2 posts tagged “perspective”
This post comes transplanted from my personal blog, originally written 11 December 2006.
I wish I had documented this process with a digital camera when it had happened. Unfortunately, I did not; these images stolen from the Internet will have to suffice. Please note that the links and images provided do not always match the product I purchased. They were as close an approximation as I could find.
When I was a freshman in college, I bought a carbon fiber bicycle fork from someone I found through craigslist.
I paid $40 for it, a fraction of the MSRP, with the intention of transplanting it onto a vintage bicycle I had yet to acquire. Upon acquiring that bicycle, however, I discovered that the steerer tube had been cut too short, and it would not avail in its intended function. I tried to resell it on craigslist (and perhaps even turn a profit), in vain.
And so it sat in storage for a very long time (two years), before a friend and former coworker donated his road bike (which was too small for him anyway) to a friend of mine. It was completely built and already had a fork on it, but I was excited anyway to discover that the bike's headtube was short enough to accommodate my own fork's steerer tube.
I could finally put this fork to good use! Of course, it would mean that the fork already on the bike would end up sitting in storage instead, but since I didn't pay $40 for that fork, I didn't care.
Incidentally, the fork is one of a group of components that all fit together to compose the front end of the bike. I was working with a new fork and an old bike, and mechanical standards had changed over time. I would need a new headset, spacers, and a stem to get it all to fit together.
Between Jake and me, we were sure we'd have some spare parts lying around that we could use. Two weeks of rummaging and no dice. Oh well; some costs can't be avoided, and at the very least, it's a one-time purchase.
Off to the bike shop (which Jake now manages). We removed the old headset and fork and pressed the new headset into the frame, which is easy with the right tools and miserable without them. Furthermore, it is an enormous pain in the ass to undo.
Here, we slapped on the new spacers and stem, adjusted bearing tension, reattached the old handlebars, and discovered that the wheel would not fit into the fork. It was a 27" wheel (630mm in diameter) on a fork made for 700c wheels (622mm in diameter). The fork, designed for racing, was made with such tight tolerances that four extra millimeters consumed all of the clearance there and squeezed the tire tight against the "ceiling".
No stopping now. As the saying goes, we were "Stepp'd in so far that, should [we] wade no more / Returning were as tedious as go o'er." I picked up a lovely 700c front wheel that morning (yes, the bike now has mismatched wheels), Shimano 105 hub matched to a Mavic MA3 rim. ~$100 retail. This wheel also needed a rim tape, a tube, and a tire.
Rim tape.
Tube.
And at this point, we also discovered that the nut that holds the front brake onto the fork could not reach the bolt. The store did not have one of these nuts in stock, and so I had to buy one from another store, sans Bro Discount.
SUMMARY OF PURCHASES:
$40 Fork
$50 Headset
$5 Spacers
$10 Stem
$50 Wheel
$10 Tire
$2 Rim strip & tube
$8 Brake bolt
$10 Headset installation
$185 TOTAL, $145 without fork
Many thanks to Jacob Lopacinski, without whom this project would never have left the ground. He hooked it up with the unmatched Bro Discount. Without it, the wheel, stem, tire, rim strip, tube, and headset installation would have cost ~$200, bringing the total cost of the project over $300.
At long last, the bike was good to go, but at considerable cost. I came out of it with an extra (old) fork, headset, stem, and wheel. I plan to give the wheel to a friend whose old wheel was stolen. I'll probably end up donating the old parts to the Bicycle Kitchen of Los Angeles.
How did this get out of hand so fast? Was it worth it to spend that kind of money to see that fork in action? At best, I'm happy that it's on a bike, but good God, would it really matter if it weren't? What's done is done, and while I'd never do it again, I'm glad the fork is out of my garage.
Lessons (hopefully) learned: know when to cut your losses; don't develop emotional attachments to useless bike parts.
Critical Mass is simply a monthly bike ride, a gentle saunter through the streets, usually around traffic hour. At the same time, it's an organic mass movement; it brings up to thousands of cyclists together in various cities throughout the United States, generally without any central organization whatsoever. Because of the sheer immensity of its ridership, its significance and objectives to each individual rider are vastly different. In every case, however, its purview is largely sociocultural, and every well-informed participant can agree, at the very least, that we ride to show an increasingly hegemonic car culture that bicycles fare just fine on the streets, too.
Most ride for fun, to connect with the cycling culture and community, to meet people, to celebrate a collective experience, to witness the urban landscape in a way that's only available twelve days out of the year. Many people ride to take a militant stand against unsafe and inconsiderate motorists. Either way, as much of a nuisance as we make ourselves (because, for unity's sake, we do "cork" intersections to keep the mass flowing through lights that have turned red), we are come and gone through each intersection in a matter of minutes, on and off the streets in a matter of hours. I believe that Critical Mass has extraordinary potential to bring the inadequacies of traffic law to the surface of the public consciousness, and that it should use that potential to make corking legal (not only is it safer, but some cyclists feel better breaking many laws when they feel the law at large does not protect them). My personal convictions aside, however, any seasoned rider knows that it can shed light on the injustices of our ethically crippled system of law enforcement.
At a Critical Mass ride in San Diego five weeks ago, the SDPD followed the Mass around with at least a dozen squad cars and a helicopter, and even arrested two cyclists for minor infractions that easily warranted no more than a ticket. At this point, whether or not these cyclists broke the letter of law is completely irrelevant; it's clear that the police department felt a responsibility to "contain" the ride and, unable to take legitimate punitive recourse against the crowd at large, employed fear tactics and made an egregious example of two cyclists who did just as much (and just as little) as anyone else. The question now is about why we're allowing the city to spend our tax dollars following around a friendly bike ride and turning a public annoyance into a carnival of power abuse, especially when the City of San Diego is effectively broke and we have so many other, more salient issues to deal with. For the record, the two arrested cyclists did nothing more than cross a double-yellow (or exit the bike lane, which happens to be legal) to pass other cyclists in the complete absence of cross-traffic.
I know that San Diego is an unusually conservative city for Southern California, but I felt that the local paper's treatment of the issue was tragically one-sided, and so I hand-wrote a letter to the editor, the text of which follows.
Dear Karin E. Winner,
I am a UCSD student and loyal reader of the Union-Tribune. I have come to rely on your paper for quality journalism on salient, local issues.
Imagine my disappointment, though, when I came across this piece on page B4 of today's issue. Critical Mass may not deserve more than 150 words in the local paper yet; it attracts only a few hundred participants per month, albeit entirely without central organization. It does, however, deserve as balanced a perspective as any other issue. Of the hundreds of cyclists in attendance, not a single one, it seems, had been asked to comment.
If we had, the article might have made some mention of how one of the officers--the one who conducted the first arrest--refused to give his badge number after being asked repeatedly, and how he openly lied to the group, telling us that arrested cyclist would only be ticketed, then sent on his way, all while this poor fellow sat helpless in the back of the squad car.
I know I can continue to rely on the Union-Tribune for its journalistic integrity, even in spite of this egregious lapse. I only hope that, as Critical Mass continues to grow in the following months, the Union-Tribune will give it the investigative attention it deserves (at least a much as "Texas Woman finds chupacabra; or was it a dog?" A2), and that as a valuable local media outlet, you will lend your voice to the disenfranchised, victimized layman rather than a few police officers whose adherence to protocol was questionable at best.
Yours Truly,
Ryan Lue
Okay, so a letter's not going to do much, but it's really the best I had for all my outlet-less frustration. And these arrests aren't the problem; they're the symptom of a broken political, cultural, and economic system that tolerates nonconformity only where it makes no real difference. It's time we mobilized--not just cyclists, but all citizens; not just about CM, but about everything that's wrong with our beloved country--because a superficial sense of social harmony isn't worth ceding our civil liberties to a police state, nor our political agency to a secretive and corrupt Administration. We've already seen this generation's Vietnam; we shouldn't have to wait around for another Kent State.
