I grew up building junker Frankenstein bikes with my older brother using parts from cast-off bicycles. This was after the 70s road cycling craze but during the 80s BMX craze. Yard sales were our primary sources of parts, but it was a demolished consignment store that provided two exotic bicycles which would be my introduction to fixed-gear bikes for the road.
The store was actually a dilapidated house with a peeling sign on the front: John's Trading Post. The elderly proprietor was Frank, the son of the original owner, John. Frank was notorious for chasing unaccompanied children away from his junk shop, but my one visit inside with my father was like a carefree trip to a museum. The dusty interior was crammed from floor to ceiling with shelves, cases, and wall displays, which held curiosities of every description. A dozen old bicycles and parts, including a huge penny-farthing wheel--were among the wonders I saw there.
When Frank died, a series of auctions followed, after which a bulldozer--much to the chagrin of the town board--pushed the entire crumbling house with its unsold contents off of its concrete slab and into the publicly-owned pond behind it. The town bought the newly-vacant lot from its new out-of-state owner in the resulting legal quagmire, and later announced plans to clean up the area and haul the abandoned debris away to the town dump--although I don't think this ever actually happened.
Kids from my neighborhood went 'fishing' around that junkyard for years. My brother and I were among the first. From the tall weeds of the waterside we salvaged an inkwell desk, a wooden step ladder, a lantern, and a tent, among many other items, but the mechanical steeds were our most prized find. The mysterious bicycles resembled 10-speeds, yet they were single-speed machines, like BMX bikes. Neither bicycle was ridable as found, but we took them home for parts.
The smaller bike had a frame geometry so bizarre that at first we thought it was bent, with the front dropped so low that the rider might easily somersault over the handlebars. It had clinchers and rim brakes, front and rear, like a 10-speed, but the familiar downtube shifters (common at that time) and derailleurs were missing, and the chain drive had just one massive 53t x 14t gear. The frame had no markings but many years later I discovered that it was a time trial bike, possibly a custom-built or experimental model imported from Europe.
The bigger bike (at about 58cm) was a 1960s-era Schwinn Paramount track machine, which had one 50t x 16t gear, sew-up tubulars, and pedals with toe cages. The steel steed was flecked with rusty scratches, but otherwise was in good shape, except for two puncture flats, which unfortunately were beyond even my father's ability to repair at the time. It had no brakes, but the fork, which was probably not the original, had a brake hole. Eventually, that little hole, and a few other strokes of luck, would be the difference that made me a fixed-gear cyclist from a relatively young age.
My brother and I were very attracted to these bikes, partly because they were alien and strange--and inspired envious wonder in the neighborhood kids who ventured by to see them--but mostly because they were very simple machines and easy to work with. My brother was a high school freshman and I was in junior high, both at ages when shifters, cassettes, derailleurs, cables, and housings seemed hopelessly complicated. This made the more basic operations of a bicycle seem the most exciting, because they were accessible to us through sheer simplicity. My father only needed to show us one time how to change a wheel, tire, tube, cog, chain, pedal, and handlebar, allowing us to build our own bicycles well enough to pass his mandatory pre-ride inspections.
The cast-off bikes which my brother and I had collected by that time afforded us parts enough to construct about a dozen simple but functional bicycles at any one time. Over the next three summers, bicycle assembly was not only our shared hobby, but a source of income and personal transportation. We built and sold several bicycles to kids in the neighborhood. We made other bikes for delivering newspapers and running errands (usually fetching pharmacy items) for residents of a large housing project for the elderly. Besides our utility bikes (which had useful but dorky wire baskets on either side of the rear wheels) we made BMX-like bikes for trails and freestyle riding, and we each built single-speed cruiser-like bikes with coaster brakes that we took to school. But most importantly to this autobiographical bicycle tale, which is already much longer than I intended, we also typically had at least one experimental 'Frankenstein' bike in the garage, where we assembled parts from two or more different bikes to see which combinations worked (or failed to work) together.
This was how my first fixed-gear machine came to be. I put the wheels from the funky time trial bike onto the track bike frame, producing a 50t x 14t fixed gear. I removed (with help from my brother) a few links from the TT bike chain, which fit well and was easy to tension, with me pulling the wheel straight back in the horizontal dropouts as my brother tightened it into place. Finally, I swapped the pista bars for motocross bars. That was it. That's all it took. Fixie 1.0 was born.
Fixie 1.0 had several problems, though. The frame was too big for me. I could not straddle the bike even on my tiptoes or comfortably reach the pedals even with the saddle set as low as possible. I was also new to toe cages and nervous about using them, even without the added difficulty that the pedals would not only drop out of reach at the bottom of every stroke but would flip cage-side down as well, unless a foot was kept inside. Worst of all, the gear was much too hard. It took all my weight on one pedal just to get the bike in motion. I might have given up and disassembled Fixie 1.0 if my brother hadn't dared me to ride it.
I learned on the very first ride that most of these drawbacks disappeared if I pedaled out of the saddle. I had some clearance over the top tube even with a pedal at 6 o'clock, so there was no need to remove my feet from the toe cages. The big gear would begin to turn with all of my weight on one pedal, and once the bike was in motion at jogging speed the pedals moved so slowly that switching my weight from one pedal to the other was effortless. Thanks to gravity the bike almost felt like it moved by itself, but this came at a high price: I could never sit down.
My mounting method was simple. Stand, facing the frame, on the right side of bike, with the pedal at 2 o'clock, holding the handlebar with my right hand. Put the toes of my right foot into the toe cage. Step up, onto the pedal, setting the bike into slow motion, while quickly stepping with my other foot over the top tube and grabbing the handlebars with my left hand. By this time, the left pedal was at 10 o'clock and rising toward 12 o'clock, giving me a moment to tip the pedal over with my toes and push my left foot into the cage. This was easier to do than to explain, and took about 3 seconds. Stopping and dismounting involved a similar process done in reverse, although, early on, I sometimes fell or dropped the bike.
The process of discovering workarounds for these initial troubles introduced a more vital problem. My maiden voyage on Fixie 1.0 began in the driveway and, for lack of the ability to slow down or stop, ended in the bushes on the front lawn. But my plan had worked. Fixie 1.0 was ridable. My father resolved this dangerous problem, and approved my new bike for use on the quiet side streets in my neighborhood, by installing a rim brake on the fork. My father probably thought that I would lose interest in the bike and take it apart before long, as always. This time, he was mistaken.
I mentioned earlier in this blog entry the importance of the brake hole. Without it, there would have been no Fixie 1.1, and no subsequent rides. There is more to tell, but that is how I came to experiment with a track bike for the road.