Holy. Hell.
Ideally, a bike should be tailored to the meet the needs of its rider. Geez, talk about a total failure in that department. Fortunately, in this case, it wasn't too late to take what went sideways and make it go straight.
Luckily, when I built the N.A.M.P. front rack, I had been just barely smart enough to design in some threaded eyelets so that I would have a place to hang a future porteur-style rack. I just thought that the future was, you know, the future. I had no idea about the recurring cold-sweat-too-vivid-surreal dreams of riding away from a steaming hot animated M&M's-looking Pedro's pizza, holding hands with an animated M&M's-looking bottle of microbrew, sitting on the curb at the corner of 30th and Grand, with their dumbass dangly legs hanging over the edge, about an inch too short from being able to touch the pavement, smiling and waving goodbye to me with their dumbass dangly animated arms.
It didn't take Shirly MacClaine to interpret this dream: I would have to build another rack.
The monkey hits the OR . . .
New fork eyelets . . .
Coming together . . .
Low-quality rattle-can touch-up . . .
Initially in this whole rack deal, I hated spending time boiling the moisture out from inside the tubing after I've submerged the rack in water to soak the flux off. But it's actually become quite soothing and hypnotic, or maybe that's just how sad my life has become . . .
I've never known you to be terribly observant, but sometimes you do surprise me and you may notice in this next picture that the crossbar on the N.A.M.P. rack is not exactly parallel with the back of the porteur deck. (Go ahead and act like you totally noticed it. Whatever.) Anyway, something really bad happened when I was building the N.A.M.P. rack. It's painful and I wasn't ready to talk about it then and I'm not ready to talk about it now. Bottom line, though, the pizza/beer rack is super-square with the bike.
I can easily picture a thick-crust pie sitting on that rack . . .
Due to stupid-ass diet and health considerations, there are no actual pizzas or half-racks at my house right now. I searched the house for a test load. Apparently, at some point in my life, I bought an entire case of Corona Light, but I don't remember anything about it. Wow, what a surprise. Anyway, the box holds a bunch of papers now, what a shame . . .
Uhh, obvious problem here with the light. I think I could clear the light with a half rack, so the obvious solution is to only buy a case in the daylight hours or make two trips for half-racks at night.
I noticed tonight that the bike seems kind of heavy to me. Can't quite figure out what's going on.
At any rate, it comforts me to know that I will never again have to leave a pizza sitting on the curb and I look forward to over-compensating about this unfortunate, embarrassing event by bragging about my forthcoming fantastic, high-performance, erotic dreams.
6 comments:
trying again, with a properly formatted link...
Lovely. As usual.
I really like the pic of the light/beer interaction.
Here's pics of front rack in action with pizza and beer.
According to some, the porteur design evolved from the French newspaper guys. But I bet the first load of the first porteur was a lot of beer. Well, for the French it was probably wine.
Soak the flux off. Hmmm, maybe I can use that.
That is pretty much what I would like to put on the Volpe. Of course it would need extensive load testing.
John, that post speaks to me. In my language.
Hank, are you screwing around with flux capacitors again?
FBC, I would expect no less than extensive testing from you.
just linked this article on my facebook account. it’s a very interesting article for all
Pizza Rack
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