Commuting - What's the most unpractical bike you ever rode to work on?

For me it would have been the specialized p1. Single speed, 2.4 inch tires great for downhills but the ride home is all uphill and when I stopped mashing it stopped rolling.

fun bike for riding stairs or the neighborhood

Back in the late 80's I spent a summer in Denmark. I lived in one little town, and worked in the next one over. The family I was staying with generously found me a loaner bike so I could ride to work.

It was plastic. See here: http://www.retromoderndesign.com/others/pages/Iterabike.html

By the end of the summer, it was unrideable.... :eek: :)

http://tomtheisen.com/images/daily.jpg

The one I ride everyday. ;)

A mountain bike. Slow as hell and heavy too.

A mountain bike for me as well. A 10 year old huffy POS and a size too small.

Didn't we just have this thread?

http://bikeforums.net/showthread.php?t=284766

...snip...
It was plastic. See here: http://www.retromoderndesign.com/others/pages/Iterabike.html

By the end of the summer, it was unrideable.... :eek: :)

Love how the tires are flat in the picture.

Didn't we just have this thread?

http://bikeforums.net/showthread.php?t=284766

Hey, I'm new here! History starts with what I can remember. I sure if we went back far enough all these threads would be old, over and over again. But since I woke up this morning I don't remember much else.


What's the Kestrel made of?

Technically this is a new thread with a different topic. The other one was what was the most impractical bike you have purchased while this one is the most impractical you have ridden to work.

I would have 3 candidates.

First is one I rode in college during the last month before graduation and I was out of money. It was an old Mongomery Ward 10 speed my brother had abandoned. The frame came apart after two weeks of riding it, so I took some baling wire and turnbuckles and pulled the downtube back into the head tube and rode on. Apparently some nasty-minded guy thought this was lame so he protested my engineering by loosening the turnbuckles completely. I rolled the bike home and tightened them again, but I was unable to get the same fit. It made it through graduation but the next week, I felt the bike going soft again about a block from work. I walked it the rest of the way. At lunch I came out, stripped all the components off and threw it in the dumpster.

The second one was a favorite 10 speed of mine. But one day one of the bottom bracket bearing races blew out and there was no way to pedal. The company had a very strict lateness policy. So I stepped on the pedal and kicked the bike along like a giant scooter. Very impractical, but I arrived on time.

The third one is this.... I don't commute on it often, but I have. It's a bit too small for me so it's terrible on hills. And my commute is all hills. So it's fun half the time and no fun the other half.
http://www.pointhappy.com/gcf/GordonOnStiletto.jpg

A fixed gear. 11 miles uphill to work. Dumb. Dumb. Dumb.

A K-Mart bike. I threw it in the spring cleaning pile outside this spring, and some 'lucky' guy made off with it...

Heh, like Artkansas above, I have ridden to work on my Giant Stiletto too (mine is black and chrome though) and, to tell the truth, while it was (and still is) a little too short, it has 7 speeds and goes pretty darn quick, quicker even than the 3-speed Fuji Shangri-la beach cruiser I was using as my main commuter at the time. But I have also ridden my 3-speed Firebike 'Bling Bling' to work and that had to be the most impractical. At 8-feet long with the front tire out in a different time zone it was a little unweildly and I sat awfully low for the kind of traffic I was in, but the looks on the faces of all those commuters was worth the slow ride. Every so often, on a particularly warm, sunny day, I still ride it to work. If you're going to have a cool bike, may as well ride it as often as possible, right?

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/149/396921964_c96caf3991.jpg

Its 42lbs and has 52/12 gearing.

hmm my $40 wal-mart moutain bike was terrible. After 2 months, the rear derailur snapped in half.

My mountain bike. It was great for the trails and downhills but commuting on asphalt/cement with them knobby, soft tires is sloooooooow.

A Trek 8000 MTB. Great bike, decked out with Deore XT and the best of everything-but completely a fish out of water on the concrete. We have a lot of hills around here, and fat tires plus suspension are no good. Let a friend borrow it because his bike got stolen. He left it out in his front yard until... guess what happened? No longer let him borrow stuff, no longer a friend, really. That bike sure was great on trails, though.

Also, I've got an Electra Townie 3-speed that's a lot of fun to go to the grocery store on, but a real bear to get up these Tennessee hills with. I ride it to work every now and then just to make me appreciate my road bikes more.

A fully faired recumbent, 68 pounds and no use during the rain. The wheels would spray me with wet grit.

Huffy mtn bike with knobbies. for a brief period one summer about 4-5 years ago, before I started commuting regularly. No wonder I stopped! that was before I discovered BF and all the great advice here! I could have made it sooo much easier on myself.

Define "unpractical." Last summer I was riding my tri bike to work a couple of days a week so I could go directly to a team ride or brick. It's not exactly set up for commuting, but on the other hand, it was a lot more practical than riding my regular commute bike and having to go home, throw the tri bike on the car rack and drive to the ride.

I used to work at the same place as my dad... I started at 6pm... he started at 10pm, but we both finished at 6am. So I got a folding bike to go to work on, and then put it in his boot (trunk) to come home.

It was a 'shopper' folder, with a Sturmey Archer 3 speed hub... and it was an absolute pain in the glutes. Utterly impractical for the ride to work... I would be peddaling like mad and tootling along at 8mph tops! It was also very uncomfortable.

My 1984 Schwinn Predator 24 and my Surly 1x1 are tied. The Surly has a 36x18 gear ratio and running 26x2.5 tires.

The bmx cruiser is a quad killer, and the Surly is a calf killer.

The other day I decided I would ride a beater to school because it was not only wet out (not a problem by itself) but due to certain circumstances I would have to keep the bike outside, which made it a no-go for my expensive (to me) touring bike. I woke up in the middle of the night in a panic realizing that I had no other bikes that were actually serviceable, besides my mom's old motobecane road bike that's about 8 centimeters too small for me. I fell back asleep thinking I'd work it out in the morning, or take the bus.

At 7:30 the next morning I found myself in the garage eyeing first my nice touring bike, then an 1985 ish bridgestone hybrid that had nothing wrong with it other than a wacky but usable rear dérailleur and a severely out of true front wheel. But the wheels were 700s...

I promptly popped the front wheel out of my tourer, and onto the fork of the bridgestone. Fit great after I adjusted the brakes.

That was how I came to be riding to school with a bike that had a 40c knobbie tired crappy back wheel and a nicer new 32c slick tire front wheel :lol: :lol: :lol:

But hey, it worked.

Back in the late 80's I spent a summer in Denmark. I lived in one little town, and worked in the next one over. The family I was staying with generously found me a loaner bike so I could ride to work.

It was plastic. See here: http://www.retromoderndesign.com/others/pages/Iterabike.html

By the end of the summer, it was unrideable.... :eek: :)

Sweet Mercy Moses, that's a gem. When I first moved here, the woman we stayed with let me use her bike: a old, too-small, upright, shopping bike. It was awful. but it did have a basket in back...

Where in Denmark were you?

The first bike that comes to mind, the second bike I owned ; A 1953 Firestone,it was a hand-me-down from my father's friend's son, it had front springs,not a "springer-fork as such but a very motorcycle -like spring set-up to put it simply.It was a small frame,I was small too.I lived in a mountainous region of NYS. The bike weighed a ton but wasn't geared bad,it WAS ride-able.Much heavier and slower than my buddies' bikes;Rollfasts,Royce Unions and Belgin jobs,others too. I've seen pictures of that dopey bike in vintage sites on the net,most of my old rides live there still.I thought most of 'em sucked,I guess they didn't. The Firestone's WORST aspect was how much attention(unwanted) it recieved. I see here that the post states ..rode to work on.. I rode to school if that qualifies.Grade school was the hardest job I've had.

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/149/396921964_c96caf3991.jpg

Its 42lbs and has 52/12 gearing.

awesome.

My choices for most peoples' perception of an "impractical commute" are between my tall bike, my 16" wheeled mini BMX, or my brakeless track bike. However, each of these has its own advantages and charms, and I continue to ride them to work and school.

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/159/436156278_9593b07f79_o.jpg

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/188/422610483_f5915e4571.jpg

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/225/446708040_4b183c088f_o.jpg

One Summer I commuted in on my vintage cyclecross bike a couple of days so I could show it off to my co-workers. I was fortunate & didn't flat the sewup tires.

...I was fortunate & didn't flat the sewup tires.

Or get those cables caught on, oh, say, a telephone pole. :eek: :D

I try to keep my bikes very practical. Sometimes they get really impractical, though, due to mechanical problems.

1)derailleur equipped bike, riding in snow, snow stuck between fenders and wheels creating lots of friction. Its long reach caliper brakes don't really do much on snow-covered steel rims so braking is sometimes by foot-on-snowy-ground. At some point the freewheel quit working so I had to continue pedaling while braking, otherwise the chain and derailleurs would get snarled up. The rear derailleur refuses to shift to a smaller cog without being pushed there by hand. The front derailleur may or may not shift to the right, and will only shift to the left if kicked. Kicking is often necessary to shift the rear derailleur to the left too.

Different bike I had for a hilly commute: the headset kept loosening up which I think was largely because I was doing a lot of braking with the front brake only, while going down a steep hill. The rear brake quit working and I didn't fix it because the brake pads were almost dead anyway. Sometimes the front brake didn't work so well either because what with the wear on the pads, it needed to be tightened up a lot. I had a scary moment or two with the whole "only one weak brake, going downhill, in wet weather" thing.