- greg steele's ramblings - http://www.gregsteele.net -

Dummy Up!

Where to start?  Still shooting for over 140 characters, and so an update of the weekend.

Friday was the 5yo’s birthday. I opted to celebrate it for the weekend with him and the rest of the fam instead of chasing fitness at a race I did not have enough of that commodity to do well in.

But the race proved fortuitous as there was a friend of a friend of a friend (really!) who was coming down to race from Boise. I had been looking at a bike that was listed in the Boise Craigslist* that had been on my mind for about 18 months. I first got interested in a Xtracycle when the privateer [1] pointed me to them. He didn’t have one yet, but was thinking of building one. He eventually made one out of his Stumpjumper [2] and I got to ride it at training camp last year. Last Interbike we spent a fair amount of time looking at the Xtracycle [3] booth… and the surly booth. Surly makes a bike with an integrated Xtracycle called the “big dummy [4]”. I was in love.

I have aspirations of building it with a rohloff and son hubs on large marge rims… but all out the door that is an almost $5k proposition. And with two little boys who may or may NOT be too keen on being schleped around town on it, seemed a big nut to crack. I bided my time and looked and looked for a good deal on a used one.

        *Tangent – how to find what you need when your local craigslist doesn’t seem to have it? well CL does a nice favor for us all in the way they localize the site to a city. instead of craigslist.org/ [5]<your city name> they choose to use the city in the prefix of the url ala <your city name>.craigslist.org [6]. What does that mean to you? It means that you can do a google query over all of the indexed craigslist via the following search term “big dummy site:craigslist.org/bik/ [7]“ returning results of “big dummy” within all the CL bike listings. Cool eh? I digress…

One racer was kind enough to pick up the bike from the owner and another was kind enough to haul it down to me, all for the low, low fee of some beer.

Bike people rule. The price of the dummy in Boise was in the sweet spot, but I just couldn’t bring myself to drive both directions to pick up a bike that would help me not drive.

So, to Josh, Uhl [8] Kai [9] and Jake, Thanks to you all for your part.

So what does any self-respecting bike dork do with a brand new (to them) bike? Take half of it apart! I pulled the bars, stem, grips, seatpost and saddle off and put some stuff I had around (kinda waiting for the dummy) on it. I still have some other immediate changes, but I didn’t want to tear into shifters for wont of a desire to actually ride it this past weekend.
dummy.jpg

I also had found the stoker stem on CL for a deal @ $25 and with the old mtb bar, the kids had a place to hold on – for now. I few trips around the block and the neighbors wanted to try it out:

dummyAndKevin.jpg

Sunday, I took the 6yo to the park with basketball, picnic lunch and toys on the back. Today we ran our sole errand on it, a 6.2 mile jaunt that was made into an adventure and almost spoiled with the weather. Sorry, no pics. I chose not to dilly dally on the way home and potentially get wet/cold/snowed on on the first real task given to the dummy.
I doubt that tomorrow will be car-free with the weather forecast and the kiddos (sorry, I am not hard core), but the rest of the week looks good.

The kids love the bike’s name “Dummy” and today there was already a request to be picked up from school on the Dummy. Dunno how long that will last, but if they are still into it after the newness wears off, I will be ecstatic.

I guess I should write about P-R* and the #reasonsGeorgeDidntWinParisRoubaix context, but I will save that for another 700+ words another time this week.

        *And an initial tasting of the Saison that is bottle conditioning… a little flat, but as to be expected 6 days after bottling…more later.

Thanks for reading,

g