Bike Culture

Photo: DustinJ. Please check out the piece below.

This is a stunt video, not an education video. The idea was to recreate a tool I read about in the book "Snowcrash". The device is called the carpoon and it costs $5. The Carpoon: Designed to attach to large slow moving vehicles and allow a bike to quietly skitch behind it. Enjoy.

The Original Suicide Shift

Originally uploaded by Rock The Bike

This bike is just one of the antique racing bikes hanging on the wall of my neighbor Gian Bongiorno's shop. It's one of Campagnolo's earliest shifting mechanisms. Apparently Fausto Coppi won the Tour on it. To operate it, you pull one lever to undo the axel quick release. At this point, the axel is imobilized in the dropouts only by notches in the dropout! Then you pedal backwards, using the other lever to change gears. Once the chain has moved to the new gear, you redo the QR for the axle, then pedal forward. Apparently these were popular because they were light weight, but they caused many accidents.

Just in time for Bicycle Music Festival, we've come up with the aTractor Seat for live on-bike music performances and superior passenger comfort.

It all started one night when we were sitting around the cafe on one of these rare warm San Francisco nights. I didn't have a Soul Cycle with me. I had the Mundo. And Mafi had her cuatro, so we decided to have an 'acoustic night,' and had a beautiful ride with lots of sing-a-longs.

The experience got my wheels turning and I started looking for ways to turn the Mundo into a serious performance bike. The aTractor Seat is a mod to the Mundo's frame that allows us to mount an IKEA tractor seat rigidly to the Mundo's frame. The frame is so stiff, that I can carry a passenger on the very rear of the rack, and I still don't feel any appreciable frame flex. The front end does get a little light, because there's so much weight behind the rear axle, but not enough to make me nervous, unless we're talking about a 200lb passenger. I took my landlord Nick in Berkeley to lunch today. He weighs about 170. The front wheel never picked up, but the steering was a little less immediate.

Anyway, I wanted you to see the types of mods that you can easily do with a Mundo. The tubing on the Mundo is thick-gauge steel, not boutique thin-walled cromoly. You can take this to any welder and they'll be able to weld a bracket on there for you for your surfboard, skis, camera mount, whatever.

Here's a cool new video we just uploaded about the Mundo, featuring a new song of mine, "Sendin' Out":

And today coming back from the beach I passed Mona Caron's new mural in progress in Noe Valley and saw this cool little detail:

In it, a gym currently at the corner of 24th and Church is replaced by a Pedal Power center, which people pedaling away on energy-harnessing bikes. On the roof of the Pedal Power center, a band jams away, using the power from below. Caron painted her favorite musicians into the mural. You can clearly make out stiltwalkers from La Malamana,

In the new Mattias Johansson video for the Rubies song "I Feel Electric", the three members of the group first appear standing over cruiser bikes tricked out with the Down Low Glow.

See also: http://www.rockthebike.com/node/1211

This afternoon in the workshop I got a call from Joel, the drummer from Afrolicious and Pleasure Maker (Thursdays at the Elbo Room). I met Joel when we were on the 2-Mile Challenge tour together. He said,

"Sorry I couldn't make it to your gig last week, I was working."

"Doing what?"

"Moving."

"Moving? Like for cash?

"Yeah."

"How much they paying you?"

"18 an hour."

Why don't 'they' make bike clothing that is more stylish? 'They' do.
Originally uploaded by Rock The Bike

Do you wonder why they don't make clothes for bike commuters with more subtle style, less spandex, and fewer bright logos?