Biking, Hiking, Underbiking

After several weeks of not riding much, and generally not going out much, I took a couple of hours this morning to ride around and explore some places in the city I haven't been. One thing San Diego really has going for it is the canyons. This time of year is especially nice, since the natural areas around here are starting to green up again after the summer. Most of the canyons in the urban area are public spaces with trails that are easily accessible as long as you know where the secret staircases and trailheads are. Part of the fun of an exploratory ride is that you get to stumble across them and have little adventures. The photo is from a canyon in Hillcrest, just north of Balboa Park, and these trails are actually part of the Balboa Park trail system.

Parts of the various trails I "discovered" today required hiking with the bike over my shoulder, others I had to walk the bike, but several of the trails allowed me to do a little underbiking*, which is the closest thing I've done to mountain biking since I was a teenager. Granted, it's not very close at all to mountain biking, but it was still fun to ride a little dirt.

*Underbike, ride a traditional road bicycle on surfaces that typically warrant the use of knobbie tires, flat bars, and sometimes suspension.

Hello

The Bianchi project inches towards completion.

Building a Bicycle Wheel

I took advantage of a rare rainy Saturday (dark and stormy, even) to build a new rear wheel for the Bianchi project. I've built a few bicycle wheels over the last several years, but I'm amazed every time I do it. It's one of those things that I never thought much about, and then when I did think about it, assumed it was way out of my league. But using Sheldon Brown's instructions, it's not really that difficult. I would even say that it's fun.

Once you have the instructions, the majority of the task is essentially just putting pieces together. If you can assemble IKEA furniture, you can build a bicycle wheel. This is not to say that tensioning and truing and dishing (the last of which I've never done because I've never build a rear wheel with external gears) don't require skill, but they are skills that you can acquire with patience and attention to detail. Hell, I made it through grad school, so I have those in spades.

I took my time, enjoyed the physicality of building something, read the instructions carefully, had a cup of tea, and the whole very civilized process took a couple of hours, with another hour or so the next evening to work on the truing, which I did by mounting the wheel in the frame and using a ruler as a gauge. I probably could have done it faster if I had needed or wanted to, but there was no reason to hurry. 

Building bicycle wheels is one of those empowering tasks that you never thought you could do, but if you're willing to take a little leap and just jump in (keeping in mind that failure is always an option), it turns out to be a pretty rewarding experience. Of course, having said this, my wheel will probably explode the first time I ride it. Jinx.

Mission San Luis Rey de Francia

Oceanside, CA