It resonates like striking a steel bridge support with a sledgehammer...which is to say; yeah. Quite a bit. Despite my travelling lifestyle that has landed me in Haiti, Baghdad, and Kabul through the last 8 years, I have maintained an ever-present fascination with things bicycle. Working on bike parts themselves is as fun as riding the things to me, if you throw in a fine Belgian ale probably better than riding. The satisfaction of fixing the very thing that moves you from place to place is sublime, something that with today's electronics-infested automobiles is no longer very practical for most of us. I love the feel of bearing grease and placing those shiny cleaned bearings back into their races for the first time, the twang of a just-right tensioned spoke. Spinning the properly adjusted cranks before attaching the chain and feeling the silky smooth rotation carried on by the weight of the pedals, it's all magical.

I can't imagine anything I'd rather do when I finally get to hang up the fed work in about a decade than fix and maybe make bikes. There's just an altruistic quality to it, that you're working on something that will make someone happy, it really makes me think it's a low paid but higher calling. The ultimate; to take tubes of raw metal and shape them into a personal conveyance capable of ferrying one across thousands of miles safely and enjoyably, that would really be the top for me. Hopefully my retirement will suffice to allow me to devote my time to such pursuits, and feel as if I have contributed a net positive. Bikes are truly wonderful creations, and the meticulous dissasembly and repair of them is certainly an activity of great worth, despite the value modern society places on it.

I was thinking along similar lines as yours recently when I detail-cleaned my road bike in our tiny Arlingon, VA apartment kitchen, with my tools and workstand deployed. Despite having packed up my entire shop for probably 4 years or more, it's still such a pleasure to wrench on my bike. I think we're in good company here on C&V, with lots of fellow tinkerers who would prefer rebuilding their bottom bracket to find a mysterious creak than go to a football game. The shiny wink and silky feel of freshly polished aluminum, the smell of tubie cement, the knowledge of properly setting the toe in on a brakeset, these things are like our catechisms as we strive towards the embodiment of cycle knowledge. Our benign addiction is unparalleled in the myriad ways it can expressed. Trolling C&V and stumbling across the religeous fervor associated with the proper way to clean old pitted chrome one could be excused for thinking us a mad, crazed group of acolytes, worshipping at the twin altars of vintage Campy and Shimano.

I guess it's one of the activities I would prefer to define me, as opposed to my work or some of my other pursuits. Even in Afghanistan, ferrying diplomats through the steets of Kabul, when I'd see an Afghan through the armored glass on an ancient rod-brake 3 speed I would wonder; where does he get that thing serviced? Would I be able to improve the shifting on that thing for him? I think one of the most evil things perpetrated in the wars has been the use of bikes stuffed with HE in the tubes as anti personnel weapons.

To me they are kind of, if not holy items, maybe just guileless ones, like a friendly dog waiting to see his owner. Bikes need our care to survive the dry, dust, wet and heat of the world. Bringing a forgotten and downtrodden one back into the world of the living is an incredible joy. Yeah, I get your gist. I think most of us do.

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