Back to the good old way that Seattle is supposed to look and feel. Cool and damp. Rode in fog all the way into work today but it sure felt good. Short of having to wipe down my glasses time and again, there was NO ICE.
I was kind of bummed after a trip to Elliot Bay cycles a few days back. I left work a bit early to swing the Mercier over there and get their take on making it a fixie. After I got home to pick it up, I had second thoughts about bastardizing it so I took the Faggin "franken-bike" down there thinking it might make a good fixed gear bike. Turns out that converting a bike to fixed gear requires a few things.. First, the rear wheel needs to be a non-cassette, threaded wheel. This was a real bummer because the old wheel I had on the Faggin was threaded and I had them convert it to a cassette. New wheel from Elliott Bay was $180 and up. The second thing is refitting the chain to a shorter length. This means removing the front and rear shifters, cables and levers too. Finally, you remove the outer chain ring and move the inner one to the outer section of the crank and use some longer nuts to tie it all together. Bottom lione was estimated to be around $200 with the new wheel. That was a bit more than I hoped for. So my new mission is finding a double threaded track wheel on eBay for it...