The Bike

The Bike part 2

Good things come to those who wait and wait

After a long summer of waiting D.H. has received his Dream Bike! Full Carbon Custom Serotta Meivici, With Zero Gravity brakes, Bontrager XXX lite Carbon Clinchers and Profile Carbon Aero bars to boot.
Now if C.S. gets here next week we will have two of the sweetest bikes that you have ever seen.

Sorry I'm having some trouble with blogger I'll load the pictures as soon as I can. But trust me the bike is way cool!

The Force is With Us!

New arrival from Orbea is an Onyx dressed out in the new SRAM Force. Looks sweeeet and shifts even better. The double-click design is very innovative and works smoothly.

Maximum Style Points

It looks like Highgear Travel group leader, Steve Jarrett, climbed Alpe d'Huez at this year's edition of l'Etape du Tour with his helmet on backwards. Classic.


We can't wait to order a poster-sized version of the Real Deal here.

An Endangered Breed

Are bicycle messengers becoming an endangered breed?

Grapheon, a graphic design firm in Portland, is kind enough to keep a bowl of sweets in its reception area, not for peckish clients but for the ravenous bicycle messengers who dash to the front desk bearing deliveries. These days, however, the bowl is dusty and the Tootsie Rolls stale. Most of Grapheon's clients prefer to e-mail their artwork.

Look around: bike messengers, the freewheeling mavericks whose tattooed calves and daredevil stunts once defined urban cool, are slowly vanishing from America's streets. In New York, the hub of the messenger world, the number has skidded from 2,500 during the dotcom frenzy in the 1990s to an estimated 1,100 today, according to Joel Metz, who runs www.messengers.org, the website of the International Federation of Bike Messenger Associations.

The reason is straightforward. High-speed internet, PDF files, digital photography and digital audio have been eroding bike-messenger revenues by between 5-10% a year since 2000, or so reckons Lorenz Götte, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Zurich (and a former bike messenger himself). The revenue slump has sent wages tumbling. In 2000, messengers in San Francisco could make $20 an hour. Now the average is closer to $11.

Bike messengers have survived dire prophecies before. In the 1980s, doomsayers had predicted that the fax machine would push the profession into oblivion. Faxes did indeed carve a big chunk out of the business, but messengers hung on, thanks both to the poor quality of faxes and to new technology, such as pagers, which allowed prompter dispatch.

Keeping up with the download-and-print world will be trickier. One strategy is specialisation. The legal system still relies on original documents, so some messengers cater to lawyers by offering benefits such as serving subpoenas and filing papers in court. “They are almost paralegals on bikes,” says Mr Götte. Others focus on deliveries that cannot be made electronically—architects' blueprints, for example, or take-out meals.

Paradoxically, although their long-term prospects look wobbly, the messenger subculture has never been stronger. Their grimy allure is celebrated in books, films, festivals, and even trading cards. Last year's Cycle Messenger World Championship, held in New York, drew 700 competitors from 30 countries. Perhaps this signals a resurgence. More probably, it reflects the urge to honour a tradition that is beginning to slip away.

— The Economist, 29 June 2006

Message of the Day

“When the spirits are low, when the day appears dark, when work becomes monotonous, when hope hardly seems worth having, just mount a bicycle and go out for a spin down the road, without thought on anything but the ride you are taking.”

— Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930), Scottish author famous for his Sherlock Holmes detective stories

City of Chicago: Bike 2015 Plan

Looking for some interesting reading? Check out Chicago's recently unveiled Bike 2015 Plan (PDF). The plan recommends projects, programs, and policies to encourage cycling around the Windy City. Three years in preparation, the plan documents 150 strategies to achieving Mayor Daley’s goal of making Chicago the most bicycle-friendly city in the USA.


Along the streets and boulevards of Chicago, vinyl banners will soon feature statistics compiled using data from the US Departments of Transportation and Agriculture showing the practical, non-polluting, and affordable benefits of commuting to work on a bicycle. For instance, the average cost of owning and maintaining a car is $9,964 per year versus $68 for a bike.

Bike Fitting Services at Highgear

The moment of truth is when you climb on your bicylce and click in. In an instant you’ll know that this feels miles beyond your old expectations of fit. Your bike is nothing less than an extension of your body, so ensuring a proper fit allows you to get the most out of your bike. Would you run in a pair of shoes that don't fit? Click here for more information, then give us a call today and schedule a time for your personal fitting.

Trek's latest Mad-one 6.9

From cyclingnews.com

Yaroslav Popovych's Discovery Channel Team Issue Trek Madone 6.9 SSL

We first heard a few weeks ago that Trek was rolling out a super secret, super light climbing bike at Le Tour, so just before the start Cyclingnews collared Trek's team guy Scotty Daubert in Strasbourg and put him in the journalistic equivalent of a full-nelson at the Discovery Channel's team hotel. We let him go when he agreed to give us the first reveal of Trek's 2007 Madone SSL 6.9. With the help of Discovery Channel's team wrench Chris Van Roosbroek, Daubert rolled Yaroslav Popovych's 6.9 SSL out of the bowels of the team truck for our exclusive first look.

According to Daubert, the Madone SSL 6.9. is the only bicycle frame in the world that uses Defense Grade High Modulus Carbon fibre, a special grade that is not available in Asia. Starting with this new material, Trek creates a hybrid laminate of its proven OCLV 55 Carbon with the new OCLV HM Carbon and builds it into what Trek claims is the world’s first sub-900 gram, horizontal top tube frame. After picking up Popo's bike, Cyclingnews can attest to the fact that the complete bike is incredibly light, close to 7kg according to Van Roosbroek.
Daubert explained that, "Popo's bike, which is a 56cm, weighs 890 grams ready to build, with seat collar and cable bosses, without the fork."

That's substantially lighter than Trek's previous benchmark, the Trek Madone 5.9 SSLx of 2006 that Lance Armstrong rode to his seventh Tour victory. How did Trek engineers get the new Madone 6.9 SSL so skinny? Daubert explained, "Our engineers looked at every single part of the frame to achieve even greater maximum weight reductions than before. For example, they created new rear dropouts and housing stops are half the weight of the previous versions. And the custom machined bottom bracket and head tube inserts from the SSLx are used. Above all, Trek now uses a true Defense Grade High-Modulus carbon fiber that is now molded instead of roll-wrapped in both the down tube and seat tube. As if all that wasn’t enough, to even further reduce weight, we also pursued new paint technology called "Low Solids" that is 20 grams lighter than before."

Daubert pointed out that, "Until now, only frames with sloping top tubes have gone under the 900 gram bar. But with the Madone 6.9 SSL, Trek is able to achieve this with a traditional frame configuration without compromising strength, rigidity or safety thanks to new OCLV HM Carbon. And don't forget that the bikes that purportedly get to the sub-900 gram weight level are all sloping designs, that require a long seat post that adds back a lot of weight. Our Trek Madone SSL 6.9 is the one bike that gets to the sub-900 gram weight without using a sloping top tube design."

Tour De France Google Maps Live Tracker

use this map tracker to find out the current positions of the race leaders as well as live data for selected drivers by a company called SRM. The position is currently computed by the distance cover but the geodevelopers behind this tracker hope to have exact GPS datasets online soon.


Tour De France Google Maps Live Tracker