Author: Bob Harrison

A friend of mine is having a party at the Malaekahana campgrounds soon and Iʻm planning on being there. The difference between the other guests and myself is that I plan on riding my bicycle there.
Even if someone else bikes there, Iʻll bet Iʻll be the only person who rode there on a single speed bike.
And even if thereʻs another single speed, Iʻll bet I have the only Rivendell Quickbeam there.
Hereʻs my planned route:

View Home to Malaekahana in a larger map
It seems a bit excessive for a bike without multiple gears, but as many already know, the QB isnʻt just any bike without multiple gears. Thatʻs because it has… um… multiple gears. Sort of. Rather than explain it all, just go read the Riv site.
Anyway, I plan on doing this as light as possible. My gear and stuff will include, and hopefully be limited to…

• Me
• Quickbeam
• Hennessey Hammock
• Extra shorts/swim suit (same item)
• Blanket bag – a thin fleecy thing thatʻs pretty light
• Socks and underwear…wet isnʻt good
• Starbucks Via coffee (for the morning)
• Instant Oatmeal (same)
• A jacket, just in case
• Slippers for after the ride

That should just about do it. Iʻll eat on the road and grab something to take to the campsite itself for the evening. Thereʻll probably be other food there anyway if I get really hungry.
My biggest concern is that the road out there doesnʻt have much of a shoulder. Itʻs pretty damn narrow. But I saw lots of folks cycling out that way so…given that I donʻt have a choice of road…itʻs a go. Weather permitting of course.
Thatʻs it for now!
Aloha!

I decided to make good on my decision to learn Spanish and signed up for online lessons and community practice at LiveMocha. From what I’ve experienced so far, it’s a “social media language tutorial.” That is, there are lessons and one can receive feedback from the community at large. As I’m also a paying member, at least for the next six months, I’m guaranteed to get feedback from qualified tutors. You can also sign up for free.
I’d actually done that some time ago, but was never motived to actually follow through. The added pressure of actually having spent money, seems to have done some good. I’m well into the Unit 1 – Lesson 2. 🙂
There are over 36 or more languages one can choose, including two flavors of Portuguese. I might just do that one some time. But first, Spanish!
Adiós

No, I didn’t get married. I got sick. Actually it seems I’ve been sick for a while now.
About 3 weeks ago, before my ride to Kapolei, I came down with a cold. It cleared up after a couple of days I thought I was good to go. Last week, just before Christmas, it reappeared. The symptoms were a bit milder, but it made for a mildly unpleasant holiday.
I did ride out to Hawaii Kai on my Quickbeam on Christmas. It was a nice low intensity ride…well going there was low intensity. Coming back I found myself at a light with a fellow on a geared bicycle who clearly had the intention of taking off quickly and showing me who was boss. He looked to be about 40. While not a spring chicken, he still had a decade on me. Off he went.
Within a quarter mile I’d passed him and over the next few miles he receded further and further in the distance.
I’m pretty sure the race was completely in my head. 🙂
Still it was nice to be faster than somebody for a change.
Anyway, I’m still not well. I went to the doctor yesterday after a week of feeling under the weather. Because of the length of my illness he suspects a bacterial chest infection and gave me a prescription for antibiotics. I hope it kicks butt.
Since Saturday I’ve slowed down a bit and have been riding my Fujiyama with the new, upgraded stem from Nashbar. It only changes the geometry of the bike a little, bringing the bars a wee bit higher and further back, while maintaining a good angle for my hands to grab the brakes. That little change is great though. The bike is much more comfortable to ride and in several days the bars have not moved in the stem. That was the problem I was trying to correct.
Another bonus is that with the new geometry the Wald Basket I have, a think it’s a 198GB, fits better and seems a lot more stable.
I’ve really gotten used to carry stuff on the front of that particular bike and look forward to doing the same on my QB once I get something to go on the front. I’ve got a Nitto Campee Mini Front Rack up there to hold…something…I just haven’t decided what yet.
There are a lot of options, from bags to baskets.
I’m tempted by the Sackville SlickerSack that Riv sells. It is slicker. It’s also $150. Of course my saddlebag was $200 so I guess it’s a bargain. The problem is that it isn’t $150. It’s really more because it requires an addition the rack I already have up front. The Nitto Platrack fits on my Mini Front and is required to support the SlickerSack.
But it is Slicker!
The thing is, I can probably get a pretty good deal on it all though. I’m told that as a member of Rivendell I will be getting a 5% credit on the stuff I ordered in 2009. That means I should have in the neighborhood of $150 to play with for all of this.
Well we’ll see what’s what when the New Year rolls around. If I get better soon, I’ll be putting in some miles on New Year’s Day. I’m thinking of riding Honolulu to Kailua, taking the bus over the Pali, then riding Honolulu to Kapolei and back. That’ll rack up a century in miles even though it’s multi-modal. Cool.
Aloha!

Into the wayback machine….and out we come in 1979. I’m living in Milwaukee Wisconsin near Brady St.
And today to I discovered an image of the home I may have been living in at the time. I definitely did live here, but it may have been 1980 or so when I actually moved in. It’s the “Haskel Hotel” named after the band, The Haskels, who lived and practiced in one set of apartments while I lived upstairs with my friends Voot Warnings and Jen Taschner.
I found these images on a site called Milwaukee Rock Poster.Com and boy does that take me back. I’d moved to Milwaukee from Hawaii at high school age and moved back to Hawaii sometime in 1984 if I’m not mistaken.
Here’s the old homestead as it were and as it are…

I lived upstairs in the back and used the entrance you can see by the yellow van.
They also have a more recent image….

I suspect not much has changed except the rent.
I wonder whatever happened to the drummer from The Curves?
Wow, thanks for the memories Milwaukee Rock Posters.com.
Aloha!

Paris-Brest-Paris it isn’t, but I had a lovely time riding the HKH route on Saturday. All told it’s a little less than 60 miles, a metric century. Most of the route is actually on bike paths which is great as the roads out there are a little less safe than those in town. They are faster for the most part and folks aren’t quite as tuned in to bikes.
The bike path skirting Pearl Harbor is actually quite rideable. I’d thought it was going to be a mess, but it was really pleasant. Here’s a view…

It took a long time to get there, about 3 hours, because I’d never done it before and I wasn’t sure how to get from one leg of the route to another. Coming back was much, much quicker.
My Quickbeam was superb. It’s hard to believe I rode 60 miles on a single speed, but I did. Too cool!
That’s it for now!
Aloha!

My new Brooks B-17 Special in British Racing Green arrived today. I was, um, really quite surprised. I’d ordered just two days ago on the 15th when Nashbar had a 25% off sale. I wasn’t quite willing to buy the new saddle at $150, but with the discount it seemed, well I did it.
The color was almost immediately disappointing…until I took the saddle into sunlight. Then the beauty was completely apparent. I’d put up a picture, but it’s almost impossible to see the lovely green color – a very deep sort of jade according to a lovely woman who was on the roof of our building where I had to go to get some sunlight this time of day. She was doing her laundry btw, that’s where our machines are…she wasn’t just hanging around on the roof.
The other item that arrived with my order was a 130mm Nashbar Comfort Quill Stem for the Fujiyama. Basically I’d sort of messed up the original stem when I changed bars a while back. When I opened the stem up a bit to slide the bars into position I’d overdone it and bent it up a bit with the result that it wouldn’t clamp well and keep the bars from sliding a bit over time.
The new one has a faceplate so you can simply place the bar where you want it and tighten everything up. We’ll have to see if it is, in fact, a better stem. So far so good as at the very least it looks better.

Some other things are on the way…

1. Velox bar end plugs
2. Another Nitto Touring water bottle cage
3. Some leather mud flaps
4. And to match the QBs color – some Klean Kanteen water bottles

There might even be a few other things on the way but that’s all I can recall for the moment.
Aloha!

Today, a week after I received my Quickbeam, I finally had a chance to try a small hill. Frankly it’s not much of a hill, but keep in mind I’m someone who sticks the flats around town for the most part.
Basically I rode up to the top of Waialae Avenue for a sandwich, well a haircut and sandwich if you must know.
NO PROBLEM
On my other bikes I always feel a little tentative pumping my way up hills. On my Bike Friday I can generally spin up them because I can gear so low. On my Giant, with all its darn suspension I either spin or die. If I stand on that bike it sort of turns into a pogo-stick. And my Fujiyama, great little beater that it is always feels like it’s going to come apart.
My QB, on the other hand, seems to be built for hills. While I’m still in 66″ range (40×16), having found that to be a great gear for my normal activities, I’d wondered about minor hills. I needn’t have worried. This bike is incredibly stable, perhaps because it fits perfectly, and I find myself enjoying a bit of pumping. And that with my huge saddlebag filled with locks, laptops, lunch, and … ran out of things beginning with L I guess. 🙂
All for now!
Aloha!

All this talk of my new Quickbeam has made my poor Bike Friday NWT a wee bit jealous. She’s been locked in her suitcase since I returned from Las Vegas.
Speaking of Las Vegas, my new “list friend” Tarik Saleh, from The Yak (Bike Friday mailing list), was just there and filed this report! His journey was, sadly, a bit colder and more hurried than mine.
Anyway, back to the point of all this. I’ve been drooling over a new Brooks B-17 Special in British Racing Green. I figured I have so much green going on the Bike Friday that I should really finish it off. It is not, I might add, bright green.
So today I discovered that Nashbar was having a one day sale; 25% off of orders over $100. Click.

I also ordered another quill stem for my Fujiyama so it wouldn’t feel left out of the fun. That leaves my Giant with no new parts. Hmmm…I’m still thinking Xtracycle.
Aloha!

Today, while continuing to recover from this bloody cold, I rode out to get some shellac to coat my bar tape and keep it a wee bit cleaner looking for longer. I had a bit of an adventure, heading first to City Mill out on Nimitz.
Sadly, and this I’ll want to remember, they don’t carry shellac. Luckily Home Depot, which is only a bit further, does.
Clear or amber? Clear or amber?
Clear doesn’t change much, amber definitely darkens things. I’ve got yellow bar tape and, while folks say amber does wonderful things for yellow cloth tape, I wanted to keep my yellow yellow. At least for a bit.
So clear shellac it was to be.
I came home after stopping at the first and second LBS I passed on the way. The first didn’t carry the gloves I like, cloth based ones by Avenir which are cheap and wear out fast. Rhino, the guy who sold and built Elaine’s bike took a look out the window at my QB and loved, absolutely loved, the Saddlesack Saddlebag (L) on the back. “Brooks?” he asked. “Better,” I replied.
But the point of this missive is to announce to the world that I’ve discovered a couple of places where my Quickbeam has been scratched a bit. Yes, my bike is officially a used bike. I know it’ll get dinged up some over time but I was hoping that I could keep it pristine for the first couple of decades. Not to be.
Of course none of this has anything to do with how well it rides.
Like a dream
Aloha!

It’s been a long week with much to tell. I haven’t told it until now because, among all the good there’s been a wee bit of the bad. I have a cold. It started on Tuesday, caused me to take the day off of work Wednesday, and I left early Thursday and will do so again today. To be honest, I just haven’t had the energy to write. But…
My Quickbeam arrived on Tuesday morning! Because my signature was required I came to work in the morning as usual, but left before the delivery window opened up. I was hopeful that my QB would arrive before I had to leave again for an anniversary banquet; did I mention I’ve had the same job for over ten years now?
The banquet wasn’t solely for me, indeed there was a total of over 3000 years of experience being feted. A good time was had by all, but…
It might have interfered with the delivery of my bike.
I received a phone call from the UPS driver asking if I’d be home and I said yes, except for the hours of the banquet when the manager of my building would sign for me. He said okay but he didn’t think he’d be there till the afternoon.
Then he arrived before before I had to leave. He was definitely my hero that day.

Rivendell’s are packed superbly. I didn’t have time to unpack the bike before lunch, but I did open it up and take a peek inside. Wow! Later I opened the box all the way up to see everything and how it was packed…

Just Wow!
But as nice as the packing was, I wasn’t planning on leaving it that way for long. After getting back from the banquet I made the decision to put the bike together which just enough parts to ride. If I’d put on the fenders and such it might have taken till dark. I thought it would be better to get out there while the sun was up!
It took next to no time to build. I’m not a competent mechanic and I managed it in under half an hour. That’s pretty darn good.
My first stop was my LBS for tubes, just in case. I didn’t have any 700x35c tubes around. Now I do. Then it was off to the park for quick photo shoot. You can see all the images of the day on my Flick page in my Quickbeam Day One set. But here’s a shot of the bike with Diamond Head in the background…

That’s the shot that’s gotten the most comments so far.
After I got home I realized my cold was worse than I thought and…I didn’t go to work in the morning because I could barely sleep all night. I’d love to say it was the excitement over having the best bike I’ve ever owned, but it was the cold.
I did, however, use the opportunity of a day at home, once I’d actually woken up, to put on the fenders. My best suggestion would be, “never do this when you are sick.” It’s not that it’s particularly hard, it’s just that with fuzzy thinking I had a number of false starts. Still it went together very well the second time around. I’m using silver plastic SKS/Esge fenders which don’t look bad at all on the silver framed QB. No, they aren’t Berthoud or Honjo, but they aren’t very expensive or noisy either. And, when all is said and done, they look pretty good.

You can see my Sackville Saddlesack (L) has finally found its proper home as well. 🙂
That was about it till Thursday when I took it to work for the first time as real working commuter bike. Here she is parked amidst her kin, actual commuters.

I’m hoping to get in a nice long ride this weekend, but for that to happen my health will need to improve a bit and it will have to do so by tomorrow. My planned route is going to be a bit busy on Sunday as it’s time once again for the Honolulu Marathon. I’m not going to compete with thousands of runners for the same small bit of road.
Rest assured though, I’ll be riding somewhere!
Aloha!
PS – Rivendell just released a peak at their Spring 2010 catalog. Sweet.