Yesterday I put the ‘Nonerini up for auction:
And I’m pleased to announce it looks like we’ve got a winner!
I can only imagine how much money we would have raised had I auctioned off something more exotic, like the Normcore Bike:
However that won’t be happening very soon, as this bike is a priceless piece of velocipedal history.
Speaking of which, like any bike dork I’ve always got one eye open for interesting bikes when I’m walking around the city, and recently this setup caught my eye:
In the post-integrated shifting era people with old bikes will often go to great lengths to get their gear controls in the vicinity of their brake levers without making a costly investment in STI or its various equivalents, and the above is a good example. While I appreciate all forms of alternative shifter, I admit I prefer mine in the more canonical locations, and as such I’ve never been interested in offerings like these from Gevenalle:
I get it, I applaud it, it’s a great alternative to costly and proprietary integrated levers, but I admit I simply can’t get past the aesthetics, and once you realize it looks like some sort of sad robot-insect looking up at you plaintively you simply can’t unsee it.
I feel the same way about the IRD Power Ratchet:
Again, it’s a fantastic alternative to something that locks you into a dedicated drivetrain and I’m all in favor of it, but I’m also a shallow and self-conscious person and lack the confidence to equip my bike with a brake lever that looks like it has a windshield wiper.
I was thinking about all this as I contemplated this particular shifter as well as the stent that ran under its raggedy bar tape, and I wondered why if they wanted more convenient shifting they didn’t just use bar end shifters instead:
They’re clean-looking, they’re easy to reach, and they don’t require running cable all the way up the bar. So why use these things instead?
Then I figured it out:
Sure, they may not take bar-end shifters, but an underappreciated advantage of the Scott Drop-In bar is that when you yoke your bike to a pole by the stem it’s that much harder to remove the bar to steal the bike:
Unless of course the thief simply removes the quill stem, in which case the bike is theirs in a matter of seconds. But today’s thieves probably don’t even know what a quill stem is, and in fact I’m reasonably certain that these days they’re only interested in e-bikes anyway.
Also, it’s no worse than locking your bike to the leg of a mailbox, which is how my own bike got stolen back when I worked as a bike messenger:
Either the box wasn’t bolted to the ground, or else somebody unbolted it while I was inside, but either way when I came out my Cannondale was gone. Regardless, as a proud member of the Bonded Trek Siblinghood, I hoped this bicycle did not meet with the same fate:
Plus, the bike sported not only the mighty Altus rear derailleur, but also my favorite chainstay protector of all time:
See?
There is no design better than function specific design.