Monday, March 30, 2009

What's new

I decided to take a winter break from blogging, but not from biking of course! Through seemingly neverending snow the trusty beater bike slogged its way through. I am happy now that spring has sprung, and the nice bikeys can come out and play without fear of getting corroded by copious amounts of road salt.

The bike fleet has expanded! First this sweet vintage cruiser. I wanted a nice simple ladies frame (to make it easy to ride in a skirt!) with single speed and a coaster brake to be a simple basket bike. The challenge? Finding one that wasn't horribly small as I'm nearly 6 feet tall. This one fits great (Swedes must be tall! This is made by Swedish bike company Crescent) and its a lot of fun to ride, though it takes some getting used to backpedalling to brake, stopping and starting up again. It has a great rack, and a chain guard - awesome for me who seems to manage to always grease my pants despite pant clips. Not recommended though to ride it around all day, then take a different bike out and attempt to backpedal to brake while approaching a busy street from a minor one. Ahem. I still need to find a nice matching basket (and a matching skirt of course!)

And here's a sneak peek at Puck, a work in progress.
Puck will become my first fixie. And a good learning about bikes project. Including painting them. So far I've completely disassembled her. I've figured out that taking a bike apart is much easier than putting one back together. Both of these bikes were finds from Community Bicycle Network (CBN). I built the back wheel for her at a CBN workshop, and quite enjoyed the process.

With this ever expanding fleet of bikes it is handy to have a place to work on them all. While CBN is a great place for that, home can be handier for routine stuff, so I bought a Park PCS-10 repair stand.
On careful observation you will note a Cannondale road bike hanging in the background. What? Not another bike?! Nope not for me.

Which brings us to the most exciting new news of all! I have a new roommate whom I'm madly in love with. Dave, my touring partner from my fun BC bike adventure, has left the beautiful wet coast, and has parked his bikes chez crazybikerchick.