Low Seat Time Year 2011

Hardly rode in 2011. I think thats pretty ridiculous.

There were circumstances and all that, but in the end it was just laziness. Why lie?

Kind of thinking about going on a tangent and getting some sort of 24″ bike that can be used for skatepark stuff. I’m old…, 20″s seem small to me. Also 20″ seem really unbalanced to me. If I had my way I would build one that used all lightest stuff for the rear, from the cranks back,  then purposely make the front of the bike a little heavier than it need be, by way of component choices, in particular the front wheel. The front end of my current BMX bike seems like 5 lbs lighter than the rear, which makes for some scary situations. But I never ride so what the eff ever,

Wonder if I have accumulated any pics since last post. Prolly nothing you haven’t seen via other feeds…

Gearing up for some Fall action

It has ben a bike-free summer for me, I am ashamed to admit. There have been issues…mainly that the car I use to get my bikes to the places I ride has ben broken down, and also that the time I used to alot for riding has been taken up by walking my new dog Lucy.

Now tings have started to mellow out with Lcy a bit, and I -just now- got my beater car GEO Prizm fixed (330k + miles and still goin baby!). So, now I can actually put the bike rack on the car and get a few miles in before the end of the year.

Aside from trail and road biking, I keep thinking about BMX and going to the skatepark. I saw a company called Sapient which has BMX bikes at about half the price that you see n the Dan’s Comp catalogs, but the bikes look pretty much the same but w/o heavy marketing and branding. Since I don’t keep up with which bike company is “cool” for the BMX crowd at any moment, I am thinking that one of those bikes might be a good way for me to get back into action skatepark-wise. The GIANT that I had been using, which I bought used a few years ago just isn’t cutting it any more, especially since I bent the handlebain a crash a while back and ended up replacing them with these gigantic cheap ass GT bars tat were on some junker bike in my backyard.

 

Hoping to get SOME knd of riding in this year.

Foot Endo

Love this foot endo pic. I am not in the pic, I just found it randomly, but it reminds me so much of the one summer long ago when foot endsos and all the variations of them were all the rage. So much so that even the kids not really into BMX in my neighborhood were trying them.

Somwhere I have an almost identical photo of me and my buddy Ed Soloway doing the whole hand to hand endo deal.

Sewing Bike

I have no idea what the reasoning behind this is. Maybe some sort of old school marketing stunt for the sewing machine company?

perfect

I love everything about this photo…

Miyata catalogs

Scans of vintage Miyata catalogs. Love it.

http://www.miyatacatalogs.com/

your oldies station

Bill would let bikers pass legally through red lights

If this passes (though it probably won’t) I think they should give the same consideration to cyclists, who also cannot trip the light sensors…

From the AJC article

“When Ann Purcell is tooling around the state on her Honda motorcycle, the weight of the sport bike is often not enough to trip the sensors at red lights.

Most people would grumble — and worry about the safety of being trapped in an intersection — in silence. But Purcell is a Georgia legislator, so she is pushing her colleagues to approve a measure to let bikers go through red lights when the signals don’t know they’re there.

“We just want to make it so you can go through without, quote, breaking the law,” said Purcell, a Republican representative from Rincon. “We understand we would have to go through with great caution.”

House Bill 161 basically would allow motorcyclists to treat red lights like stop signs. “

Wallride Death Spiral

Haro “Freestyle Moves” Book

Now that we have a new printer/scanner dealie, I have started to go through my archive to digitize some things, and came across this little gem from years gone by:

Bob Haro “Freestyle Moves”, purchased 1984 from Golden Ring Bicycle Shop, where I would start working 4 years later. The book was probably the first ever freestyle how-to guide outside of the BMX magazines. It covered everything from the basics all the way up to the toughest tricks of the day. It also features lots of “kick turns” and variations for the small wedge ramp, which has long since gone the way of the dinosaur. Heres the actual page flip pic so you don’t think I went out and grabbed a jpg off the google then tried to front.

One hand one foot drop in baby!  My copy is pretty beat up…some of the pages are loose from the binding and the edges are pretty tattered, but it is a complete specimen. I could be persuaded to sell it for the right price to a good home.

If you want to see a much more detailed list of BMX Freestyle books, including a complete scan of Freestyle moves, check out this site. I’m gonna go do some curb endos and reminisce.