My New Bike… 1986 Fuji Sagres

Hello Internet,

So this is my bike that I got off of eBay! It is a 1986 Fuji Sagres. It was a middle of the line Fuji from back in the 80’s. A quick rundown of the stats.

27″ wheels (hard to find tires for, but doable)
Genesis Triple Crank (Came from my old bike)
Suntour LePree Rear Derailler, Front Derailler and Downtube Shifters
Shimano Tiagra Brake Levers (New but came with the bike)
Dia Compe Brakes
Nitto Quill Stem
Toba Fergie Fenders (Installed By Me)
Brooks Flyer Leather Saddle (From My Previous Bike)
Nitto Olympiad Handlebars (old version of the Nitto Noodle Handlebar)
Lizard Skins Handlebar Tape (new but came with the bike)
Avenir Tires (New With Bike)
Greenfield Kickstand(Off of my old bike)

I have to say that I really love the bike. It fit practically all of the things that I was looking for in a bike. A breakdown of why I chose this bike.

1. Steel Frame
I knew that I wanted a steel frame because as far as practicality goes, there is no other material that bikes are made out of that comes close to steel. For one, steel offers a price point that definitely beats out the competition. For one, steel bikes were the main material up until halfway through the 90’s. This affords us practical cyclists the luxury of abundant used bikes to choose from. It also provides a much smoother ride than newer materials, and for non race applications, comfort is usually somewhat important. Steel is resilient. I don’t know how much my readers know about metallurgy, but when it comes to metals, steel will always provide the most reliable metal when it comes to bike frames. Steel can be fixed my many people easily practically no matter where in the country you are. If you were to fall on your bike and snap a chainstay. It is reasonable to assume that you would be able to find at least a half a dozen people in the closest town who could weld that chainstay back together. Good luck with that if you ride aluminum or carbon fiber. Yes, aluminum can be welded, but most people do not have the ability to do it.

2. Fender and Rack Mounts
If you are looking for a practical bike. You NEED these. Period, no way around it whatsoever. You can get away with aluminum, but you NEED fender and rack mounts to be practical. Yes, there are work arounds to bikes without the mounts, and I will get into that someday, but they aren’t as strong, reliable or convenient as mounts that are part of the frame.

3. Tire Clearance for wider tires
If I am building a high performance bike, chances are I am not worried about getting in tires wider than 25mm. But on a practical bike, wider tires suit you better. Whether it be for comfort, reliability, load capacity, or whatever, wider tires are important. I know I can get about 35mm wide tires (27″x1-3/8″).

4.(ish) Threaded headset
If you don’t know, a threaded headset uses a quill stem that fits inside of the fork tube. A threadless headset uses a stem that clamps onto the outside of the fork tube. First picture is threaded, second is threadless.

Even though threaded headsets are not common in this day and age, they do offer advantages over the much more modern threadless headsets that you usually see on today’s race bike. For one, they allow you the ability of changing the handlebar height EASILY. This is a big deal, especially when buying a used bike. Thanks to groups like the velominati(I will tear into them in a future post), people believe that they have to hack off all of their fork’s tube except for about 40mm where the stem is installed. It is uncool to have handlebars that are any higher than as low as possible. This is great for professional racers, but really, how many of us need that? The problem that this makes for the practical cyclist, is that if we were to buy one of these bikes, there is very little that we can do in order to raise the handlebars and make the bike more useful. Yes there are work arounds, but they can be expensive, and they are definitely ugly. Plus, with these workarounds, you still can’t adjust it while away from home like you can with a threaded headset. The other advantage of a threaded headset is that it allows you to take your handlebars off, yet leave the headset adjusted perfectly. This is particularly useful if you are boxing up your bike to fly with it to go on a tour. With a modern headset, the fork is held onto the frame by the stem that attaches the handlebars.

And now… Bike Porn

A guide to buying a bike off of eBay.

If you follow me on , you know that recently, my bike broke its rear derailler. I was riding down the street with my son in tow to grandma’s house to spend the afternoon with. I got about 3 blocks away when all of a sudden, SNAP, my rear derailler broke. And when I say broke, I MEAN broke.
As you can see, it just straight up broke.

At first, I couldn’t think of why it broke, but then my wife later mentioned to me that a couple of months ago, which I had forgotten, I broke a link on my bike, and was forced to shorten the chain. That day, while riding home, I went into my big ring/big cog combination. This combination uses a ton of chain, and unfortunately, a shortened chain has too few links to do it. This caused my whole drivetrain to jam. I remember having to force it out of the biggest cog, and this must have undoubtedly bent and stressed the rear derailler.

This luckily was not that big of a deal, because I had ordered a used bike not 2 days before off of eBay. I actually encourage people to do so. It is a great way to get good reliable bikes for much cheaper than you would at your local bike shop, who charges a premium for used bikes in an attempt to dissuade you from purchasing used steel bike and persuade you into buying a brand new, overly expensive and uncomfortable bike. Older bikes were often made out of steel, which provides many advantages, including smoother ride, easier repair ability, and more reliability.

Carbon fiber is a fragile material, and even accidentally bumping it up against something in the wrong way can crack and ruin a 2 thousand dollar frame. They also are not good for pulling trailers or using racks as they aren’t built to carry loads. Aluminum is stiff and generally reliable, but it can’t be repaired like steel can, and it provides a much harsher ride.

This is where eBay really shines for bike purchasing, because the availability of good quality older steel bikes at a low price is abundant. You can find plenty of different bikes from a 100-300 which is where I believe most people would set as a maximum budget. Keep in mind that shipping a bike is expensive, and will usually add 50-100 dollars to the final sale cost. This doesn’t make them too expensive, but know that you will have to add in more shipping than just 10 bucks. Luckily, on eBay, they post their shipping costs upfront so that there will be no surprises upon checkout.

1. Make sure you understand and are comfortable with the shipping method involved
This seller had chosen to use a shipping method that I had never heard of called Greyhound Package Express. I looked it up, and what it is is Greyhound selling space in the belly of their buses to ship large items that would normally be very costly to ship via UPS or FedEx. I definitely know of Greyhound, and it is a reputable company, so why not? It was only after this that I found out that Greyhound Package Express can take a couple of weeks to reach the destination.

The other thing that you have to be aware of and look out for is that many people selling bikes off of eBay will only allow local pickup only. So before you even start looking at the details of a bike that looks interesting, make sure that you either live near by, or that they will ship. Also, make sure you are comfortable with the shipping method. Some ship by Greyhound Express to save money, and that is a viable alternative shipping method, but it does take a longer time to receive the item as it is shipped “space available” on the bus. This means that if it is a full bus load full of people and luggage, your package waits for the next bus. Not too many people on eBay ship this way, but it is out there.

2. Do your research to find out about the bike and what it is worth.
A few quick searches on eBay and on Google can net you a lot of information about a bike. First, to find out how much that bike should be worth, search for the bike’s name on eBay to see other listings. Then, when search results come back, scroll down on the left side until you see a check box that says “sold listings” under the heading of “Show Only” This will show you the past history of all of the bikes of that make and model that have been sold. This will give you a rough estimate of how much the bike is worth.

Also, do a quick search on the internet, people are always posting information about vintage bikes, and you can find out a lot about those bikes from doing a quick Google search.

3. Make sure you absolutely know the size of the bike and that it will work for you.
A lot of people who sell bikes on the internet don’t know much about bikes and know even less about bike sizing. A lot of them will post the frame size on their listing, but many do not. Don’t be afraid to ask the seller questions. I know some people don’t like to contact sellers, but if you are interested in a bike and not all of your questions have been answered, as them. They will usually get back to you very quickly as good service sells products on eBay. Older frames usually have a level top tube, which means it doesn’t slop downward from the handlebars, this makes the standover height on vintage bikes more for the same frame height than modern bikes. This isn’t a problem, but this means make sure you know the standover height. You don’t want to buy a bike with 36″ standover when you only have a 32″ inseam.

There are a lot of bike snobs out there who will tell you that riding a bike first and making sure you get a perfect fit is extremely important, and that this can only be done at your local bike shop. I say bull s#$%. If you are a racer, go ahead, if you are the average everyday person, you can get away with a lot of different bike sizes, provided that you can at least stand over the bike. I do agree that the fit of the bike is important for performance, but obviously this blog is about practical bikes, not racing bikes. Most of the time, you can change some inexpensive parts out to make the bike fit better if it really is uncomfortable.

4. Always make sure it has mounts for racks and fenders.
Most older bikes come with rack and fender mounts, but some don’t. If you are reading this blog, that means that obviously you care about the practicality of a bike, therefor, mounts are important. Usually, all you have to do is look at the pictures to verify their existence. The yellow arrows show what you are looking for.

NYC proves that creating cycling infrastructure is definitely worth it.

If anyone has ever seen the movie Premium Rush, you can somewhat get an idea about how unfriendly a lot of the streets in NYC are to your average cyclist. While I have never been to the big apple, it is pretty obvious. A couple of years ago, New York City spent a lot of money developing advanced bicycle lanes on 8th and 9th avenue. While I am not familiar with these streets, they are apparently some of the business and most crash ridden streets in all of New York City. I have been unable to get an exact figure, but from some sources that I have read, it cost about 300,000 per mile to upgrade the roads to have these bike lanes. That seems like a lot, but for one, these bike lanes are actually protected from regular traffic, so they are somewhat like their own street running parallel to 8th and 9th avenue. So these are obviously much more costly than the 3-4 foot wide bike lanes that most of us are hopefully more familiar with. Here is a picture of what their bike lanes look like.

When NYC did this, there was a lot of controversy over it with people saying that it would never pay for itself, that the confusing nature of the new intersections would be more dangerous, and various other cons. The pros are somewhat more obvious, but to name a few would be increased bicycle usage, and decreased accidents involving bicycles and cars.

So after a couple years of this grand experiment in NYC, they have pretty much proved once and for all without any doubt whatsoever that the benefits do outweigh the cost by a lot. On 8th avenue, there was a 35% reduction in injuries involving ANY street user. Not just with bikes. On 9th avenue, it was a whopping 58% reduction. This can be attributed to the fact that all 3 forms of street users are now totally segregated, decreasing distractions and increasing efficiency. The increase in safety to me is good enough, but on top of that, revenue for the businesses along those routes reported a 49% increase in revenue, and these numbers were taken during recession years, so that it definitely something to be had.

I live in central Illinois where we don’t have any cycling infrastructure except for along some secondary streets in the very bad, crime ridden areas of Peoria. The locations of these bike lanes leave a lot to be desired, as no one really has much business in that area anyway. It has been proven that these bike lanes increase safety and revenue for the city, so I think it is about time that people started pushing their city boards to develop cycling infrastructure along busy roads to encourage bike commuting, and general bike usage.

My current bike setup… Part 2 of ongoing

So as I said in my previous post, my “cockpit” is a little bit different from most people’s. This is because I centered it around my stem, which is obviously very unique.


Tranz-X Adjustable Stem for Threadless Forks

Tranz-x Adjustable Quill Stem for Threaded Systems

This is the Tranz-X Adjustable StemI saw this a few months ago while I was looking for a kickstand for my bike. It happened to be in one of the recommended products based on what I was looking at at the time. What caught my attention immediately was the fact that it was adjustable without tools. From what I can tell, this is the only stem that adjusts without tools. I don’t know that for a fact, but I have yet to ever see another one that does. I was intrigued, and it seemed like it was cheap enough, so I bought it in the hopes that it would make my bike a little more versatile, because as I have previously mentioned, the bike that I own is set up for racing, and not really for comfort, touring, or commuting. When it arrived, I was actually quite pleased with the look. It has that classic polished silver look to it, instead of matte, painted or brushed. I like shiny things. I did notice before I ordered it that the handlebar that I had at the time would not fit into this stem, as it has an oversized clamping area, and the bar takes the classic 25.4(1 inch) handlebars.

That’s where I decided to buy the Nitto B12 Randonneur Drop Handlebar.

I chose this, because from the reviews that I had read, randonneur handlebars are set up more for comfort than standard drop bars. For one, the drops flare out, so that you can be in the drops with your arms straight, and not have to bend over so that your forearms avoid the tops of the bars. It also has curves on the straights on top that more mimic the shape of your hand that gives a little more support on long rides.

Here’s another picture, showing a different angle of the stem
As you can see, it is now almost straight up. This gives you the ability to sit much straighter, relieving lower back pain. This is awesome on those long rides when you need a change of body posture. This is also great if you are just slowly cruising with the family on a bike path, as it allows you a better view of the world around you. Keep in mind, there is a reason why racing bikes are hunched over like they are. It is just more aerodynamic. If you are riding into a headwind, it is definitely advisable to lower the stem as far as it will go, as riding upright into wind is not very fun. When I first tried the stem, I was nervous because I thought that it would be loose, unstable, wobbly, or something that just didn’t command confidence. But amazingly, this thing is bomber solid. I have even been able to change the stem position while riding, although I don’t suggest that as it does take quite a bit of balance to accomplish.

The other thing that you can see is that the original bike came with STI levers, and that I switched those out for brake levers and friction shifters. This is because I do eventually plan on having a proper touring bike, and I wanted friction instead of indexed shifters as friction is more reliable and more easily replaced. The other thing with friction is that it can be used with any gear/derailleur combination, so if you have to replace a part on the road with something that isn’t a direct replacement, you know your shifters will work. The last thing that friction has as a positive is that they aren’t finicky about adjustments, so you don’t have to super fine tune your derailleurs. I bought these friction shifters by sunrace. They were dirt cheap, and work really well. However, I will be upgrading to bar end shifters when I do eventually upgrade the frame. It isn’t anything against these shifters, it is merely that they take up room on the tops of the handlebars. I will be moving these shifters to a mountain bike where there is much more room on the handlebars for such things. From what I can tell, these are the only cheap thumb friction shifters made today. They were common when I was a kid, but not these days.

Sunrace SLM10 Friction Shifter Set

The brake levers are quite good as well, they serve their purpose with no issues whatsoever. One thing that I really like about this brake levers is they have a quick release that allows them to open up the brakes even more when changing a tire, making tire changes just that much easier. They are labeled as from a company called Origin8, but they are actually made by tektro, so you know you are getting quality levers.

Origin8 Road Aero Bicycle Brake Levers, Standard, Silver/Black

Aosom Elite II Trailer. The best child bike trailer/stroller for the money…

Aosom Elite II 2 Child Trailer/Stroller.
One of the biggest problems that people have when it comes to bikes is what to do with the kids that are too young to ride their own bikes. The obvious option is to get one of those ultra cheap seats that attaches behind the rider in which the child can sit in and be strapped down. I will say this about those… If you really can’t afford anything more than those seats, then by all means, get one. But I would not ever recommend one of those seats to anyone otherwise. I would highly recommend a bike trailer to pull behind your bike. They are a little pricier than a seat, but they offer so many advantages that it really becomes obvious that they are by far worth the extra expense.

The first reason why I do not suggest getting one of those seats is that they are cumbersome and awkward. First off, you have to put your child in the seat before you get on your bike. Unless you have a women’s step through frame, and you’re like me, you have to lean the bike over to get your leg over the top tube. This has caused me a few problems. When you lean the bike over, your kid doesn’t like it. If you don’t want to lean your bike over so far, your second option is to swing your leg over the seat, which of course can end up with you kicking your child. The second issue with those seats is that they really change the way that the bike handles on the road, and not at all in a good way. For one, it makes your bike very top heavy, because you are adding 30 pounds+ of weight very high on your bike. This makes turning more awkward and less stable. The other problem is that many kids like to move, and when they start swinging their weight from side to side, it tends to make your bike swing from side to side. Not much fun in my opinion. The other issues is that it negates the possibility of a rack, so therefore, you won’t be able to run errands with your bike, because you wouldn’t even be able to wear a backpack, because it would be shoved up in your child’s face. The last issue that I have with them is that in the hopefully unlikely event that you crash, or get flung over your bars, or fall or have any kind of accident, your child will be falling from quite high up down into the pavement. Not exactly the most safe place for a child to fall from.

So from there, the other option is the bike trailer. This is the option that I recommend. A lot of bike trailers are able to be converted into strollers when you reach your destination so that you can continue to have your child seated while on foot. This is great for the parents who like to bike to a store, or the zoo, or any other place where you would be doing quite a bit of walking after getting there.

So you may now be wondering what trailer out there would I recommend and why. In comes the Aosom Elite II 2 Child Trailer/Stroller.

This baby has made my life so much easier. First off, as the name implies, it doubles as a trailer and a stroller, so that is obviously a great feature. You would actually be surprised by how many trailers don’t come with a stroller, and you have to buy the stroller option extra. This is especially true of high end trailers, where all of the extra features are add ons instead of included. I also love how the stroller wheel attaches at the front of the frame instead of at the end of the trailer arm, this makes it so much more compact when navigating in the mall or in stores. You can see in this picture where the wheel is mounted.

This thing rolls very smoothly. My wife and I daily ride 20-30 miles while I am pulling this trailer. It is awesome for bringing the family together. You will feel it behind you, especially uphill, but unless you are not an educated person, you will realize that if you are carrying 70 extra pounds, you’ll feel it no matter what the design is. The most expensive trailers will still be felt. The transformation from trailer to stroller is easy. You can even do it with your child in the trailer. When you disconnect it from the bike, just lean it back. Your child won’t fall out, they will just be on their back for a few seconds as you pivot the trailing arm under the trailer. Note, make sure when tipping it back that you don’t have the stroller wheel on the back mounts, because it won’t tip very far. This picture shows where you stow the stroller wheel when not in use.

Now, some people have also mentioned that trailers have issues with getting through doorways. This is true. But what do you expect it is a double wide stroller after all? To make this easier, I never even use the wheel guards that come with it( that are these bars that go on either side that protect from things hitting the wheels). They have never even been on the trailer. I know where the trailer is, so I don’t feel like I am going to clip a street sign and get it caught. It is up to you, but I am just telling you what I do. With the fender guards off, it fits through my front door at least. I can tell some narrower doors may be an issue. The bars that serve as the parking brakes are a little wider than the tire, so I took a hacksaw and cut off the excess to make it less likely to hit something. I don’t fault Aosom for this, it is a double wide trailer. I don’t have a picture of the bars that I am talking about, but it is a bar that presses against the tire to act as a parking brake so that it doesn’t roll downhill. They stick out a little farther than the tire, by maybe 3/4″ on both sides.

It mounts to the big really easily. It comes with a little hitch that you slip onto the axle on the outside of the rear dropout, then the trailer slides onto the hitch and is latched in place by a locking pin. Then there is a safety strap that goes around the frame of the bike in the almost impossible event that the hitch breaks.

You can also see in the picture that it works just find with my Greenfield Kickstand

As far as putting together and taking apart. It is pretty easy. The directions are funny, and unhelpful, but it doesn’t take much to figure it out. This won’t collapse in 5 seconds like a regular stroller, but it isn’t a regular stroller. If you want more ease of dissassembly, spend more for a more expensive trailer. You are getting a great deal on this trailer, I really couldn’t say this enough.

Words to the wise. If you like to go out of town with this trailer, expect wind to cause delays. All trailers are going to be huge wind catchers. It isn’t this model, its the product type in general. I only say this so that you will give yourself more time to get somewhere. Running around in town, wind will be minimal, so it shouldn’t be an issue. I pull this with a road bike, so I am constantly pushing the envelope as far as speed is concerned. I will also say this, if you have a geared bike and a single speed, opt for the geared bike, it will make life easier when going up hills. Some people complain about helmet clearance and bla bla bla, but honestly I don’t make my son wear a helmet in this thing, the steel bars are stout, and the frame is stiff, its a roll cage that will protect your child, its bombproof. And if you think that a helmet will save your child if you got rear ended by a car, I suggest you really start to look into the research that has been done showing how ineffective bike helmets really are. Your child does not need to wear a bike helmet while riding in this thing. Would your parents have put a bike helmet on you? No, get real.