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I sill enjoy urban rides now and again, but these days I prefer to point my bike in the other direction and head away from the big city, where it’s more necropolis than metropolis:
I’ve snapped pictures of many a bike in this spot…
…and while I didn’t expect the Roadini to fit on the stairs, it just managed to squeeze in:
It must not be as long as I thought.
Anyway, all was going smoothly, until I was almost home and this happened:
What the hell is going on!?! It’s been less than a week since my last encounter with a rogue fastener–same tire and everything:
Also, can a historian tell me what century this is from?
Presumably it was driven into place centuries ago by someone with a name like Jebediah, but whatever it was holding together has long since rotted away.
While I had no problem putting in a new tube and riding the rest of the way home, the sidewall was bulging disconcertingly at the site of the exit wound and so, alas, I have since…retired the tire. I will admit I had been looking for an excuse to get some new tires for the Roadini, since I think something in a 38 with a smooth tread would be perfect. However, people say stuff like this happens in threes, so now I’m afraid to put new tires on the bike until I’ve completed the dramatic puncture series. So for now I’ve replaced the victim with an old sacrificial cyclocross tire. I can only imagine what will pierce it next. Will it be a tack? A brad? A staple? I’m so excited to find out that I’ve been studying hardware in anticipation:
Though at the current rate of increase I wouldn’t be surprised if the next piece of hardware to penetrate my tire is an old railroad spike.
In any case, just as I did last time, I quickly changed the tube and inflated it with the “Mike Frameplumper” frame pump from Rivendell, which is getting quite a workout these days:
[Photos via Rivendell website]
Incidentally, last time I told the AI to make an image of Mike Frameplumper it made this:
And this time it made this:
You know what?
I don’t even think it’s the same guy.
Nevertheless, I’ve been quite pleased with Sir Plump-A-Lot, and at no point did I wish I’d jumped on the “electric pump bandwagon” instead:
You know when a child wants to do something you know is going to end in disaster and you say to them, “Do I really have to explain why that’s a bad idea?” This is really the only proper response to carrying around an electric pump. At this point it’s only a matter of time before someone invents a multitool that requires batteries, and I can pretty much guarantee that within 10 years even non-assisted bikes will be equipped with battery packs just to power all your accessories. After all, if you run out of power, how will you be able to drink?
But, see, an old-fashioned hand pump simply won’t cut it anymore, thanks to all these “improvements:”
I have nothing against tubeless. Some of my best friends bikes are tubless:
Even so, as I’ve mentioned before, in between tubulars and tubeless there was a good five or ten minutes there when fixing a flat was easy. You flipped a quick release, you popped the wheel out, you swapped the tube, you pumped it up, and you put it back together again. But I guess that was too easy, so now we have tubeless tires that never flat, except when they do, at which point you need to seat them with an electric pump.
Speaking of roadside assistance, shortly after fixing my flat I came across this:
I didn’t want to be too much of a looky-loo, so I took the photo from pretty far away, but what you’re seeing is a car that appears to have flipped over on the Saw Mill Parkway and wound up in the ditch between it and the bike path:
No doubt traffic was backed up all the way into Manhattan. When I got home I checked to see if there was any news about the crash online, but all I found was this:
He must have been the one person around here with a scannable license plate.
