Bikes and Hardware

Bikes over the years

There was some really old bike with a coaster brake when I was a tiny tot, followed by a Huffy BMX bike (which, sadly, I never learned how to do any stunts with). In high school, I had a ten speed cheap bike that was oddly similar to a modern hybrid (bigger tires but not mountain tires, upright handlebars, etc. with just a normal fork) that I used through college that was pretty much falling apart by the time I was done. I opted not to move it because it sat unused for too long and was in such awful shape.

The big thing, of course, is that nobody had given me a proper engineering explanation for chain wear and sprocket wear and so the chain was all worn out with some clearly bad links and the sprockets were ground to the chain’s sprockets, so I’d have to replace all of the gears and chains and that would add up for a cheap department store ten speed.

Hindsight, of course, suggests that this would have been the perfect bike to do something silly with, like a fixie conversion.

Either way, I decided that I wanted a new bike. I was told by a friend that I should take a look at hybrid bikes and I figured that I’d probably enjoy a nice new bike that hadn’t been stored outside in the elements for years, so I went into bike store and picked up a Trek 7100. It had a 22” frame and was blue and was stolen (from the secured parking underneath my building, no less) before anything had the chance to even think about going even mildly wrong with it.

Now, it got stolen right before wintertime, so I just decided to go bikeless for a bit, which actually kinda sucked. I didn’t want to go right back into the same bike store and get the exact same bike all over again, so I stewed about it. Finally it felt like the “right” time, so I went through a few bike stores with an Excel spreadsheet and picked out a bike.

The guy at the bike store was certain that he could fit me into a medium sized bike. We kept going up in frame size until I had a 22” frame. I didn’t know what I was looking for with the Trek 7100, but I had a better idea with the new bike. I do feel that most of the decisions about it were fairly close to right. I like trails but not full fledged mountain biking, so I like having the fatter but non-studded tires and the suspension fork.

So I ended up with the Fuji Nevada 3.5. It seems to be a rebadged version of Fuji’s Police bike because the loadout is about the same. It’s a hardtail mountain frame with different tires and already came with all of the usual bolt-ons like toe-clips and a rack and bar-ends already attached. The mechanical parts are a little higher end than the old Trek and it’s got one more gear… although that’s mostly a better granny gear instead of a faster high end gear.

icon

Inner Tubes, Tires, and Flats
Unlike cars, we don't have a compact spare in back, can't afford to have super-sturdy tire casings, and don't get our path swept adequately. Thus, fixing flat tires are somewhat inevitable....

icon

Lighting
Competitive cyclists don't always think about this. But one of the biggest and most important things about riding as a form of transportation is being seen and being able to see other people... and lighting helps. This is largely an American problem, mind you, because we think bikes are either toys…

icon

Bike Clothing
Your average person on the street thinks of cyclists, especially road bikers, in terms of their spandex wardrobe. When I first met the husband of one of my college friends and my cycling came up, the first word out of his mouth was "Do you wear ball shorts?" because apparently he's seen a few too…

icon

Bike luggage
There's a wide variety of bike-specific luggage options out there. You might think it's just another way for bike makers to extract money from you, but it turns out that proper selection from the wide variety of stuff-hauling options is important. First, however, you must gauge your style. See…

icon

Bike luggage racks
For the last bike, I'd wanted to get bike racks, but I wasn't sure what would fit. The current bike came with a rack. After a few days of biking on the new bike, I decided that, for everybody who isn't actively racing, you need a bike rack. Period. It's too useful. You can keep your center of…

icon

Pedals and Bike shoes
There's a confusingly huge amount of information floating around about pedals on the bike. It's easy to listen to people talk about power transfer and pulling up on the pedals and things like that. And most of it's totally wrong. I thought I'd insert some reality to the situation. I even checked my…