Yup, the saga continues.

No, I'm not renaming this blogs The Got Department Store Bike, but I am having fun with these wheels. While my first venture beyond the mailbox was to ride trails, my primary intent for the Boundary was not as a mountain bike, strictly speaking. I'd been looking at the current breed of hybrids. 

Wait, before that, even more back story: in 2020, when much of the sensible world shut down, and we still didn't have data on the safety of group activity outdoors, I rode by myself a lot, well, even more than usual. One advantage of this I found was lots of exploring of my relatively new environs, and one advantage of exploring by myself is I needn't concern myself about dragging someone else into a dead end swamp, or more importantly, dragging someone else THROUGH a dead end swamp.

My feet did eventually dry, and this riding, which I enjoyed even more than the other riding I really liked, shifted the form of the bike I rode. An old rigid mountain bike with not particularly big tires that rolled well for pavement connections worked well, sort of a, well, hybrid cross between mountain and road bikes! Wow, "hybrid cross", the bicycle industry marketing departments could hire me!

But when I looked at hybrid offerings, the tire clearance, while likely enough, wasn't ample, and I wanted more-than-enough. Especially for connections alongside railroad tracks, at least moderate size 29" mountain bike tires do an admirable job of rolling, and happily, 29" is just another, more marketable, way of saying big 700c, so a more modern mountain rig made rigid offered the desirable flexibility.

So, despite starting with this bike on trails, which is an advance from my days of riding 23c tires and drop bars on singletrack, yesterday I made progress toward rolling this roller into my original intent. That meant inverted knob 35c tires, not gawd awfully wide handlebars, and clamping a pair of my beloved "bar-middles" onto them. 

Ah, home sweet home, and look, the bike even came with the only clamp-on grips I've ever been able to use, with the clamp on the INSIDE, not the outside where a hard band hurts the soft, fleshy part of my palm that I hang there. Sometimes the not-right bikes do a few things right that every other does wrong--for me!

And in swapping the tires, and to appropriately sized tubes, with Schrader valves, I discovered Schwindle hasn't completely lost connection to their heritage, but of course, it's the unfortunate part they kept. Back is the old days of 26x1-3/8 size tires, which use a different diameter rim than 26" mountain bikes (650xyzpdq, or something like that), the gang in Madison went one worse with their own unique, probably proprietary, 26" size. 

In a nod to that traditional, the heirs of that company spec'd this bike with special long-valve-stem Schrader tubes to clear the depth of the aero rims and allow a pump to actually depress the valve stem for inflation, but I figured out dropping a 3/16" ball bearing into the pump chuck depresses the valve, while not exactly nicely, effectively enough!

And finally, the most important modification, and possibly a sign that I'm falling at least a little bit in love. I might even try for some better matching paint!