My first foray into singlespeed-dom occurred in 1991. At the time, I was riding a Yeti FRO, blinged out with Mavic Paris-Dakar hubs and a Shimano 7-speed Dura-Ace freewheel, and Cook Brothers cranks spinning a super swank Edco bottom bracket. The bike also had a Mountain Cycles Suspender fork replete with Pro-Stop disc brake. This was my XC race bike; it weighed a svelte 30 pounds on the nose, and it sucked. It was the rolling culmination of a whole pile of bad decisions that had been made in what I can only describe as “a magpie state of mind.”
I had just moved up to the expert class and was getting blown out the back of every race, and in between races was experiencing at least one catastrophic mechanical a week. I was, as a result, kind of hating the whole mountain biking experience.
The bottom bracket bearings imploded jumping off my neighbor’s deck when the bike was a few weeks old. The cranks were creaky after that same session until the day I finally replaced them. I bent or broke a rear axle almost weekly. The chainsuck between my 34 tooth middle ring and 48 tooth big ring was constant and monumentally shitty. And the fork, Jesus. I’ve written enough about that already, but it was grim. I heard about a bike race up in Yreka, called the Humbug HurryUp, offering $500 for the first place single speeder, and even though I was barely fast enough to regularly be third from last in the local expert class races, I figured nobody else would really be dumb enough to ride a 35 mile XC race that packed in about 6000’ of climbing on a one speed and therefore I must have a decent shot. Also, the Yeti was had a set of Simplex horizontal dropouts, so the conversion was easy to rig up.
The race was to take place in July, so sometime in January I stripped the gears off, replaced the three ring circus with a 36-tooth Onza Buzzsaw, twisted up a new rear wheel around an XT cassette hub, fashioned some spacers out of schedule 40 PVC and filed down the dimples on an 18t Bendix coaster brake cog. I slapped the old rigid fork back onto the Yeti, and pedaled off into the rain. That spring, I regularly found myself mid-pack at the races, instead of getting blown out the back, sometimes, I even caught glimpses of the fast guys. My Yeti, which had previously been a creaking pile of woe, was quiet and smooth and utterly reliable. I was enjoying riding again, even if at times I was handicapped by a 17-ish mph, 120rpm top speed, and at other times feeling like I might herniate myself on climbs.
The Humbug HurryUp came and went. I did not win, but my eyes had been opened. The bike mattered a whole lot less than the rider. No matter how much money I poured into parts, those parts were more or less inert and pretty much the same when looked at from far enough away.
But, I swear to dog, I may as well be part magpie. Make some shiny new stuff, and sure enough I will covet it.
A year later the Yeti had been supplanted by the first of two Retrotecs, and I would repeatedly be seduced into slapping the newest, lightest, allegedly coolest shit onto my bikes. Often, this would have results eerily similar to all that went wrong back in the Suspenders/Edco/Mavic days. And then I’d scrounge around for something cheap and heavy and probably used, and would try not to notice how most of the time, the “budget emergency substitute” components worked better than the “maximum perceived radness” parts they had replaced.
The one speed experiment lasted for about a decade, and culminated with the Rock Lobster at the top of this article. The picture is from a review in BIKE magazine in October of 1996, and aside from the Indy fork, the bike was a testament to bling; Paul hubs, King headset, Sweet Wings cranks, titanium bars, carbon seatpost, 1.8″ tires, salsa titanium q.r skewers, natch. By the time the one speed experiment ended four years later, it was rolling Marzocchi Z3 open bath forks, 2.2″ Fire XC sneakers, a used XTR rear hub with a steel King cog, heavy handlebars, and cold forged cranks. I had to learn the lessons of the Yeti all over again.
Then I moved to the mountains, and it was real steep and real rough, and it was time to start embracing gears and suspension. And damned if I didn’t repeat the cycle of stupid bike and component choices again, again, and again.
I would love to say it’s a universal human condition, that we ALL suffer from this desire to take something that is “good enough” and then tinker and purchase our way toward perceived “improvement”, even though we would probably be better served by using all our hard-earned time and money differently. But I suspect it afflicts some of us (me, in particular) more than others. In order to spare repeating the Groundhog Day-esque spiral of times I’ve flayed myself on this topic regarding bikes over the years, I will instead offer the parable of OG, a 1976 Chevrolet C20.
A couple years ago, I NEEDED a truck, in order to haul my dirt bike around. And it NEEDED to be something just old enough that its ability to function was minimally intruded upon by computers, and it NEEDED to have a manual transmission. Because, ummm… I swear there was a solid reason at the time. Since there weren’t any 1999 F150s or just the right Ford Rangers being sold locally, I found myself pulling the trigger on OG. 115k miles, mostly straight, not too much rust, 350 small block feeding a quietly uninspiring somewhere less than 160hp through a clunky old SM465 transmission. A classic beater, reliable enough to get around, dirty enough not to care, no need to try any funny stuff. Perfect.
Except the tires were ancient, cracked, and starting to come apart. 16.5” rims. Hmmm, there are about three or four choices of tires for those outdated rims. They aren’t awesome, and they’re sort of expensive. So, what the heck, may as well get some newish 17s, add a little tasteful but subtle flair to OG, and have a whole galaxy of tire choices by comparison. Makes sense, right?
Then fluid started disappearing from the braking system. The master cylinder was one of the culprits, and was relatively easily and inexpensively dealt with – replaced stock for stock. But the rear wheel cylinders were leaking and needed to be replaced, and that meant shoes as well, and the drums probably needed to be turned but nobody local turns drums anymore, and those old drums weigh a fuckton anyway, and hell, this handy rear disc conversion kit doesn’t cost much more than the necessary brake parts, and what the heck, it comes with wheel bearings too!
Thus began a brutal indoctrination into the mysteries of 14-bolt GM rear ends best described as “fun with exploding bearings while spackling the wheel wells with gear oil”. Part of this education also involved many conversations with old Chevy whisperers who would invariably say something like “if it wasn’t really broken, why’d you have to go and try to fix it like that?” But, but, but, rotational weight, right?
This is an especially damning situation for someone like me, because there are nearly limitless options for how to fuck up a perfectly fine old truck. Almost all the stock parts are still available. AND, there’s a “performance aftermarket” with no perceivable upper limit when it comes to pouring gasoline onto piles of money and setting them ablaze. No spark? Probably an ignition module, available for about $30 (good idea to have a spare in the glove box). BUT, those old plug wires and plugs, and cap and rotor are probably pretty roached by now anyway, and what the hell, for a mere $716 you can slap an entire MSD Pro-Billet setup on there. FREE SHIPPING! Choke gave up the ghost? Pffft, ditch that tired old Quadra-Bog, dude. Get with the times, go for fuel injection! You can slap a Holley Sniper in there for about $1500. FREE SHIPPING!
And before you know it, you’re scouring Facebook Marketplace looking for wrecked new vans to scavenge for LS swaps, and making very shaky excuses to justify the cost of Tremec T56 transmissions. “Well, it’s pretty much a straight bolt-up, and there’s TWO overdrive ratios. So I’ll be getting waaaay better gas mileage…”
I was telling a friend about the mental contortions I was going through regarding OG, and she said; “So, you bought it to haul your dirt bikes, and you were complaining about not having a garage. Why didn’t you just buy a little enclosed trailer? Your OTHER car can pull it. It would cost way less. And you could just store the dirt bike inside it”. The thought had never even crossed my mind. I was completely blind to this incredibly sensible path.
A stanza from a poem by kiwi poet Denis Glover floated through my head as I tried to steer myself back toward sanity:
Elizabeth is dead now (it’s years ago)
Old Tom went light in the head;
And Quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle
The magpies said.
A purple one speed is waiting north of the border. I might be ready to start wearing the gearless hair shirt again. The company that makes it asked if I wanted to do a “custom project,” and write a story about how I used it as a blank slate to modify into whatever I envisioned it becoming. My mind went there, for a while, last fall. I imagined suspension forks and bougie cranks, toyed around with bringing the world’s most overbuilt and pointless Boost-spaced coaster brake into existence, thought long and hard about what I’d change and why. After a few weeks of clattering it around the local trails, I decided I’m going to leave it just the way it came – bone stock. Maybe I’ll swap the tires. Nothing more. It is time to try and kill my inner magpie before it eats me out of house and home.
There’s an adage floating around, usually found in the scroll along with all those other well-meaning self-help idioms, about how “no life lesson is worth learning twice.”
Yeah, well, that’s just your opinion, man. When it comes to getting burned by component choices driven by vanity or lust, I have learned this same lesson at least three times a decade since I stripped that Yeti down to its best ever version thirty years ago. And I suspect I’m not done yet.