The Long Weekend Report

I’m running behind on blog posts…

On the last Monday before May 25th we non-francophone Canadians celebrate Victoria Day. This is  in recognition of Queen Victoria’s birthday and also is the day that we recognize the current  sovereign’s birthday.   Officially, that is.  In actual practice, everybody that I know refers to it as “The May Long Weekend” and gives no real thought to distant monarchs, either current or long deceased. Those who care for gardening mark it as the point at which one can feel fairly safe that frost is not going to strike overnight. For many it is the first camping weekend of the year, often plagued by swarms of drunken idiots. For myself, it was a pleasantly bikey weekend.

Over the course of the weekend I made some real progress with my bike maintenance tasks. I finished lacing  the new rims for my Raleigh 20 and trued the rear wheel. The front still has to be trued. I am inching ahead towards being able to ride that bike again. I replaced two broken spokes on the ’65 CCM and trued the wheel, putting the bike back in riding condition. I also replaced the punctured tube on the Apollo and put a new cassette on the Kona Jake. All in all, the little fleet is slowly improving.

On Saturday I woke up early and took Nishiki-san for a spin on some of the roads North of the city. I was out of the house by 6 o’clock and was able to ride up 82 St. without worrying about traffic. This is a great route out of the city early in the morning as it brings you all the way past the Henday to the Forces Base. It was pretty cold ( 3 degrees) and windy but still a great ride. I didn’t take many photos as my fingers were getting numb from the icy breeze. Once back in the city I went to the Downtown Farmer’s market which had set up in its outdoor location for the first time this year. The vendors were looking pretty cold and many were wrapped up in blankets. I bought a pile of food including a basket of excellent mushrooms from Mo-Na Foods. Man, I missed my mushroom connection during the off season.

Although I still haven’t quite mastered the panorama mode on my camera, I think this picture really shows how flat it is around here.

Nishiki-san can handle a little unpaved riding.

Last years cat tails alongside a weirdly deserted 141st.

On Sunday I had a few errands to run so I took the opportunity to take the newly recommissioned CCM for a leisurely spin.  Cruising along the streets on the old 3-speed was very relaxing and I spent the first bit of the ride with a big goofy smile on my face. I’ve missed this bike. I went to MEC to pick up a cassette for the Kona Jake and then down to Earth’s General Store for some sundries. The weather was excellent and the river valley trails were well populated with holiday cyclists. It was a great day of city cycling.

The obligatory photo at the High Level Bridge

POV shots are also required when crossing the High Level.

The bridge for the Edmonton Transit LRT runs next to the High Level. The pedestrian walkway underneath the railway connects to the river valley trails and was quite busy.

There were lots of cyclists.

This ramp off the bridge is fun to coast down.

Crossing the High Level

My New Super Power

Yes, I have a new super power. Acquiring it was surprisingly easy. There was no shower of cosmic rays,  no radioactive spider bites and no freak lab accident. The power was bestowed upon me by a more prosaic means: a YouTube video.  Thanks to this video I can now remove and reinstall a bicycle tire with my bare hands, without any tools! GASP!

I had been unaware of how weak  my tire changing technique was. A short time ago I broke a tire lever trying to install a particularly stubborn tire. Armed with my new power I was a able to remove and reinstall the same tire, on the same rim with my bare hands.  Although I had previously read a description of this technique here but it didn’t really click with me until I saw this video.  It is so surprisingly simple that you should immediately run to your bike and try it for yourself. GO NOW!

Perigee-Syzygy Ride

I’m sorry about the clunky title of this blog post. I was originally going to title it “Supermoon Ride”.  However, a quick trip to Wikipedia informed me that the term supermoon was coined in recent decades by an astrologer. As I am pretty firmly in the NON astrology camp my choice seemed obvious.

Anyway….

On Saturday night the sky was clear, the moon was bright, and I was awake at one a.m. A bike ride seemed in order. When I woke my wife up to tell her I was headed out she sleepily told me to take pictures of the moon. I was doubtful that my little point and shoot camera would be able to capture anything worthwhile, but I dutifully tucked it into my shoulder bag. I was planning on taking my recently purchased Norco Magnum GT for a fast ride so I decided not to pack my somewhat bulky tripod with me. In retrospect, this was an obvious mistake.

The riding was fantastic. The night was cool without being cold, the traffic was light and the bike was ridiculously smooth rolling and fast. And, of course, the moon was brilliant and beautiful. I must say, however, that any increase in the apparent size of the moon was not discernible to me. I zipped through quiet residential neighbourhoods into downtown. There was still a good amount of carousing going and I had a pretty amusing short conversation with an intoxicated pedestrian while I waited for  light to change. I headed back North along the top of the river valley enjoying the moonlit view of the river.

While the ride was great the photographing was only OK. Without the tripod, it was more than a little difficult to hold the camera steady enough to prevent blurry photos. It mostly involved a lot of holding my breath and trying to find objects to steady the camera against. Sometimes that object was the ground, requiring me to lay flat in the grass. In all, the results were at least as good as my Midnight Photoshoot last year when I did bring the tripod but was using my older and lesser camera. That’s progress.

I was back home by 3 a.m. and postponed the photo culling until the next day. A keen eye will be able to guess which photos I took for my wife (hint: there are no bikes).

80s Norco Magnum GT Road Bike

It’s Spring in Edmonton and the bikes are multiplying in the Tuckamoredew household. This latest arrival was the result of an uncharacteristically instant decision on my part. Normally, I delay and loudly agonize over any bike related purchase until my wife tells me to buy it or be quiet. While most of my purchases come via Kijiji classified ads, this time it was from Pinkbike.  I usually only check Pinkbike for parts and not complete bikes, particularly not road bikes. Any road bikes listed are usually quite new and are typically at least $1000. This is well outside (think astronomical distances) my budget for casual bike purchases. However, on impulse I checked and spotted this nice vintage road bike listed for $75.00.  After a quick flurry of electronic communication with the seller I had agreed to buy the bike and pick it up early the following morning. The seller was a second year university student who had bought the bike to covert to fixed gear but decided instead to stick with his trials mountain bike. This was fine with me as this bike is in such good and original condition that it would be a shame to fixify it.

What did I get for $75.00? Quite a decent mid 80s road bike with nice components:

• Tange Mangaloy double butted tubing

• 700c Araya alloy rims (schraeder drilled) with Suzue 36-spoke cartridge bearing hubs

• Sugino Super Maxy triple crankset with drilled chainrings

• Suntour  ratcheting downtube shifters

• Suntour ARX derailleurs

• Dia-Compe side-pull brakes with drilled levers.

It was the drilled chainrings and cartridge bearing hubs that caught my attention in the sellers ad. They are pretty much identical to the components on my much loved ’83 Nishiki Continental. At the very least, I thought, I would be able to use this bike for spare parts for Nishiki-san. As it turns out, the bike is in excellent shape and except for the decrepit tires it’s in good riding condition. I haven’t taken it for a long ride yet because of the shabby tires but the short neighbourhood jaunts I have taken have shown it to ride light, very  smooth and fast. It handles nimbly and stops quickly. It is, unfortunately, perhaps a tad small for me. Not so small that I won’t ride for a while before making up my mind if I’m keeping it.

Mangaloy was Tange's brand name for a manganese-molybdenum steel. Quality wise it lies between Hi-Ten and Chromoly. Its chief virtue compared to chromoly was that brazing temperature wasn't as critical and was therefore better suited to automated manufacturing.

I'm always unreasonably impressed by cartridge bearing hubs in older bikes.

I like these factory drilled chainrings, though they aren't quite as fantastically improbable as the real serious cases of drillium. Doubtless, they are sturdier.

I have Suntour ratcheting thumb shifters on my winter bike and they are as nice as friction shifters get. I have a couple of sets of these ratcheting downtube shifters in my parts box but I'd never got around to installing them on a bike. The small amount of riding I've done on this bike indicates that they are also very nice, as expected.

I'll be replacing the hoods and electrical tape bar wrap.

This is the worst bit of paint damage. Otherwise, there are only minor scuffs and scratches.

Norco, based in British Columbia, is currently  the ubiquitous Canadian brand with bikes for all ages, of many types, at a range of prices. Although they’ve been around since 1964 there’s not a lot of information online about their early days. They seem to have been involved with a number of Japanese manufacturers before they ever marketed bikes under their own brand: my ’83 Nishiki Continental has a decal that reads “Designed by Norco”. This Magnum GT is likely from only a year or two later and definitely has similarities to the Continental. Norco acquired the Japanese bike company Sekai in 1983 and later phased out the brand in favour of their own. I have found pictures online of several Sekai Magnum GT bikes and they are unsurprisingly nearly identical to this Norco bike. The GT apparently stands for Grand Touring and some of the bikes seem to support this. This one however isn’t a convincing touring bike except for the triple crankset. Whatever it is, I’m enjoying it so far and I’m looking forward to getting some new tires on it so I can rack up a few kilometers. This may be my best bike score to date. I do wish it was a little bigger, though.

I like the old Norco head badge.

Somebody was a little extravagant with the cable housing.

Goodbye Raleigh Rocky II

Rocky, I barely knew you.

In an effort to reduce the bike fleet I’ve recently given the Rocky to someone else, a friend of a friend who needed a bike for transportation and couldn’t afford one.  I bought the bike last year at a police auction for the princely sum of $40.00 but never really rode it a lot.  Although I did like the way it handled it never did quite find its way into regular rotation (no pun intended).  I had plans of converting it into a DIY longtail bike, but in all honesty I knew it would be a long time before I would get around to that project.

Fixing this bike up to pass on was a learning experience in generosity. I initially thought that I would salvage several of the components  from the bike to recoup my costs and replace them with cheaper parts from my small stockpile.  This did not work so well. There were compatibility problems and I spend a lot of time trying to make the replacement parts work. In the end, I had to put most of the original parts back on the bike. This represented a lot of wasted time. If I had just tuned up the bike it likely would have taken me less than an hour to have the bike ready. Instead, it took more than 4 hours. In the future I will not let my cheapness overwhelm me.

This turned out not to reduce the bike fleet as I had planned. On Saturday, I scored a fantastic deal on an excellent vintage road bike that I simply could not pass up (more on this soon). Furthermore, on the same day, while volunteering at a ravine cleanup I found a partially dismantled mountain bike of decent quality. I’ll be reporting that one to the police to see if I can find its owner. Nonetheless, there seems to be some sort of Law of Conservation of Bikes at work.

 

Bike ‘n Busk

Pedaling to busk.

There hasn’t been much busking talk here lately for the simple reason that I haven’t been busking at all. This is the quiet time for big event busks. Hockey is finished for the season (at least as far as the Oiler’s are concerned) and football won’t start for a while yet. Furthermore, there haven’t been many concerts that fall on days that I am free to play.

Last night , I was able to busk the incoming crowd of the Johnny Reid concert. A lot of the time I don’t really know who the hell the performers are these days and I have to look them up on the internet to decide if the concert is worth showing up for. Wikipedia told me he was a country music singer with several Canadian hit songs. Hmm.  It didn’t sound promising. If he’d had international hits I’d be certain of a big crowd. On the other hand, Albertans love their country music. A quick trip to Ticketmaster lad me to believe that the show was almost sold out. Yay!

Ticketmaster, you deceived me.

Although the crowd was smallish they liked our music and were fairly generous. This busk finally proved a theory that I have been forming for some time now. The Edmonton country music crowd likes tunes in major keys in 4/4 time. Marches and reels? Yes. Strathspeys? Somewhat. Minor keys, jigs, slip jigs?  Not so much. Waltzes? Sure, but I only know one.

I rode the Raleigh 20 to the event. My idea was that it is small and I’d be able to take inside with me and not have it take up a lot of room. This worked like a charm. Although I plan to swap out the strange delrin headset bushing, on this occasion I was glad of the stiff steering as it compensated for the weight of the instrument case I was carrying. It was a pleasure to take the little bike out for a jaunt but I still need to tune it up a bit. One of the pedals fell apart on the way home. That’s alright though, because those original Raleigh ball bearingless pedals are awful and I was planning on replacing them, anyway. I’ll be writing more about that soon.

River Break-Up

The short stretch of the North Saskatchewan River that I see each day has been ice free for a little while now. However, a few days ago there was a lot of ice moving through from further upstream. This is a spectacle that only lasts for a little while an I’m always glad when I don’t miss it. The implacable force of the river suddenly becomes obvious as it pushes the pans of ice downstream regardless of obstacles. There is constant low rumbling noise accompanied by a crystalline tinkling. When I was standing on the pedestrian bridge watching the large sheets of ice split against the piers it was reminiscent of the ice-breaking ocean ferries that I traveled by back on the East coast. Powerful. I took a short video clip of the river break-up but it doesn’t really capture the experience.

In bike related news, I have been riding the Kona Jake cross bike again for the last couple of weeks. This was my first real bike and I still love it. It’s fast, nimble and rugged: a good compromise between a road bike and a mountain bike. The Jake is Kona’s entry level cross bike and I really think it’s aimed at people like me rather than anyone who might actually race it. This is my favourite bike to ride once the snow is mostly gone. And someday soon it will really be gone. I hope.

2008 Kona Jake