Getting Obsessed
I’ve been blabbing on and on about my bicycle to everyone I know recently. I bought a used bicycle from a guy on craigslist, and have been using it almost every work day to commute. It’s fscking fantastic to ride in nowadays, as the old quads have had a couple of months of everyday bicycling to get up to speed, and now I ride in without much difficulty across a secluded bike path and side street section, crossing only two major streets on the way.
I don’t really deal with traffic anymore, although when I started I was regularly riding on the right side of the road all the way in, which earned me a small scolding from an older biker passing me by on the right sidewalk, along with some folks on an internal Yahoo bicyclers mailing list. The side route I take now is actually much better, more enjoyable, and safer than my old one, so i’m happy they all bugged me about it.
Okay, so now that we’re up to speed, here’s what I really want to talk about. Bicycle maintenance is fun. Working with my hands is fun. Although i’ve been busy as hell running back and forth between late, late work hours and errands here and there, i’ve been building up the courage to tackle some overhaul work on the bike that I’ve been a little afraid of since buying it.
This past weekend, I spent a lot of time and ended up taking apart the front hub and headset this weekend to degrease, scrub, and repack with fresh grease. The front hub was actually in pretty decent shape, but the headset had a definite pit running around each of the cups that is pretty much not going to be repairable. It’s an older bike, so parts of the races that the bearings spin in are integrated parts of the frame, and the mating parts are on the fork. That means it’s not a simple matter of going out and getting anything new.
Since it’s an old bike, I promised myself that i’d just relearn how to bicyle on it, learn how to do my own maintenance, and also not care if it got stolen. The problem with working on something myself is that I get attached to things I work on. If I’m able to fix it, I take pride in that. Given that i’m completely going on book reading, I feel pretty good about how i’ve done so far.
After the repair work this past weekend, I took the bike out for a spin to downtown Sunnyvale to check my PO Box, and stopped at a Thai-Indonesian restaurant to refuel myself. One of the owners gave me a compliment on the bicycle, and that was just extra helium for my already big ego. I don’t know if i’ll ever be happy parting with something that was a part of my history. Maybe one day, i’ll sit in a “nice” bike and be won over. But for now, there’s something about old technology that just has character. I guess that’s also why I spent the rest of the weekend working on and obsessing over my 20 year old car. 