Bike of the Day: Jamis Quest

I finally did it. After two full years of research, false-starts, and saving, I finally bought a road bike I can love. In the process, I learned that I have serious issues with commitment. On Saturday, my Dad, Carver (my son), and I dropped into Velo Veloce, a local, very “snooty” bike shop in Issaquah. As we were kicking through the shop avoiding the cranky sales clerks, I stumbled on the Jamis Quest—a fairly non-descript steel bike with Reynolds 651 tubing. Being something of a steel enthusiast, I pulled the bike off the rack just for fun. Immediately, I was struck by the lack of heft. Compared to my aluminum bike at home, it felt noticeably lighter. Then I started noticing the componentry: mostly 105 with an Ultegra rear derailleur. Somewhat hesitantly I reached for the price tag. The bike was listed at a number exceeding “too much.” No surprise there. Then I noticed that the shop had discounted the price by 40%. That not only put the bike at the affordable level, it put it more or less at a price I had planned to spend on a bike last summer.


Well, we piled back into the truck and headed back to bucolic Maple Valley where I mentioned the bike to Rachael in passing. Having put up with my capricious bike tastes for years, she recognized very quickly that this was the type of bike I had been looking for at a very affordable price. She encouraged me to go back, get the stinking bike, and be done with it. I thought about it. My dad and I went for a ride in the woods, where I thought about it some more. Eventually, I slept on it. The next morning, Carver, Dad, and I hung some towel hooks for Rachael and then went back down to the shop. We walked into the shop, I pulled the bike off the rack and asked the closest sales clerk for a test ride. After the test ride, and a little “chit-chat,” I asked for a concession on pedals. He was unrelenting. No deal. So we walked out.

Back at home, we fed the kids some lunch, my folks left for Spokane, and Rachael got on the phone with her mom. Finally, I steeled my resolve, put Grace down for a nap, loaded Lydia, Ellie, and Carver into the truck and left for the shop one last time. On the way, I explained to the kids that the people at this shop did not like kids, and that they would speak unkindly to them if the girls were seen touching any of the merchandise. The girls, who like going to the bike shop, promised to hold hands and not touch anything. Carver, who is beyond reasoning with, would be forced to hold my hand the entire time. While the sales clerk rang up the Jamis, I showed the kids the $10,000 titanium and carbon bikes explaining that “those bikes cost more than our minivan. Isn’t that amazing??” We stared at a steel Waterford bike and discussed the difference between cyclocross and straight road bikes. The girls sat on the kid mountain bikes and pointed out their favorite helmets. Who says indoctrination can't be fun?

Finally, the bike was ready. We rolled it out into the lot where I let Carver and Ellie “test ride” the bike. Then we threw it in the back and headed home. When we got home, I wrenched on the bike for an hour or so swapping out the seat post and the wheel set. Then Ellie and I rode our bikes around the block.

It took me three trips to the shop over two days, but finally I was able to part with the bills. It now resides in my garage where these pictures were taken.

Bike of the Day: Pereira Cycles

While looking for new builders a year ago, I found the Pereira Cycles site. According to the site, Tony Pereira, the eponymous owner, is a tech-slump refugee turned full-time framebuilder out of Portland. The fact that he is a full-time builder of bikes says a lot about the quality of his work. But to keep things interesting, I have included an example below that speaks for itself. (Keep scrolling, there are multiple mouth-watering images.) You can find his work at http://www.pereiracycles.com/. If you’re a nut for custom-made steel bikes, check out his gallery.

Here is a TIG-welded single-speed mountain bike, but he builds road bikes as well. In fact, he has a few road bikes with some unconventional derailleur shifting mechanisms. Fascinating. I may submit one of those in a future post, so I’ll hold off for the time being.




















CHECK OUT THOSE CLEAN WELDS!


















INTERNAL CABLE ROUTING??? Wow. Notice the pear symbol on the seat tube. Classy.

Bike of the Day: DBR V-link 3.0

For today’s Bike of the Day, we’ll be branching out into my native bike territory: off-road cycling.

One day, early in the winter of 1986, my father came home from work with two 5-gallon pails in the trunk of our family's ’84 Buick Skylark. He called me into the garage to share his “surprise” with me. To keep things brief, he had the remains of a 1979 Yamaha 2-stroke 80 cc motorcycle. And when I say “remains,” I may be over-generous in my description of the state of this bike. We were dealing with a motley pile of rusting bits of aluminum, steel, and vinyl. All winter, to my displeasure, I shivered in the garage with my father as he pieced this bike back together. Eventually, after a few false starts, we got the bike to run. Something awoke within me during those first rides up in the Canyon with my dad. I began to “thirst” for what mountain biking enthusiasts refer to as “singletrack,” which the rest of us know as trails: the narrower, the better.

Due to lack of funds, I left off dirt-biking about the time I graduated from High School. Today, I satiate that thirst to “carve” an isolated section of singletrack on the back of mountain bike. For today’s bike, we will look at my first full suspension mountain bike: the DBR (“Diamond Back Racing”) V-Link 3.0. And here it is in all its primeval glory.


Specs:

1. XT rear derailleur
2. LX crankset
3. LX shifters
4. Avid 1.0 levers and brakes
5. WTB double-walled rims and tires
6. 5th Element shock
7. Marzocchi Z1 Bomber fork (one of the best forks that Marzocchi made)
8. Titec post, stem, and bar

Whenever I look at this bike, I inadvertently shiver—both out of revulsion and fondness. First, this bike is a constant reminder to me of my darker materialistic side. At the time I purchased this bike, I was finishing up my Senior year as an undergraduate. One of my three roommates, a man by the name of Mark Maher, was a mechanical engineering major with a serious lust for bikes. Between work and class, he and I would discuss biking and bike building. We even toyed with building our own full-suspension mountain bike frame from the salvaged tubing of abandoned bikes around campus. (He’ll enter our Bike of the Day chronicles again.)

At any rate, one day he came to me with a bike listing he had found—FOR ME—on the classified board of the student center on campus. As my mind was consumed with acquiring and building bikes, his passionate insistence that I owed it to myself to look at the bike easily wore down my resistance. That night I borrowed the car of a different roommate, stopped by the ATM, and foolishly withdrew the asking price. (I have since learned the error of my ways and no longer take money with me when viewing a bike.)

Even today, I can remember coasting out of the seller’s garage on the bike and sensing for the first time how it rode. Compared to my hard-tail (a bike with only front suspension), this bike felt SOLID and plush. The shifting was precise and the braking whiplash-inducing. You guessed it, I bought the bike with nary a quibble. All those years of bartering in Guatemala’s open-air markets for nothing. There I was, 22-years-old: no girl friend, no car, no computer. All I had to my name was approximately $300 (post-purchase), some second-hand clothes, and soon, two bikes. Obviously, I didn’t need a second bike. Even more damning, the bike was too large for me. It didn’t fit.

The sizing issue had some interesting consequences one of which manifested itself a few weeks later as spring broke. You have to know something about Utah winters to appreciate how I was feeling that day. We had just been through months of bitter cold, snow, and hazy gray inversions. Unlike Washington, Utah turns brown and dull in the Winter. Anyway, that day the sun was out and everything from campus to the lower foothills of the Wasatch Range immediately east of campus had turned a bright, translucent green.

As I rode through the Quad, my thoughts went to Rachael. We had met earlier that semester and being a young man in Spring, my fancy naturally turned to love--the love of something not quite as cold and unyielding as bikes). That day there were over a hundred people studying in the Quad, enjoying the sun, and milling around. In order to give vent to the rebirth I felt, I instinctively pulled back hard on the handlebars. I was in love, I was warm again, I would ‘wheelie’ through the Quad, and I didn’t care who saw me.

Generally when a bike is too large for an individual, the top tube (the bar that extends from the seatpost to the handlebars) is too long, stretching the rider out along its distance and limiting that rider’s leverage on the bike. Thus, it requires substantially more strength to wheelie a bike that is too big. To compensate I pulled with all 150 pounds of my might. But I failed to take into account the boost that infatuation would give to my otherwise underwhelming strength. And there before those hundreds of people, I went over backwards landing flat on my back nearly in the dead center of the Quad with a loud crack. The bike scooted ahead narrowly missing some pedestrians, my books scattered across the sidewalk, and a hush fell on the crowd. Heh . . .

Someone asked if I was okay.

“Oh yeah. I'm just fine.” I said through clenched teeth and a forced smile. Then I limped over to my bike, crammed my books back into my pack, and rode the rest of the way home a humbler me. Vanity is a cruel master.

A couple of months later, I tried to sell the bike to buy a wedding ring. For two weeks no one bit. Then one day I came out of class to find the bike missing. I was crushed. I was banking on the proceeds from the sale of that bike to cover my first of two installments on Rachael’s ring. The next day I mentioned the theft to my dad. My father, a life-long insurance man, pointed out that I was still covered under his homeowner’s policy. The policy had a clause that covered the replacement price of the bike less $500. After some research, I determined the bike must have been worth $1,600 new. In retrospect, I realized I undervalued the bike.

In any event, I came away with $1,100 which covered my first installment on Rachael’s ring. Today, all I have to show for the bike is my own wedding ring: a plain titanium band that the jeweler threw in when I purchased Rachael’s ring for an extra $25. Titanium may scratch, but it never bends.

Bike of the Day: Schwinn Paramount

So there’s a lot of history behind the Paramount. Legend goes (and it really has a ring of legend) that Serotta built this late 90’s Schwinn Paramount. Evidently, Serotta didn’t want the word to get out that they built something for a mainstream manufacturer so they’ve followed up every leak on the internet and tried to eliminate these leaks. As for the bike, this particular paramount frame is constructed with titanium tubing and—obviously—a heavy dose of Serotta craftsmanship.

Last year, when I was looking to upgrade my road bike I saw this bike on Craigslist. This particular version came equipped with 9-speed Ultegra componentry (my favorite). The crank was a double, even cleaner. I knew better than to let this one go. So I called the guy immediately and we ended up meeting on Mercer Island that evening. I came in the minivan with kids in tow, which actually has bearing on this story.

So the guy shows up, and I hop on the ride. The frame was low to the ground. The bike handled nimbly, just this side of twitchy. You could tell it would really rip. The seller needed money to cover rent and decided to jettison the Paramount. I hemmed and hawed and eventually decided to buy it. I knew better than to come with money (a different sad story) so I went to the bank—with the kids still in tow. At the bank, I just couldn’t bite the bullet. I kept thinking about how much kids cost and how irresponsible it would be to blow 800 bones on a bike. So I went back to the guy and said “sorry, I’m a dork. Thanks for letting me ride your bike a couple of times around the park n’ ride.” He shrugged and that was the last I ever heard of him.

Fast forward a month and a half. It’s July 11th at mile 150 of the STP. I’m lying under a tree feeling slightly nauseous. Around me are hundreds of sweaty one-day riders. And suddenly—one tree over—I see a Schwinn Paramount. I walk over to the guy and begin talking to him about the bike. Long story short, he was the guy that actually bought the bike after I walked away. I still day dream about buying the bike. But I don’t regret the decision I made . . . at least not much.