$1.73 of marginal gains. Maximum childlike wonder.
I never had spokey-dokes as a kid. I could probably try to chalk that up to a sense of high-minded idealism about things looking or feeling just so, but really, I think the answer lies more in the fact that I probably wasn’t a very fun kid.
But I was aware of them – of course I was, how could you not be as a child of the ’80s and ’90s? Maybe you called them spokey-dokes or spoke beads or any number of regional variations on the form, but the basic gist is that they are little bits of plastic that you stick on your spokes.
What do they do? Very little, that’s what. There are different taxonomies within the broader genus, some of them a kind of round bead that slides up and down the spoke when in motion (these are the ones I think of as a ‘classic’ spokey-doke, but who knows, really). There are also other shapes available, like stars and love hearts.
At low speed, the classic spokey-doke makes little marimba sounds as it slides up and down. At high speeds, they whir to the outside thanks to centrifugal force. Also, they’re colourful. That’s probably the main point – a little flourish for the wheel of a child’s bike.
While the market penetration of spokey-dokes seems to have dropped off a bit over the years, there remains something about them that has proven curiously durable in my mind. Part of that is probably tied to my own changing conceptions about what bicycles are, or can be, to the people that ride them. I used to think it was to get somewhere, or to be fast. Now I realise that the ultimate goal of riding is to time travel – in the sense of winding the body clock back to a period of greater fitness, sometimes, but beyond physical improvement too, in a more literal sense. At its most pure, when your tyres go swoosh or you skid your rear wheel so it sends up an arc of dust or you carve a daring corner and feel the G forces, you feel like a kid again, with the bike as a conduit.
And if it has spoke beads on it? My untested hypothesis: surely that could only make it better.
Phase 1: Click and go
All of which is to say that I was looking for ways to optimise a new version of my own riding experience, and that of my children, with some accessories, and that’s how I found myself spending $1.73 AUD (US$1.22/EU1.03) on a pack of 36 spoke beads from Temu. Including shipping. A total investment of 4.8 Australian cents per unit! Where else are you going to find that kind of value for something that will probably outlast everyone currently on earth?! A future fossil of the Anthropocene! Practically museum-grade!
As mentioned, there are different shapes of spoke beads, and the ones I got dropped into my letterbox were chosen mostly at random – in the sense of A) me spending about five seconds on the purchase decision, B) I didn’t know what colours I’d get, and C) I don’t think I got a choice of format either. The five-pointed stars were jaunty enough, though, with sharp but imprecisely cut prongs. The colour breakdown (three red, six blue, seven yellow, eight pink, 12 green and a single weird nugget of green plastic that looked a bit like a frog) was indeed random. It was time to whack them on a bike and see if time travel was possible.
Initial impressions weren’t overly positive. Unlike the classic spokey-doke, these ones were spaced for two different spoke thicknesses. The wider of the two was loose enough that the star could slide up and down the spoke; the narrower required a firm push of the thumb to wedge in place, where it stayed put.
The critical problem with this product, I quickly learnt, is that the wider setting didn’t actually keep them attached to the spoke. A few had flung themselves off my wheel before me and my silly pink bike had even left the driveway, and my dream of rolling around with melodic pinging from my wheels evaporated.
In an attempt to assuage my environmental dread about dropping neon plastics all over the road, I pushed them back into place in the narrower indent, where they stayed. For the next few rides, I dutifully counted 36 spoke beads at the start of a ride, and 36 spoke beads at the end. Counting up to 36 is a very low bar for fun and childlike wonder: there was no auditory dopamine, and the visual appeal was getting old, too.
It was time to outsource the testing to some actual children.
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