This Space for Rent

That would appear to be pretty shiny all over.

Do you do something specific for the frame in the way of waxing, polish, or etc.?

What I mainly use for care on the MLCM is fenders, plus brushing the wheels after I’ve been out in the rain (the fenders and the rando bag keep crap from getting onto most of the bicycle) but an amazing amount of crud gets onto the rims, and I like to clean it off so that it doesn’t congeal on the braking surfaces. I’ll occasionally wipe it down with a rag when it gets dusty, but no waxes, polishes, or any other skincare products are used.

It helps that the frame is powdercoated and fairly new. I don’t know how much the people at René Herse used it before they put it up for sale, but I think they only had it for a year or so before it came into my hands, so it’s been out in the wilds for not more than 2 ½ years.

I had somehow formed the impression that the frame was a good bit older than that! I shall claim to have been confused by the lugged styling.

I’m still somewhat impressed at the retained degree of shiny, though. That garnet-red powder coat must be good stuff.

Oh, no, there’s a pretty substantial collection of lug fetishists in the bicycling world (look at Rivendell, for example, René Herse, or (if you’re in the market for $10,000 bicycles that are backordered 5-6 years) Vanilla) so it’s pretty easdy to buy new lugged frames.

cheap lugged frames, on the other hand, are not quite so easy to find. I was lucky with the MLCM; René Herse caters more to the “I’d like to buy half a dozen US$10,000 bespoke bicycles, please!” crowd, so this used production frame wasn’t exactly flying off their outlet shelf.

It doubtless displays a lack of charity on my part, but I’ve always associated the Rivendell aesthetic (well, the Rivendell bicycle aesthetic; I don’t want to haul any postulated elves into this…) as being for people who do not trust any kind of numerical design process and want it to be very clear and visible that they don’t have any intention of going fast. Lugs never crept into it, beyond perhaps thinking that early 70s Raleigh bikes seem to have been an Influence.

But, yeah, hey, active lug aesthetic out there. Not something I thought had any current traction. (I managed to read your previous statements about being lucky to get that frame as the “there was one in the back, v. dusty, and no one knew how long it had been there”, rather than as “this isn’t expensive enough for our customers, might as well sell it for cheap to get it out of here”.)

Can’t possibly complain about it as an aesthetic, though it’s not my cup of tea; part of the reason I picked the True North for the Experiment was looking at a number of shop pictures and thinking “those are really pretty welds”.

The anti-measurement shtick that Rivendell uses is a deliberate marketing gimmick (Grant Petersen is, after all, a marketing person) to woo the riders-but-not-racers in. It’s not nearly as bad as, oh, Velo Orange’s J. Peterman-lite style (and the both of them are infinitely better than Rapha’s (and Chris King and the rest of the flabbergastingly large collection of bicycle lifestyle vendors who orbit around them) Robb Report+Esquire-marketing style (the one vanity on the MLCM is a Chris King headset, which I got before I realized that they also sell Chris King coffee tampers and salt and pepper shakers. Gag. At least I bought it used on Ebay.)

But the one thing to be said for Rivendell frames is that once you get past the wall of marketing prose (and if you like sloping top tubes, and have the money to put down $1-2000 for just the frame) is that they’re very nicely done; the lugwork is a little bit too decorative for my tastes, but it’s done in a distinctive way, as are the factory paint schemes. I have trouble telling a Vanilla from a Jamis at a distance (in Portland we’ve got scads of Vanillas, and I can only recognise one when I get up close after I’ve been lured in by the look of the handlebars and/or racks) but a Rivendell is easily recognisable from a long ways away.

And despite the marketing, people can ride those bikes quite quickly. 2-3 pounds of frame weight won’t make the riders any slower.