Better safe than sorry: PR edition

SRAM is recalling a whole shit-heap of chains with its PowerLock masterlink, saying that the clever little link is susceptible to cracking on chains sold from March to August of 2009.

Pinchie just rebuilt his whole drive train, and he bought a SRAM chain, so I'm sure he's checking into this.

But so you're wondering: How and when does a company like SRAM decide to recall 25,000 chains? There have so far been four reports of a cracked masterlink.

I'm not sure about you, but I saw at least a dozen broken chains during the Dakota 50. That's undoubtedly about par for the course, and broken chains -- while they're a drag and can occasionally result in a streak of bad language, a bruised knee or an uncomfortable meeting of testicles and stem-- it's hardly one of the more catastrophic failures that a bike can suffer.

So a recall seems a bit zealous on the part of SRAM, but of course in this day and age you gotta stay ahead of the press and the negative publicity -- and the eventual golddigger who'll jump on a trend, blow a masterlink, and try to sue for a lifetime supply of Bugles.

If you're worried about your brand-new SRAM drivetrain, you can checkout the deets here.

Are cyclists litterbugs?

"I'm guilty of every sin but littering."--Soul Coughing

I have to admit that over the years I've become a bit jaded about littering. Maybe it's all the trucker piss-bombs I've had to bunnyhop on shoulders and ditches of the dirty Midwest for the better part of three decades. Years of scanning the shoulders for treasure like ditch-porn or conetop beer cans also maybe predisposes a fellow to a lighter shade of self-righteousness. After a while, the garbage just becomes a part of the scenery. That's kinda sad, I admit, but after a while you realize that it's maybe penny wise and pound foolish to worry about 12-oz bottles of redneck urine, when the Military Industrial Complex is busy spewing gajillions of toxic, atmospherically fatal cough-cough into the ecosphere, and a billion Chinese and Indians, eager to become the new Middle Class, can't wait to buy their first two-stroke Tata deathcrib.



On a long road-ride this past weekend with my pal Markney, we spent a lot of time riding along the mighty, muddy, trash-bedecked Mississippi. (This is by far the ugliest time of the year here in the True North -- when every stratum of snow-encased shit is now compressed into a single dirty wet layer with not even a fig leaf of cover. As far as you can see into the woods, there someone has been with a ziplock bag, a bottle of Mountain Dew, or a soiled pair of boxer shorts.) The backwaters and billibongs really were choked with plastic soda bottles and garbage bags, but the river was high and fast, and carrying it all away, I suppose, to the great plastic convergence flotilla in the Far Beyond, big as Texas.




Now tolerating garbage and contributing to it are two different things, and even though my personal patron saint Ed Abbey was known to toss his empties without so much as a peep from his well-lubricated and generally fire-and-brimstone scorched conscience, you know he lived in a different time, before there were 5 cent deposits in California, Utah, Delaware, Maine and a whopping 10 cents in Michigan!

There are two times when cyclists are notorious litterers. During races, when it's a first rate pain in the ass to extract a power gel or a fart bar or beef stick from your pockets and then get the gooey bastard off your finger like a massive booger or cockleburr -- always sticks to the rescue finger, then back and forth forever -- much less get it safely deposited back in pocket. I admit now that I too do it in certain high-volume races taking place on a massive two or three lane course at which there are entire teams of trash pickers bringing up the rear with their little spears and sacks -- and also by the way, karmically speaking, I'm a guy who frequently picks this shit up if it happens to be underfoot or at hand and I'm in a non-racing heart rate zone. Roadies are terrible about throwing water bottles, something I've complained about in the past -- not so much due to the actual sin of littering, but the sin of basically handing a shit sandwich to observers, passersby, pedestrians standing on their idyllic front lawns carved out of corn fields -- to watch the funny clown brigade go by pedalling there clever little machines, only to have a rain of BPA fall on them, leaking cytomax and eventually killing their livestock by sharding up in their intestines.

The other time is Homie Fall Fest, though of littering at this event I am pretty much blameless, and my mess bag still stinks like spilled flat malt liquor to prove it, and I just found a tall boy of PBR still enshrined in the cage of my singlespeed.

Anyway, all of this comes up because some clever folks over at Bike Hacks have created a handlebar bag made out of a plastic trash bag and rubber cement, which looks pretty nifty, but if my experience tells me anything, you don't want to fill this thing with urine-soaked and turd-infested kitty litter. I don't think it'll hold, so you may as well just pour that directly onto your shoeless feet on the cold floor of the basement, as I do.






Seems a shame to throw away a perfectly good tape measure though.

The Ingenuity of the Middle Classes: A Comparative Study

In a desperate bid to stay relevant, interesting, or at least busy -- idle hands, the devil's workshop! -- the Formula 1 folks have created this high-tech, "data rich" $30,000 bike. Why did they do that? Because a traditional in-hub watt meter performs all the same functions at the totally unimpressive, pre-recession price of about $1,000.


In a separate announcement, the Treasury's Tim Geithner has announced a special Public-Private Investment Initiative to purchase the F001 for all present and former AIG executives.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the planet in China, there were clear indications of why the West is totally fucked.


I'll bet he has a little wooden patch kit and a wooden pump in his pocket, too!

Wake up, sleepy head

Hibernation over. This year, the hair stays on the legs, and the platform pedals go back on the commuter bike, soon as the salt has been rained off the road and into our beautiful, saline lakes and creeks. And I swear to you, gentle reader, that you'll never see me in a pair of these -- referred to oddly as the "Adidas Classic Collection not road shoe Campus."



Not road shoe? Not buy that. Good to see that a more substantial sole is coming back into style, though. I worried about all those urban fixie hipsters in their wee little slippers. You could step on a rusty nail! And get lockjaw! Or at least a painful tetanus shot! These kicks, as you can see, are perfect for standing on top of circuit breaker boxes.

There is nothing "vintage" about all those "track shoes" you see around town. 20 or 30 years ago, there was one kind of biking shoe. It was black. Leather. Very stiff and dainty. Even a little bit douche-baggy. Sidis, if I remember correctly. I know because I shopped high and low for some, and never did find any, so settled for a pair of Pony coaches shoes that, looking back, pretty much cemented my reputation as the biggest dork between Chicago and Seattle.

Ultimate weight weenie

The fact that I needed about six terry-cloth towels to sop up the sweat on my recumbant spinning bike in the basement of the Beverly Hilton (where I am auditioning for the part of Laurent Fignon as an obese, Proust-obsessed teenager in a Spielberg vehicle about Greg Lemond traveling back in time to win three additional Tours de France, including 1999, 2000, and 2001) reminds me:

I had a friend who was a pretty serious roadie. He'd recently gotten back into racing. Having been a cat-1 masters racer in his late thirties, he'd dominated local road races in Southern California. But then he hit a plateau where he just wasn't improving anymore, and his results started to slip, and he "left" the sport in disgust. Now that sort of mindset and response to negative stimulus is not common among average genetically impaired, former-cigarette-smoking, mid-pack riders with six-pack love handles like myself, but what's even more offensive is that he came back into the sport after 10 years off for the worst possible reason: A wattage meter. Convinced that he'd topped out due to sloppy training, he felt a wattage meter was the key to his triumphant return. But he was a bit of a pinchpenny too, so he got tremendously excited about this massive Star Trekky device that you attach to your handlebars that looks like a small mailbox.

The advantage of this thing was that it did not cost $10,000 like most hub- and crank-based wattage meters. For the price of a really good bottle of Scotch, this device would crank out the numbers for even the most geeky legshaver. Based, I think, on the weight of the rider, wind speed, and even an internal altimeter and GPS, the thing was supposedly accurate to within very narrow margin of error.

"And the thing weighs 300 grams less than a hub meter!" my friend exclaimed to me, after crushing me up Ohio hill.

"So how can it possibly know your wattage without measuring any actual resistance in your drive train?" I asked.

"Simple. You just program your weight, then it calculates wattage based on speed and elevation. Uh. Look the algorithms are way too complicated for your miniature brain."

"Does it factor in your weight loss during the ride, due to sweating? I mean, it's not uncommon for me to weigh like five pounds less after a long hot ride.¹ That must muck up the data, right?"

There was along moment of silence. And then I thought I saw a few tears trace a line down his cheek.

And then he bawled like a little baby, laying in the street and pounding his fists and his Sidi Dominators into the macadam.




¹Which I promptly replace with large quantities of good American lager and a chili-dog, where available.

Huey Lewis notwithstanding, it IS hip to be square

So I had a buddy back in college who was the punkest punk rocker. When he went to bed at night, he had punk rock sheets and punk rock pajamas and punk rock dreams. In the morning, he ate punk rock flakes right out of the box, pouring the milk right in and sloshing it around, super-punk like. You could see that he was the punkest punk from hundreds of yards away, just a punk rock speck out on the horizon. There were Jewish Rabbis who argued about when the day ended and when night began, and they decided that it was night at the moment when you could no longer see just how punk rock my buddy Scott was. That's how punk rock he was.

Then for unknown reasons, maybe because of Scott's unprecedented punkness, everyone wanted to be punk rock. Ramone's t-shirts proliferated like ragweed. The surface of the Earth everywhere became dimpled from all the pogo dancing, the impact of hundreds of thousands of engineer's boots and black Chuck Taylors. Black Flag tattoos spread like some kind of awful, highly infectious skin disease. Suburban girls who used to smell like Irish Spring soap cut their hair in brutal shapes and smoked clove cigarettes. You'd see mosh pits form spontaneously at the student bookstore, stage-diving during chapel, crowd surfing during philosophy lectures. When you closed your eyes, you saw black stovepipe jeans and motorcycle jackets and mohawks and spikey dog collars and tartan plaid on the backs of your eyelids, it was like a vision burned into your retinas.

I remember thinking, "Now that everyone is so punk rock, I wonder what Scott will do to continue being the punkest punk rocker. He'll probably do something really crazy, like get a mullet and wear a leisure suit, or at least some polyester bellbottoms, and he'll start listening exclusively to heinous Canadian bands like April Wine and Chiliwack and Moxxy Fruvous." And that's more or less what he did. I saw him the next day at the student union, and he had these big white mitts on, and floppy white bunny ears with pink interiors, and the most godawful pair of hiphuggers you ever saw, and he was loudly singing all the lyrics to Rush's "2112." Everyone hated him for being so much more punk rock than they could ever hope to be.

I bring this all up because I'm pretty sure that wherever Scott is today, he's been riding an Italian fixie with track drops and handgrips dappled with stars and hearts, wearing a huge Bailey Works mess bag and kicking it in vintage Adidas Varsities, and now that all the kids are doing this, Scott is undoubtedly wearing corderoys and tweed and running a mid-80s Nishiki with dove bars and a kid's trail-a-bike (just because it looks cool), a Wald wire basket, and a three-speed Sturmey-Archer.

I want to be like Scott. I imagine you do too. Who doesn't want to be the punkest punk?

So I bought a handelbar basket today. You should too.

Rationalizing a bad attitude

Each morning, I get up with my piss boner, and go to the bathroom and look in the mirror and I ask myself: Why am I such a dick about 29ers? What's my problem exactly? Here are a few rationalizations.

• The only advantage of a 29-inch wheel for trails around here, which are tight and twisty hardpacked dirt with your gratuitous speed-bump thrown in to justify all those shock absorbers, is a larger footprint. Better traction, especially when the trail gets dry, no question about it. Although I would argue that rigid 29ers are a net zero on this advantage; no shock, no contact in chattery corners.
  
• But thanks to centrifugal/centripetal force, a bigger wheel offers more resistance in the turns, making it a bit more of a wrestling match to weasel through our bitchin' singletrack. Nothing dives into the corners like an Eastern-style "woods bike" with a shorter wheelbase and steeper headtube -- and junior-sized rims.
  
• Generally speaking, the bikes that are sold around these parts are way overdesigned for the trails we have. The local trailbuilding folks have sort of decided to build trails to match, and they've done a great job. But when you stop to think about it, it's sort of like: with all the SUVs around, why don't they design more highways to look like this:

• I like to make fun of Grant and all the other Rivendell retro-grouches out there with their leather handgrips and canvas saddlebags, but the truth is, anyone who regularly wrenches on a variety of bikes bemoans the expanding universe of standards. It still irks me when I go to the basement and see my Bontrager Privateer and my Indie Fab hanging forkless, for want of a decent fork of any kind-- rigid or shock -- for a 1-inch head tube. Splined BB spindles? Internal headsets? Feh and feh. And if you're a wheelbuilder or spend any time replacing spokes on a fleet of bikes, you know that you pretty much need to have about a half dozen different spoke lengths on hand just as a starting point. (When I am elected King of the Universe, all hub flanges will be exactly the same size. Violators will be demoted to the folding bike department.) So: Any bike or component that offers infinite adaptability is fine with me. Where does the 29er fit into this moral continuum? Well, sure, there's some interchangeability with 700c tires and rims, so that's kind of cool to get a little dirt-road crossover, although generally speaking it's only the wealthy and the insane who can afford to build, say, a set of 700c DT Swiss roadrims to run on a 29er in the dirt. It is encouraging, on the other hand, that folks who run disk brakes (who doesn't these days, except Luddites and super weight-weenies?) can swap out 29-inch wheels with their 26-in wheels. Or running a 29X26 rig is kinda sexy. I'm all for asymmetry. Except for that stupid Lefty fork, heh heh.
  
• Finally, insofar as my bike stable and workshop are concerned, it is patently clear to me that change is bad and new things are suspect. It's the same thing with rearranging the living room furniture. I liked it the way it was. It was perfectly good. Geeze.

Another one that got away...

Although my own experiments with leaving a bike pump outside in all weather have not been encouraging, surely this shouldn't stop someone from moving ahead with this ingenious idea.



Originating country? The Netherlands, duh!

A plug for a pure cycling aesthetic

I was out riding the Ciocc the other day, and I noticed that my barend plugs were mismatched. One was silver plastic, and the other was black plastic. Now this in itself didn't bother me. I've been known to wear different socks on each foot, either accidentally, or on purpose, or more often, accidentally-on-purpose -- a disposition also known as extreme laziness. In other words, I know I'm doing it, and I do it anyway. Willfully lazy, if that makes any sense. A thoughtful person might hope that asymmetry in the bike fashion world will one day supercede the Cannondale Lefty, but me being too lazy to fold socks in the laundry room -- well, that ain't exactly a bold fashion statement.

But so the next day, I went for another ride on the Ciocc. And midway through the ride, I noticed that the black plug was gone. This, of course, violates my legendary and nitpicky sense of cycling aesthetics -- the same sense of cycling aesthetics that has caused me to gripe bitterly about those scrotal saddle-bags, Dynacrap bikes, and sissy brake levers on cyclocross bikes, while everyone just stands around looking at my mouth like they don't speak my language.

Anyway, I was pleased to find the black plug laying on the floor of the garage in a sort of slurry of old transmission fluid, sandbox sand, a single mid-80s Diadora road shoe, and the broken shaft of a kickstand that would make an excellent shiv in cycling prison.

It got me thinking: Self-uninstalling plugs on my bar ends has been a longterm scourge that could use a decent permanent solution, preferably an absurdly overblown one that would require lots of time and money and effort. I'll bet Phil makes a polished, engraved Chrome-Moly bar end that installs with a torsion wrench and comes in special fixie and singlespeed models, anodized where available.


Until I receive my Phil catalog in the mail though, I thought I'd while away the hours with some DIY bar-end solutions.


Glue them in. I see no reason why I shouldn't just epoxy those suckers in permanently, other than the strong possiblity that plug fashions will invariably change in the next five to ten years, and I'll be stuck with the equivalent of bellbottoms at a time when everyone else is wearing stovepipes. Conversely, what if I have some sort of brain aneurism that turns me into a profound idiot and I want to put bar-end shifters on my roadbike? This would be the reverse of an actual situation in my garage: My Crosscheck, long since converted to a singlespeed commuter, retains -- and I mean retains, tenacious as an Amish claim of innocence--its bar-end shifters. I prefer to answer endless questions about what purpose they serve, rather than herniate my large intestine trying to get these things out.




Use wine corks. I think this is something I could totally get the Rivendell grumps excited about. Heck, they probably already have cork plugs to compliment their cork grips. But wine corks offer the splendid benefit of giving you yet another excuse to drink more. On top of that, it engenders an idea that is potentially revoilutionary: Why not use all that empty space inside your bars and frame to store your favorite beverage? Iditabike and Continental Divide legend Mike Curiak fills his tubes with white gas! (But you have to work your way up from wine and beer, I think. You can't just go straight to shooters of lantern fuel.)



Weld your barends shut. Like all those other high-end bikes with "sealed tubing," why not go ahead and finish off those handlebars with an end cap? Of course, sealed tubes are infamous for somehow allowing water inside, which you don't really notice until your frame has the displacement of a Cooper Mini. In that case, maybe you seal one side off, and then put a spigot on the other bar.



Use an actual butt plug. It's time to go ahead and step across the line of innuendo here and just acknowledge that the bar-end plug is strikingly similar to -- and , I assume interchangeable with -- the butt plug. A very brief session of research hipped me to the fact that the variety of styles and sizes is... well it's wide, to say the least. Not directly related note: One of my first gay friends claimed that he sometimes masturbated while riding his bike.



Put nose-cones on them. I realize that it's not exactly weight-conscious nor prudent to go with solid steel handlebars that could be sharpened to a point, like a pencil. But I think it should be possible to put very penetrating cone-like plugs into my bar ends, for a stylish variation that recalls the speed and precision of Madonna's boobs.



P.S. I know there are perfectly reasonable, locking plugs. But that would be too easy. And reasonable.

Giant: Big and getting bigger!

Giant Bicycles has announced record revenues, citing a "perfect storm" of... well, I guess global warming, bumper-to-bumper gridlock, fuel prices, and a tanking global economy. Between Giant and Shimano, the two account for something like 90 percent of all bikes.

But I was surprised to learn that Giant is, on the whole, somewhat more expensive -- almost twice as expensive, in fact -- at the wholesale level than the industry average.

In China, by far its largest production center, its average price for an exported bike is 100 usd, against an industry average of 30-40 usd, said Sheu.

The average export price of its made-in-Taiwan bikes is 340 usd, compared with the industry average of 222 usd.

Then again, when you think about the 10 gazillion bike-shaped objects produced by Dynacrap and Kent each year, sold in great bike shops like Target and Kmart, you realize how the numbers could be skewed dramatically downward.

Ahhh. It's been a while since I vented my spleen re: Dynacrap.

Supply and demand, my friend. Supply and demand

Whatever you might think of Trek -- the General Motors of the bike industry and all that-- they've got the muscle and the money to do some nifty stuff. And I'm not just talking about those strange TDF advertisements that feature the unshaven Lance Armstrong. (I do like "Believe," it's a cut above the cheesy and crass "Best.")

So I think it's in the spirit of "Believe" rather than "Best" that they've pioneered this little "bike gas station" in Madison. Judging from what I saw on my way up to the UP last week, I'd say there will be plenty of vacant gas stations looking for new leasees in coming months and years.

Let a million bike trailers bloom

In Denmark, Ikea is rolling out its own bikeshare program, but with an extra bonus: Their bikes will come equipped with a trailer, one of which I want about as much as I want a vintage Kosmo.com mess bag. (A lot!) Ikea says about 20 percent of their Danish customers arrive at the store by bike. (At my local Ikea, at the Mall of America, that number is more like, uh... zero. The South Metro is less bike-friendly than Los Angeles, and not nearly as pretty. I've been known to ride the Surly out that way though. The last time, in fact, was to buy a 7.5 MM hex wrench at Sears in order to take off my self-extracting Campy crankset.)



Thing is, though: My full-sized Dodge Caravan -- a behemoth in every sense of the word -- has frequently been too small to bring home what I need from Ikea.

Perhaps I need to downsize my purchases and stick to wine glasses, lightbulbs, and Swedish meatballs.

Put your cell phone to work while you ride

Sound In Motion has created a new bluetooth device that can turn your cellphone into a cyclometer. Here's the idea: A wheel sensor that is allegedly 360 times more accurate than typical sensors (and 2000 times more accurate than GPS) attaches to your bike and networks with your bluetooth-enabled celly or blackberry, thus turning that dead weight in your pocket into a useful device measuring speed, distance, and so on.


Most people who are anal about this sort of data already have cyclometers mounted permanently on their handlebars, of course, along with heart rate monitors, watt meters, inclinometers, rain guages, and whatnot. But I can see Sound In Motion appealing to my specific demographic: Half-assed weekend warriors who kinda want to know what our numbers are, but kinda don't either.

It also will appeal to the "clean lines" snobs who believe that a naked bike is a beautiful bike. That's an extreme POV that I don't agree with generally, except for what I've come to call "bikenutz" -- those unfortunate, ubiquitous scrotal sacs that hang beneath the saddle and look ridiculous.

School Daze: How'dya like to be a REAL bike mechanic?

United Bicycle Institute is a nifty mechanics' and framebulding school out in gorgeous Ashland, Oregon. Tuition for a typical course is around $1500, and there are about 500 students enrolled at any given time. Framebuilding is currently the hot topic -- courses are apparently filled for the forseeable future, in everything from fillet brazing to aluminum welding.



If you're like me, you assume you know just about everything there is to know about fixing a bike. And if you're like me, you're wrong. Way wrong. (Take UBI's mechanics' quiz if you'd like a strong dose of our ignorance, grasshopper.)

But what I really like about UBI is their companionable easy-going style. (One shop rule: no open-toed shoes! Ever dropped a shop-sized pedal wrench on your toe?) Especially as expressed in their very user-friendly spoke calculator, to which I shall forevermore direct newbie wheelbuilders asking for advice.

Pop! Goes the innertube

Of the 1000 uses for old bicycle tubes that I've now been exposed to, by far the most provocative is the gun grip.





Your guide, Tommy Potx, notes: "It may not look that pretty, but in a push, one tends not to mind."

I'm especially interested to know more about this. What kind of a "push," precisely, would you be in where you needed extra friction on your pistol grip and you had time to find an old bike tube to wrap around it?

The possible -- and long hoped-for -- decline of the bike diaper

Guerilla knitting? Sounds a bit like jumbo shrimp, dunnit. But that's precisely what's going on in Chico, California -- and we expect this thing to take off, um, regionally in the coming months.



Coming to a bike rack or stop sign near you: Knitted bike cozies, to keep your frame scratchless, gleaming, and warm!



With any luck, this trend will lead to a corresponding decline in those butt-ugly top-tube pads the fixie hipsters love so much. (Note to Fixie Hipster: So why does the "clean lines" argument apply to riding without brakes or gears, but not to putting a diaper on your bike?)

Titanium-Carbon frames: An anecdotal condemnation

Is titanium dead? Over the weekend, Byron rode a new Davidson prototype called the Hotspur. The main point of differentiation is lighter oversized ti tubes, but the bike has a carbon rear triangle.


I've never liked hybrid bikes that try to marry disparate materials together. Ask any plumber if he ever puts brass fittings over steel pipes, for example, or mixes and matches the PVC drainage conduit with the copper deliveries. Now I realize that my cranks and chainrings are aluminum, that my spoke nipples are brass, that my chain is stainless, and that my frame is high-tensile steel.

But I think it's silly to puzzle together materials in the frame itself, and it falls under the rubric of "not leaving well enough alone" or "reinventing the wheel." Also, consider the climber: The more knots you tie in a rope, the more failure points you introduce.



I'm no rocket surgeon, but if you're a reasonable person who isn't pathologically obsessed with the weight (and cost) of your bike, then titanium + carbon can never live up to the pure pleasure, dependability, and value of uninterrupted steel. The rest is an exercise in vanity, self-delusion, and eventual failure. In my infalliable opinion, of course.

How to pack a handlebar bag!

Darren Alff, the professional bike tour guy, has provided a helpful little program on how to pack your touring bags, which might have been helpful last Friday, the night before Hurl's Slick 50.

Not sure how you get to be a professional bike tour guy, but it must be tiring, since Darren has to lay down during the intro.

Don't forget: Something for self-defense!

Would you shift your suspension as often as your gears?

The gents at Bike Radar are convinced that the Scott Ransom is the state of the art in mountain bike design. The 30-pound "all-mountain" bike has trigger-shifters for its suspension, including a "traction" setting that actually reduces the travel. This raises the spectre of an old argument many times repeated, namely that suspension is not designed to keep your butt comfortable, it's designed to keep your wheels in contact with the earth.




But of course that's not entirely true with these big-hit bikes that are intended for shipping docks and Canadian bluff-hucking.

So I can accept that, although I would resort to the old El Camino law that suggests that hybrids are never going to please the pure-at-heart. Great looking ride, but the El Camino is neither a good car nor a useful truck. Seriously.


And lest you think I'm all wet, here's an interesting quote from Paul Denk, the man who designed the Ransom: "We could have built it much lighter, but then it wouldn’t have had that aggressive look — and style is fundamental in this category. "

The 7-Pound Bike: Appetizer or Entree?

By now you've heard about Gunter Mai and his 7-pound roadbike with its $15,000 wheelset.






So the question that's really burning in my mind is this: Clearly, Mai is best-of-class in the category of "weight weenie." But logically speaking, is he a big weight weenie. Like, say, a Kielbasa?



Or is he a miniscule weenie. Like, say, a Vienna Sausage, or a breakfast link?