this one that works itself loose once every three rides, so when I walked in I said: "Okay, so I hope I'm only going to have you tighten my headset, but before you do that I want you to look at this and tell me if my fork is broken." I did the brake-squeezy headset test. Patrick (can I use his name without permission? It's free publicity, right?) snatched the bike out of my hands, hollering "DO NOT RIDE THIS!" It was all very dramatic.

But I was dead set on being at the ride this morning, so Patrick dug up a cheap replacement fork and took out the old one. Apparently in 12 years of wrenching, my fork is only the second one that he's seen fail in this particular way. He's also one of the ones that dealt with the GT when it cracked, and so he pointed out that I was probably eligible for some sort of award for the sheer number of broken bikes I've dragged in there this year.

My new fork is CHROME. Yeah, a yellow bike with a chrome fork. It's hilarious.


After I got home, Andy came over to take a look at the Pepsi bike, since he was crazy enough to volunteer to help me with it. He spent most of the time laughing. As I may have pointed out before, PepsiCo was actually giving these bikes away to their employees, and that was right around when I was born, so this is not exactly a top-of-the-line piece of equipment we're talking about here. Never was. So not only does it have the aforementioned evil BMX bottom bracket, it also has 26" wheels and (no shit) 90mm front hub spacing. Is there even such thing as a 90mm front hub? So now my options are either to keep the front wheel I have, meaning that if I want a flip-flop hub in back I'll have to get a custom 26" flip-flop wheel built for me, OR, I can (and this is all Andy's idea, just for the record) take it to Freewheel and tell them to spread the front fork to accommodate a normal 100mm hub. Andy's advice is to "ignore whatever they tell you about 'safety' and just tell 'em to do it." And you should have heard the contempt dripping from his voice when he said the word safety. Given Patrick's remark earlier the same evening about how narrowly I avoided "giving [my] dentist a lot of money," I may concern myself a little more with this "safety" business than Andy suggests. I haven't decided yet. The custom wheel might be more than I want to pay. Then again, as Gilby pointed out, nobody on earth is going to steal my rear wheel because mine would be the only bike in the city that it could be used on.

And then this morning the yellow bike, with its shiny chrome fork, got to go for a cool 55 miles around Lake Minnetonka and back. Sascha wrote about it in detail already, so I'll skip that, but it was a good ride. And I discovered that one other girl I know and two of her friends are also heading down to Hell Week, so while YOU all may be sticks in the proverbial mud, SOME people around here know how to have fun. Minnesota will be well represented.

p.s. if I write really, really long posts, does it make up for them only appearing once a week?

p.p.s. there, Sascha, now the boobies are not at the top of the screen. You're safe.