So I missed Interbyke

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I did not attend Interbyke this year after seven, eight or nine consecutive appearances. Each previous fall I would pack up and head north four hours to that stinking shithole called Las Vegas. I didn’t miss it so much, to be honest. I can get plenty drunk and eat bad food here at home. Of course, having not gone and looked around I have no idea what new bike products are about to drop. But, truth be told, even when I attended the show, I had no idea what new bike products were about to drop. Usually it’s ten miles of bullshit with the occasional interesting gem thrown it. And sometimes it’s not. Some things are going to be cool to some people, I’m sure of that much at least.

So, I’m trolling around my inbox the other day hittin’ up the links people send me and I’m like; whoa, this crankset looks interesting. Could be cool. It also looks a lot like something my man Ben Flemington was running a few years back on his Surly. He broke it like four times. That was a different crank, but still a planetary gear. And he broke it four times.

This is the Truvattiv Hammerschmidt, goddamnit! Not some other vastly inferior crankset. Could be an unwieldy boat anchor that constantly falls apart. What’s the Q factor with all that shit stuffed in there – full on Donald Duck style? How can it not weight four pounds? How can it not fuck up and leave you with nothing 25 miles from pavement with darkness falling and only a few drops of tepid water left in your bottle to hold off the coyotes with? There are good reasons not to run a system like this. And having to walk out of wherever you are when it decides to stop engaging is # 1 on that list. Or, maybe they did their homework, the shit is way solid, and it’s the coolest thing since sliced bread. I love the idea of having a 22/36 up front on a single speed. Run a 16 or 17 in the back and you’ve got a nice tall gear at a bit over two to one (I run a 29’er w/ 2.1 tires) and a bail out for seated climbing. Tight chain, no slap, no derailleur to hit on rocks. Ride through water, mud, snow, shit still works. Solid, solid, solid. Too bad it’s not offered in a 180mm… yet. I can’t be running them short ass bitches! How ’bout a 177.5? Bueller? Bueller?

We’ll see, we’ll see. My man Racer Jared checked ’em out during the BozoDemo out in Bootleg. He thought it’d be “coolio” on a singlespeed. I love that guy. If it’s coolio with Jared it’s coolio with me.

Who am I kidding? I don’t even ride bikes anymore. At least I’m not one of these bozos: sadguysontradingfloors.tumblr.com. I can thank sweet baby jesus every day for that.

Joke I’ve nowhere else to post:

Female v. Male Friendships

Friendship among Women:
A woman didn’t come home one night. The next morning she told her husband that she had slept over at a friend’s house. The man called his wife’s 10 best friends. None of them knew anything about it.

Friendship among Men:
A man didn’t come home one night. The next morning he told his wife that he had slept over at a friend’s house. The woman called her husband’s 10 best friends. Eight confirmed that he had slept over, and two said he was still there.

Ain’t it the truth….

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About big jonny

The man, the legend. The guy who started it all back in the Year of Our Lord Beer, 2000, with a couple of pages worth of idiotic ranting hardcoded on some random porn site that would host anything you uploaded, a book called HTML for Dummies (which was completely appropriate), a bad attitude (which hasn’t much changed), and a Dell desktop running Win95 with 64 mgs of ram and a six gig hard drive. Those were the days. Then he went to law school. Go figure. Flagstaff, Arizona, USA

14 Replies to “So I missed Interbyke”

  1. Hammerschmidt breaking? Not a chance, first of all. It’s SRAM. Secondly, if It did, I’d just coast back down to the truck anyway.

  2. i don’t know how good the thing is going to be, but i do know that while i was walking around the show in an alcoholic daze i kept calling it the wienerschnitzel crank
    i really think that is a better name for it.

  3. The Hammerschmidt paradox: Moronic on a suspension bike, brilliant on a single speed. I suppose bad things don’t happen to good people.

  4. I rode it at a distributor meeting with Sram just before sea otter and to be honest it felt magic. I’ve not been stunned by too many “new” things in the biking world and especially not in the past 5 years or so, but this was jaw dropping wow. We’ll see how it holds up but I’m willing to give it a fair shot.

  5. …gee, mikey…

    …that’s the most reasonable political assessment you’ve posted throughout this whole electoral process…

    …actions speak louder than words…

  6. Hammerschmidt Rohloff combo…holy Schnitzel that would be cool…overkill, but cool.

  7. Dude

    you should have been there last year when Litespeed tried to tell us that people would pay 6 Grand for a new Titanium frame just because they went back to a standard headset….because they were “listening to their customers”

    Dude told me that at the booth and I spit Coke out my nose and dropped my bag of goodies…..

    cutting edge my friends cutting edge shit there..