Fresh drink of water!

Now this is a good street video!
A little bit of originality and actual "street" riding made this an enjoyable edit.

End of season mini edit from simon Petepiece on Vimeo.

Fixed gears.

Yeah, I know this is a strange topic for me. However, I have to say something soon or I'm going to explode on the next trendy bike asshole I see ride down my street.

I rode fixed gear bikes for a while. It ultimately led to me riding mountain bikes. Here is the reason. When I quit BMX years a go I still wanted to ride a bike, just not braking myself on a little micro bike. After riding and racing BMX for over 20 years, it was a much needed break. So I bought a roadbike. It was fine for a little while, but not what I was looking for. Around this time I started seeing more and more people riding track bikes on the street. Some of them were throwing BMX flatland tricks. So I thought to myself "this is the cure I've been looking for". I went out and bought a track bike.

Being able to ride a road bike sort of like a BMX bike was pretty cool. Only a handful of people anywhere in the world were doing it. I had this idea that I could take it a little further. So I started hopping stairs, pedal grinding ledges, etc. To be honest, I was frowned on by pretty much the entire LA bike scene for doing these things. Hell, I even had some flat rail tricks and skatepark lines. It just was unacceptable at the time to ride a track bike without a stupid looking side bag and gay ass hat! Yeah, I went there.

Still, I kept doing what I was doing because it was fun for me. Fuck all those clone hipster reject wannabe's! Nice mustache motherfucker, I can't tell if your off to ride your bike, or headed down to the Blue Oyster Club to have your mustache ridden!

Anyway.......

The bikes at the time just weren't up to the task of performing under the stresses I was putting it under. I "fixed" this by getting an MTB frame with horizontal dropouts, putting on a set of BMX cranks/bearings, BMX stem, MTB handlebars, and some plastic pedals that I screwed my own clips into. I also ran a set of super thin 26" rims and tires.

I got made fun of for this. I would go on some mass bike rides such as Midnight Ridazz, Critical Mass, etc. and would have people look at my bike and shake their head in disgust. Others would tell me I was making the fixed scene look bad by doing BMX grinds/tricks on a track bike.

Now, many years later.......
I look at the fixed gear scene. The silly hats, stupid side bags, and homo-erotic mustaches are still the same. The bikes on the other hand, now there's some evolution. In the last month I have to say that I have seen at least eight fixed gear riders sporting DMR bars, forks, cranks, etc. That's just in my part of LA. Not to mention that ALL of their bikes now look almost exactly like the bike I was riding years back. That's fine. I'm glad I had the wits to see where the sport was going long before it went there.

The problem I have with it now is that all these fixed bike companies are producing look-alike mtb and bmx products and labeling them as fixed bike parts. If I had a nickel for how many times I've been asked why I ride fixy bars on mt MTB........
For instance, The Shadow Conspiracy. They invented, patented, and own the design for the half link chain. These chains got popular in the fixed community because of all the half-wits that were converting vertical dropout frames to single speed fixed had massive chain slack issues. Half link chains solved this. Now, jack ass rip off fuckhead companies market the half link chain as a "Track Chain", thus giving it the appearance that it was designed for track bikes.

All this came to me today while on Brooklyn Machine Works website. Nothing against them at all. I just saw one of their bikes up in their blog and to me, it looks like an MTB with a flagpole to sit on and skinny wheels. What do you think?

Again.........