What do you remember about the party foul scene when you started?

Tarckives Bikes
61

In the summer of 2007 I got into riding bikes again. I’d ridden to school in junior high on a Schwinn World Sport (carrying my French horn in its case on the rear rack), wrote my first ever term paper in high school on “The Bicycle As An Alternate Means of Transportation” (and was nearly laughed out of the classroom by my teacher when she heard the topic), and ridden beach cruisers a lot while living in college. I started riding again because I was doing a lot of paddleboarding at the time and it seemed stupid to drive the 1.5mi down to the beach when I could just ride a bike and tow my paddleboard on a trailer instead.

At the time I was exchanging email correspondence with a friend in Colorado, a big time bike enthusiast who is (for all I know) still sort of bumming his way around the world via bike. He suggested I check out a fixed gear bike because it was generally similar in concept (so he said) to the coaster brake equipped beach cruiser I was riding. Stopping with your feet and all that. I remember telling him something about him being crazy & etc.

In November of '07 I got a new job and started bike commuting daily, on the beach cruiser. As I got more into cycling I started noticing the different kinds of bikes around town and whatnot. Started reading BF around the same time, mainly focused on Utility Cycling but would check out the SSFG stuff and some of the other forums.

Thought I was going to be moving to the next town over so planned to get a road bike in order to more comfortably commute the 10 or so miles each way, ended up getting a Cross Check with a flipflop hub because the hub I wanted at the time (Nexus 8 speed IGH) was backordered. Didn’t end up moving but loved riding the fixed gear.

My first real intro to party foul culture came from a poster for some weekly drag races put on by the local fixed gear group. Lurked them a few times from afar but didn’t end up coming out to hang with them till earlier this year. Have now become something of a regular with the local fixed heads and am really enjoying a nice new group of friends. Am also partaking of the pretty diverse range of options in my town’s bike culture, which as it turns out is pretty extensive. Good times all around. Bicycles have become my main thing and I’m loving it.

Along with many others, I was there for the whole Tarckbike insurrection. I was just getting into fixed gears at the time and was still feeling like an outsider, but was really amused by the clumsy heavy-handedness of Brian and crew. Had no real expectations for Tarckbike but it’s turned into my main non-local bike forum. Good stuff here by good people. And ironically so much more civil than at BF, LOL!

62

He didn’t answer so I will. Zelah is a transplant… he’s talking about the east coast. Virginia I believe?[/quote]

Yeah, I thought it seemed impossible that he was the second person riding fixed gear in Portland in 2007 or whenever.

63

first thread i started on BF
http://www.bikeforums.net/showthread.php?t=85015
second
http://www.bikeforums.net/showthread.php?t=86718
third etc.
http://www.bikeforums.net/showthread.php?t=112509
http://www.bikeforums.net/showthread.php?t=152624
http://www.bikeforums.net/showthread.php?t=153856
http://www.bikeforums.net/showthread.php?t=153041
and the best, most regrettable thread i ever posted.
http://www.bikeforums.net/showthread.php?t=266772&page=2

64

No, seriously, who puked on the Lexus?

65

Oh man.

66

Started riding fixed in summer of 2006? when I was in school.

I remember regularly seeing about 15-25 guys and maybe a handful of women who rode fixed. There were probably a bunch more who I never noticed.

I was one of maybe 3 or 4 kids who would ride up to campus on a fixed gear almost every day. There were probably a lot more who I never noticed.

No one gave people shit about brakelessness (except for me).

Most people rode drops or bullhorns. Then those super narrow jackass bars were popular for a while until everyone realized how dumb they are.

Semi-janky conversions or IRO/KHS Flite/Pista seemed to be the norm. I knew a couple guys who had lugged track frames with blinged out parts, but even those bikes were kind of pieced together, nobody I knew had full NJS bikes or full campy or what have you.

I remember a lot of jackass conversions on campus but I only ever saw them locked up or on the bus racks.

Everyone wanted to build a keirin bike or a vintage 100% italian track bike. These kinds of bikes and parts were still pretty affordable compared with today, but we still couldn’t afford them.

No one wanted threadless stems. I remember people replacing their forks so they could have threaded stems. Dumb.

Tricks were starting to get big, but mostly it was just backwards circles and trackstands and the occasional barspin.

Information was kind of hard to find, Sheldon Brown, 63xc.com and BF were it, really. Bike coops too.

A number of the fixed gear riders in my town were also into building tallbikes and choppers and shit. I never really got into that.

There were a couple shitty loaner fixed gears that kind of floated around the campus around the time I started riding, they were made out of dented old huffys and magnas. The tallbiker/fixed gear/bike coop kids built them and they were very poorly spraypainted orange and had “deathtrap” written in sharpie on the downtubes. They were the shittiest, most dangerous bikes I have ever ridden. Loctited cogs on old rusty wheels, a single shitty old brake caliper with no stopping power and worn down pads, chains would frequently fall off, finger tight bolts, mismatched plastic pedals and an absurdly low gearing that guaranteed that you would spin out on the tiniest of hills.

67

Bought my first fixed in 2002. At the time there were about a dozen other guys in town who rode fixed… a couple bike messengers and a bunch of straight edge hardcore kids like me. Started Sprintclub the following year and transitioned to road racing and putting on USAC recognized track races over the next four years as more and more kids got into riding as an extension of drinking games. Now I just sell them lots of bikes and parts while the only time I regularly ride a track bike is on a track with the occasional commute on my Brooklyn when I’m not in enough hurry to use a road or cross bike.

As said most guys riding track bikes when I started riding were sxe. A “cheap” track bike was a GT pulse and most had either a Cannondale, 3rensho, or some Italian frame like a Ciocc. My steamroller was rather frowned on as boring and uninteresting. By the time I started putting on races in parking lots and cemeteries I had moved on to the Olmo that Rusty now rides. At the time most kids were still riding at least mid-level to high quality fixed gears and stuff like bulletproof cranks and other cheaper stuff was not even on the radar. The cheaper stuff really did not start cropping up until around 2004 or 2005 when the whole bike gang / Slaughterama thing started here. I tried to make nice with that scene and we took part in the first Slaughterama scavenger hunt but after clearly winning it and being told one of the teams of the kids putting on the race won with about half the points I said fuck it stopped going to those events and turned my attention to racing.

Now things do not resemble the times when I got into riding at all but I am really happy that non sanctioned street track racing is happening all over the world now even though that scene has completely died here in my own town.

68

my BF posts are goldmines of esoteric wisdom

69

started restoring my parents’ 70’s road bikes 2 summers ago.

Converted my dad’s nishiki to fg. had fun that summer.

bought fg bike.

deconverted dad’s bike.

bought road bike.

totally over riding fixed.

trying to sell fg bike

70

Started in 2006 when a friend bought a copy of Pedal.

My parents used to organize bike races in Seattle and started the Bicycle Paper, so it was easy for me to get into it, they were excited I was finally into getting a nicer bike to get around on.

71

Oh, random other stuff, I remember seeing my first set of Phil hubs in person at a Cleveland alley cat and being like, “woah, I know about those from the internet”

Same with a Pista Concept I saw in Columbus…I’d seen plenty on velodromes by that point, but not on the street.

72

I rode a fixy in 1997! It was a front-braked flat bar conversion with spd’s, and probably a suicide hub . While visiting Vancouver I borrowed it from a punk messenger who was much cooler than me. It was fun and I remember being surprised at how easy it was to make do with one gear.

Fast forward to 2006:
Had been commuting and distance riding a Devinci touring bike around for a couple of years and wanted to get into fixed gears. So, I cut the brazeons off a marinoni and built a dumb tarckbike. I remember a fair amount of butthurt and whining from eddiebrannan and other nyc guys, over the fact that people in the fixed gear internet scene were beginning to notice that a lot of it was pretty stupid (although still totally fun). This was of course the development that eventually spawned tarckbike.

73

I converted a Shogun 600 back in 1990 (suicide hub with BB lock ring) Was there an Internet?

74

Yes, but I doubt that there were any Gopher sites about fixed gear back then.

75

I remember when dutret winding up crazy Ken Cox. His long winded, paragraph and structure-free ramblings were epically stupid and boring.

76

a few years ago, picked up a bike i saw in the neighbors yard that was sitting there for about a year, it was a teal murray, i hated the color so i painted it ultra flat black (stealth) and fixed it up , and started riding it around, got back into cycling after a few years of not touching a bike and that was that.
most people that ride around here do it for transportation purposes.

77

[quote=rudetay]Started in 2006 when a friend bought a copy of Pedal.

My parents used to organize bike races in Seattle and started the Bicycle Paper, so it was easy for me to get into it, they were excited I was finally into getting a nicer bike to get around on.[/quote]

Wait - do you live up here right now?

78

lets see. 2007ish. ive always rode bikes but at this time, not really. just had a mountain bike i would ride when i went around taking pics. well an old friend of mine moved away and came back to visit and was telling me about this crazy fixed gear thing. i didnt really get it. then, i guess he moved back and showed up at my work with a conversion. still didnt understand why you would want to ride that on the street and ive never even seen anyone riding fixed gear until my friend showed up at my work. tally mark one person. time past. i had a strong urge to want to ride again but didnt really know what. i started thinking about fixed gear bikes because i knew it was a little different and i wanted to try it out. i didnt know that it was a bicycling sensation sweeping the land. i just wanted a new bike. so about a year and a half ago, i bought my bike. still not into the scene. i ride by myself. now i want a road bike, the bike i should have bought in the first place.

79

Court.

Also, lets remember that this is a thread about the SCENE when you started riding. Not why YOU started or what you were riding (unless it has relevance to a discussion of the scene). Seriously, if you’re going to get off topic you need to be banned and go start your own forum somewhere else.

Thanks to whoever mentioned 63xc. That site was amazing and proved that fixed riding extended well beyond our little city cliques. It was a sad day for the scene when they stopped updating. Thinking about it reminds me of a time when the scene was so much more than the petty shit that started going in 05/06. Back then it felt like it was a life-long thing that was more of a lifestyle choice than a fad. People who rode fixed were those that would actively seek it out. It wasn’t handed to you in the form of complete budget bikes or knowledgeable staff in a boutique shop.

80

I’m guessing he’s batshit fucking insane as are all the people in life that I truly like.