| Editor's Note: When Blogger stopped supporting FTP it pretty much threw a big monkey wrench into all of my online publishing. The service seems to be plagued with bugs and I suspect we are seeing the death of another once-relevant web icon. The same thing happened to me when Yahoo bought e-groups, and again when geocities ceased to be. JohnnyPayphone.net has become my online resume and is updated rarely and by hand. Chicagofreakbike, which was updating only a few times a year even when I was in Chicago, has slowed way down and is being updated by hand. It still remains, as many people tell me, a great place to poke around for ideas and so it shall survive. My blog, which is ten years old this year, has ground to a halt as I attempted to migrate it to johnnypayphone.blogspot.com but I forgot and updated the old one by hand and I'm just finding the whole blog thing to be less relevant these days as I use the internet less and less. Pennyfakething.com has been giving me a "migration pending" beachball on the blogger dashboard for several months now. I intend to keep the site and update it by hand as I develop my pennyfakething designs. My great-grandfather's diary, The Diary of Fletcher Ames Hatch, is the only one that really works for me on blogspot because I still have the source material in hand and can trust my site's content on the servers of a company that may go the way of geocities. I really only put it there, and at twitter in order to trickle it into the internet cache. Meanwhile for aggregating content that is not my own I find tumblr to be quite easy to use and you may enjoy johnnypayphone.tumblr.com. As I find myself busier and more active in real life I update less and less, and for this I apologize to anybody who may be out there enjoying any of these fine online Johnny Payphone products these last ten years. The world is a drastically different place than it was then, and so is the internet, and so is my life. I always like answer emails about wacky bike design and can still be reached at payphone at primate dot net. |
The $1600 Tallbike: A Product Review
The 80s were full of gimmicky bikes that were for fun and not for transportation. The LeRun, the rowbike, the Good Times bike with its awful rim brake and plastic expanding chainring, the Cycle Chariot with the front of a bike and the back of a skateboard, the Super Trick Cycle, and hundreds more. None of them were very successful. The reason is obvious: If you're going to spend anything on a bike at all, you want a bike you can ride. Having a second $1000 to spend on a bike that is less useful is rare.
Not that I think they're banking on this thing being a breakaway product. I've seen the ones they've made for fun, and no doubt this is just something they did because they're bike geeks and nobody has done it. However, they don't seem to realize what bike clubs have already figured out the hard way: Giving someone a tallbike when they don't have the motivation or ability to make it themselves is just a bad idea. It's a bad idea mainly because those people hurt themselves, bad. The building of the bike is a nice filter to screen out the bozos, do-nothings, wannabes, and dumbshits. It doesn't require a ton of competence but it does require you to be able to fog a mirror, and that's just about the skill level it takes to ride a tallbike without killing yourself.
This phenomenon can be observed in the automotive world, where any chotchmo with enough money can buy himself a racing-quality sportscar. What do those guys do? Usually they wreck the thing, quick. Not that I have a deep philisophical objection to letting idiots kill themselves.
I can't help but notice that, while the componentry is all fancy, it's not a very good tallbike. It seems to have been designed by someone who has not made very many tallbikes, for these reasons:
-Foremost, the seat is over the rear axle. This is how tallbikes end up when they are made from two bikes, because the seat tube is not vertical. However, there's no reason a tallbike should be this way, and in fact, if you're making it from scratch you can easily make a bike that is well balanced with a longer wheelbase. You get a nice big cargo area down at the bottom when you do it that way.
-The frame design is the shape you get when you stack two frames, and then run a pipe from the seat to the rear dropouts. This is the way many tallbikes end up. However, there's no reason to make them this way from scratch. If you look at early tallbikes from the 1900s they had more of a traditional diamond frame, just taller.
-Aluminum is not an acceptable metal for making bicycles. Is this a racing tallbike? Is the intention for the rider to retain the muffin-tops they would otherwise sweat off with a metal frame? The reason aluminum forks are illegal is that unlike steel, which tempers under stress, aluminum cracks. Those cracks can only grow, and when the wear reaches a certain point- SNAP- your frame snaps. Steel, when it fails, tends to bend. Once I had a pennyfakething's spine break, and I kept pedaling as the bike slowly got closer and closer to the ground. I wouldn't ride a bike made of aluminum, any more than I'd ride one made of carbon fiber, which splinters into a thousand daggers in a wreck. Add to this the fact that on this bike you're going to be up in the air when that catastrophic failure occurs.
I could make some crack about the bike having a brake, but at least they didn't put a rear one on it.
I wonder if they'll sell you a tallbike fork to use in a frame of your own construction. Not many people have the ability to thread their own steer tubes.
If Fietsfabriek ships me a demo model I'll give the bike a more thorough review. ;)
UPDATE: The bikes were made in a single run, and so they will not sell you a fork because there aren't any to sell, they're in the bikes.
