The curse of the bicycle
Several decades ago, I took (most of my) paycheck and trotted down to the local bicycle shop (the now-demised OutSpoken, on Belmont in Chicago) and bought myself as much bicycle as I could get for US$1000. The (newly released at that time?) all-aluminum (except for the fork, I think) Trek 1000 they recommended turned out to be a pretty good bicycle; I used it a bit in Chicago, including a couple of trips where I crated it up and took it on holiday to Hawaii (but, thanks to some ill-timed monsoons, never got to do the once around Oahu trip I wanted to do,) and eventually ended up using it as my bicycle up here in Oregon. As a go-out-on-the-line-and-pedal-really-fast bike, it’s pretty good, but as a go-to-the-grocery-store-and-bring-back-food bike, it, um, needs work.
So, after waffling about it for at least two years, I finally decided that I would buy an Xtracycle Free Radical and stretch this puppy out into a longer, but still gratifyingly light, dual-purpose vehicle. Seems like a fairly simple procedure; buy a free radical kit, then spend a day tearing down the bicycle, stretching it out, then getting used to riding a 25% longer vehicle.
But first, to avoid confusion, it would be good to actually measure the thing, right? It’s just a regular old touring bike, so it shouldn’t be any problem, or so I’d think. But, no, there is one critical measurement that gets in the way; the free radical has a tongue that fits in between the chainstays (it bolts into the back dropouts, then is anchored to the very front of the chainstays by a couple of hefty plates and a big old bolt) that’s approximately 40.5cm long, and the Trek 1000 chainstays are appoximately 40.6cm long.
And the seatpost is raked back 15%, so that 40.6 cm becomes < 40.5cm approximately 1/3rd of the height of the tongue above the chainstay. So the Xtracycle assembly instructions that say “clamp a couple of” (the cringingly badly-named) “FAPs around the chainstays and rest the tongue of the free radical ON TOP OF THEM” runs headlong into the teeny problem that I’d have to cut a big old hole in (and, needless to say, COMPLETELY DESTROY the structural integrity of) the seatpost.
So, damn, that’s just not going to work.
I could go out and hunt around in the used bicycle racks for a nice donorcycle, and use it as the front end for a (second) chore-only xtracycle, but one of my combined chore-and-exercise (for I am fond of my heart, and if I am to keep the damned thing pressurising my blood at ~120/70 instead of the much more cardiacally exciting ~160/100 that it was running before I quit work this spring, I pretty much need to ride at least 120 miles a week) routines is “ride 30 miles, then pop in at the store and pick up supplies before going home,” and that won’t tend to work so well if it becomes ‘ride 30 miles, go home, change bicycles, then ride down to the shop" because my native indolence tends to put a full stop after the “go home” portion of the itinerary, and I worry that a cheap used bicycle is likely to be some hugely heavy mass of steel that would be adverse to being driven at reasonable speeds.
Perhaps there’s some custom bicycle builder in town that could build me a custom cringingly named attachment plate so I could cuddle the free radical tongue down between the chainstays, or I could spend the US$500, then hire some metalworker to cut down the tongue to 38cm, or I could sell more camera gear (not that I’ve got much left I want to sell, alas; I sold much of my camera gear so I could buy this Macbook Air I’m typing on right now) and buy a new aluminum bike just like the cursed Trek (except with 43cm chainstays.)
The problem is that I don’t really want to sell the cursed Trek, and I really don’t want to end up with a garage full of bicycles when all I need is one of them.
Sigh. I will consult the Oregon Lottery oracle and see what the stars have to say about it.
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The cursed Trek is 26 pounds unloaded, and even adding the free radical to that weight still leaves it + me lighter than I was back before I started riding extensively. (and don’t forget that the Free Radical would be even lighter once I had someone cut and weld the cnap tongue back a cm or so ;-) ) But the thing is that I’m not so much enslaved to aluminum as I’m enslaved to the idea of keeping my costs down, since I’m a stay-at-home dad and don’t have the cash inflow that I used to have. A money-is-no-object budget would probably have seen me buying a Kona Ute, then stripping it down to the frame and reoutfitting it with a racing seat, new handlebars, touring wheels, and 700x25 tires (the Ute has a pretty light frame and a short wheelbase, which almost makes up for it not looking nearly as nice as the Free Radical does,) but that would run upwards of US$1000 for something that costs me US$489 + $2 [bus fare so I can carry the boxed Free Radical back home] down at Clever Cycles (which, as far as I’m able to tell, is the *only* Portland bicycle store that actually bothers to mention online that they sell the Free Radical kits, which is why they’ve got my business,) provided I can fit it to the existing frame.
And I’ve already sold US$500 worth of camera and computer parts on ebay, so the Free Radical has already been paid for, so it’s *free* if not for that pesky cnap bracket.
So, yeah, I don’t want a cheap donorbike either :-( I just want my Trekracycle so I can bring groceries back from the big big store without having loaves of bread eaten by my front wheel.
Dude, all you need to do is resell the kit and pick up a sweet kid trailer. Hook that up to the back of the bike and you are ready to go.
I ride an ancient Austro Daimler tourer and my grocery store trips are remarkably more productive these days.
The problem with a trailer (aside from adding an additional wheel or two) is that it’s another thing that I’d need to lug around, and I’d never take it with me on my 30 mile loops ending with a trip to the store. And, now that it’s several months later and I’ve gotten the free radical and had it trimmed to fit the Trek, it’s pretty much exactly what I wanted; I’ve lost about a mile per hour (though some of that may be an artifact of it being winter now) but in return I can do populaire-length loops and drop in at the store before I come home without having to have an empty trailer bouncing along for 100km or so.
And the Xtracycle people are right; a stretched bicycle handles just like a bobtail bicycle. It’s a little more tandemish than it used to be; my weight is more evenly distributed between the wheels, so if I’m riding in snow or gravel the rear wheel breaks loose and spins more quickly than before, but it’s made up for by the longer wheelbase making the ride less bouncy than it used to be.
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So… you’re enslaved to aluminum, eh? Consider that the weight you add with the Xtra could make the difference between Al and Steel moot. Consider also that for lots of Xtra owners, it becomes The Bicycle, not the errand bike. It just happens. Therefore you wouldn’t want to trade bikes and a cheap donorbike would be very frustrating. The Free Radical is some seriously elegant engineering. COuld you sell the Trek or trade up for one with the right dimensions? If you already had the Xtra, you could be picking up beer cans from the road and cashing them in…