Category: Cycling

Just an update on my supremely expensive and self-indulgent recherches du temps perdu. Took the Master Cruiser out last night. Was able to easily make a 14″ bunnyhop. That’s pretty lousy by my pre-middle-age standards, but given the fact that I’ve broken ten bones and been operated on three times since January of 2014, I’ll take it. Those of you who want some context for this can click on the jump and see the 32-year-old me doing the same thing.

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I’ve been putting bikes together since I Vise-Gripped brother Bark’s Huffy Stu Thomsen into adjustment thirty-two years ago. So it’s somewhat embarrassing to admit that it took me the best part of an hour to assemble my 1986 Haro Lineage Master Cruiser using a variety of primarily automotive tools. I don’t know what happened to all of my bike stuff in the past ten years. The good news is that I was able to find the two really expensive but almost necessary items that made adjusting the rear U-brake less of a chore — my cable cutter and third-hand tool that I bought from Park Tools during the (only) Clinton Administration.

The Master Cruiser (as opposed to the Master Compressor, which is a Jaeger LeCoulture watch costing between five and hundred times as much as this bike) is a deliberate historical fabrication. The first skatepark-oriented 24-inch Haro was the Nyquist X24 Backtrail. I bought one in 2001 and rode it almost every day for about a year. I remember it very well because while I was riding it at the skatepark in Lancaster, Ohio after work one afternoon I hung up the back wheel on the coping of a seven-foot quarterpipe. I lost both feet and tumbled to the asphalt, ringing my bell hard enough to taste colors and putting a sprain in my left ankle that never really went away.

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I remember Jimmy LeVan very well. He and I raced Superclass together at the Louisville BMX track between 1991 and 1994. He was a natural talent, but he was also heedlessly courageous and thoroughly devoted to his craft. Somewhere in my basement is one of the first twenty or so T-shirts that S&M bikes made for him. It was yellow, with a can of Jif on the front that had been redrawn to say “Jim”.

He was braver than I was. Not just because he would try stuff that was obviously stupid and/or risky, but because he lived the BMX lifestyle when I was too much of a coward to join him. While I sat in 400-level classes debating philosophy and poetry, he was on the road, sleeping in a car, doing odd jobs or even panhandling for gas money, traveling the country and riding for the sheer joy of it. I closed my mail-order bike shop on my father’s orders and got a real job, working for Ford Credit. Jimmy started a stunted stub of a BMX brand (Metal Bikes) and toured the world promoting it by doing the stunts and the gap that nobody else would do.

In the video above, you can see Jimmy making “The Church Gap” in Austin. Click the jump to see somebody trying to imitate him, and failing…

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I don’t think of myself as a lucky person — too many broken bones and too many outsized consequences for small mistakes — but sometimes I do have fate on my side. Here’s an example: About 72 hours ago, somebody listed an old bike for sale on Pittsburgh’s Craigslist. I was sitting around Thursday night when I was struck with a sudden desire to search for this particular bike. Never before in my life had I searched for this bike, and I mean never. My search brought up the bike, which had been listed about four hours previously. As it happened, this weekend was the one weekend I planned on having open between now and May, so I was able to go to Sewickley, PA and get it for the considerable sum of $140.

It was a remarkable coincidence that somebody would list this bike within driving distance and I’d have the idea to look for it, all on the same day. So what did I get?

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Twenty minutes into John’s first afternoon at the track, some local kid, shirtless and dirty, on a rusty bike that was two sizes too big, rode into the first turn the wrong way. Avoiding him, John swerved, fell off his DiamondBack, and slid down the asphalt on his hands. I could hear him crying from two hundred feet away.

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So. Last week’s Ducati 900 stalled out at a reserve-not-met $3,200. Now, we have another one, and this one has a story.
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It’s seventy-two pounds and can go 23 miles at 12mph. What makes it interesting, I suppose, is the form factor of the thing. It’s billed as the world’s smallest electric vehicle. And the video is pure Sprockets.
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