After gushing all over the Faggin (a phrase I never thought I’d type) recently, this past Friday I ushered in the weekend astride the freshly-105ed Milwaukee, and wouldn’t you know it, that bike felt fantastic too:
To me, the appeal of the Milaukee is its staunch conservativism. It’s steel, yet not ostentatiously so, since it has lugs. It uses 32-spoke wheels and has no crabon, but it has a modern 11-speed drivetrain and a threadless steerer. It has a sloping top tube, but it only slopes a little bit. And it has medium-reach brakes–not the short-reach necklace clasps you find on race bikes, and not the great big long-reach barbecue tongs you find on Rivendae. They’re just wide enough to allow a 30+mm tire or a pair of fenders, but still short enough you might mistake them for shorties at first glance. Really, unless you just hate road bikes on principle there’s not really anything about the Milwaukee to offend your sensibilities, whatever they may be. If it were human, it could easily make a living modeling clothes for the Gap, and I mean that in the best possible way.
Then on Saturday morning I had some stuff to do in THE CAR THAT I OWN, and with the rain due to arrive at about mid-day I decided to take the ol’ AMPer along with me and make a stop at Cunningham Park, unquestionably the finest singletrack west of the Cross Island Parkway:
And also the most lung-like in probably the entire tri-state area:
[PDF. They’ve added lots more trails since this map was made, too.]
The light, agile AMP was immediately at home on the tight, twisty trails, though after years of riding singlespeed mountain bikes and then the Jones with it’s single-ring clutch derailleur drivetrain I’d forgotten all about chain slap. Also, the hiss mentioned in the Mountain Bike Action review Paul included with the bike was more apparent than it had been on my first ride:
“Hard use causes the shock units to suck minute amounts of air past the )-rings–not enough to cause fading, just an annoying hiss on big hits.”
This is because, like a New York City apartment, Cunningham packs a lots and lots stuff into very little space, and so every few feet you’ll find another “trail feature” to get the bike’s joints working–and hissing.
Towards the end of that first ride on the AMP I’d also started having some issues with the chain mysteriously jumping from the middle ring onto the grandparent ring on climbs, which was odd since the drivetrain had been working reliably until then. Before heading to Cunningham I’d lubed the chain and made sure the gears were adjusted, but I soon found that the problem was still there–and in fact it was pronounced enough that it seemed pointless to continue the ride. Clearly I’d need to get to the bottom of this, but in order to fully unleash my idiocy upon the bike I’d need tools and spare parts and all that kind of stuff, and so for the time being I had no choice but to return to the car.
Feeling acutely the effects of velocipedus interruptus, as soon as I got home I exchanged the AMP for the Homer, intermittent rain be damned:
Upon reaching the village of Hastings-On-Hudson I found a protest underway:
I see no reason to contaminate this blog with politics; suffice it to say I think we’re fortunate to live in a country where we get to choose the president, and we’re also fortunate to live in a country where the people unhappy with that choice we get to walk around with signs. However, I do have a problem with this particular sign:
I mean that’s a tiny piece of cardboard, barely enough to air even a single grievance, so even if the amount of wrong does exceed its dimensions that in itself is woefully insufficient to convey a sense of enormity. For this reason, the sign’s diminutive size completely undermines its point–unless the grievance is literally that she does not have enough carboard at home and this little scrap is the best she could come up with. But in the age of Amazon I find this difficult to believe. If anything we’re living in a Golden Age of Cardboard, and one can only imagine how much more powerful the protests of the 1960s would have been if there had been this sheer abundance of excess packing material.
Anyway, whatever may be wrong with the world, or with the AMP, or with anything else, there wasn’t a single thing wrong with the Homer. Even the rain couldn’t dampen my enthusiasm:
And no annoying hiss!