The bicycle, John Henry

I finally finished building my touring bicycle, the end of last week. I've christened him John Henry. Here he is above; oh, and there I am. I was originally going to post a sexy close-up. But I felt a sudden too-close kinship with the guys who drive their pimped-out sports cars up and down the avenue, using their rear-view mirrors mostly to check their hair. Who wants to see a close-up of a bike? Well I do, actually. Especially if it's my hair. Bike, I mean. But in this case what you're getting, reader, is better: the bike AND its rider.


In the bike shop there is a term: frankenbike. A frankenbike's parts have been dug up from various graveyards. Frankenbikes are impossible to tune, because nothing in the drivetrain is really compatible. You often find hose-clamps on a frankenbike. John Henry is the quintessential specimen of a frankenbike.

The front end of the drivetrain is comprised of a crankset and derailleur from a 1989 Dura-Ace road racing group, which my friend, Greg, gave to me. "1989" and "road racing" translate to painfully high gearing. To compensate, I have a 9spd cassette in the rear that ranges from 11 to 34 teeth, providing me the lowest gearing I can buy. The low gear feels good, but it'll still be a haul up some of those steep passes. The rear derailleur is an XT mountain bike derailleur given to me by Dan. I needed the mountain derailleur's long pulley cage to be able to wrap up all the extra chain for such a huge range of gears. The crankset rotates on a super-long spindle Shimano bottom bracket that our shop was trying to get rid of for $5. I had to piece together two 9spd SRAM chains to get enough links to handle all the gear combinations and to reach across the extra-long touring chainstays. The shifters are also from Greg's Dura-Ace group. They're down-tube shifters, something that went out of style when animal print sweatshirts came in. And the rear shifter is for an 8spd cassette. To make that compatible with my 9spd cassette, I've switched it to friction shifting. That means it doesn't click into position. It just glides through all of the gears. Picture a trumpet player trying to play a trombone. Or a guitarist trying to play an upright bass. Or Niels Bohr trying to imagine continuous atomic energy states. What I'm saying is it's very difficult to operate a friction shifter.

The front rack was part of a $50 deal for a set of panniers that a co-worker of mine designed and built in the 80s. It attaches to my front fork with two u-bolts that stick way too far out. I'm afraid after all of this, I'm going to have to employ hose-clamps to keep it on.