Urban Adventures & More

I thought I’d fill in a few rides I have done just for completeness.

1. The Ashuwillticook Rail Trail was beautiful. It runs along the water, not very close to the road, not many road crossings. My only wish was that it had a swimming hole, too.

2. When I got my fixed gear back last month, I just went out around Boston in any old direction. At the time, I couldn’t even find all the roads on the map. However, when I went to Jamaica Plain a few weeks ago, I was able to place everything much better. I still am not sure of the second half of the ride (starting with Stony Brook and going until Boston College), but here’s the route anyway (with notes to jog my memory). It was hot. It was on big roads. There isn’t much to recommend it; I probably should have stuck with my original plan to go on Jamaica Way.

3. This isn’t a single route, I just wanted to reflect on how lovely it is to ride around Cambridge and Boston, especially late at night. At least half a dozen times I have taken the bike out after midnight and ridden the nearly empty streets of Cambridge and of Boston. As much as I don’t like nighttime activities in general, these have a special charm; after a certain hour, you get to see such interesting characters with their guard down. Some favorite roads and places are Broadway and Cambridge Street, Cambridgeport (which always confuses me) and Downtown and the Financial District.  For a while, Beacon Street just out of Inman Square was cursed; before my bike got its spiffy upgrades, I consistently lost my chain at the top of the hill there. During the daytime, I am a fan of the Somerville Community Path east of Davis Square, which is the extension of the Minuteman Route.

As I indicated in my previous post, I’ve been learning how to get my chainring straightened out. The internet, as far as I can tell, basically only has Sheldon Brown’s useful (but slightly cryptic) explanation of how to do this. However, now that I have dealt with it, I understand the issue better.

Recall that the role of the chainring is transfer energy from your feet (by way of the pedals and crank) to the chain and eventually to the back tire. Because every ounce of energy your feet put into the pedals is meant to be transferred into the chain, getting very low resistance makes a huge difference in the feel and performance of the bike. When there is too much slack in the chain (low tension) or the chain binds at any point  (high tension), that is energy that should be going from your feet to the wheels, but is instead being dissipated by inefficiency in the system.

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Following up on my previous post about my new bike, everything has been going quite peachy. Who knew that buying everything new helps?

Well, it’s no silver bullet. If there’s anything I have learned about fixed gears so far, it is that you have to get the crank bolts just right, and check them frequently. There should not be any noise, and there should not be any binding of the chain. When I first got the repairs done, there developed an awful rattling in the chainring; it turns out the bolts were too long and weren’t able to be tightened enough. After a couple weeks riding around with a new set of properly sized bolts, the rattling came back. I got a wrench and discovered everything had come loose. I tightened, and the chainring went back to being almost totally quiet.

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