hello out there

Saturday/June/27/2008
Welcome. I suppose we should just get right into it then: This summer, right now in fact, I am planning on building a bike - that is, a bicycle - and riding it from Vancouver, Canada to San Francisco, San Francisco. This probably sounds more ambitious than it is.

Allow me to catch you up; last summer a few friends and I rode our bikes from SFC to LA. It was around 500 miles and it took us 9 days (an admittedly casual pace). It's a common enough feat that hundreds (maybe thousands) of cyclists do a similar route every year for various events and charities. You might say it fringes on quotidian. I wouldn't because that would be kind of a jerk thing to say, especially for those of us without legs.

So while from Vancouver (which is pretty close to the Canada-US border, just to save you the trouble of finding a map) to the SFC is about twice as long as last year's trip, it is still sane enough. The x-factor, of course, will be that I will be constantly praying to all interested gods that my bike stays more-or-less intact the entire thousand miles. I'm sure an animal sacrifice will be in order at some point.

But to keep it in the true nature of the American Spirit, I have to be back in Marin by August, 16 for my friends' wedding. (They're marrying each other, hence the plural possessive). It couldn't have been planned this good - I just got lucky.

Of course, I will be getting much help for the frame design and construction. My friend, Peter Verdone, will be guiding me through the business of bicycle frame building. Peter has been doing this a lot longer than me and I feel confident under his instruction.

So when do we start? Right now. Four days ago in fact. It was a Tuesday...

I met with Pete, who is the machinist for San Francisco State's physics department, and we got some preliminary measurements and sketched out a draft of what my bike might look like using a slick program called BikeCAD (there is a free version online). This allowed us to determine, roughly, the correct size tubing I would need for my frame.

The next day I helped my girlfriend move into her new place in lovely Oakland, CA.

I came back Thursday to practice welding. I've welded for something on the order of minutes in my life so Pete told me to read some welding books. I found a dense volume and read the chapter on TIG welding. Thursday's lesson ended with me breaking the welding machine after only an hour of practice. It wasn't my fault, the water hose got a leak, but I offered to pay for it. Pete said he'd fix it on Monday.

Anyway, so come Friday I had a scheduled bike fitting appointment at Cycle Sports in Oakland. The bike fit would determine the precise dimensions of my ideal bike. They set me up on a fit bike and after about an hour and a half I was more informed on bike geometries than ever. It was really a shit-load of information and I'll be lucky if I retained half of it. Fortunately, they emailed me an excel spreadsheet with my ideal sizes and a program for determining different bike set-ups. It's all pretty involved, and I'll spare you the details now.