Dear beater bike

Hey BFSSFG people. Welcome to the site. Try not to destroy my server!

While we haven’t covered a lot of bike stuff on this site yet, you should know that behind the scenes, we are total bike kids. Yoda and I both have two bikes, and up until a little while ago, I personally had 4. Since moving to New York, we simplified and liquidated some assets. Yoda has a nice bike (her Bareknuckle) up here, with her IRO Mark V beater waiting in Philly. I on the other hand, have my nice bike (Bob Jackson Vigorelli) being built up in Philly, and only have my beater to get me around town.

At the point in the post, you may be asking yourself what exactly constitutes a “beater bike.” Well, I’ll tell you. A beater is a bicycle that you honestly don’t care about when it comes to aesthetics. You are willing to lock it up against anything, cover it in stickers, jump it off a cliff, whatever. Typically, a rider only gets to fully appreciate a beater bike after they’ve had a couple different frames that they’ve been attached to.

While not the case for everyone, if you are a 20-something that rides bikes seriously, yours probably went like this : rode a bike as a kid, most likely a huffy or schwinn. With no concept of build quality, parents picked up some garishly colored mountain-bike-ish POS from Walmart or your closest LBS. Maybe you got a hybrid as a teen, but by highschool you were too cool to be seen on a bike, especially if you had access to a car. By college, the car is gone again, and if you go to school in a major metropolitan area, you are stuck taking the smelly, unreliable public transportation. ENTER BIKE AGAIN! Only now, you are totally broke. You lurk on craigslist, not really knowing what you need, but you end up with some 70’s/80’s roadbike with a rusted out interior and squeaky brakes. This is the make it/break it period. You either ride in warm weather, and chicken out during the cold weather, or you fall in love with the increased freedom and low cost of maintenance and decide to further invest in your newly rediscovered passion. You begin researching the different types of bikes, and become aware of what other people are riding. Somewhere in the back of your mind, you became aware of the fact that big knobby tires and mountain bikes as a whole are slow (see: no fun), and that while nice road bikes are super expensive, you’ve been noticing these road bike looking things on the streets with the cool kids.

They seem very simple, clean, kind of beautiful. Sometimes they have 1 brake, other times none at all. You realize that they are actually called “fixed gears” or “single speeds” and that they are popular with this weird urban athlete known as the “messenger.” You decide to take the plunge and buy a bike you can be proud of.

Most people start at the “off the rack” tier, buying a $400-600 complete bike like the Mercier Kilo TT, KHS Flite 100, or a Bianchi Pista. The problem with this bike is that the components are absolute SHIT. While it got you into the game, its various pieces are slowly starting to fail you, and the cost of replacing them is adding up. Now you either (a) keep the frame, replacing the parts, or (b) sell the thing for as much as you can get and move up to Tier 2.

Tier 2, where I currently am, is where you buy a nice frame. Just the frame. At this point, you know enough about bikes to choose threaded or threadless forks, steel versus aluminum, and what spoke count will keep your fat ass from hitting the ground after you bombed that monstrous pothole. You are now friends with a bike mechanic, and arrange to have it built up. You are now totally comfortable with the idea of riding a $1,200 bike, and don’t bat when someone points out that your stem cost as much as their complete bike. You know why its better.

Unfortunately, there isn’t much room to improve from here. You either get a more expensive vintage frame, or you jump to the head of the line, the holy grail; you go custom.

While this evolution is taking place, you have a honey-moon period with your newest bike. You clean it frequently, wrap protective layers around the tubes, and promise yourself you will never lock up outside for fear of what the vicious world might do to your innocent pride and joy. Then the first big scratch arrives. And the honey moon is over. This bike slowly gets more and more beat up as you get more comfortable with it, slipping slowly down the path towards “beater” until the day that you have saved up enough money and make the jump to the next tier.

The reason that I’m writing about this today is because my current beater bike, the Bianchi Pista, didn’t actually follow that path. Because my Bob Jackson was fraught with some many issues in the shipment process (subject for another post entirely), I arrived in New York bikeless. Within the first week, I wandered around Manhattan trying to find a used bike shop that just might have a fixie or single speed that I could buy and lock up all day without caring whether or not the “smog was bothering it.” By the 4th day, I came across a shop that was willing to sell me a brand new Pista for $350. And I thought to myself, “thats a steal!” This is a bike that I would have cherished two years ago.

Today during work, I road it through a rain storm, and then got a flat. And then I rode the flat home. Well, home from the fucking subway stop. Because I really don’t care about it, and yet, I love it. And thats a beautiful thing. A beater bike from day one. Just wait till I get some spray paint….