Intrigued by the Pedersen

While most of the time my reactions to bicycles are love or hate at first sight, my interest in the Pedersen developed slowly. I do not even remember the first time I saw one. It's sort of always been there, in a distant corner of my awareness - a lovely absurdity that I categorised somewhere in the realm of antique bicycle designs that have no place in practical, everyday cycling.





That began to change, as I watched my friendWolfgangcasually roll up on aPedersenone summer day in Vienna last year. I knew that hehad one in his collection. I just didn't know that he actively rode it, or even that itcouldbe ridden in the same manner as a regular bicycle - in traffic, at commuting speed.Turns out I knew nothing at all about these machines. Still produced in Europe and even imported in the US, the Pedersen is a Danish design that, its proponents boast, is the most comfortable bicycle in existence.





The multiple-stay frame construction provides suspension. The hammock saddle, even more so. The result is an upright, cushy ride, that Pedersen enthusiasts describe as downright regal in comparison to standard bicycles. Wolfgang's bike was too tall for me to ride, so I cannot say whether I agree. But I find myself wondering more and more and would very much like to try one.





Though I do not remember the first time I saw a Pedersen, I do remember the last time: a couple of weeks ago in the garage of the office building where the Co-Habitant works. Yes, someone who works in his building commutes on a Pedersenand leaves it locked up with all the other bikes. I suppose they are all used to seeing it there by now and no longer process it as anything out of the ordinary, but I was terribly excited to discover it. And it seemed to be in my size. Perhaps I should leave a note...





If you are curious to know more about Pedersen bicyles, there is a history page here, and agreat article in Bicycling Magazine by Florence Williams about hunting for one in Copenhagen. Feedback from owners is, of course, most welcome: Are they feasible as commuter bikes? How on Earth do you mount and dismount them?

spent ginger

A Question of Favourites

Having now ridden most of the bicycles profiled here, one question I often get is which are my favourites. If I had to buy a new transportation bike today, which one would it be? While I find it impossible to choose just one, I can tell you which I prefer from each of the categories I described earlier: heavy duty Dutch bikes, lightweight Italian city bikes, and middleweight "classic hybrids."



[image via Gazelle USA]

If I were in the market for a Dutch bike specifically, I think I would buy a Gazelle. Currently producedGazelle bicycles are missing some of the charming details of their predecessors, such as the lugged connector between the curved top tube and the downtube, and the traditional bolted seatcluster. But they still have an attractive lugged fork crown, a predominantly lugged frame, and an elegant overall look. I would buy not the Toer Populair, but the Basic model (3 speed with coaster brake) for $859, and replace the saddle with my own. I prefer Gazelle to Batavus, because it seems better made. I prefer Gazelle to Workcycles, mainly because the Workcyclesis too heavy for me. Also, both Workcycles and Batavus bikes have unicrown forks rather than lugged crown forks, and I just can't bring myself to choose a bike with that feature if I have other options.



One Dutch bike I have not yet tried is Achielle (which now has a US distributor), so I cannot say whether I'd prefer it to the Gazelle. Unlike most other modern Dutch bikes, it is still made in the EU and the pictures look fantastic, but nonetheless it is impossible to know without trying. If anybody's ridden one and can compare it to the other Dutch bikes, I'd love to hear about it.



[image via Bella Ciao]

If I were looking for a light but classic transportation bicycle, the choice is really just between the Italians: Abici andBella Ciao. I would, and did, choose a Bella Ciao, because I prefer its ride quality and frame construction. I find theBella Ciaoto be less aggressive than the Abici, while being equally lightweight andfast - which, to me, makes for a more comfortable ride.And the unicrown fork on the Abici is, again, just not something I can live with. I also prefer the Bella Ciao's chaincase and handlebars, but those points are relatively minor in comparison. Both Abici and Bella Ciaoframes are made in Italy.



[image via Adeline Adeline]

And finally, if I were looking for a midweight bicycle, I would buy a Retrovelo - the 3-speed Klara model for $1,450.Retrovelobicycles are beautifully constructed, with impeccable lugwork and a mouth-wateringly gorgeous triple plate fork crown. And more importantly, I don't know of a single Retrovelo owner as of yet who is unhappy with the bike. Compared to PashleyandVelorbis, the Retrovelois somewhat faster and does better up hills, as well as feels cushier over potholes. The handlebars and stem are not my cup of tea, and I do wish it had a coaster brake and a full chaincase. But the bike is otherwise so nice, that I find these features alarmingly easy to ignore. In short: I want one, but have absolutely no excuse and no money to get it.



While I hope this explains my own selection process, it would be good to hear different opinions. The new bike shopping season is just around the corner and many are starting to research bicycles again. Which bicycle did you choose to buy, or would you now choose to buy - and why? If you already own a classic transportation bike, are you happy with it, or are you considering switching to another?

Finishing What You Started

"The hardest part of this for beginners is usually the cleanup," Mike said at the start. "It's a lot of filing. That's what breaks people."




"Oh," I said. "Well, that shouldn't be a problem. I've done filing."




Going into this, I was worried about many things. The measuring, the cutting, the alignment, the brazing. But filing I could handle. I thought back to my days of intaglio printmaking (etching on metal plates). The person who taught me insisted that everything had to be done from scratch and manually - from cutting sheets of metal to preparing the plates. The latter involved beveling the edges at just the right angle, then endlessly filing, sanding and buffing them until the bevels were perfectly even and smooth, polished to a mirror finish. His insistence on this level of prep work had more than a few students in tears before we even touched ink or got anywhere near the press. But for some reason I stuck with it, eventually got the hang of it, and continued to use this method after I began to work independently. It just didn't feel right to do it any other way. Now whenever I see an etching, I can't help but look at the edges in search for file marks. All of this is to say, the prospect of filing for hours did not frighten me.






So how do I explain what happened a week ago? I don't want to exaggerate it into some dramatic melt down, but it was certainly a low point. A very long day, throughout the course of which I grew increasingly quieter and less bouncy than I had been up to that point. This was supposed to be the last day. So maybe it was the discrepancy between having believed I was almost done, and discovering more and more little things needing to be finished. All these little things added up, and taken together amounted to a lot of work. Bridges, bottle cage mounts, eyelets, braze-ons for cable routing.I had been awake since 5:30am. By 5:30pm, I was so tired that I had a hard time focusing. By the time we mocked the whole thing up to make sure the wheels, tires, rack and brakes all worked together,I was no longer fully present. At this stage we decided that the frame was finished - "good enough." But the feeling of satisfaction or at least catharsis that I had expected at the end did not come.




At home later that evening I did nothing and thought of nothing, feeling utterly dejected. It wasn't until the following day that I could even get myself to look at my pictures of the finished frame. And then I finally felt something: panic. "Good Lord, how could I leave it like this? This is notfinished!" I could see smears of brass and silver. If I zoomed in closely enough, I could make out uneven surfaces. I had filed away at these areas, but apparently not enough. Mike had been right: like most first timers, I had flaked out on the cleanup. With horror, I imagined him powdercoating the frame as it was, uneven shorelines and all. Or, worse yet, putting the finishing touches on it himself, whilst chuckling "I knew the finishing would get her!" So I phoned him, trying to stay calm. He had not powdercoated the frame yet. And yes, fine, I could come over to continue working on cleanup. This put me in a fine mood.I showed up bright and early on a Friday morning full of energy.



Somehow I maintained that energy for an entire day of using nothing but some files and emory cloth strips. All I did from 9:30am until 5:30pm, with a break for lunch, was file and sand, and it was tremendously satisfying. I guess having reached that low point my previous time at the shop, there was nowhere to go but up.




Mike had to go out for much of the day, and I was mostly on my own working on this. Not being able to seek feedback (Does this part look even? Did I file too much in this spot?) added a new layer of excitement to the process. When he returned, I think he was pretty amused by how cheerful I was after being at this for hours.






One of the trickiest parts to clean up was the area around the Grand Bois fork crown. Those curly-cues make it difficult to get the file into that little space and chisel away at the extra filler material without gouging the crown or blades in the process. It took me longer to get it to this state from this state, than it did to do the initial post-brazing cleanup. The trick is to dig into the shoreline build-up with the tip of a file, then angle the file just so to lightly and gingerly clean up the rest.






But the most challenging part of all was the seat cluster. My beautiful seat cluster! We made the seat stay caps from scratch to look exactly the way I wanted; it was the coolest thing ever. But during brazing I got a bunch of silver all over the caps, and was now terrified that in cleaning them up I would ruin their perfect concave surfaces. So ever so lightly, I dug into the tiny bulges with the tip of a file, using the most delicate micro-movements I was capable of to remove the filler material but not the steel underneath, then polished with an emory cloth until I got the stuff off. This took a while!




And so it went.The pictures here show the frame close to the point where I stopped, but not quite there.I didn't have the energy for pictures by the time I was done.






If you are wondering about the uneven looking surface from the sanding marks, they disappear after the frame gets sandblasted. The headlugs started out looking like this after brazing, then this, and eventually ended up as you see them above.




Don't get me wrong: The finishing on my frame still isn't "good" by real builders' standards. In fact I would not mind continuing to work on it, but unfortunately we are out of time. But at least now I can live with the state I left it in. And no matter how the bike turns out, I got the feeling of catharsis and closure I wanted out of the process. I learned how to build a bicycle frame (and fork!), from start to finish.

Skiers crossing West Bearskin Lake

I spent yesterday afternoon along the Gunflint Trail in Northeast Minnesota, and it was a chilly and blustery winter day. I was hoping to catch a glimpse of a Moose cow and calf that have been seen hanging around the mid-trail area. I did not see the Moose, but I did get a lot of other shots that I like. As I drove past West Bearskin Lake on Clearwater Road I noticed two skiers in the distance, crossing the lake. The wind was kicking up the snow behind them. It looked like a miserably cold lake crossing, which I thought made for an interesting picture.

Chil Pepper Ristra

Chili Pepper Ristras where hanging a lot of places in Old Town. A ristra is a string of dryed chili peppers. New Mexico is known for lot of different kinds of chili peppers. It was and still is tradition to hang the strings of chili ristras on your house to finish drying and then over the winter you could take down a string and use it in what ever you were cooking. I don't use enough chilis or chili power to buy the ristras (and most people don't). Most of what I use is already ground into a fine powder ready to put into my beans, or chili stew. Hatch, New Mexico raises more chilis than any other place in the United States. I can't seem to raise them at all.

User Friendly Interface

Now that it's winter, I find that strangers talk to me more than usual about cycling - typically when they see me locking up my bike. Over the past couple of weeks, several women have told me that they'd love to ride a bike, but find the logistics daunting: having to buy lights and figure out how to mount them; constantly getting flats (something they remember from previous cycling experiences); having to figure out how to carry their handbag, struggling to mount the bike in business attire, and other similar concerns. Their misgivings are fueled by the perception that cycling will complicate their lives - compared to walking, or taking public transportation, or driving.



What frustrates me about this, is that all of their concerns can be addressed with the right bike. As I explain about step-through frames, dynamo lighting, tires with puncture-protection, dress guards, chain cases, and panniers that attach to the bicycle's rack in seconds, I can see the ladies' faces light up as they eye these features hungrily.



One woman tried to step through my frame in her skirt-suit and squealedwith delight when she was able to do it. She had never tried anything other than a mountainbike before. She said: "I knewyou had a special type of bike! It's got this... user-friendly interface!" That phrase echoed in my mind for some time.



Even though I enjoy learning about bicycle design and own multiple bikes on which I constantly experiment, I am first and foremost a "transportation cyclist." My main priority is to have that one bike that is reliable, comfortable, and as low-maintenance as possible. The bicycle I use for transportation needs to make life easy for me. It needs to minimise the extent to which I think about it and tinker with it - so that I can focus on work and life itself, not on the bicycle. Skirt suit? Heavy bag? Dark outside? Raining like crazy? The "user friendly interface" on my machine accommodates all of these scenarios.



Many manufacturers are making what they are calling "transportation bicycles" nowadays, but not all of these bikes work for everyone. When a woman wearing a skirt suit walks into a bike store and says she would like to start cycling to work, my hope is that the salesperson will point to the section with the right kind of bicycle for her - rather than saying "Well, you won't be able to do it wearing that!" Auser-friendly interface means that we should all be able to do it. Holiday wish: more elegant, practical, comfortable bicycle options for the women in skirt-suits who feel out of place in bike shops. It's getting better, but we aren't there yet.

Seminole Canyon State Park

After leaving Padre Island, I headed west on Texas Route 44 connecting to U.S 83 west of Encinal. From there it was north to Uvalde, which has a very nice public library with excellent wifi, where I was able to schedule those posts on Padre Island. The next morning it was west on U.S. 90 with Big Bend National Park as the next destination. I was tempted to stop at one of the camping areas in the Amistad National Recreation Area just west of Del Rio but the campgrounds I saw weren't all that appealing so I continued on a little ways to Seminole Canyon State Park near Comstock.

The campground was on the top of a very large hill. The sites were quite nice, with a covered picnic table, which provided some protection from the sun but none whatsoever from the wind!

Arriving at Seminole Canyon in the early evening of February 19th, it was too late in the day to hike the trail to the canyon, a six mile roundtrip, but it wasn't too late to catch a wonderful sunset!

Virginia Living Museum

The last two times we were in this area, we said we wanted to visit the Virginia Living Museum. We drove over one weekend day just to find out they had already closed by the time we arrived. Since I was in recovering mode and couldn't do a whole lot of physical activity, we figured today would be a great day. We were not disappointed in our choice.



I'm not sure how to describe this place. It is part museum and part zoo would be as good of a description as I can come up with. The outdoors area has an area with water and boardwalks.





There are many animals out here to see.



The inside area is part museum displays and interactive learning fun and then has more animals too. Their website says they have over 250 animal and plant exhibits there. They also have a planetarium which we did not visit. We loved this place!



On a side note: the pictures are not great in quality or number because I only used the camera on my phone to take them. I could not bear the thought of lugging the big camera around today. I stupidly thought when they released me and said no restrictions beyond heavy lifting that it meant I would be up to doing anything but heavy lifting. Uh...no. I really was shocked how sore and tired I was after surgery. So this was a short trip and a laid back trip for us, due to my body telling me it did indeed have some restrictions!



Living the life in Virginia!

Late Summer Glory

Late Summer, originally uploaded by ParsecTraveller.

One of the many 'Grandpa Ott' morning glories this summer. They are actually experiencing a second bloom period, and the 'Heavenly Blue' vines are just getting started.

Does anyone else have some morning glories this year?

Meanwhile Back in Time

Scenes from Bethany beach,

JULY 1940...

George on a Mule






Peter and Pat













George and Bebe, John and Dorothy Monaco

Hog Heaven~Bike Week in Myrtle Beach

When Austin was about three years old, he was obsessed with Harley's. He could tell if there was a Harley around long before he could even see them. Meaning, he knew one by the sound alone. We'd be driving on the interstate and hear the roar of a bike coming up behind us and he'd shout out, That's a Harley! And he was always correct in his guess. I was, and still am, so impressed by that. The boy has good taste.



Imagine our surprise to land in Myrtle Beach and realize we coordinated our trip with Bike Week/Harley Davidson Bike Week. This has added such a fun dimension to our visit here. They are in the campground we are staying at. They are at the places we stop to visit. And they are on the road whenever we drive.




There is a Harley Davidson dealership right up the road, and each day we've passed by there are tons of bikes there to drool over.







We are in Hog Heaven! Can I show you my favorite?



I had no idea they made pink helmets. That is gonna be me someday, mark my words!



Living the life where we dream to be bikers in NC!

House on Fire

After our "rest" day with minimal hiking and another soak in a hot tub last night, we were ready for another full day of hiking adventures. Our first hike of the day brought us to Mule Canyon on Cedar Mesa, to an ancient Anasazi ruin known as the "House on Fire". Since we were now at a higher elevation than we had previously been on the trip, the environment was a bit different from what we had seen so far. Mule Canyon was a beautiful hike with a LOT of trees and shrubs and even a little bit of water in the canyon. It was a shock to do a hike with so much vegetation, because most of the hikes we had done so far were in open desert andextremely dry with very little vegetation.





















































The hike to the House on Fire ruins was a very pleasant one with minimal elevation change. After about a 1.5 mile walk we rounded a bend in the canyon and immediately noticed the ruins on the right. House on Fire is just one of several ruins in Mule Canyon, and was occupied by the Anasazi. According to literature that we saw about the area, the ruins in Mule Canyon are over 800 years old and have never been excavated or restored in any way. The House on Fire ruin is so named because of the overhanging cliff above the ruins that has patterns in it resembling flames. If you visit the ruins in the morning all of the light illuminating the House on Fire is reflected light from the opposite side of the canyon, which means that the roof above the ruins glows with warm light and contributes to the "fire" look. We found it a fascinating site to visit. We would have loved to hike through more of the canyon to see some of the other ruins but we had a long hike planned within Natural Bridges National Monument so after taking in the wonder that is the House on Fire, we hiked back to the truck and continued on to Natural Bridges.

Grillin' & Chillin'

Tonight we headed to downtown Wauchula, where they had Main Street blocked off for the Grillin' and Chillin' event. It was a fund raising event that had a grilling contest. There was music and some classic cars there too. We had fun!



I didn't take my camera, so these are courtesy of Aric:

And just because they are so cute:

What Makes a Bicycle Shop Good?

A couple of weeks ago, I was fortunate enough to discover Open Bicycle in Somerville, Mass. Recognising a good bicycle shop is similar to meeting a person you really like for the first time: It's hard to describe the feeling, but when it's there you know it. That is how I felt when I walked into Open Bicycle.



Open can best be described as a bicycle shop, art gallery and community project in one -- executed in the most unpretentious and inviting way possible. In addition to the regular bike shop stuff, there is a lounge area with a sofa and coffee table, and an adjacent exhibition space that is home to the Chorus Gallery. The cavernous shop is softly lit and exudes a club-house coziness. The merchandise is lovingly arranged and placed on display like specimens of a precious personal collection.



A gorgeous display case of saddles, hubs and cranksets.



Nitto handlebars.



Hand-sewn leather U-Lock cozies!



A treasure chest of grips.



Leather helmets!



A lovely tool-wrap and wool socks. Other products include crocheted gloves, leather toe clips, cycling shoes, messenger bags, and clothing. The items for sale sport typewritten tags, and some are wrapped in twine like little gifts. Even if you are not looking to buy anything, just viewing these things is an aesthetic treat.



Oh yes: and they sell bicycles too. Open focuses on urban and commuter needs, offering mainly quality vintage bicycles and new bicycles made by local frame-builders, including Icarus, Royal H Cycles, and Independent Fabrication. There is a strong fixed gear vibe, but roadbikes and touring bikes are available as well.



If you are looking for a custom project involving building up a vintage frame, or having a unique bicycle made by one of the local frame-builders, Open will guide you through it (pictured above is a prototype frame by Icarus). They also repair bicycles with a good turn-around time and give honest advice. Their product prices and labor fees are very reasonable, and their customer service is top notch. The staff is enthusiastic about bicycles and caring about customers.



As an artist and a velo-lover, I truly appreciate what Open are doing for the local cycling community. If you live in the Boston area, you really must visit this wonderful shop. They are having a gallery opening this Saturday, so that's a great opportunity to stop by!