Late May, early June. Pants, pantographing, nail polishing pedals, project updates, bees, a snake way down there at the bottom and easily avoided (M).

There's a new coffee table book about bicycle head badges. A Dutch fellow named Jos wrote it, and he asked us for submissions, and now the book is out and there they are. We sent 30 different head badges, and as much as I'd LIKE him to've shown them all, we still got the biggest single spread in the book--for those of you keeping score

Here's our spread, followed by others:

kjkjk

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I hope the heirs of these badge-designers and badge-makers are as rich as Howard Hughes. I wish the book were in English, and maybe it will be some day. I wish I knew what our pages said, and the Naamplaatfabrik page. Don't we all wish we all paid attention in Dutch class? 

The price per book INCLUDING POSTAGE is €52, about $55. Pay by paypal.

I'm not gonna start promoting books here, but this is a unique one, and it there are several $5 and $10 pages in in, so I think it's a killer deal for that. He told me this morning that he has 115 left. Maybe there'll be another batch, I don't know. I asked Jos if it was OK to show a bunch of pages, and he said yes.

Related: 

I like our badges. The designs are good, they're metal-y and crafty, but it's ye olde telling that ones about a hundred year ago are so dumbfoundingly and even maddeningly fantastic. When I was looking into head badges before we had one, I looked for metal stampers, metal embossers, nameplate makers, and the high unclearable hurdle was the bumpiness. I wanted thin, bumpy, brass badges, and 'twarnt happening. I've seen thousands on old cheap Japanese worker and townie bikes, Bridgestone has its own head badge room, which, thinking back in a psychological way, must have made an impression on me. 

In 1990 I thought the badges from the museum would look good on the Bstone catalog cover, and it came out good:

Some of them look like beer cans (not good, and this isn't an anti-beer thing at all. Some are smooth, some are bumpy, some look like the were designed in two minutes or less, some look like they took a month and a team of Leonardo da Vinci's. 

The best head badge I've ever seen, I mean my favorite, is this one, which I borrowed from the museum and swear to god forgot to return it for 15 years, had misplaced and forgotten about it, until I found it in the back of a drawer and oh man, the instant, scalp-goosebump-inducing, guilt is still memorable. It's sickening still, even as I'm typing this. I mailed it back to a former Bstone co-worker, who returned it, and they'd forgotten about it and at least, thank god again, didn't associate its missing with me. But they know it was me who returned it, so maybe I got the respect that's sometimes accorded to a thief-gone-honest.

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As I was hunting down that 1990 Bstone catalog, I also found a 1979 or so Rivendell Mountain Works catalog. RMW had a strong influence. I was as much of a RMW acolyte/groupie/devotee as one could be, and it was all earned. The Rivendell Mountain Works catalogs were so informative, so well-written, inspirational, and I loved that they were independent of trends. This 1979 or so catalog came out when DOME tents and TUNNEL tents were all the rage. Tents had to be big and roomy for kind of glamping, but pretending to be mountainous rough-and-tumble stuff, kind of like the bike equivalent of riding 8-inch travel full suspension carbon fiber bikes on fire roads.

Rivendell had (and I owned and still do) this tent:

then I'll skip a page and go to this one, which addresses its size.

The thing about tents and wind is: The taller the tent, the faster the wind. Lower tents get hit by slower winds. The best shape for a wind tent is narrow and sharp. A knife edge won't fit bodies, but that's the idea. And, the walls should be tight and stay tight when the wind hits them. All of those things are the opposite of roomy pleasant tents, but this tent was never intended for that. It is perfectly named—Bombshelter—and on one trip up mountain at a basecamp halfway up where other climbing parties pitched their tents, the winds were 80 to 100mph (measured) for 8 hours at night, and this Bombshelter was the only tent still standing in the morning.

That is relevant to my life now and how I think about bikes and trends. Nobody was buying Bombshelters back then. You couldn't buy them in stores; you had to order and wait for the one seamstress to sew it, and it might be three months. It was only 35-inches high inside, but for the kind of tent is was, that was plenty. When the wind was blasting it, the lower the better. The inner height was enough to sit up in, barely, if you weren't tall. 

Anyway, the trendy tents ripped, or the wind broke their poles, or they got lifted off the ground because they didn't have buried snow flaps to prevent the wind from getting underneath them, and just tumbled and turned with the occupants inside. 

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 The last thing on this post, below the bees (and even then you have to scroll down to see it) is a rattlesnake. Many people are creeped out by snakes, even photos of them. I, me, I don't want to pick one up, but I like getting close. I hate rattlesnakes. I know, the web of life, and if there were no rattlesnakes who knows, there might not be any of us--but I'm thinking hey, just replace them all with gopher snakes or king snakes, and call it a day. The snake photo is from last night's ride, anyway.

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Sam Hopkins's 1976-1977 Ritchey

Sam Hopkins: Father of Heidi Hopkins, national team racer in the late '70s. The Hopkins from the Mark-Hopkins hotel chain (fancier than Hilton, I think). Tom Ritchey built this bike when he was a teenager, maybe twenty. It famously weighed 17 lbs. The fork crown has no top. The saddle is custom. Check the details. From the collection of Heidi Hopkins, send to me by Jim Merz/partner.

Early Jim Merz crossy-type bike

Jim Merz, framebuilder, innovator, former Specialized employee, and one of the top builders in the world. A serious bike for fast riding only.

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eBikes help Ukraine

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The quill stem isn't dead or anything, but it has been underappreciated to the next step in the good direction from being an endangered species. Well, wait, It IS dead in the real market, and it's not because it isn't good, or that the threadless stem is better. They both have their strong points, but the strong points aren't driving popularity. I've said this before, so if its sounds repeated it is, but what's driving lots of threadless headsets and quill-less stems—certainly on roadish and gravel bikes— is the impracticality, the hassle, the expense that manufacturers have to deal with when they offer replacement forks. To provide another fork if one gets wrecked in a crash, or something else. 

If the bike is designed with for a quill stem, it needs a threaded headset. If it has a threaded headset, the threaded portion, typically 2-inches at the top, has to be in the right place for a headset, and that's determined by the length of the head tube, which is dictated by the frame size. If you have, for any given model, five sizes and two colors, that means ten different forks. If you make 25,000, five thousand of each size, of that model and you have only one replacement fork for every 5,000 bikes, that might not be enough, if each bike has a reasonable lifespan of 25 years. Which...seems about right for a steel frame with a steel fork.

At Bridgestone we had probably 500 forks for various bikes over the ears, and most were collecting dust, liiterall, uncovered in boxes on shelves in bays in the warehouse. Cardboard boxes of dusty forks, I can see them now,

Here at Rivendell we've had the same deal going on at a smaller scale, and at some point we need the space for other things, so we sometimes put together funky combos of frames and forks that functionally are fine, but weren't meant to be together...and we sell them cheaper, or sometimes get them both repainted. These days we order two forks per color per size for all of our bikes

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That's all snooty stuff. It's fine, it was "fun" back then, but it's now in the "—eur" category.

This is the new way to make your bike a notch above and less likely to get stolen:

https://vimeo.com/711401660

Or, slightly less fun is this still image:

It's not exactly the same as cutting into medal and filling it in with Italian paint, but it's more doable, cheaper, easier, and kind of fun.

The pedals there have wooden extender blocks, a fun option-project we arranged and probably can't keep doing because it's kind of a hassle. But you don't need the x-tend-r blocks to do this to pedals, and you don't need to panda-ize pedals by mixing silver and black. As far as that goes, you can give your all-silver pedals black bodies, do whatever. 

Anyway--maybe it's all too far-out, but it's been fun, and I've done it to three pairs of pedals so far.

Here's how to pantograph your SILVER crank:

We (well, I) use nail polish. Joe Bell, world's best bike painter, once told me he thought nail polish was super as touch-up paint, even tougher than his own paint. It comes in tons of colors and costs $4 to $8 per vial, and if you don't like your work, you can always use, you guessed it, nail polish remover. Pedals are fun, but it's kind of a shame that you cover up your work when you're riding. Do stems, seat posts, handlebars, hubs, inner perimeters of rims, spokes, derailers (I did a sloppy job on my most-used derailer, and ... I like it).

Nail polish will make your bike more attractive to you, but less attractive to thieves. There's no sense in pushing this. Do what you want, I'm just saying it's OK to goof off with your bike, even if it's a good bike. Make it yours.

If you try this and are proud of the results, I'd like to see 'em. Send high-rez images to grant@rivbike.com before the end of june. I'll post 'em here and maybe you'll get something cheap free, but no promises, and don't send pix expecting something fantastic. 

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Here's a Gus with a drive train that pushes all limits and on paper shouldn't work, and we'd never recommend it, but the guy wanted it and it works great, and now we know:

It is, for sure, the only bike like it in the world.

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TODAY, MAY 20, is officially World Bee Day. You can google that for proof.

Two days ago, jumping the gun, we disco'd a bunch of bees  in a bush right outside out door. It's not fascinating, but it is bees. We don't know how long it took them to build the nest. A 0:34 video of bees.

https://vimeo.com/710484478

An ambulance drove by and made them swarm. It's a 0:14 video with some "name of the Lord in vain" audio by Antonio:

https://vimeo.com/710954558

OK...the promised snake photo after the alphabet:

a

b

d

e

f

g

h

i

j

k

l

m

n

o

p

q

r

s

t

u

v

w

x

y

z