Bikety bike

[rebeccmeister]

A view of Saturday's backyard bike shop:



Looks pretty good, right, because you can't see the humidity. Of course, you can't see the missing link I dropped, either.

'twas a busy night last night, too. I went on two social bike rides - the usual Monday Night Social Ride, then a Brews Cruise put on by a local brewery. The Brews Cruise had about 3 times as many riders as the Social Ride, heh.





Not the best of photos, but that's what you get when I'm taking photos with the PowerShot A620 whilst riding. It was good to build some connections and hang out. The last stop of the brews cruise was at one of the local bike shops, where we hung around and drank beer and looked at bikes. Sounds terrible, eh? After a bit, my friends T and J appeared, since they'd just wrapped up with Monday Night Kids' Mountain Biking. At the end, riding home along College, T and J decided to detour back into Hensel Park for some nighttime mountain bike riding. That's the park where I've been helping out with trail-building on occasion.





I would have joined them, except I was still hauling all my luggage, hobo-style, including the increasingly fragile Novara-pannier, and I'm pretty certain even the super-mild trails would have brought it closer to total destruction. It's probably time to shop for a replacement again. Sigh.

Still. It feels like a lot of bicycling things are finally starting to come together here.

Comments

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

I like the idea of off-road trailering, but man, the implementation always ends up with the trailer stuck in a bush.
Maybe time to build panniers out of metal?

[rebeccmeister.livejournal.com]

If I were to do more off-road trailering, I'd definitely use a Bob trailer, as they trail much better than two-wheel ones.

And yeah...I'm thinking I should be able to get some more mileage out of the broken pannier if I replace the back panel (panel that rests along the rear rack) with something more sturdy than coroplast. And then I start thinking about designs to turn my backpack into a pannier...

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

The ones my mom made, had two inner fabric panels, the outer one replaceable, and the space between them intended for fitting a plate to stiffen it. Dad ended up using sign vinyl of some sort: stiff but still somewhat flexible. It lasted for like 15 years between replacements.

and yeah, bob trailers. I've tried the ones with suspension but typically the wheel's so far back it tracks/bounces really well without.

[rebeccmeister.livejournal.com]

Oh man. Do you have photos of the old handmade panniers? I have this feeling that, when my main ones wear out (Overland panniers, currently 16 years old), I'm going to make my own replacements to match the same design. The stiffeners in the Overland ones have held up perfectly well.

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

I may have some around still: I'll look. They were all kits from a company called Frostline, who made instructions/sold fabric/sold complete assembly kits for coats, sleeping bags, panniers, handlebar bags, pretty much anything a touring cyclist would need. They were pretty well thought-out for the 1970's. I think they even had an outlet store in Denver, although that's long since disappeared.

[rebeccmeister.livejournal.com]

Oh man, there's this amazing fabric store in Seattle called Seattle Fabrics that specializes in technical fabrics (fleece, canvas, cordura, etc), and now that I look through their stuff, I see they've got a pattern, too.

An AZ friend of mine was making panniers for a little while, too, and used all sorts of interesting fabrics and colors.

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

We had ripstop nylon coated in tiny glass beads for visibility on most all the stuff Mom made. It was durable, too: she made the sleeping bags (sans reflective material) in probably 1978 and I still have two of them.