The Nutcracker... on Bike Parts

My friend Paul (who sends me awesome bike links) just sent me this, and I had to share. Especially since Mike is a Specialized, and that's who commissioned this little bit of cheerful lunacy: The Dance of the Sugarplum Fairies, played entirely on bicycle parts.



Click here for a complete explanation of where this came from and why: San Francisco composer Flip Baber says, of the process: "I recorded hours of bike sounds and edited the best chunks in BIAS Peak. After that, most of the spokes, cables and disc brakes were fed into the EXS24 Sampler within Logic Pro. It was super tricky since most of these metallic sounds have a pretty warped (no pun intended) overtone series. I interpreted the score by ear from a random mp3 I Limewired for reference. From there it was all about re-arranging the score in my head to compensate for the strange overtones. The source sounds were kept pretty raw besides some mild pitch shifting from keymapping & a touch of impulse response reverb to match the acoustical space of the orchestral reference recording. Between the road and mountain bike, there were octaves of difference (maybe I should get my wheels trued?) and they yielded some great sounds, most of which didn’t even get used…although they will end up on something eventually. Other than that, there were some automated volume swells and plenty of panning since you would associate a bike sounds with stereo movement. I hope this exposes my journey from bike to mixdown!"

I've got my wool to keep me warm...

For Christmas, my parents, who want me to stay warm, gave me a base layer set - an undershirt and leggings - from Icebreaker, a New Zealand company that makes Merino wool clothing. I got the mid-range base layer (200) - which should stand me in good stead through most Ontario winter days, especially if I'm on the move. We'll see: can't wait to test it out on the bike. I've already worn it cross-country skiing and it performed just fine.

Merino's pretty nifty stuff - it insulates, it breathes like crazy, it's super lightweight (you'd never know this stuff was made from wool: it feels almost like cotton, just warmer), and when it does wear out, which won't be for quite some time, you can compost it. This stuff is really thin, and it's surprisingly soft. In our family we listen, every Christmas Eve, to A Child's Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas, and the narrator talks about "aunts who always wore wool next to the skin" and who give "mustached and rasping vests that made you wonder why the aunts had any skin left at all." This is not that wool. Far from it. I wore it out skiing on Christmas Day and most of the day on Boxing Day. So stretchy, so soft, so warm.

So, I'll have to try it out on the roads, when I get back to Ottawa and Mike. I'm really looking forward to having the leggings to wear under my jeans - what is it that makes denim so very very cold?

I found a tag on the shirt that gave me a unique "BAAcode" that, presumably, allows me to trace the wool in my item to the sheep stations it was grown on in New Zealand. I don't know if I believe that or not, but I did go check it out on their site, entered my code, and found out where my shirt was when it was on the hoof. And then I spent a while just clicking around reading about merino, checking out videos of the station owners, looking at pictures of herds of wooly sheep. Great website design. I was totally sucked in.

Now... I get to find out if a New Zealand sheep can grow wool that can hack an Ottawa winter. Hah!

Merry Christmas from me and Mike

Yes, it's a tire wreath. I found the picture on BikeHacks.com.

Merry Christmas to all.

And to all a good bike.

Savage's

I'm visiting my family in Fredericton for Christmas: back in the hometown wandering around the same downtown streets doing the last of my Christmas shopping. And this morning I was walking past Savage's Bike Centre and decided to drop in and see what I could expect to pay for studded tires (if anyone in town would be carrying them, I thought, it would be Savage's.) Plus, I really wanted to go in and check out the shop, which has seriously expanded since I was a kid and wheeled my first mountain bike in there for a look at the brakes.

The counter is most of the way toward the front of the shop and a couple of the guys were standing at it and said hi as my friend and I came in. Including Matt Savage, who I went to high school with. Actually, Matt is one-half of a set of identical twins that I went to high school with: I think they're a year older than me. I think Matt was already working at the shop at the time, and maybe his brother was too.

The thing about Savage's that I didn't know until this visit is that it's been there, and in the same family, for more than 110 years. One hundred and thirteen, to be exact. This is the oldest established bike shop in Canada. It was begun here in Fredericton in 1897 and the Savages have been selling and fixing bikes ever since, right down to Matt, who manages the store now. I mean, you think of bike shops as being run by the latest crop of 25-year-olds. Not this one. This one has been selling and repairing bicycles for more than a century, father to son. And in a town that really isn't particularly cyclist-heavy.

So I had to go in and have a look around. I asked about tires - Matt told me he didn't have any studded tires in, and that they sold out fast in the winter. "I wouldn't pay more than eighty or a hundred dollars though," he said. "When you get back to Ottawa." I looked longingly at some of the skater-style helmets they had stacked by the door, walked to the back to check out the bikes (my friend and I both really admired one of the Specialized single-speed city bikes - big thick frame but with those bladelike skinny tires and light enough to pick up easily), chatted to one of the staff in the back about winter biking, and then we headed back out to go on with the Christmas shopping.

I think I'm weirdly proud that Fredericton's greatest bike shop is also the country's oldest. It's a strange thing to be happy about, but I think I am. It's nice to think about that kind of long-term passion, I guess. A hundred years of fixing gears and repairing brakes and straightening handlebars and replacing bike chain.

You know it's winter when...

Mike has left a possibly-permanent set of salt stains on the carpet outside my apartment, right underneath where the rear tire and the front set of gears are when I stand him in the hallway to thaw after I get in. The one under the derailleur is the worst: chain lube plus salt plus road grime plus slush is not kind to carpet.

Well, I'm not about to bring him in to thaw and drip all over my hardwood floor, right?... I leave him out there for a half hour or so to drip dry, then open the door and allow him in. A little like a dog that's in disgrace.

It's amazing how much snow he brings in with him. The tires throw slush back against the underside of the frame and up into the rear set of gears, where it sticks and clogs around the gearshift cables. It almost feels futile to clear it off, since I'll just get the bike coated again the next time I go out, but I know I should. It's also true that I go through lubricant like a fiend when the weather's bad. Not that you tend to notice a sticky gear or a grinding in the pedals while you're teetering along at three-quarters speed, keeping an eye out for patches of ice or ridges left by the plow, but in the back of my mind I'm always aware that I'm putting the bike through really, really unkind conditions, and if I don't want to replace most of the drive train in the spring I should probably be wiping it down, lubricating absolutely everything, and probably trying to protect the paint job while I'm at it.

I see some debate out there in the blogosphere over using fixed-gear bikes for the winter; the sort of single-speeder that you usually find in either older style bikes, or seriously heavy-duty ones. The idea is that winter is so hard on your gears, and you're so unlikely to be traveling fast or hard enough to need more than one gear, that you're saving yourself a lot of replacement parts and headache by switching to a simpler bike with fewer working parts. The only downside is having to work a lot harder on hills (and you really don't want to stand up on the pedals on a slick, icy hill.) It's a moot point for me: even if I wanted to get a second bike, I don't have anywhere to keep it. As it is, Mike is dripping on the floor inside my apartment because there's no bike parking downstairs.

So, I have to do what I can to protect my bike's delicate bits. MEC (bless their hardcore little hearts) posted a great set of tips for winterizing your bike. New Years Resolution: get that midwinter tuneup, some studded tires, a can of WD-40, and a gallon or so of all-purpose lubricant.

And a rubber mat for the hallway. Sooner or later my landlord's going to complain.

Stranded

I couldn't resist snapping a shot of this bike, which was sitting on the Transitway bridge this morning at Mackenzie King, just outside the Rideau Centre. Looks like someone locked it up sometime around, oh, last Wednesday when the snow came down, and hasn't come back for it. And I don't think that bike's going anywhere till spring...

It reminds me of another bike - a brown commuter - that I passed every evening on the River Path, just past the bridge to Algonquin College. It was locked to a tree, near a little clearing that led down to the water where people often sit, and it stayed there for at least two months. Every time I passed it I had to wonder how it got there, who locked it up and left it there, and why they never came back to pick it up. As time went on, I also kept wondering why the front tire hadn't been stolen yet.

And then one day the tire was gone. I was surprised it had taken as long as it did: not really the bike-theft capital of anywhere, Ottawa.

Those abandoned bikes, though: every time I see one I have to wonder why and how they got left where they are. If anyone's coming back for them. What the policy is on abandoned bicycles. Does the city have to come and cut the locks when no one comes for them? When do they leave those spots, and how?

Early Riders

I was just skimming around and spotted these: Early Rider balance bikes, for children roughly 2-6 years old. No training wheels. No pedals. Big fatboy back tires. Made out of wood. And utterly cool-looking.

I know a couple of 4-year-olds, and it's nearly Christmas, so this caught my eye, although I think they're only available in the US so far and I don't have $180 to spend on my friends' children. But these are really interesting. I always defaulted to the idea that training wheels were pretty much it as far as interim, "learning" bikes went. (And I admit it: I was jealous of the other kids in my neighbourhood that had training wheels. It didn't make much sense, because I had already learned to ride my bike, but there it is, training wheels, Kangaroo sneakers and Zoodles - all things I mistakenly thought I desperately wanted when I was a kid.)

But it's true that training wheels give you a false sense of balance: once they come off you still have to learn to balance on two wheels - while pedaling. This is cooler. Besides, I've also seen pedalless mountain bikes for adults, and they're totally cool. (If a little limited - you can basically only use them to go very fast down the sides of mountains. Like snowboarding, but on a bike.)

And I do remember learning to ride a bike. I think I was 6 or so, and I got a red bike - I think it was a Schwinn - for my birthday. It was a full-on pedal bike, single-speed, with backpedal brakes. My parents basically showed me the bare-bones method of learning to bike: Start at the top of the back lawn, which ended in a field full of tall grass. Roll down the slope until you smash into the tall grass and tip over. Pick self up, push bike back up to the top of the lawn. Repeat. Which I did.

And I remember getting up really early the next day to go out there and do that some more. Somehow, it seems, I managed to get the hang of the whole balance thing that way. Then I graduated to rolling up and down the driveway. In my memory, at any rate, it really didn't take long to figure the bike thing out. So training wheels? Who needed them?