I’m curious how long you other people have been riding the bikes we do, and what first got you interested.
I used to ride around on a janky-as-fuck mountain bike that made a horrible squealing/screeching noise constantly while being ridden; nearly every single person who I ever rode by would turn around and stare at me. It was my daily ride too. Then, I saw this video a couple years ago and couldn’t help but go out and buy myself a road bike. And that’s why I’m here, it’s all because of Lucas Brunelle, and not wanting to pay for car insurance and gas.
couple years ago when I didnt want to pay for gas anymore, bought a road bike for $5 and fixed it up. Then converted it, then built up my knuckle some time later and bought an older road bike, built up my schwinn, now bought the trek.
i’ve never even had a license so i’ve always relied on a bike. up until about 6 years ago it was always some crappy bike though. well i realized that road bikes were much more efficient for getting places, so i bought a crappy road bike. parts immediately stopped working and i didn’t know how to fix the problems so i just started removing them. after a couple weeks of removing stuff i found some fixed gear info online and went for it. sweeet.
I walked out of a Bike shop just off Gramercy Park in NYC with a Fuji Track bike. It was spring 2000. I had no Idea what I had gotten myself into, But I figured that messengers rode them, and if I was going to have to lock a bike up on the streets of New York while I worked 12 hour days, it shouldn’t have anything anyone would want to steal.
Riding home down Broadway, brakeless for the first time was pretty stupid… but not the dumbest thing I ever did…
I too was riding a janky-as-fuck mountain bike that had been given to me by the UCSC bike coop in exchange for painting them a sign, and I taco’d the rear wheel doing some dumb shit on a fire road. I needed a bike for transportation, so I popped into the bike coop and bought a piece of shit Schwinn Varsity singlespeed with the brakes hooked up to the stem shifters for $30 and rode it until almost everything broke. It almost killed me several times; I can’t believe how dangerous that thing was now that I think back upon it. From there, I built up a fixed gear or two and eventually bought and upgraded a road bike.
Hmm… about 2 years ago I bought a perty looking mountain. I would ride it very long distances (20 miles each way sometimes) on incredibly nobby thick tires that sucked. After a 55 year old man sailed by me on a road bike while i was pumping as hard as I could and he was barely trying I realized I needed to try a new bike.
My little sister had a hybrid that was MUCH MUCH MUCH MUCH lighter and faster and I loved it. Rode that for about a year and then heard about fixed gears and my friend had a friend who was all into it.
I bought an early 80’s motobecane frameset and a 130$ wheelset off ebay and traded my old mountain bike (which by this time after no maintanence was pretty bad) to my friend’s friend for all the other pieces and for him to put it together. Fell in love. Put on some nitto rb-021 bullhorns and REALLY started having fun.
Now I just got an 09’ langster yesterday. Had some problems putting on my bull horns (needed a shim for 26mm to 31.8 mm) and now I can’t get the proper front brake on (neither from my old conversion or from my new langster) so it looks like i’m gonna go brakeless for a bit. I admit it is kinda zen.
Got me into Broken Social Scene. I got into biking when my friend who was into touring and vintage bicycles helped me fix up my dad’s roadbike sitting in the garage. Later I bought my own bike, a Windsor Proffesional and he helped me fix that up. A few months later, I joined the Bike Coop here and got even more into bikes once I learned how to work on them.
I’ve been riding in some form or another forever. I got my first fixed gear when I was like 16 or 17, and I raced a little at the track until it fell into total disrepair. I always did a lot of road riding, and I dusted off my fixed gear again in maybe 2001 or 2002, after I started reading Sheldon Brown’s website, and because a lot of the guys I rode with trained fixed.
I have to say that watching those Lucas Brunelle videos for the first time was actually pretty mind-blowing. I’ve raced (poorly) for a long time, and I was even aware of alleycats in New York, even if I didn’t actually participate, but nothing prepared me for those videos. They still look so awesome today, even if it spawned a monster.
I’ve been riding fixed/ss since around 2000 when I bought a Bianchi Pista (flat black frame, whatever year that was). I got interested into when the whole singlespeed mountain bike scene started taking off. Although now that I think of it, I have no idea why I bought a track bike instead of a ss mountain bike. I’ve been riding bikes consistently since I was 4 or 5.
I was on acid and needed a place to stay for the night and everyone was crashing at this one guy’s house. I had never met him before. At like 4 in the morning we had to go on a grocery run and he showed me his bike…it was a singlespeed road conversion with just a front brake. I could hardly ride the geo (I was used to a crappy gt cross-country bike) but I was so intrigued by it. i had only seen singlespeed bmxes and had never ridden one, and his road bike felt fast but so much like a toy. I was in love. I bought an alpha mercury on craigslist with the first money I could put together, rode it singlespeed for a month, saw the trailer for macaframa, flipped the hub, and the rest just sort of happened…
I wanted something to get me to school. I hated driving and taking transit all the time was getting old. I saw a track bike locked up at school and thought it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. Only a few people rode fixed in the city then and I met some of them through anarchist gatherings and demos. Through them I learned what a track bike was. I did some research online and stumbled on FGG, Sheldon, BF, 63xc and the Lucas Brunell movies. I bought a Fuji track on ebay in 2003 and learned to ride brakeless (I was pretty dangerous for the first year or so).