Maybe I need to work harder on my Craigslist ads.
https://newyork.craigslist.org/brk/b...149034796.html
Full text:
Two things:
1.) Never heard of a Stinsmen? Read on, dear friend, and you’ll be glad you did.
2.) This ad begins with a quiz.
What?? Why a quiz?
Because this bike is worthy of such a test. When an author writes a book in which he or she has considered the craft of writing and storytelling down to the sentence level, the book is sometimes referred to as “a writer’s book” – meaning that other writers and writerly types know enough to notice and enjoy the book's tiny hallmarks of good craftmanship. In that same way, a Stinsmen is a “bike person’s bike.” You gotta know your bike nerd stuff in order to appreciate this bike.
And also because this frame, as you will read, is all about heroics. So channel your inner Joseph Campbell hero, and overcome the challenge of this quiz. You owe it to the person for whom this frame was designed and built.
The quiz.
Please match these cycling statements with their source.
1. “Planing.”
2. “Most riders ride frames that are too small.”
3. “The bicycle should in essence disappear beneath you.”
4. “You’re buying my design choices... the material Is the least consequential choice.”
A. Jan Heine
B. Shimano design philosophy
C. Richard Sachs
D. Grant Petersen
If you respond to this ad, why not be a sport and include your answers in your response? (I think most people who would respond to this ad could probably figure out most of these using their own knowledge and not the Google. Even if you don’t want to buy the bike – respond! Maybe we’ll become friends!)
As a secondary set of statements to consider (and how the idea for the quiz developed in my imagination) – check out these statements:
“I’m looking for a vintage steel bike to toodle around on. Coffee shops and stuff.”
“This is for leisurely Sunday rides when it’s sunny.”
“I dunno. Maybe I’ll put some flat bars on it?”
“I want to feel what steel bikes can really do.”
Only the last statement will do justice to what this bike was built for.
And here’s why. It's about what this frameset offers. The angles and material come together _at speed_. Big ring speed. Dilly-dally around a parking lot and the front wheel wants to flop. But take it out, get your legs warmed up, then sizzle the chain into the 53 and the bike…settles in. At speed, the pedaling forces will give you the right degree of pedal-feel for your efforts: light but firm. The tubing ripples over the small rises and dips in the road the way that steel can. At the same time, the handling becomes neutral. The bike “sticks” to the ground. It all comes together as the bike cruises like a missile. At the speed in which most other bikes get vague in the front end, or at the very least not altogether trustworthy, this one is guided, grounded, as if it’s patiently but earnestly tracking something. Most likely a finish line.
It’s always taken me 45 minutes to warm up. During that time, I notice, say, the saddle, the temperature, local farmers in their fields. But once it’s go-time, and this bike gets on-cam, everything goes away as the world around me shrinks tighter and tighter into a fluid now-ness. Life is a narrow, focused center that this bike can hold for miles and miles. it invites everything to fade away. It’s an endorphin machine. It's its own energy source.
Got young kids, yardwork, housework, honey-do list, a spare tire you didn’t used to have? This bike will put the “warrior” back into your weekend efforts.
Most bike geometries nowadays are neutral, or just to one side of it, so that’s what most people know. This one isn’t in that spectrum. This is a bike for fast finishers. It keeps its head when everyone all around you is losing theirs.
Leave the downtube shifters on it. It’s part of this bike’s hubris. And you can go there on this bike. For one, it’s stable enough that anyone who’s never used them can step on that invisible bridge and realize that those internet message board warnings about crashing if you use DT shifters are poppycock.
(Get some core strength, people.)
Secondly, this bike’s personality is all about displaying such boldness. This is a macho, hard-driving, diesel-legged, coal-rolling rig. It unapologetically eats red meat. Its jeans are not purposely tight. It has veins in its brawny forearms. The entire bike is a clenched fist, if you want to ride it that way.
Do not put anything from Velo Orange on this bike.
Component-wise, it is purpose-built for winning. The bike was Campagnolo-equipped because Campy hubs were the benchmark for quality and their brakes were a declaration of serious intent. The shifting responsibilities were Dura-Ace because at that time, Shimano had the better shifting system.
It has a history its earned. In my imagination, the prior owner had this bike in college or grad school. He studied Geology. In the summers of those years, before his dissertation research took him farther west, he rode this bike from the Lehigh Valley to somewhere near Madison, WI, while wearing cut-off shorts and a denim shirt with sleeves rolled up. His spartan possessions he carried in a canvas backpack, and he tied a bedroll across the handlebar. The trip brought him into the wind for days at a time and he rode in the drops the whole way. He was built for such efforts, both in genetics and nurturing.
Once in Wisconsin, he worked as a high-current-service-lineman. He’d gotten the job with help from his father’s only war buddy, a guy named Buck, whose life his father had saved during a firefight with Viet Kong regulars in the dawning hours of a muggy June morning.
The chips on the bike’s top tube are from the stainless steel roll-buckle of his tool belt, because that’s how he’d carried it on that long ride each way. The belt would swing like a metronome until he got strong and fluid and then the belt hung still. That’s when he knew he was getting race-fit.
He rode out there for that dangerous work because it paid exceptionally well. That made school each following autumn possible. He was also there because it put him close to Superweek events -- the festival of national-level competitive cycling. There, he’d compete with chiseled limbs, an acrobat’s physique, a sponsorless jersey, no team mates, and probably a mustache.
Everyone at Superweek came to know who he was. Before and after the races, they’d approach then pass him in their cars as he cruised along the shoulder. To them, He was The Guy Who Rode To The Race, Raced, Then Rode Home Again. Always in the drops. Always smooth. Always a good wheel to follow.
They had no idea how far from home he really was.
And now the Stinsmen is back home. Like Odysseus - the BOSS.
About the builder: John Stinsmen was a framebuilder in the Lehigh Valley area some years ago before he began designing race car chassis. He was known for his high quality, careful work and innovative thinking in designing both road frames and track frames. About those frames, there are at least two matters that are worthy of recognition: #1 - he built frames for American Olympians for the 1988 Olympics. This is of that period. After I bought this bike, I called John in order to learn more about the frameset. There are no tubing decals but John said it is Japanese (i.e. Tange or Ishiwata), because that’s who was sending him tubesets to build with at that time. They wanted representation in the Olympics.
#2 - he developed the aerodynamically-focused “funny bike” design, which soon everyone – and I mean EVERYONE – (think Indurain’s Pinarello) made a version of (remember those? Illegal now in the eyes of the UCI!) They came from the thoughts and intellect of John – the man who designed this frame.
Historically, to a bike nerd like me, this is a really, really, really neat bike. I think John is an unsung hero of American framebuilding and this frame exhibits his calculated approach to the physics and forces at play in competitive cycling.
The frame is storied with cycling-related chips but it is not damaged. I rode it for much of last summer and it behaves exactly like I have written that it does. (The Wisconsin stuff, well, I just ran with that.)
I’m reluctant to sell it, but if the ad is up the bike is available. This is an in-person pick-up situation, only.
NO offense meant with the quiz! I thought like-minded cyclists would enjoy knowing that there are others out there who speak their dialect of esoterica.
If I wind up keeping it, maybe I’ll ride it at the next Bicycling Magazine’s Fall Fest. Come say hi!