rotharpunc

I'm 25...

mkeller234

I got the joke, it's all good

lotek 

not a bad thread at all. No one is suggesting grinding off braze ons or derailleur hangers, in fact
they're cautioning against doing that. One poster is rebuilding from fixed to original geared spec.
It's a credit to the FGSS group that they don't advocate 'Drewing' a bike.

fuzz2050

Thanks, I just posted my vintage trek turned fixed gear there. In my defense, I have an almost identical trek touring bike from just a year later, and I figured this would get rid of some of my bicycle overlap.

JohnDThompson 

Sheldon Brown said he ran a Biopace ring on one of his fixed gears, but I suspect finding the right chain tension to make it work reliably would require patience.

N.B. the larger Biopace rings are closer to round than the small ones. I had a 28T one that looked almost square!

JohnDThompson 

The crank's fine, and you can get round rings to fit it (bog-standard 130mm BCD).

StephenH

I've got a Schwin Heavy Duty cruiser on which the front sprocket is somehow off-center. I haven't torn it down to see if it's just a sprocket made off-center or what, but you get significant variations in chain tension as you rotate the crank. Rides all right, though.

Skylar

Sorry.

patbateman

Yea I have a biopace chainring on my fixed gear, had a little issue with tension at first, but got it resolved with a little trial and error (and the chain coming off mashing down a hill in San Francisco)

But it's a 52, so that might have something to do with my tension success (since the larger ones are more round), I'm going to get a new crankset eventually but for now it works fine

sykerocker 

Yeah, we're trying to stop them from being stupid.

I know, I know; nothing like an impossible task . . . . . . . .

nick burns

Yup, I'm running the same crank on my Pista. Works fine and chainline is perfect.

sykerocker 

Probably as good a point as any to bring up this mention:

I think the hipster crowd has finally 'matured'. On a load of recent iBoB postings, two of the members (from LA, of course) mention seeing three 'hipsters' with their fixies going between the local clubs on a weekend evening. The catch? They had unloaded them from their cars, and were . . . . . . (wait for it) . . . . . . walking them.

This is what I meant by 'matured' - the "trailered Harley Davidson syndrome" has finally hit fixiedom. Absolute poseurs who don't ride.

patbateman

Just for the record, and I'm not saying this to try and start a fight with you at all,

but the fixed gear group I'm in is full of guys that have biked for a good portion of their lives in one capacity or another, and we go on group rides a couple times a week.

Because the real reason we ride "fixies", is because we enjoy riding bikes.

Shocker right? The fact that there are three dip****s in LA smoking cloves, being pretentious and walking their out of the box mercier tt's from club to club doesn't mean that everyone who rides a fixed gear is a "hipster", or that they don't know a damn thing about bikes.

sykerocker 

Never attempted to claim that it was. What I'm laughing about is that the fixie riding scene has what I've always called 'matured' (as in 'aged', not 'grown-up') - it's become such a regular, accepted sub-group of cycling that the poseurs have finally started to show up. They'll be around for awhile, then go away, chasing the next hip trend.

Besides being a cyclist, I'm also a biker (Harley, etc.). For the past twenty years the serious bikers have been putting up with our own poseurs: The crowd that takes their nice shiny Twin Cam, trailers it the 70 miles to the local bike rally, then spends the weekend putting from bar to bar within the city limits. Only if it's not raining, hasn't rained in the last four hours (gotta let the roads time to dry out), and has absolutely no chance of raining for the next five or six hours. And spends the rest of the time in the motel parking lot polishing their rides.

And, unfortunately, that's the public perception of 'biker' anymore, thanks to the media coverage of the rallys. Those guys with their shiny Twin Cams and clean fresh leathers look a lot better on television than the guys who actually rode the 400 miles to the event, and let their bikes parked, uncovered, in the rain.

In Richmond, I run across both types of fixie riders: The serious ones who wrench their own bikes, actually run them as their sole, daily transportation - and the come-lately idiots who haven't figured out that a minimum of one caliper brake is necessary if you're going to swap the wheel to the single speed side.

No disrespect intended to the serious rider - or the community in general.

CardiacKid

I want to know what is the opposite of a "consumer-level" bike. See post #4. The only thing I can think of is some of the older TdF bikes which were actually custom built and rebadged. I guess it violates hipster ethics to turn one of those into a fixie.

bibliobob

It's a moot point really. The fad has surely jumped the shark by now. We'll find out in the Spring, I suppose.

For those of you who don't read BSNYC, see below....


https://www.teenvogue.com/style/marke...-looks?slide=3

No offense to serious FG riders....

WNG

You know it's bad once you see Paris Hilton toting a fixed gear about instead of a lap dog in her Gucci bag.
When I see that image, I'll have to go outside and barf.

riva

Damn, that outfit runs more than I spend on clothes in several years time..

Panthers007

Surprised it doesn't have a price-tag hanging off it/her.

Blue Order

Except he wasn't talking about the crank. He was talking about the crankset, and I take that to include the chain rings.

Blue Order

The L.A. club scene has always been full of poseurs, though. Still, pretty funny.

You know, though-- everybody who's rocking a messenger style but isn't a messenger is a poseur. The fixie scene has been for the most part a poseur scene since its inception.

These poseurs in L.A. are just taking the posing to a new level...