Well the website and Ebay are soon to get a shot at a bunch of stuff we procured over the past 6-12 months now. After scouring the country, and the world, for awesome stuff, time is now to start to offer it up. We have picked the gems we want to keep for our collection, I have personally found a couple cool things for myself including a 1961 Schwinn Paramount tourist bicycle. That is the model that came stock as a Sturmey Archer 3 speed, with upright handlebars and fenders and chainguard! Pretty awesome. I set up a vintage mixte Witcomb frame as a single speed. Well, on to some soon to be seen items. PreWar Schwinn Cycletruck from the Hershey Chocalate factory, late 1970s Raleigh Professional 54cm, tall Raleigh International frameset, deluxe late 70s Benotto road frame, various rare campagnolo, huret, and simplex bits.
I leave you with my new bike I am using for city commuting. It is an early 1960s french Rochet chrome frame. It was originally chrome plated, then painted a translucent candy color over it. when I got it, it had already been stripped of it's paint. It is currently set up as a fixed gear, as I have not had time to install the front brake to turn it into a Sturmey Archer 3 speed. I got the handlebars, brake levers, fenders, and front Porteur rack from Velo Orange. Front rack is not properly installed it yet. The Schmidt dynohub and Schmidt e-6 light are from Peter White cycles. I still have to install a chainguard as well. The rack is the perfect size for a flight case record box that I strap down with old inner tubes. The handlebar stem is an old underslung track stem I had laying around.
Over the past few days I have been a bit under the weather, well anyone around me would say I am sick and grouchy! I thought that would be the perfect time to go over the website and start from scratch on some of the basic things I totally disliked about it. Not the greatest idea when you are under the spell of Nyquil. I made some good starts but looking back, hours spent while sick and working are hours wasted. I should have stuck to my original idea of watching trilogies- Spiderman, the Mummy, Indiana Jones(sorry I do not count the new one). The hours spent finagling with basic HTML code and CSS left my brain in mush and rather frustrated. I was able to come up with a flyer design for a DJ night I have this week. I am glad I was distracted with that. All that said, I did put a new and improved. . .ish pages online.
Well over a year since the last posting has been long enough. In honor of a total overhaul of the Bikeville website(to be online soon), I am going to also start blogging again. I have also enlisted some of my coworkers to help contribute as well, so the post will be more regular.
We will discuss various aspects of working a used bicycle shop-cool and interesting repairs, cool new products out there, and finally, cool parts and bicycles we run across from our various travels around the USA.
Image above is from the Philadelphia photo archive, that have a searchable archive of photos taken around the city. The Tripoli Barber building, seen in the left, would decades later become the home of Via bicycle.
So keep a eye out for the new website, it will be at the same address, and let's see how this bloggin' goes again.
Much like a marathon runner runs 26.2 miles, not 26 miles, I rode 373 miles this weekend. Not 360 miles, as I previously thought I was doing, but 373 miles! I did it with my supportive and strong friends Pat and Cecile, without them, I might still be out on the road. We completed the final brevette for qualifying for Paris brest Paris.
It is very interesting as the more miles we do, the more acclimated one becomes to being on a bike. When I was younger, about 8-10 years ago now, I would do many shorter rides, averaging at least 100-150 miles a week, usually more in the summer. All of that shorter riding fails in comparison to the mental and physical test these ultra distances put on you body. The amount of time you are sitting on the seat, just pedalling away, seems so ludicrous when you have not done anything like that before. The overall time this weekend on and off the bike to complete the route was 35 hours and 55 minutes. We stopped in Sommers Point, showered, and slept for 3 hours, and then were back on our bikes before sunrise.
The ride began at 4am from Hightstown, New Jersey, near Princeton. The route basically went south to the southern most points and then returned back up north. Saturday's ride was surprisingly undifficult, I do not say easy as we did ride 240+ miles that day in the 90 degree heat, but it could have been worse. I was rather out of it by the time we rolled into the motel at 1am., from the heat, not eating anything of substance and the developing saddle sore.
We had first planned on sleeping until 5am and leave at 6am, but Pat couldn't sleep and we were up around 4am and decided to leave at 5am. We felt bad that we had made plans to ride with some people that we previously rode in with, but there was no sense of wasting an hour just waiting for them.
Sunday was great, tailwind, overcast and the high temperature was in the 70s. Perfect relief from the previous day of hot sun, and headwinds. Towards the end of the ride, my body was really feeling the mileage under it, but with the help of the "carrot stick"-pat and cecile- I was able to ride it out.
I am left today with a real sense of accomplishment, and a better understanding of what my body can endure, and the fact that one can push themselves so much further than one might ever imagine. There were many times in my head I needed, not just wanted to stop, but I pushed on and was able to muster the strength from somewhere. I joked many times about finding my "third or fourth wind," as on a long ride, you have your highs and lows, and you just keep on pedaling.
One side note- common inside joke amongst bike mechanics is JRA, Just Riding Along. It is a joke because so many customers come to the shop with some major basket case of a repair and claim that they were "just riding along. . .and then my bike wheel fell off. . .and then the tire exploded." The JRA that happened this weekend was a little different. We were riding for about 2 hours on Sunday morning, after our little sleep, when we in encountered some fellow riders that were ahead of us, they were going the wrong way and we turned to look at our right, and there was smoke bellowing out of a house. One of the riders jumps off the bike and proceeds to bang on the door, then goes in to find an elderly man in there having trouble breathing. We call 911, but were not really able to give them an accurate address, as we had no real idea where we were other than what the Cue sheet said. Luckily, a volunteer fireman happen to be driving by and saw a pack of riders and then noticed the smoke coming out the house and came to assist. I even took part by helping, read=forcing, the elderly man to sit down, he kept on trying to go into the house. Once under control by the fireman, we get back on the road. There is a really strong possibility that if we were not just riding along, that it might have gone unnoticed and it would have had dire consequences. As parting words, the elderly man said he had never had anything like this happen before, I then responded 'it has to happen once in your lifetime, good to get it out of the way.'
I have recently been putting complete bicycle up on Ebay, it is a thing I try to do every Spring to clear out some stock here at the shop. I mainly do it in the Spring in hopes to deliver a bike to one of the various swap meets I am already attending, so I don't have to box the bike up. Well to be truthful, I don't have to box the bicycle up, Matthew generally does.
Collectors always think we part out bicycles when we buy them at swap meets, we rarely do. This year, we took a Campagnolo 50th Anniversary group off of a tall unknown Italian frame and sold the parts. Sometimes we might have a derailleur "fall off" a bike, exchanged for something else, and sell it out the door. Most of the time, if it is a nice period bike, after a swap meet it follows me upstairs and sits in the pile of bikes until someone may happen to come in and buy it, or it is relegated to my "Spring Time Bicycle Sale" on Ebay
So, we had already sold a mid 1960s Mercier, just sold a Raleigh International and currently we have a Bauer Kunstfahren bike(trick bike) and an early 1970s Bottecchia. The Bauer is a really cool bike. See the video from YouTube to know what I mean.
So I may put up one or two more bikes up before Cirque, in hope of being able to bring them there for delivery.
It's been a while since my last post and a bunch of things have happened. I went to the Trexlertown swap meet, rode the 5 Boro tour in NYC with my wife and friends, and most recently- completed my 400k(257 miles) qualifier ride.
attached are various photos of the past 2 weekends, the 5 boro tour and the 400k ride.
The 400k ride left central New Jersey at 4am and went south to Carney's Point and then further south to Salem. It was a lot of farmland in the beginning, and turned to Pine Barrens for most of the day. One unanticipated happening was the rain, I was without a jacket and even a long sleeve jersey. Our notions of finishing around 9pm-10pm were quickly deluded when there was 60mile stretch of headwind, then hours of rain. We came into the final Controle at 1:30am, having been on our bikes for 21 and a half hours. The bright side is that we had 6 1/2 hours to spare!
The trip went well, the weather turned perfect, after rain on Thursday and Friday morning. We left midday Thursday and encountered periods of torrential downpour before arriving at Memory Lane at 11pm. We scouted around and bought one bike that night.
Friday morning was looking grim, the field was flooded in spots and that made a lot of mud. The Memory Lane scene is mostly classic Balloon tire and Middleweight bikes, but we have been going long enough that sellers know what kind of bikes we are looking for and bring them for us. The two days at Memory Lane did not turn up any rare bikes for us, but we did find a bunch of riders to bring back to the shop and a nice Schwinn Town and Country Tandem. The best thing I picked up was probably an NOS TA waterbottle cage, still with the tag.
From there, we packed up and drove about an hour and a half north to Ann Arbor Michigan, looking for a motel to take a shower and get a good night's sleep. In Ohio, we sleep in the van usually, or if the weather permits, outside the van. Turns out, it was University of Michigan's graduation weekend and almost all rooms were booked. We found a room, ate, set the alarm, and went to sleep around 9pm. One problem, the alarm went off at 2am, rather than 5am, and we almost didn't realize until we were about to get in the van and leave. I finally went back to sleep around 3:30am.
The line of vehicles leading into the swap meet is usually short around 5:30am, but this year it was already around the first bend. That was a promising sign. Once we were let in, it was a buying frenzy, 5 bikes bought from one guy, 2 bought on the way back to the van with the first batch. People approaching me to buy their bikes, and even more people trying to buy the bikes we just bought to bring back to Philadelphia. This went on all day. No rare bikes or parts were found, just useful bikes and parts for the shop. I wonder how many people went to the swap meet looking for left side Selecta cranks, basic 1/2" pedal axle BMX platform pedals, or 700c Super Champion 40 hole rims? Probably not many, but we were very happy to find them.
I did remember to put on sunblock and drank plenty of water, but the long weekend was getting to us, and the packing seemed to take forever. We were on the road around 6pm or so, and soon realized that we were not going to get that far. So we got a room in Ohio and feel asleep eating Oreos for dinner.
The drive back to Philly was nice, the weather was beautiful. I came back with a few "keepers" for myself- all books. I got a set of Schwinn Service Manuals, Collecting and Restoring Antique Bicycles, and some reprints of high wheel and turn of the century bicycle catalogs. Overall, a nice trip, but it left me wishing I found something cool.
Pictures are of the bikes we bought there, we arrived with an empty van!
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