A bike a day, and I rejoice, yay!

 

I can't say this is becoming a habit, because, well, it has in fact been a habit for a long, long time.  I like bikes, and while sometimes they like me enough to wander into my path, on other occasions I actually seek them out, and today was such an occasion.  I even bought this bike, paying infinitely more than the the free my-street-side Kabuki of yesterday.  So yes, picking up old bikes is an old habit, but I can't say that it usually happens with this sort of regularity.

Something of an odd story or two with this one, I will further admit, since I'm in the mode of coming clean with habits and so forth.  First one: I have a bit of a lengthy love affair with Raleigh Technium bikes, and not solely because they have such a tremendously 90s name, although I do kinda love that in a way that's as close to being hipster as I'm likely to try.  My first Technium was a 420 which came to me as a dump find, incomplete without the special cable stop that bolts to the bottom of the downtube.  I, of course, feared not, and with it's horizontal dropouts, it has served me as a fixed gear for what must be, wow, well in excess of a decade.

Technium, beyond stirring the 90s hip pot, was Raleigh-ese for three aluminum main tubes with chromo lugs and stays, all glued together in the US of A.  I am far from overtly patriotic, but I do like the idea of a domestically sourced bike for the simple reason of transportation cost, and I don't particularly mean the expense in money, but rather all the icky externalities such as kicking the groin of a mother earth we sort of need to survive.  Transportation means fuel, often in gigantic container ships these days.  So yeah, sweet spot for a bike that was made kinda where I live.

But beyond that preference, my 420 fixed gear just rides so sweet.  Something about steel stays bonded to not-overly-large aluminum made for a cushy ride that was also pretty dang light compared to most of the entry bikes against which it vied for consumer dollars.  Yeah, it is one of the nicer riding bikes I've found.  So much so, I went looking for the 420's upper-entry-end brethren with the shift (actually, no pun intended--just luck I guess) to downtube shifter mounts and a 40 "lack of units" upgrade to the 460 name.  I found it, and it WAS sweat, but alas is "WAS" because I broke the rear dropout a couple years back and haven't had the gumption to figure out brazing in a replacement.

But it seems the Technium upgrades continue, and I've left the world of numeric names and (sniffle) long reach brakes wrapped around 27" tires and wheels, and for those of you who scoff of 27" wheels, mark my word, they are to 700c what 27.5 is to 26.  Yes, marginally bigger, but so much cooler with the cool kids.  And no, I tend not to care too much about the cools kids, so I get to ride weird things that work, like 27" wheels.  But alas, not when I ride the new one, a 700c Olympian.

Oh yes, I did mention there is a quantity of two when it comes to odd stories related to this bike.  It came from South Hadley, the next town over.  The place, in fact, where I bought an industrial drill press a few years back.  And when I say "place", I don't just mean the town, but the actually house.  This bike belonged to the son of my drill press' former owner, so it seems I have now twice lightened their load for the move down to Florida.  I wonder what the rest of the family has to sell.

And did I mention, "Yay!"?  Yay, yay--yeah--YAY!