A History of Fixies

Sometime in law school the blue Cannondale became S__'s, then Sam's.  It is now the wise old man of the Huffman Bicycle Club collection, pictured to the right after some botox injections and skin tightening.  I managed to putz through the following five or six years with only a low-rent Novara mountain bike to my name; the Novara became a commuting rig until I sold it out the back door for $100 after a bad rebuild job in which I attempted to make it single-speed.

My return to cycling was on a fixed gear -- the IRO Jamie Roy, built on a factory-second frameset I bought from this brand new frame-builder based out of Brooklyn for less than $100.  (Sad to see IRO discontinued the aluminum Jamie Roy, but the steel Mark V framesets are on fire-sale!)  Here's one built up in a very different configuration from my own, but you can see the frame.  Not a bad-looking ride.

From Sheldon Brown's website.

I raced the IRO in my first attempt at an IDT, the Great Floridian in 2006.  Bad idea.  The Great Floridian is run in what may be the only part of central Florida that is not pancake flat, and I actually walked the bike up one climb.  Interestingly or otherwise, that ride was my longest ever on any bike, to say nothing of a fixie.  It was also a wicked hot day, with temps exceeding 100.  I required a solid seven hours for the bike leg and quit after one mile on the run.  At some point I sold the IRO for $300, not a great price but not bad after the use it had given me.

I replaced it with an el cheapo Motobecane Messenger, purchased for $250 off of eBay.  Mine was orange rather than blue.  Not an unattractive bike at all.

$300 shipped at Bikesdirect!  Only $500 more will make it ridable!

That supple steel-framed bike rode nicely, but the build was atrocious.  Its most glorious outing was a trip from Starbucks at Old Georgetown and Democracy to Pennsylvania and back, with Sam aboard, on another perilously hot day.  That 200K permanent -- the now defunct Mason-Dixon Permanent -- took us 12.5 hours, which included an hour napping in the shade at the 150K point and at least 10 stops for Sam to tighten the spokes.  On one stretch I drafted while Sam spun that bike to 28 mph while rolling through the century mark.

I recently sold the Messenger, much improved over its original build, for $300 to a really earnest young hipster, whose girlfriend confessed that they had just moved from Atlanta and were really looking forward to riding in DC.  By that I gather she actually meant "in" DC, rather than from DC to quieter places.  To each his own.

I'm now without a fixie.  For which reason this wheelset is being built by Ron at Whitemountainwheels as I write:

				Total		Total
	Weight (ea)	Price (ea)	#	Weight(g)		Price
Front
Sapim CX-Ray (silver)	4.6	$2.69	24	110.4		$64.56
Al Nipple (blue)	0.35	$0.35	24	8.4		$8.40
ENO front (black) bolt-on	260	$129.00	1	260		$129.00
Kinlin XC279 (black)	490	$69.00	1	490		$69.00
				Build		$50.00
				868.8		$320.96
Rear
Sapim CX-Ray (silver)	4.6	$2.69	14	64.4		$37.66
Sapim CX-Ray (silver)	4.6	$2.69	14	64.4		$37.66
Al Nipple (blue)	0.35	$0.35	28	9.8		$9.80
ENO standard fixed (black), bolt-on, 130mm	270	$159.00	1	270		$159.00
Kinlin XC279 (black)	490	$69.00	1	490		$69.00
				Build		$50.00
				898.6		$363.12
			Total	1767.4		$684.08

The Cervelo P2SL (right) is the sacrificial lamb for this new ride.  More to come.