Krazy Koga

Found this crazy little gem of a mountain bike on campus the other day when all I had was my phone on me. Kinda took a look at it from afar and almost blew it off. I'm glad I didn't because the wickedness is all in the details. Looks like a bonded aluminum construction, with a strange metal finish or anodized rather than painted tubing. XTR M900 crank, early XT everything else. Some interesting details on the brake levers: not sure if they just couldn't get that XT logo on there enough, or they figured the inside of the brake levers were the only place they wouldn't get worn off by super-high end semi-pro shredder types.

I love that sharkfin chainstay guard, wish someone would reproduce these things. You get a little extra cred when your chainstay guard backs up your whole bike's single track-eating good looks. I really flipped out when I saw the rims on this bike up close, though. Check them out: Mavic 217 rims with an anodized finish -- not a single color but a continuous gradient all the way around. Sickness, buddy.

Would like to do more research on this bike, but I don't have a lot of time on my hands. From what I can tell Koga-Miyata was making some far-out bikes in the early to mid '90s, including this little chunk of bling. If you've got more info, hit me up.

XT rear deer, Sharkfin and sweet Mavic 217's

Glad you put that extra logo on it, I wasn't sure

The wild Keirin in its native habitat

Getting a lot of traffic this weekend on my Tumblr dashboard related to the Keirin meet-up in LA. Kind of cool to see the real reason behind the existence of NJS parts and Japanese track bikes getting some legitimate attention. Pretty interesting sport, wish I had tried harder to figure out where and when the meets happened while I was still in Japan.

A friend of mine that was in the know 8 years ago, asked me to see if I could track down any frames while I was in Japan. I was in a pretty small village way up in the mountains, so bikes faded pretty far from my consciousness, but every once and a while I would find a shop in a larger town and ask around. No leads. I remember asking a guy at a small shop in Takayama wether he knew anything about Keirin and he looked at me like I was nuts, probably because he thought I was asking about Kirin, which you could buy from a vending machine on any street corner. It wasn't until the week before I left, that I found a velodrome right around the corner from a friends house in Gifu. Doh.

Touring Teardrop

I've had a thing for teardrop trailers for a 4 or 5 years now. I used to daydream about building a superlight steamed plywood and fiberglass teardrop while I was putting in shifts at Whole Earth Provison Co. in Austin. Watertight but well ventilated with a little stow away kitchen in the back hatch, my cozy, custom teardrop still takes to highways and the national parks all across the mythic, Quozian North America of my mind from time to time, towed behind the much-missed left-hand-drive Subaru I used to own in Japan.

Ha. And then I saw this. My dream of a teardrop is revised. I am starting to mentally construct one that I could conceivably stow in my Vancouver apartment, perhaps one that could double as a loveseat and maybe triple as a conversation starter in those domestic environs. The mind races with the possibilities, and glides along the smooth, sleek lines of the bikeable teardrop, one with a roof rack for surfboards or kayaks. Man, am I stoked on this idea. Got lots of other things to do though, so I'll put this way back on the backest burner and let it stew.

I've got a big, big backlog of stuff to post to the blog but it is going to have to wait for a little while longer until I catch up with the stuff that actually pays bills. Back soon.

One Liners: Car is to "Whip" as Bike is to __________?

I was down in Portland, OR over the weekend and spent most of it happily soaking in the bike culture. I actually posted this on Flickr ages ago, but after seeing and hearing bicycles only half-ironically being referred to as "whips" again over the weekend, I thought this needed a repost. This was parked in front of a grocery store somewhere in western Japan and when I saw it, I thought that this must be the answer for the problem used as an intellectual wooden dummy since ancient times -->

If CAR:WHIP then BIKE:______?

Beer: Fernie Brewing Company What The Huck

what the huck huckleberry wheat ale, originally uploaded by radiobread.

Well, for the first beer post here I took a terrible set of photos, drank the beer and threw the bottle out. Then I realized I had terrible beer photos. I'll have to do better than that in the future.

The upside: I found radiobread's Flickr stream, replete with a vast selection of the beers of BC in the photo-cooler. Sweet. Thanks, radiobread. (Hope you don't mind the exposure)

So I figured I would kick the beer front of this blog off with this offering from Fernie Brewing Company, out of Eastern BC. I figured the name of the beer properly celebrates the opening of the bike park at Whistler, recently opened up for a summer's worth of full-suspension, high speed meat-hucking.

I'm kind of fascinated by huckleberries (which don't actually do much hucking) since growing up in Texas, the only huckleberries I had ever really had any contact with were Huckleberry Hound and Johnny Ringo's huckleberry, Doc Holiday, in the movie Tombstone. So...not much. Coming to the Pacific Northwest a few years ago, I realized there were actual huckleberries hiding out in the forests. Since then, after taking a plants class a few years back and learning how to ID them, I've gotten pretty fond of snacking trailside on the tiny red berries of the Lower Mainland's native huckleberry (Vaccinium parvifolium).

En-ee-way, I dig huckleberries. So, when I spotted this particular beer at the beer store last week, I did a double take. Apt name: What the Huck. A huckleberry infused beer? I'm not normally inclined towards drinking fruity beers so I hesitated and then, because I caught myself hesitating, picked it up. What the huck.

Fernie Brewing Company handcrafts all their beers and only uses natural ingredients. Since the brewery is nestled in the Rockies' abundant watershed, I'm assuming they are using that well-advertised ingredient -- the ice-cold water of the Rockies -- too. Sounds like a good foundation for a beer.

True to its ale-ness, it is darker and, true to the label's advertising, with a hint of purple from the huckleberries -- and a nice crisp head to it. The huckleberry flavour is subtle, and adds a slight tartness to the finish. Being a wheat beer, it is pretty smooth with a tiny hint of spice, and while the huckleberry flavour builds over the course of the .5 L bottle, it never gets to the point of being overpowering or overfruity. Fernie sez it pairs well with pork, chicken or seafood dishes.

I hope I sound like I know what I'm talking about. What I'm really thinking is: This is a perfect beer to pair with sunny, summer late afternoons on the West Coast after some trail time, hiking or biking, with friends. Kinda like grown-up beer Kool-Aid, but, you know... really good.

Do I still sound like I know what I'm talking about?

Rating: Good beer, Fernie. 8 out of 9 cogs, eh. ********

Whistler Trail Map

The Whistler Valley Bike Trail Map here, in case anyone is looking for it.

Ride report: Whistler for the "weekend"

Had a weird offset "weekend" this week, recreationally. I didn't get to Whistler until Monday when I spent the day checking out one of the biking trails. I haven't been to Whistler for non-snow sports, so it was all new to me. Rode the Riverside trail until I hit several long stretches of snow, kinda got sketched out but managed to ride through some mildly technical stuff, and finished the ride off with a wipe out on a steep drop-in. Fun. Shot some goofy one-handed video on a really mellow section of trail:

Nice view from the highway overlook on the way back, too. Bonus! :

Clever Yeti

yeti 007, originally uploaded by BMC Mike.

Black Mountain Cycles posted this today on a Yeti in for work. Pretty clever way to run a bottom-pull derailleur on a frame with braze-on routing for top-pull. (Well, if you don't count the necessary braze-on for the chainstay cable bolt.)

Solves the common problem of locating a cable barrel adjuster for the FD as well. Is that an older side-pull road caliper cable stop set-up? Cool beans.

Rocky Mountain actually solved this problem on some of their older bikes by mounting a pulley on the back of the seat tube near the bottom bracket. I'll try to get some photos posted here of that set-up since I have just such a frame in the closet.

I've been trying to set up the Rocky Mountain with an old Ritchey 2x9 42/29t chainring set up. My top-pull Suntour XC Microdrive triple derailleur has been balking at having to try to shift this, with good reason. Pretty hard to find a top-pull double front derailleur from this time period. Looks like some McGuyvering in this direction might be warranted. I'll keep you posted.

Vintage MTB: Oakland Dirt Owls

Rad club logo of my friends down in Oakland. That dirt owl rocks the biplane:

Vintage MTB: Oakland Dirt Owls

Gnarnia is where it's at.

High design bike shelf

A friend gave me grief the other day. She said visiting my apartment was like visiting a sporting goods store. Probably should clear a few bikes out of my living room, or at least do a better job of displaying them. This nice item might help. Via Knife and Saw:

Tune-ups

Mind-blowing weather in Vancouver today: Sunny and 17 degrees (65 F, south-of-the-border speak) with light breezes and not a cloud in the sky. Off to Whistler for the weekend and hopefully there will be some singletrack involved, so it seemed like a good time to check the Karate Monkey's state of tune after a long rainy season. Legs were slow but the bike was clicking along precisely and Pacific Spirit Regional Park provided some fast, smooth-rolling trails to get the heart rate up.

Old tech: Loving the cost efficiency of the recent Sram X-O gripshift-to-Suntour XC 9000 thumbshifter swap to shift for the front SLX 36-24 double. Works like a charm!

Ritchey Mystery Machine

Summer is for biking. Found a cool bike the other day just in time to get it cleaned up and adjusted for today's sunny weather.

It is a Ritchey, but it hard to suss out which model. TIG welded Japanese frame, clearly a Ritchey design from handle bars to rear derailleur, but with a decidedly odd, lugged flat-crown fork. It looks a lot like the design found on Diamondbacks a few years earlier. Paint matches though, so signs point to it being the original fork. The Old Mountain Bikes registry only has one model that resembles this one and there are a few differences in decal placement and that model is sporting TA cranks.

Otherwise the spec is similar: Shimano 600 EX crankset, freewheel and "starfish" headset, early Deore XT "Deerhead" derailleurs, cantis, shifters and the high-flange hubs that seemed to have only been around for a year or two. Also odd: The Selle Italia Anatomic seat in place of the Avocet found on most other Ritcheys.

But that lugged fork is really odd -- Ritchey pioneered the unicrown fork and that was the predominant spec for most Ritcheys until suspension forks took over. Ritchey also made the biplane fork famous and thus heavily imitated (twice over, in some ways, with Grant Peterson's help). This one is neither -- a faux biplane, lugged number. Grant Peterson and Bridgestone did have some good thing to say about flat crown forks like this though.

There were a few fully lugged Ritcheys imported to Canada that are common enough for there to be lots of information about them. Those bikes were Ritchey-designed but made by Toyo (great builder) out of Japan and imported to Canada by a then fledgling Rocky Mountain Bikes, who had worked a distribution deal out with TR. This was around the time the Gary Fisher and Tom Ritchey split off from their joint venture, and the story is that Tom Ritchey was looking for new distribution partners and Rocky Mountain stepped in for Canada. It seems like that turned out to be a fruitful relationship over the ensuing years, but more on that another time.

Fun ride! Pretty agile despite the long wheel base and the "lazy" seat tube and head tube angles. And pretty light. Feels like the bike comes in at lower than the 28 lbs. that Ritchey lists for its heavier models. Cruising on old steel to start the summer!

New York's bike problems solved

From the other coast: This (link) is a bit tongue-in-cheek, but the medicine is there in all that sugar. Good read!

The game trails and watering holes of the bike-gazelles of New York

via radpropaganda

Trophy gazelles

**

Birth of a gazelle

New stuff, but it will wait

Where is the summer at? It is rainy and crappy and grey all over the place in Vancouver. Have some fun stuff to post but I need some sunshine for photo-taking. My people in Austin, meanwhile, are sweating and swimming in the sunny 90s. Ah well.

Picked up a few things recently. A frame on the cheap, brake levers to feed my Suntour XC habit. Good stuff over the weekend too.

I'll leave you with the brake levers for now, talk more about the other stuff when I get some photos taken. I usually leave stuff like this to gather dust at the UBC Bike Kitchen, but I picked these up for a potential overhaul on the Rocky Mountain and in place of a set of classic Shimano 600 calipers that were seductively super-shiny, but that I otherwise have zero use for. Not starting any more gruppo-hunts, thanks. Anyway, coming away with the Suntour levers instead of a massive new bike project disguised as jewel-like Shimano 600 calipers felt a little like a victory. (Rationalizations...)

Look like late 80's /early 90's Suntour XC -- Comp or Pro, hard to say without the foil stickers but they were basically the same levers unless my research findings are wrong.

Bad in black and all-metal construction with rubberized lever ends. More on these in a few days, because they've got some interesting stuff going on with them, good and bad.

Posting up