It is so wintry in SW Michigan. I can’t ride bikes, but I’m game to talk bikes. This is a long post with no photos, so if you are here for pics and not for story time, come back in a couple weeks when there will be photos.
Yesterday, I dropped off everything I need to make a Charlie H. Gallop at the bike shop. I requested my number one favorite master mechanic to build it, and the price of that is time. It will take time before he can get to it. He is in the middle of building my son’s new dyno Clem wheels at the moment. He also just finished random, weird fixes on my Racing Platypus yesterday, and he returned my purple Platypus to me last week. I could be single-handedly keeping my bike shop in bread these winter months. He eyed my bags of parts and said, “You have your own shelf in the back, you know.” He handed one bag to N and said, “Put this on the Leah Shelf.” I have my own charge code in the computer at that shop, but that’s another story. This was the hardest bike build I’ve planned. Which isn’t saying much considering I have only had a handful of bikes, but still. The concept of this golden Charlie eluded me. Should I do what I wanted or what was expected? Should the bike be a compromise? In my view, road bikes are the ultimate in snobbery. All the other bike categories seem to live and let live. When you roll up to a road cycling ride, you can know you are being evaluated as other riders take stock of your bike and your kit. “Pure Road Bike” is what I call it: Road bikes should look *a certain way*. Road bike riders should also look *a certain way*. The Racing Platypus is not Pure Road Bike. And while a sparkly raspberry Rivendell mixte can hang with the mean-looking carbon machines on club rides, the comments and the prejudice have become tiresome. Everyone wants to be accepted. “Just think if Leah had a road bike,” my club friends would say. I always laughed it off, said I was content with the Racing Platypus. And I was. But I started to wonder what it would feel like to have a Pure Road Bike. I bought my Charlie on a whim. I always get excited when Rivendell puts out a new model. I read the product description; it was like they had written it for *me*. At high noon of the presale, in the midst of Rivendell’s New Yorker fame, I put a golden Charlie in my cart and expected they’d snapped up before I could secure one. The purchase went through. The frame arrived and then sat. I finally had a road bike and could not decide how to build it. People thought I should keep it classy with silver parts. Ok, add just a pop of color to make it yours. Maybe drop bars. Keep it light - leave off those extras, you have them on your other bikes. I’d tire of agonizing and leave the project. I looked at my purple Platypus. I’d chosen every part for that bike, and it’s my favorite build. I anodized its parts and made it a rainbow-y blur of color. Everybody likes that crazy bike, even the purists who’d never choose rainbow and oil slick. They like it *for me*. I tossed the classy, silver idea and decided I’d do what I like best: color. Since I love the rainbow bike I decided on another natural wonder theme. I’d chased the aurora borealis this summer and BAM, I knew what this bike was: A Northern Lights Charlie. Velocity’s anodizer rides the Wednesday Evening Ride with me and he was game to try a deep custom Quill rim in northern lights. He pulled out a practice rim and laid the color down. Lifted it with acid and added different colors, walking a tightrope that risked the colors running and looking muddy. He aimed for a shimmering night sky look based on the inspiration photo I’d sent. He nailed it on the first try. Meanwhile, the Mountain West’s celebrated woman anodizer, Ashley, was staring into my box of parts, wondering how best to capture the northern lights on aluminum. Ashley can do anything; but she was conflicted about this project. First try yielded too much black in the background. The next attempt showed a colorful splatter effect. It was beautiful but lost the shimmering northern lights theme. Unsatisfied, she tried again and finally captured it. Shimmering northern lights twinkled at me from a Choco bar on my screen. Undeniably beautiful, whatever your opinion about Pure Road Bike. Some of the parts transferred color better than others; aluminum is not all the same. The Rivendell Silver 2 shifters were problematic; the finish is a plasticky, flaky compound that Ashley ended up blasting off. They took color poorly. The Silver 3 cranks, however, were wonderful. Maybe the best part on the bike. The chain guard and rings showed more pastel. The northern lights are ever-changing so all these different looks are good representations of the real phenomenon. Selecting accessories was extremely difficult. If I added the extras that make the bike useful, it would look less like a road bike. I do want people to see this colorful bike as a road bike, not as an oddball. What makes a road bike a road bike? Drop bars? Light weight? Stripped down? I tried to imagine my bike with no kickstand. What road bike has a kickstand? Well, Leah’s Northern Lights Charlie does. I take a lot of photos; leaning the bike is inconvenient. Grant pointed out that my bars would swing and topple the bike; trad road bikes prop easier. What about fenders? There are plenty of wet rides in Michigan and the muddy water that shoots up one’s back and onto one’s bags is intolerable to me. Gets in the way of being darling. Dyno. It’s expensive and adds weight and I know it. But after having dyno on all my other bikes and never ever thinking of charging and attaching my lights it feels like being hamstrung, a downgrade. Most of my miles are club ride miles - that’s way too often to fight with battery lights. As for bars, I met a man on his shiny new purple RoadUno, and he had Choco bars, which I thought looked sporty. I ruled out drop bars because they seemed a gamble. I would probably hate them. In the end, the concessions I made are that I would attach no rack and only use a BananaSax on the saddle. So, not very many concessions. But the bike is rumored to feel light, fast, spritely. I think it will be different enough from my other bikes. I hand-wring about how this bike will be viewed in the roadie world. They will be so excited to hear I got a road bike. They will be so let down when they see my version of that. I don’t think I can apologize. I think I have to be Leah. I set out in pursuit of Pure Road Bike. I found a Northern Lights Charlie instead. And I think it’s going to be grand. Leah -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "RBW Owners Bunch" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/rbw-owners-bunch/9434bea1-8282-42cf-b6b8-b5de35d6a37en%40googlegroups.com.
