Im feeling a little like this whole cycling “scene” has gotten a little two serious. The great thing about single speeds and sometimes fixed gears as well is the fuck you convention additude that seems to go along with this kind of stuff. What made Sheldon such a great writer was that he approched everything with an air of complete unihibition. He didnt care about the established traditions of cycling. He wasn’t looking at it from an ideological perspective. He was talking about trying things out, experimenting with different ideas about what a bike should look like. Yeah some of the stuff he tried didnt make sense. Not every new idea will be a sucess. But if we dont give ourselves the freedom to play and to just try things to see what happens we will never have the opportunity to discover something great. Take 650b conversions for example. Conventional bicycle design says road bikes should have the largest diameter rims and the skiniest hardest tires to make them fast. But touring guys know thats bull and so their bikes are built differently. But if you allready have a bike and you want to do differnt kinds of riding on it it makes a lot of sense to use pre existing parts to change it’s characteristics. I get the desire to build the perfect machine, but honestly i dont think that such a thing exist. Every big leap in bicycle tecnology has come along because somebody had an idea. Maybe some of them were not good. But they push us to keep thinking about bicycle design. People have called Grant Peterson a Retro Grouch and honestly i think the term is kind of endearing. But if you really think about the kind of bikes he is building, there really isnt a historical president for them. Yes they draw heavily on traditional design and fabrication tecniques, but the final product is something brand new. Even the people like Dan Boxer, who are really emulating the traditional French designs, are doing so with a modern perspective with all the advantages of modern materials and componetry. We each owe it to ourselves and our own cycling experience to have a little fun now and then. Run a funky tire combo, mount your handlebars in a different way, use a part for something it wasnt designed to do. This is how we learn, and as a result we build better bikes. Lets go have some fun.
