The Common Wrench

If you’re reading this, you most likely ride a bike.  Either that or you’ve stumbled across this page thinking it’s about the study of a small brown bird.  You might know how to fix bikes as well, maybe even work in a shop.  Whatever you are– whether rider, mechanic, or amateur ornithologist– the bicycle plays a big part in your life. 

When thinking about how we relate to our bikes I was reminded of a quote from Levi Strauss.  Strauss once said that “food is good think with…” and I think the same can be said about bicycles.  What did Strauss mean, though?  How do you think with your food?  Strauss understood the extent to which food defines us socially, economically, and even politically.  When you decide which super market to shop at or what restaurants to go to, what kind of food to buy and what to cook, you’re thinking about a lot of things.  Is health a concern to you?  Do you care about organic foods and supply chains, read ingredient lists or count calories?  Maybe you never cook but just order out, or eat only raw foods.  We define ourselves through what we eat and how we eat it.  We also create a public image through food.  Eating is something that’s usually done with other people, either in our home or out at a restaurant.  There are entire blogs devoted to what we cook and eat. 

  Certainly we do the same with our bikes.  What components we use, what companies we buy from, what we make ourselves.  Our bikes talk about where we go and what kind of riding we do, our aesthetic taste and our economic status.  But unlike food, bikes stay around for a long time, get bought and sold or stuff in basements or garages.  And so bikes become rolling timelines:  every bike I work on has a story in it.  This is one of my favorite things about working on bikes, and it’s what keeps each day new and interesting.  At Quad, we don’t assemble a lot of brand-spankin new bikes.  We work on the old stuff, the rides a lot of other shops might tell you to just toss out.  These rusted, dirt-encrusted machines are like an archeological dig, telling you tales about where the bike’s been, what kind of people owned it and how they treated it.

The sad thing is, we see a lot of new department store bikes too, and those aren’t made to last.  I feel my stomach drop every time one of these dual-suspension monsters rolls through the door on wheels that are already out of true, brakes that don’t stop and derailleurs too weak to shift. They just don’t make ’em like they used too.  I see old Free Spirits and Roadmasters (Sears bikes) from the 60’s and 70’s come into the shop still rolling, and often they’re lighter than these new clunkers.  Something tells me no one’s going to be working on 30yr old Triaxs.  

I’ll sum up with another quote, this one from an Architecture professor of mine, Bill Hubbard.  He told me “Buildings are tools to think with, not objects to look at”, and his words ring true for bikes as well.  No matter how beautiful or hideous, bikes are always a means in the end.  So as I ride this morning to Harvard Yard to cut free all of the bikes abandoned this semester, I say “Think with your bike!”  That, and ride often.

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