Cyclokairos

Grant Petersen’s Blahg led me to a New York Times interview with Jose Mujica. The central message: limit your needs to necessities, and work only for these. With our ability to create a vast range of “needs”, the market responds, feeding ever increasing consumption. We work too much in order to fund the consumption, and as we needlessly replace perfectly usable items, there’s significant waste. There’s a message of limitation in Hugo Black’s The English – “The difference between what you want and what you need, is what you can carry on a horse”. Swap horse for bike, and I see the appeal of a bike tour: not just the freedom of the open road, but freedom from stuff.

I have a good go at limiting my consumption. White goods are used and repaired to the point of exhaustion, although with obsolescence and disposal at the heart of consumerism, getting something repaired rather than buying new is easier said than done. Take the microwave, it works fine, just don’t leave it switched on, it doesn’t half make some weird sounds. I also try to get the most out of cars – thirty odd years of driving and I’m on my fourth (the latter only bought this year). I don’t like driving, the roads in the West Midlands are bursting at the seams, but living the other side of Birmingham from where I work, the commute by bike would be dangerous in taking a route that is, time-wise, a realistic twice-a-day one. I clock up 12,000 miles a year by car – that’s a painful number, 12,000 miles sat in a metal box. The travails of someone living in a developed Western nation – a life of decadence compared to many. If I was true to my word, I could rid myself of so much I have, and still get by fine. A Finnish proverb I read recently: onnellisuus on se paikka puuttuvaisuuden ja yltäkylläisyyden välillä – happiness is a place between scarcity and abundance.

The famished elephant in my own room of abundance – bikes and their bits. I’ve got too many bikes, and too many spare parts. Ridding myself of more than half of my bikes, and still I would have too many. But having built virtually all of them, there’s an investment that’s hard to walk away from – and building them satiates creative urges as much as any other interest. The latest effort, repainting a frame gathering dust, a Novara Randonee. In need of a cheap frame to build a bike to ride as part of my commute to work in a previous life, I picked it on eBay some 18 years or so ago. Having never heard of it, I had to look up the brand – an in-house one of the American retailer REI. The seller was UK based, but somehow the frame had made the journey across the Atlantic. In its favour, it’s steel, but I don’t care for the ovalised down tube, and the fork it came with isn’t original but rather some generically functional affair.

I used some Spray.Bike products:

Their builder’s putty spray is meant to smooth over defects in the original paint. Turns out the there’s defects and there’s defects. Some of the defects were ones that only disappear with a complete stripping of the paint (sandpaper didn’t make much of a difference). And I ran out of the spray – since one can is meant to cover a frame (and fork?), I must have gone too thick in places (or it was the extra needed for the fork).

Next a coat of burgundy paint and a band of cream on the seat-tube. I was impressed with the sharpness between the two colours, no bleeding.

Then two layers of transparent finish (one leaves a satin finish, two gives gloss). The results a little inconsistent – a further coat in places required for a consistent glossiness.

Have you tracked the change of leaf colour in the background – that’s the speed I work at, one measured in seasons. Expect a backdrop of fully brown beech leaves, or if I’m really slow, back to green, for any future work.