Caterpillars & Poplar Fluff

Little green caterpillars and gentle flurries of poplar seeds are one the annual signs that tell me that summer is so very close to officially arriving. These two make their appearance near the end of spring and signal the end of brisk morning rides and pleasantly warm evenings.

The caterpillars are Larger Boxelder Leafrollers and they mostly feed on the leaves of Manitoba Maples. As there are no shortage of these trees in the river valley, Edmonton cyclists using the trails are accustomed to suddenly riding into swarms of the caterpillars . You will be zipping along when the light filtering through the foliage will illuminate a host  of little jade Leafrollers rappelling down from canopy above on invisible lines. Attempts to dodge them are futile; you are bound to accumulate a number of tiny hitchhikers.

These hungry little critters can defoliate an entire tree. Luckily the weedy Manitoba Maple is such a rugged character that within a few weeks it can grow complete new set of leaves.

In addition to Manitoba Maples the river valley is well provided with poplar trees. Throughout late spring these trees will form seed pods that release steady flurries of white fluff. It gathers in drifts throughout the woods, sometimes nearly carpeting the entire forest floor. This year we have had so much rain that, although there has been lots of poplar fluff falling, it has not been able accumulate in the cloud-like, landscape-transforming blankets that I love. I tried to take some photos of the fluff flurries today but my camera or myself (or both) were not equal to the task. I did take a video, but at the time of writing I don’t have the energy to coax my ancient, hand-cranked computer into editing the file. Please just imagine a juxtaposition of giant snowflakes and vibrant greenery; you will have a good approximation. One of my great spring pleasures is cycling through the falling poplar seeds. Contrary to many people’s belief, the poplar fluff does not cause allergic reactions: the poplar seed season coincides with the grass pollen season, the real culprit of springtime sniffles.

A fallen seed pod. One of many.

Moments after taking this photo, my bike fell on top of my crouching self, drawing blood. I hope you appreciate my dedication…and stupidity.

Bike of the Week: 2007 Iron Horse Sachem 3.0 (aka “The Ravine Bike”)

2007 Iron Horse Sachem 3.0

What I know about mountain biking you could fit in a child sized CamelBak and still have room to spare for a week’s worth of back country bikepacking supplies. That is to say, though as an unhelmeted child I would ride my banana bike down the 45 degree slope of our local gravel pit ; and while as a teen I road my Supercycle 12-speed around the rocky, cliff-side paths of my coastal Newfoundland home; and as a young adult I pedaled my rigid framed MTB through my Dad’s rough and ready wood cutting tracks – I have very little knowledge of contemporary mountain bikes and the specialized technology developed for this type of riding. Still, I didn’t let that stop me from rehabilitating the Iron Horse bike I salvaged more than a year ago.

I refer to this bike as my Ravine Bike not because I ride it in the ravines (although I do) but because that’s where I found it: in Kennedale Ravine. I discovered the Sachem when I was volunteering at a ravine clean-up . It had been abandoned for some time and I had to tear it free of the vegetation that grown around it. It had been stripped of the wheels, front derailleur and shifter, and front brake lever and caliper. In the past I’ve found the remains of stolen bikes before and they have always been low-end pieces of junk. This one however seemed to show some promise.

Here I am carrying the bike home from the ravine,enjoying the irony of transporting a 2007 mountain bike with a 3-speed forty-two years its senior.

When I got home I checked to see if it had been reported stolen. It had not. Or if it had been, enough time had passed that the record was no longer on file. At first I considered stripping it for parts as there were some decent components left on it. However, it occurred to me that it wouldn’t take a lot of effort to get it back in working order, and a decent mountain bike was one thing I didn’t yet have in my little fleet.

I did a little internet sleuthing and found that the Sachem 3.0 had been Iron Horse’s entry level all-mountain bike (something between a cross-country  and a down hill bike) and likely retailed for more than a $1000. Not a high-end bike, but not a department store piece of junk, either. You can see the original parts spec here and read a BikeRadar review here.    It seemed like as good a bike as my very mediocre skills warranted. The frame is quite stout and looked like it could take a lot of abuse, more than I’d likely ever dish out.

The first step in rebuilding it was acquiring the parts needed, not being the sort of components that I already had in my little stockpile. As I usually have a number of bike projects in the works, I didn’t rush this one. Over the course of the summer and early fall I kept an eye out  for components and accumulated them. I found parts at Bikeworks, on Kijjijj, and at the MEC gear swap. The only part that I had to buy new was the seatpost.

The wheels were the toughest to find as I am cheap and decent disc brake wheels don’t often show up at Bikeworks North, where I get most of my parts. I picked up the rear wheel (Mavic on Deore) from a Kijiji ad and the seller gave them to me for half his original asking price because he accidentally gave the wrong address and sent me on a half-hour wild goose chase looking for his house. For the front, I salvaged the Rhyno-lite rim from a     wheel with a dead hub, and the hub from another wheel with a tacoed rim. The dimensions worked out so nicely that I was able to do the trick where you tape the new rim to the old one and transfer the spokes one at a time. This is such an easy way to build a wheel that I was able to do it while sitting at home watching a movie with my family (The Adventures of Tintin).

Assembling the rest of the bike wasn’t difficult, although setting up the brakes caused some head scratching, as I’d never worked with disc brakes before. Happily, I eventually figured it all out and by late winter the bike was complete. I had the chance to ride it a few times before the snow finally retreated from our fair city (kicking and clinging on to the bitter end as it did this year) and though it was  fun to ride through the snow, I was looking forward to a proper trail riding test.

If you’ve read any of my bog posts in the past week, then you know that I’ve been really enjoying this bike. I’ve been discovering new trails in the river valley and have been riding some fairly technical singletrack with more confidence than I would normally have. Having a decent quality bike has really made difference to my riding experience. The geometry and handling are neutral enough that it seems to do everything adequately and forgive the flaws of a weak rider. I still want to upgrade a few components when I have the chance, and I have to fine-tune the shifting a little, but nevertheless I’ll be riding this one this summer.

My 4 year old assistant mechanic.

I want to upgrade the functional but uninspiring Alivio shifters.

Suntour XC Pro pedals, ’cause I apparently can’t build a bike without vintage components.

My first foray into the world of disc brakes: finicky to set up but , boy howdy, they sure work well.

A really rugged frame.

Blissful river valley riding.

Commuting by Mountain Bike

When I first started riding my bike to work several years ago, I had a department store “mountain bike” and my commuting route often took me along the unpaved trails in the river valley and Mill Creek ravine. As the years have passed I’ve acquired better bikes and have gradually shifted focus to riding more on the roads and paved trails. This is partly because I’ve mostly been riding road bikes and partly because I’ve allowed my early rising discipline to erode, resulting in a sprinting, mad dash to work most days, along the shortest possible route. While this hurried commuting is certainly good from a fitness perspective, it definitely diminishes my ability to take advantage of the variety of routes.

After my great trail ride on Sunday, I was keen to try riding the Ravine Bike to work. In fact, I was eager enough that it actually gave me the motivation drag myself out of bed early yesterday.  I rode a mixture of mostly singletrack and gravel trails all the way to work and back home again at the end of the day. I zipped along paths I haven’t been on in a long time and explored some new ones, discovering some pretty great singletrack. After this ride, and my major trail discovery on Sunday, I’m starting to realize that this stuff is quietly waiting just out of sight all over the place.

 

Near the beginning of my trip home. I’ve always felt an impulse to climb onto the supports of this bridge with a musical instrument and play a few tunes. Could there be troll blood in my family tree?

The river is running high and fast.

There were a lot of ominous eddies and vortices. They looked much more impressive in person than they do in this picture.

As commuting routes go, this is simply fantastic.

This beaver was making surprisingly good time swimming against the current.

As great as the riding was, I wouldn’t want to do it every day. I think some of the fun would be lost if it became just another routine. I do, however, want to start riding the mountain bike to work on a regular basis. Perhaps once a week? There is another advantage to consider: the lack of racks and cargo capacity on the Ravine Bike gives me a perfect excuse for not running any shopping errands on the way home.

Yeeeee-haaaaaw!

 

Today, I got up in the wee hours of the morning and took the Ravine Bike down on the river valley trails for a fantastic three-hour shakedown ride. This is the first real ride I’ve taken it on since I finished building it up this past winter. How good was it? It was so good that I almost posted my next  ”Bike of the Week” entry five days early. It was so good that even spending one-and-a-half hours cleaning out the fridge after the ride couldn’t dampen my enthusiasm. It was so good that I want to go do it again RIGHT NOW. The weather was beautiful, the river valley is bursting with greenery , and the bike gobbled up the trails. Even the lingering effects of a bout with asthma yesterday couldn’t bring me down.

 

Bike of the Week: Motorized 80′s Kuwahara MTB

This week’s bike belongs to a patron who came into Bikeworks North looking for a suspension fork for his motorized Kuwahara.

Normally, I’m not much of a fan of gasoline powered bicycles, but this one is such a tidy conversion that I had to take a picture. Also, the bicycle is a rather nice early 80′s Kuwahara. This winter I tuned up a very similar for sale at the shop, and if it had been a little bigger I’d have bought it for myself.

In the past, I’ve had  a sort of knee-jerk, negative reaction to motorized bicycles of all sorts.    This attitude was exacerbated by often having to patiently explain to  family members and acquaintances that I really DO like riding my bicycle to work and that getting a motorized one would definitely reduce the amount of exercise I was getting. Gasoline powered bikes, in particular are also loud, exhaust producing, and require trips to the gas station.

I recent years, however, I have come to appreciate the utility of the new generation of electric bikes. While I don’t have any plans to get one for myself any time soon, I can see how they are useful for many people. In particular, they let a person make commuting trips of longer distances than they would normally be capable of. My instructor in a solar energy course used his in this way: riding his e-bike he was able to greatly cut down on the number of days he commuted using his truck. He also measured the energy required to charge the battery and determined that he was only paying 12 cents a day to use the bike. That’s a heck of a savings over the price of gasoline for a truck.

Another natural application is in cargo bikes. Adding an electric motor gives a cyclist the option of hauling heavier loads for longer distances. There are a number of electric cargo bikes on the market. At a local bike shop I was recently looking at a Trek Transport Plus, a slick looking machine. The nearly $3000 price tag puts it somewhat out of my reach at this time but I could imagine myself cobbling together a DIY version, as our local RavingBikeFiend did. However, in the near future I already have plenty of bike projects lined up to keep me busy.

Long Weekend Ride

This past long weekend I finally – after what seems like an eon since the distantly remembered autumn – finally, got out of the city for a moderately long ride. Though I’d planned a ride between 75km and 100km, it ended up being only 50km. Still, a good inaugural ride for the season.

Despite the forecast of gloom and showers, the weather of the day lived up to the promises of this sign.

Last summer I took a number of rides through the countryside north of the city. This year I want to explore the many unpaved township and range roads in the area. With this in mind I brought the Kona Jake on this first trip. It’s a sort of rugged road bike that is great at handling a mixture of paved and gravel roads, rolling nicely on the 700 X 35 Schwalbe Marathon Dureme tires.

There was a stiff headwind as I rode out of city, but I was happy enough to finally be on the open road that it didn’t much bother me. I took my normal route up 82nd street and over the Henday, then over to 50th street and north from there along familiar territory. When I finally reached one of the roads I wanted to explore I discovered that it appeared to have been recently graded: new loose gravel and loony sized rocks covered the entire road surface. I tried riding along it for a ways but it was very rough going, with my wheels occasionally firing little stones off to the side with pop and whine. I persisted for about a kilometer but was not really all that disappointed when my phone rang with a call summoning me home. I’ll go back and try the road another time once it gets packed down a bit.

There’s not much shelter from the wind out on these roads.

As I sped homeward with the wind at my back,  back I encountered a large group of road cyclists on their way north , I assume on a club ride. There were between 20 and 30 of them spread out into three groups, appearing to take the business very seriously as they were pedaling with a rather intense look and for the most part declined to acknowledge my friendly nod and wave. I did get a  companionable ”hello” from one fellow and a cheerful, sunny smile from one woman. I suppose I didn’t really fit in with the Lycra Lodge what with my sandals and socks, 3/4 length cotton pants, commuting helmet with lights strapped on,   and baggy jacket snapping in the wind like a flag.

The rest of the ride home was speedy and uneventful. It was a nicely gentle start to the seasons riding and next weekend I hope to manage a longer ride.

 

Bike of the Week: ’70s Sekine GT Novelty Mini Bike.

Sekine GT

This week’s bike is a weird but fascinating old Sekine GT that showed up this past week as a donation at Bikeworks North. Since I first spotted it, the Sekine GT has been clouding my mind with a befuddling fascination. I don’t actually want the bike, but I keep looking it over each time I’m in the shop. It’s so peculiar that it draws the eye.

Sekine was a Japanese company that made bicycles for many decades. They’re fairly well known here in Canada because during the bike boom of the ’70s they opened a factory in Manitoba. At the time the Canadian government  had imposed some very high tariffs on imported bicycles (doubtless at the urging of the dominant domestic bicycle maker CCM) and Sekine was able to avoid this tariff by assembling most of the bike in Canada. The bikes were of good quality and sold well.I have seen many old Sekine 10-speed road bikes here in Edmonton.

This Japanese made Sekine GT is a different and fascinating little beast. I can find no reference to it on the internet, and perhaps they didn’t make very many of them.

Here is a combination you don’t see every day: a cottered crank and rear suspension! It’s interesting how this suspension system isn’t wildly different than modern mountain bike suspension. The big 57 tooth chainring is paired with a little 3-speed freewheel in the rear.

I love the look of biplane fork crowns on old bikes. This is the first “triplane” I’ve seen. If I owned this bike I might call it “The Orange Baron”.

Very funky rear rack-like object.

A huge Sekine branded reflector.

 

It has 14″ X 3″ tires and band brakes for both wheels.

This crazy little bicycle will make some collector very happy.