Mojo Gets Fixed (Walter's Story)

When I returned from Cleveland after a stint of traveling, I found an old friend and told him my idea: to make a bike messenger company in Cleveland. He laughed at me because he had been a messenger for years and there had been hordes of messengers in Cleveland since the 80s. But he did take the time to introduce me into the industry and I began the best job I've ever had as one of Bonnie Speed's couriers: #423. You can see their website, which even features a picture of my fellow messenger 418, who rode a multispeed Bianchi road bike and insisted on wearing jeans and boots and smoking cigarettes even in the hot summer weather. Anyways, when I came there the only bike I had was an old women's' Free Spirit cruiser that I got for $10 at Goodwill. So I needed a bike. My aforementioned friend, Ted, whose main messenger bike was his Bianchi Pista with no brakes which he still rides regularly, told me to go down to Mitch's. Actually, Mitch's shop had a name-- maybe it was Mayfield Cyclery or something of the sort-- but the man himself was so bizarre, few referenced it any other way. Mitch's shop was covered in parts-- old stuff, new stuff, cool stuff, lame stuff-- and he always had a good deal. For me, he got me a 14 speed Miyata One Hundred for a little under that amount. He sold it to some woman and she rode it very little and sold it back to him. It still had the original Miyata-brand tires on it! I said what the hell and went for it. Later I found out that, though Miyata (originally a gun factory) was not the first bicycle manufacturer in Japan (that seems to be Kajino in Yokohama which came into existence in 1879), they built the first safety bicycle (i.e. not a highwheeler/ordinary or boneshaker; here's an actual picture The bike I ended up with had really bitching triple butted tubes and cool 80s geometry (right at the time that they figured out that you also need to alter the length of the top tube in proportion to alterations in the length of the seat tube in order to get a proper fit). The other thing that it has was a lot of gears. Despite the occasional uphill, I found I really wasn't using them very much. One day when I was in between runs, I tried to shift and the front derailleur ran the chain into rather than onto the large chainring and I had had enough. I took off the front and rear derailleur and set the chain in the 52 chainring and somewhere in the cassette that would allow appropriate chain tension. Later I had a local shop convert it over to a 16 tooth freewheel by way of a shitload of spacers after I managed to bend my chain from riding with a bad chainline (it was lucky it happened at the end of the day, too: it took me twice as long to get home, having to pedal half a revolution and then backpedal to keep moving forward without throwing the chain). I stripped off the rear brake and finally felt free to ride.

While we were both messengers, Ted got his Pista and after a ride on it, I was hooked. The joy of spinning and pure inertia. The simplicity. Riding became a feeling rather than a thinking process. Oh man, I thought, I have to have a fixed gear. But circumstance didn't allow it while I was a messenger.

When I came Eugene, Oregon, and started to work for Bike Friday and built my Pocket Llama, I had a desire to do some serious mountain biking and some hardcore loaded touring in a part of the country riddled with mountains rather than the little bumps of Ohio. So I got a SRAM 3x7 hub wide a wide range cassette. I rode it for three years while the Miyata rusted in the shop. I did, however, ride it for a little while as a commuter before I finished my Bike Friday and it was then that the bike earned its name.

I had traded a friend some work on his bike for some unrelated goods and got a hair in my ass to fix my own bike. I got the front wheel out to true it and in the process managed to round a few old nasty nipples. So I walked to the shop to get some more nipples. I trued the wheel and went on a ride and PING! PING! I broke a couple spokes. So I went to the shop to get some more spokes and laced them up and started to true the wheel and ran out of nipples again. By this time I had to go to work and had to walk for an hour just to get there. I moped around all day without my bike. Finally I got home with some new nipples and spokes and stayed up late making it right. I went on a ride up the steepest hill to the nearest store for a reward (barley pop!) and suddenly felt glee again. It was then that I realized how important the freedom bestowed upon me by pedal powered transportation was and I dubbed my bike Mojo.

Despite this, perhaps distracted by the newness of my travel bike, she lay quietly alone in the shop. Then, earlier this summer, came Ben at Bike Friday, a young lad with a vicious desire to build a fixed gear. His passion served as momentum for me to build mine and thus save Mojo from her impending doom by oxidation. I had collected some parts over the years at Bike Friday but I still needed a few things. Luckily, now being in the bike industry, I had a way to cheaply secure the extra parts I needed. Meanwhile, I started disassembling all the old crappy parts off the bike, which was a couple days job to begin with. Everything was very difficult to get out; for example, I ended up using a vice to get the bottom bracket cups out and tried everything I could, including a hydraulic press, to get the quill wedge out of the fork. I still have the fork laying around in case, somehow, I can figure out a way to get the quill out. Luckily I had an alternative: a friend had a Guerciotti fork that, unlike the original Miyata, would accept standard reach dual caliper brakes. Despite that, it was heavier, but I could make it work. It was from a much larger frame and to make it work required that we cut and rethread the steerer tube. With that being done, I discovered there was a butt in the steerer tube just below where I had cut it. This required a good drilling with a rather large drill bit. Luckily, I had a whole machine shop available to me so this wasn't a problem. I should have bought a threadless headset and approached it that way in retrospect, but so be it. With the frame finished, one fateful Saturday, while helping Bike Friday customers in our quiet showroom, Ben and I assembled our fixed gears while Ted built up a new mountain bike.

I made a few trips to Revolution Cycles to show it off and turned down quite a few free car rides home just to ride that bike. Since its first few days of existence, I have ridden 868.7 kilometers and made only a few minor changes in the components that have resulted in the bike you see today. On my wish list is a new saddle and headset. But more important than that is to keep riding.

Update, March 2004: And that's what I've done: kept riding. As you can see, the bike has evolved; things added/things removed. As I've gotten used to spinning, I dropped the gearing to make myself spin more. I have gotten close to 170RPM but not yet my goal of 200. Maybe this summer. I find myself using the brake a lot less lately and I've gotten trackstanding down pretty good. Think I finally found a good riding but durable tire, but I'm still searching. The particular shade of those Vredestein's kind of clashed, too. Now if only I could get black cranks. Oh! Big revelation: riding's more fun when you concentrate on riding; I ditched the computer. I also might add I went on a couple lunch rides with the fast boys at the shop and managed to not only keep up with them, to not only give a few pulls, but to beat them all up the big hill.. TWICE! Carpe inertia!"

So the moral of the story: messengers are everywhere, gears are a burden, you're either fixed or your broken, and ride on!

This page maintained by Michael Rasmussen, a bicycle commuter.
Send an email about your fixed experience!

We support interoperability. Pages with are validated through the World Wide Web Consortium.