Fat Bikes and Grip Studs

 

pic source: fat-bike.com

As much as I am happy and excited about Mutant Winter III, there is another winter cycling solution I am interested in. Fat Bikes. These are bikes that are designed for use on snow or sand or generally ugly terrain, characterized by crazy wide rims and very wide and usually rather soft tires. Good examples of the most popular are the Salsa Mukluk and the Surly Pugsley.

The reason I'm interested is that I could ride the unplowed and icy MUPs in London Ontario on one of these wonderful mutant-by-design bicycles. Studded skinny or even MTB tires aren't good enough to handle them; I have tried. The thing is, crazy wide rims and tires require crazy wide forks and crazy everything else. Crazy is expensive, especially when 1 in 1000 cyclists* will really want and actually pay for one. To give you an idea, searching ebay.ca for "surly pugsley" or "salsa mukluk" doesn't even yield any results featuring full bikes... $300 rims, etc, but no bikes.

I don't have the money to buy one of these things. A Pugsley sells for about $1700 on REI. A Mukluk runs about the same. I started looking into building one, but quickly realized that even the parts and tires put these things out of reach for me right now.

One nice thing I discovered while looking into building one of these monsters was gripstuds.com. There have always been DIY methods of studding bike tires, but I've never really believed that hardware store screws would hold up very well. Grip Studs fill the gap nicely. They are expensive, but with these you could stud any tire you wanted with high quality studs rather than trying to find a finished product like I have so far.

I think I'm gonna go talk to the people at First Cycleworks... they seem to enjoy building mutant cycles more than most other shops in town and I'm hoping they might have some useful and doable fat bike advice for me. Wish me luck!

Yer Pal,

R A N T W I C K

* That statistic is based on nothing tangible. The 1000 could as easily be 500 or 10000. The author of this blog is thinking you'll get the idea whether number is accurate or not.

All Itch, No Scratch - Bike Building Purgatory

The itch is back. The bike-building itch. It has been four or five months since I finished with the last one. I currently own two bikes I built up myself (excluding the frames and wheels), my winter MTB commuter and my summer fixed gear commuter, which is partially composed of parts from my first (now de-commissioned) experiment in bike building. Having been a mostly urban rider all my life, I am finally hearing the call of the highways and the countryside. While I can go a very long way on my fixed bike, I want to try some distances and hills that would likely kill me on a fixed gear. So it's time to build a geared touring bike. I'm thinking something suitable for reasonably fast light loaded touring would suit me best at this time. Now that I've been bitten by the bike-building bug, I won't even consider just buying a complete bike... Eewww.

I didn't know I had such an expressive visage! No wonder people seem to know what I'm thinking all the time. Darn it! I knew I should have been an actor! Curse you, influencers of my youth, curse you! Ah well, back on topic...

I am not a wealthy person. I can't build or buy the bikes I want at will. I need to save up, obtain bargain parts as they present themselves, and be patient. I wouldn't change that if I could, though. The satisfaction of getting something just right over a long time is what I love about doing it myself. Something I've learned from my previous builds is not to buy ebay or other parts that should or could work... I collected more than I needed, wasting money and time along the way. I will have to overcome laziness and something of a pack-rat mentality and re-sell that stuff some time.

This time around, I will determine precisely what I want and know which parts will be compatible before spending a penny. I find that I am not content to cobble together a decent bike from truly inexpensive bits and pieces. None of my bikes would ever be considered high-end, but the more I do this the pickier I become. My last build, the fixed commuter, was the first that left me truly happy and without a single regret. I wouldn't change a thing on that bike.

The trouble is that while I save money and do my research, I see stuff that would be great, but I can't pull the trigger and start. Instead I view and re-view stuff, starting with frames. Once I have a frame (or old bike to strip down) that meets my requirements, whether found online or around town, everything will be easier. I can't just pick and buy one right now though; and what if the perfect thing is waiting at a yard sale this weekend? How will I feel about a snap purchase then? Of course, much of my component shopping will be driven by frame choice. So, here I am, looking at anything and everything, pondering all kinds of decisions, many of which have ramifications for the others. I'm left in bike building purgatory, obsessing and thinking in circles about how to proceed.

This is how it will be until I feel truly ready to go, and who knows how long that will be? I can now look forward to weeks or even months of indecision and anguish. The single worst symptom of this illness is that I will love every minute of it.

Don't ever build a bike unless you are prepared to build many more.

R A N T W I C K

PS - Click Here to jump forward in time to see the frame I eventually found!