Category: Projects

DSC08006, originally uploaded by Philip Williamson.

This is the Quickbeam tape finished off with much much finer silver wire. I also spent a lot more time winding cleanly and put the loop underneath the bar where it doesn’t show.
There’s definitely some room for improvement in my technique to get a more uniform wrap, but it’s a lot nicer than the job on the Ross. I might like the look of the copper wire better, though.

I fancied up the Ross fixed gear, a fairly plain bike made of pure Allentown 1020, with a cooper bar wrap finsher.

For some reason, I’ve never been a fan of the Rivendell twine finish for bar wrap, but I stole the basic principle and applied it to copper wire. I did a thrash job for a couple of reasons:
1. I’d already eaten lunch and only had a couple minutes until I had to be back at work.
2. As Pablo Picasso said, great geniuses are too busy breaking new ground to make things look beautiful. Leave that to the lesser artists.
3. I was going to change the bars tonight, but I blogged about the old ones instead.
4. Pablo Picasso was an asshole.*

This is what came out of the art bin, but I know I have some stainless steel wire. Which I bought for art purposes. Which is what I’ll use when I get fresh tape and put the moustache bars back on.

These are the essential tools: wire, needle-nosed vice-grips, dikes so old that little Dutch boy probably lost a finger to them. Beer.

Put down a loop of wire, and then wrap over it.

Wrap, wrap, wrap wrap wrap.
I went from the ‘far’ end toward the loop, leaving spaces but pulling tightly, then back and forth, dropping the new wraps into the old gaps. I crossed under the bar, so the top looked more smooth. Next time I’ll put the loop underneath, too.

When I was ‘done’ wrapping, I put the newly cut end through the loop I started with…
I’d been working off the spool, which was in my pocket – kept it close and corralled, but let it unspool cleanly.

Oh yeah: “um, started with…”

…and pulled the other (original) free end back underneath the wrap with the pliers. The loop part disappeared under the wrap, along with the captured second end.

Snip snip on each end, then kind of shove the one sharp end under the wrapping with the tip of the dikes and Bob’s yer uncle!
Copper-wire-finished bar wrap.

And it’s darkening outside… time to put the kid to bed.

*In his avocado el Dorado.

Amanda Zimmerman, the new Dirt Rag art director, commissioned an illustration from me to go with ‘Last Chance For Gas’, which is the piece that closes the magazine. Amanda encouraged me slip in a cycling bird reference, too, which was fun.

We went back and forth with sketches of the inside and outside of the shop, and the narrator and the new commuter he sees outside. Finally it all came together with both, and I floated the panel anchored by the big rectangle of the window that separates the two people.

Calling the the shop ‘Paradise Cycles’ was about the last idea, when you’d think it would’ve been the first. My favorite part of the finished picture is the pile of tires on the left.

Update: Well, the race is over, two guys beat the course record, and several guys were laid low by dehydration. Praise be to folks who are smart enough to drop out before they damage themselves permanently. After the last couple years, finishing on a fixed gear is starting to seem… impossible. Nathan Bay, the only finishing singlespeed rider this year (and only the second after Kent Peterson?) finished 8 hours over the limit. Topofusion shows it as 8 minutes over, which boggled my mind at the unfairness of it all. :^)

Follow it here.
Read the posts from the bottom, one at a time. This would make a great movie, just the phone messages, some maps and lots of footage of the route. It would be hypnotic.

These guys are racing from Canada to Mexico down the spine of the continent. On bicycles. Unsupported. Everything they need, they carry on their backs.

Here are the stats from Topofusion, updated by Scott Morris (probably not the same one I knew at Sony). A lot of the positioning is best-guess, since they self-report from payphones to an answering machine, and some of them don’t seem to do much of that. Tom Purvis transcribes it all onto the GDR blog.

Dave Nice is doing it on a fixed-gear machine. Whoa.

It’s the only sporting event I’ve ever found remotely interesting, and I wish them all the best best best. Holy cow, man.