Originally Posted by
prj71
This would be correct. But the majority of enthusiasts on this forum and many other forums for any hobby...Most are using expensive equipment...Be it cameras, Fly rods, guns, bows, skis,. These enthusiast forums, much like this one, aren't full of people posting about cheap products they bought at a department store.
There are lots of people posting on this forum that
aren’t using expensive equipment. I ride relatively expensive bikes but I never question what others are riding. People at my co-op are proud of the cheapest bikes available but I would never look down on them for riding that kind of bike.
Pretty much everything we do is bad for the environment. Just driving to work in your car is bad for the environment. Purchasing all the items from the stores that are in plastic containers or plastic bags is bad for the environment. I could go on and on...But that's a different discussion.
Yes, what we monkeys do is generally bad for the environment but that doesn’t mean you should go out of your way to make it worse. Driving a car to work? I rode my bike to work and school for over 40 years (from 50% to 60% of the time). I
didn’t put 38 tons of carbon dioxide into the air in addition to several hundred pounds of tire wear. I’ve also avoided putting hundreds…yes, hundreds…of tubes into the waste stream as well.
How does one go through a 100 patches in a year? If I have to patch, I've used the Park Tool adhesive patches but I can count on one hand how many I have had to use in the past 10 years.
By living in places where pokey things grow. The bane of cyclists’ existence out west (or near southern Missouri) is goatheads. The picture below is a relatively common sight. That’s about 10 plants. The little yellow flowers produce 5 spiked seeds per flower and each plant can have hundreds of blooms.
The green ones look like this, although these are from Sikeston, MO and are rather overfed.
The seeds dry and become very woody. They sit on the ground as a caltrop which means there is almost always a spike available to puncture something. Bike tires are just the right thickness for them to go right through the casing and into the tube. I’ve been on rides where I’ve ended up throwing away tires because I stopped counting at 60 punctures and wasn’t even halfway around the tire.