Hand (Tool)

PHOTO: Mauricio Orantes

EDITING: Me

On Hands, Tools, and the Value of Work

I usually work alone when I work on my bicycles, in part by design because I enjoy the quiet, and in part because it’s not usually a job that requires two people. As a result, I have never put much thought into how I perform the work, or why I do certain things the way I do. I’ve learned to work – or I should say, am learning to work – in the way that best suites me. It’s a process that demands little active self-reflection, just trial and error. And error. And error.

Recently, however, I have been helping a friend work on some of his old bikes, and I find that my work style is under some scrutiny. I’ve been told that I am very “creative” and “inventive” in my solutions to problems, and I have been gently critiqued for the fact that I don’t, as a general rule, use power tools.

While I would like to agree that I am creative in my problem-solving skills, I rather think that my way of working is, in fact, so simple as to be uninteresting, and that my creative problem solving is merely a function of the fact that my tools are often either simple or improvised out of necessity, rather than any great degree of creativity or inventiveness on my part. I can’t afford a lot of expensive or specialized tools, so I only buy tools when I absolutely need them, and I’m always looking for ways to make one tool perform multiple functions.

As I’ve mulled over my friend’s observations and my own reactions to them over the past few weeks, I’ve realized that my way of working is due in large part to watching my father work, and from spending a great deal of time knocking about in my grandfather’s garage. From my father I learned patience and swear words (not mutually exclusive, mind you), and the truism that there is always more than one solution to a problem. From my grandfather’s garage (sans grandfather, who died when I was very young) I learned the value of disorganization, organization, improvisation, and thoughtful planning, all mashed together into a mélange of competence, experimentation, thrift, and precision.

Also from my grandfather, or rather his tools, I learned to be distrustful of anything I don’t power myself. All of the electrical gadgets or power tools in my grandfather’s garage were broken. Motors had burned out, circuits had fried, wires had corroded, switches had broken, etc. All of the hand-powered tools, however, were all still in perfect order. Hammer and axe handles had been replaced, wooden sheaths had been fashioned for handsaws to protect their teeth, moving mechanisms had been carefully oiled and wrapped in rags or plastic bags for storage.

As a kid, I had my own set of hand tools, which I employed on any number of non-threatening and largely non-functional projects, most of which ended in frustration (although I now know how valuable this was). Now as I work on my bicycles, I find myself able to judge the stubbornness of a stuck bolt or screw by applying pressure in just the right way with a wrench or screwdriver. I rarely strip a bolt or screw, and in fact, I find it much easier to ruin a project with a power tool than a hand tool. I can usually tell when I need to let up the pressure, and I can also usually tell when I’m going to need to improvise a solution beyond the simple tool I have in my hand. I have a pretty good feel for when the hacksaw is really biting, and I can usually tell when the file or rasp needs a little more pressure on the outside edge.

Does all this make me a master project-doer? Hardly. But whether it’s bikes or some other project, I know that I feel more connected to my work because I use the strength of my hands and arms, and the leverage of my elbows and shoulders, to accomplish it. And if I can improvise a solution without buying another tool, I won’t deny that I do feel some small sense of pride, and the impression that maybe my grandfather would have approved.

As I mash my way through repairs and restorations, and even basic maintenance on my bicycles, I am constantly grateful for the lessons I’ve absorbed, the mistakes I’ve made, and the modest successes I’ve earned with only my two hands and my small collection of tools. It’s further proof for me that the bicycle, with its relatively simple design, ease of maintenance, and accessibility is not only a machine to move our bodies through space, but a mechanism by which we can move ourselves in perhaps even more fundamental ways. 

The Foolish Scorchers

A scorcher and his bloomered mate,

Each mounted on a "bike,"

Bore down upon an old toll-gate

That stretched across the pike.

SOURCE: Chicago Tribune, 12 July 1896

The View from the Sidewalk

Or, why Americans were once-upon-a-time in love with the bicycle, and why they should be again.

The argument that bicycles are not a viable form of transportation in our auto-oriented culture is predicated on one basic assumption: bicycles are car replacements. As such, they compare rather unfavorably: they can’t carry as much, they’re slower, they require more effort (there are at least twice as many good counter-arguments, but I don’t think I need to enumerate them here).

In all of this, we should keep in mind that bicycles, at the moment of their innovation, were not viewed as car replacements because there were no cars.  When bicycles came into widespread use, they were an alternative to walking, streetcars, horses, and horse-drawn vehicles.

Imagine that, by some quirk of fate, that all of the necessary technological convergences required to innovate the automobile never happened. The car was never invented, it never entered our culture, it never occurred to anyone. It’s a stretch, but bear with me.

Without our cars and buses, what options would we have for daily transportation? The lack of possibilities is somewhat startling. Walking becomes the cheapest and most accessible mode of travel. Horses are expensive to buy and maintain, and streetcars can only run on tracks, and thus cannot go everywhere. For a great deal of our daily travel, we’re left with only our own two feet to get around.

Imagine then, what an impact the bicycle would have on a pedestrian culture. Suddenly, our possibilities for independent travel seem endless. We might think something like this, which appeared in the New York Times in 1881:

“The Future of the Bicycle,” 26 June 1881

“Upon the conditions of practice and fairly good roads the bicycle is a practicable and practical vehicle….  Its superior efficiency as compared with walking is also strictly under physical laws. It converts reciprocal into rotary motion…. The movement in walking is continuous only in one sense, being broken every time the foot strikes the ground; the wheel, on the contrary, has an uninterrupted motion…. The special heat and fatigue of the feet, noticeable most in warm weather, are also avoided, and the swifter motion produces a little breeze for cooling…. At first, the riding is itself the end sought, and the satisfactions and physical benefits therefrom are ample justification for seeking that end.  But the strictest utility is reached when, having to go somewhere, one chooses the bicycle as the efficient instrument for going.”

Incidentally, and apropos of my earlier post about the state of our roads, the article goes on to conclude that increased advocacy for “very smooth roads” with be “one of the most valuable offices of the bicycle in America.”

If there’s a point here, it’s this: when you consider all of the modes of transportation available to you, stop thinking about it from only one point of view. Instead of comparing bicycles to cars, compare them to walking, which is pretty much the only option left to us if we take the automobile out of the equation. With rising fuel costs, crumbling infrastructure, and continuing economic downturn, a lot of people are finding that they’re using their car less, or that they simply can’t afford to drive or own a car at all. In fact, there are a lot of people, most of them hidden from those of us in a comfortably middle-class position, who are not a part of America’s car culture because they simply can’t own a car. These are the people we need to get on bicycles, because for them, for all intents and purposes, it’s still 1881.

The Greatest Safety

SOURCE: New York Times, 20 June 1891

The View from a Moment, 1945

In 1945, the Schwinn Company, then at its zenith, produced a 50th Anniversary book to commemorate its first half-century in business. It was an interesting moment for the American bicycle industry. The first bicycle boom of the 1890s and early 1900s had died away by the 1920s, when the automobile became the new must-have item for middle class families. Although not quite yet relegated to the toy chest, the bicycle during the 1920s became an accessory, rather than a mode of transportation.

By the 1930s, as the excerpt below points out, more adults returned to the bicycle as a useful vehicle during the Great Depression. In 1945, with the war either just over, or soon ended (there is no indication when in 1945 the book was printed), the future of American transportational bicycling was by no means certain. The era of expressways and freeways and urban centers hacked-up with on- and off-ramps and overpasses was still to come. There was, in the moment this book was produced, a real potential for the bicycle to return to the center, or at least closer to the center, of American life.

At the same time, Schwinn and other manufacturers knew that the juvenile market was their largest and most consistent. Driving a car was already seen as a badge of adulthood, and bicycling was becoming widely regarded, as the excerpt also points out, as a sort of apprenticeship for the greater responsibility of driving a car.

What emerges is a curious combination of optimism about the future of bicycling in America (it is a Schwinn publication, after all), and a sort of grudging acceptance that the first real age of the bicycle has well and truly ended in America.

From 50 Years of Schwinn-Built Bicycles: The Story of the Bicycle and its Contributions to Our Way of Life. Chicago, IL: Arnold, Schwinn, and Co., 1945.

"The bicycle with the big basket has long been a familiar sight in our streets.  This short distance delivery is inexpensive; it requires no motor fuel; its tires last so long they are discarded because of age deterioration more often than because of wear. The investment in the cycle is small and with reasonable care it lasts indefinitely...

The bicycle is the transportation of our children and our youth... It is cheap, pleasant, safe and healthy transportation. But for the youngster, it is far more than that. Every normal boy and girl wants a bicycle... In our age of mechanization, mechanical devices have a constantly increasing interest for our children, and nothing satisfies that interest so much as the bicycle... It teaches children the rules of traffic control and safety and conditions them for the greater responsibility of driving a motor car later on...

The great depression of the 30's brought a re-awakening of adult interest in cycling, born perhaps of a desire for simpler, saner living after the strain of the frantic 20's. That interest has grown constantly and bids fair to become an important factor in adult recreation and transportation. Factory yards, like school yards, have ever-increasing numbers of bicycles, during work hours. Workers who live within cycling distance of their work, are beginning to realize the folly of driving their motor cars comparatively short distances to and from work, and subjecting them to deterioration brought about by standing out in the dust and baking heat of summer...

Cycling for health will do much toward relieving the nervous tension of modern living and overcome the debilitating effects arising from the convenience of modern, mechanized transportation, both public and private...."

Comedic Interlude, 3 of 3

The Bicycle in the Role of "Home Exerciser" -- 3rd of 3 in a series.

7. "Now it is plumb and everything is well."

8. "But he has had enough exercise for one day and it's too late to go out."

SOURCE: Chicago Tribune, 20 June 1897

Comedic Interlude, 2 of 3

The Bicycle in the Role of a "Home Exerciser" --2nd of 3 in a series

4. "The saddle must be lowered."

5. "While I am about it I might oil the chain."

6. "Harder to replace than I thought."

SOURCE: Chicago Tribune, 20 June 1897

Comedic Interlude, 1 of 3

The Bicycle in the Role of a "Home Exerciser" -- 1st of 3 in a series:

1. "Now I'm ready for over the hills and far away."

2. "I ought to have done this pumping last night."

3. "Are all the nuts tight?"

SOURCE: Chicago Tribune, 20 June 1897

Ride of Silence?

I have essentially the same question as in my post below. Does the "Ride of Silence" to honor bicyclists injured or killed while riding on public roadways actually marginalize the bicycle as a legitimate form of transportation? If we act like an oppressed minority, do we not just confirm our status as an oppressed minority? Do such events (and Ghost Bikes, too) actually do anything to reach out to the non-bicycling public, or are they events that the bicycling community does for itself? If the latter, does it only further isolate, embitter, and/or enrage bicyclists, perhaps encouraging them to take their next negative encounter with a driver to the next level?

Further, these events bring accident victims posthumously into a bicycle "community" that they may not have been a part of when alive. Does making them martyrs to a cause they may not even have believed in (one doesn't need to be dogmatic to get killed while riding a bicycle, after all) really do proper justice to their memory? Wouldn't that time and energy be better spent volunteering for the local bicycle advocacy organization or bike kitchen?

My question at the end of it all is just this: Why are we doing this? We say we want bicycling to be inclusive, but don't such "nation building" events by their very form and function create insiders and outsiders? Us and Them? Us versus Them?

You can perhaps discern my own leanings on the issue, but the questions posed are genuine. What do you think? Reasonable disagreement is encouraged. Poopy-pants-ness, not so much.

Bike to Work Day?

I can guess that this post is going to cause a hubbub amongst all three of my readers, but I'll pose the question anyway. First, a little context.

In my life as an academic, I work mostly on the history of race in the nineteenth century. I read a lot of what used to be called "Black History," and more recently, "African American History." I don't find these categories particularly useful, since I think they unrealistically separate (or segregate, you might say) historical human experience based on race. Some scholars of like mind have made the argument that Black History Month (February) has outlived its usefulness because it encourages the view that the history of black people is somehow separate or distinct from "regular" history. I have similar opinions about Women's History Month (March).

So, here's the question: does designating a Bike Month (May) and Bike to Work Day similarly segregate bicycling as transportation from our idea of "regular" transportation? Shouldn't every day potentially be Bike to Work Day? In other words, does the profile-raising potential of a Bike Month/Day outweigh the implicit marginalization of bicycling into just one specific timeframe? Or is the concept of bicycling as transportation still "new" enough that we need a month specifically to highlight it? Watcha think?

Our Crumbling Infrastructure

A report out today by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials offers a grim report card on the state of the nation's roads. My hometown of San Diego, California ranked near the top for poor road conditions. Here's a link to a rather large PDF of the full report.

A full 84% of San Diego's roads were classified by AASHTO as "Poor" or "Mediocre" and only 10% as "Good." I can attest to this dismal state of things with a vengeance. Driving or riding, the roads around here are shameful. Our car is going to need suspension work soon, I think, and I don't believe I've been on one single ride in this city that I didn't have to dodge a pothole, crack, sinkhole, ridge, bump, blob, or some other type of yawning crater that could either break an axle or untrue a wheel. Not to mention all the smaller ones I've had to just suffer through.

A few months ago, I decided I would ride around just my neighborhood and plot on a Google map all of the horrific stretches of road and dangerously neglected intersections, specifically from a bicyclist's perspective, with a view toward presenting my findings to my local city councilman. After two outings, I realized that futility of this task. All of the streets were in need of something, so pointing out just the worst trouble spots wouldn't fix the real problem. In fact, the way they "fix" potholes and other roadway damage around here, it probably would have made the worst spots even worse.

In the 1890s, when bicycling really took off, bicycle clubs were at the forefront of the push to pave the nation's streets and roads, years before automobiles would become prevalent. Today, while safer streets continue to be a focus of bicycling advocacy organizations, the simple maintenance of the roadways seems to have taken a back seat to sexier issues like protected bike lanes, bike/pedestrian boulevards, traffic calming, etc.  But damaged roads are far more dangerous to bicyclists than to motorists, and those of us who ride need to be vocal in pointing out problems and fighting not only for improvements to the transportation infrastructure, but for simple maintenance of what already exists. We tend to look down the road to solve problems we perceive in the future (increased congestion, pollution, etc.) with an eye toward progress, and rightly so, but in doing so, we ignore the potholes right in front of us at our own peril.

Snapshot from Bicycle

"Sixth--Fall scene. Snapshot from bicycle while running swiftly. Unsuccessful. Too realistic for amateur. Decides not to photograph any more for thirty or forty years."

A lot of bicycle bloggers and friends on Flickr favor the "panda" photograph, or a snapshot taken while riding your bicycle, which includes you and/or your bicycle in the shot. Now, it's usually all I can do to keep upright and in a relatively straight line while riding, so I've never attempted, and probably won't attempt, any panda portraits anytime soon. They're neat to look at, but boy-howdy, seems like an accident just itchin' to happen. Incidentally, I love this cartoon because of the convergence of two kinds of revolutionary technology: bicycle and snapshot camera (that box at the bottom of the frame). Seems folks set about finding new ways to fall off of bicycles and/or break cameras almost immediately after their invention. 

SOURCE: Chicago Tribune, 30 September 1900

On Maintaining Silence

I don't do a lot of deep thinking while I'm riding. Some people use riding time to think about other things, but I find it enough just to experience the physical sensations of moving through space on a bicycle. I also think about the street ahead of me, traffic, the route I'm taking, the scenery (if I can look away from traffic), and I'm always tuned-in to my bicycle. This last is especially important for me, since all of my bikes are older than I am, and tend to develop little eccentricities. It's good to know which noises are okay, and which are new and potentially alarming.

So far, my "new" daily ride, which is almost 55 years old, is a super-star. He's quiet, smooth, and comfortable. So quiet, in fact (knock wood), that I've started thinking about the noise levels around me, instead of worrying about the noise levels beneath me. What I noticed, more than anything, is how bloody loud our auto culture is. Car alarms, horns, bad transmissions, brakes, squealing tires, car stereos, and just regular engine noise comprise a huge percentage of the daily noise we encounter as we travel about.

A friend of mine recently posted a video of film footage from Barcelona circa 1908. The camera was mounted on a streetcar and recorded its progress through the city. There are a lot of bicycles, a lot more pedestrians, as well as some horse-drawn carts. While there is no audio with the clip, we can imagine that the primary noise, aside from the streetcar itself, was human-generated. Conversation, music, laughter, shouting, even arguments, would have risen above the noise of horses' hooves, and the clanging of the streetcar. The reason there would have been so much human noise is two-fold: first, the people were actually in the streets, instead of inside cars; and two, there was no roar of traffic to drown them out.

Now, unlike a lot of bike bloggers, I'm not anti-car. We have a car. I'm not going to get into the relative virtues or evils of driving vs. bicycling, I think it's a waste of time; but I will say that this question of noise -- or rather, silence -- is the one thing that turns me off the most about cars. A silent form of transportation, or nearly silent, which actually places human bodies in the open, frees up a vast amount of aural space in the world. Imagine how we might connect to each other, to our communities, to ourselves, if we didn't feel like it was all we could do just to keep our heads above the noise.

By the way, except in rare cases, I'm going to try to keep my posts here as link-free as possible. If you want the link to the Barcelona video, just ask, and I'll provide it in the comments.

SOURCE: Chicago Tribune, 16 May 1897

On Bike Love

I mean the dirty kind. I don't know if I have much to say on this, other than to pose the question: why do we eroticize the bicycle? From the concept of particularly juicy bicycle photography, referred to now as "bike porn," to the juxtaposition of bikes and nudes, bikes and love, bikes and romance, etc., we seem to have a particular desire to combine human sexuality with the inanimate and inorganic mechanisms of the bicycle.

SOURCE 

Do we actually love bicycles so much we wish we could make love to them? Or is this just another facet of the human tendency to assign human characteristics (sexuality, in this case) to the objects, environment, and other creatures we interact with?

SOURCE: San Diego State University Special Collections & University Archives

Travel Abroad

Heavens! I must be riding in China.

SOURCE: Chicago Tribune, 9 September 1906

On Keeping Bicycle Advocacy Positive

It has been interesting over the last several days to watch different bloggers react to this New York Times story about Dutch bikes becoming the new "it" accessory. Here are a few examples, illustrating a spectrum of reactions:

Chic Cyclist: "It's heartening to see that this topic is going mainstream, and a good read. "

Bike Snob NYC: "Obviously, the fixie backlash has been going on for a long time now, but the sheer bulk and weight of these Dutch city bikes nicely embodies just how much mass this backlash movement has gained."

Drunk & In Charge of a Bicycle: "Puke. It's a bicycle, not an accessory. "

Personally, I couldn't care less whether Dutch bikes are the next big thing in New York City, or anywhere else. Aside from liking the design and features of the bikes, I really have no opinion on the matter, and I've never ridden one.

The bikes are really beside the point, it's the reaction amongst the bike blogging community that interests me. The majority of the responses to this article have been sarcastic and dismissive, with only a few positive reactions. I'll admit to leaving a somewhat critical comment at Chic Cyclist, but it was more about a specific quote from the article than it was about the article itself. And really, sarcastic and dismissive is what most have come to expect from Bike Snob and D&ICOAB on just about any topic, so that's not really a surprise.

I think, however, that we as a community need to change our tone when talking about bicycles becoming popular, for whatever reason, because unless we welcome the positive changes to our nation's bicycle culture when they do occur, we're going to seem like guardians at the gate, judging others for how, when, where, and why they ride. It's not up to bike bloggers to tell people what is authentic bike culture and what isn't.

So somebody buys a Dutch bike because it's the latest thing. So what? Yes, ideally, that person would have bought the bike to cut out car trips, be more environmentally friendly, help make the streets more livable, etc., but those things will be accomplished anyway, so who really cares why they bought the thing in the first place? The most valid reason to object to bicycles being viewed as "accessories" is that people don't take them seriously as transportation. But just get on one for a quick errand to the corner store, and you can't help but understand that a bicycle is a vehicle.

Again, simply riding the bicycle is the solution to the problem, and as long as more people are doing that, bike bloggers who feel compelled to bash their motives just look like curmudgeons. We're supposed to be opening our arms to new riders, folks, not offering caustic wit in order to demonstrate our superiority. Bicycles were the fashion accessory in the 1890s, too, an era that many consider to be the first golden age of the bicycle. The history lesson here is pretty simple: If they're popular, people will ride them. Isn't that the point?

On the Aesthetics of Bicycles

These are a few thoughts I’ve been toying with for a while now. I don’t know that I’ve said anything really worthwhile here, but I’m posting it anyway. Throwing a few things against the wall and seeing what sticks, you might say.

A bicycle is an inanimate – although kinetic – object. It does not have a heart, soul, or personality (although we frequently attach these attributes to them, but that’s another post). So, I am fully aware that, as they say, “a bicycle is just a bicycle,” but I would also like to suggest that a bicycle can and should be something quite beautiful. Not beautiful in an abstract sense, as in “bicycles are beautiful because of what they can help us accomplish," but actual physical beauty, and in this way, the reasons bicycles should be beautiful have little to do with bicycles themselves.

For a bicycle to be beautiful, it needn’t be new or expensive, custom-made or hand-built. Certainly, bicycles built by hand and featuring the finest and most expensive parts are frequently beautiful, but these things are not prerequisites for beauty. The beauty of a bicycle is not determined by its cost, the status it confers on its owner, or even how quickly or comfortably it moves its rider through space. What then, makes a bicycle beautiful?

The answer, of course, is something subjective, but I would like to suggest not wholly so. I don’t believe I am over-generalizing when I say that for a bicycle to be beautiful, it should exhibit some amount of grace, elegance, and style. I don’t mean “fashion” when I say style, and I don’t mean “fancy” when I say elegance. What I mean is a perhaps-indefinable quality that causes us to pause for a moment, register the beauty of the thing we are observing, and come away somehow enriched. It’s not the same as admiring costly components or flashy gadgets for their own sake – it should be something much deeper, and it is in this sense that it matters very little whether a beautiful bicycle is really a bicycle at all.

The quality, or combination of qualities, that causes us to pause over a beautiful bicycle will be different for me than for you, but it should be the same indefinable something that causes us to linger over a beautiful work of art.  At base, our common attraction to beauty – whether it be a bicycle or a painting – is one of those hopeful features of humankind. The subjectivity of “taste” is less important than a common appreciation for things beautiful, rendering pointless the arguments over the comparative aesthetics of the over-engineered road racing bicycle, the sleek urban fixed-gear, or the slouchy beach cruiser.

The value of a beautiful bicycle, regardless of why we find it beautiful, is equal in significance to the value we might more commonly seek in a gallery or a museum, and all the more so because we can see it every day. Beauty enriches, calms, and sustains us. For there to be more beautiful things in the world, I believe, is of the utmost importance. If it serves no other purpose for you, make this your reason for finding and riding a bicycle that is, to you, beautiful. 

But the pig jumped

A panel from a newspaper comic from the 1890s. The punchline has something to do with a "scorcher" (a fast or reckless rider in the parlance of the times) trying to make a pig jump, and as you might imagine, the pig jumps the wrong way. Not exactly complex humor, but I do enjoy this particular panel. I've been looking at early cycling cartoons, trying to work up a thesis about how the advent of the automobile affected popular perceptions of bicycling. Very interesting, I should have something to share on the subject before long. Until then, I've got a few more of these in the queue, just for fun.

SOURCE: Chicago Tribune, 24 August 1895

You're doing another blog why?

Wellsir, this blog is a sort of sibling endeavor to my Old Bike Blog, which, god-bless-it, is all about old bikes, and I just won't have it cluttered up with a lot of unrelated stuff. I do post there sometimes about non-old-bike things, but I try to keep those to a minimum. Here I hope to have a more congenial space to wax pointless about everything from helmets to hand brakes, from cargo to car-free. I don't expect I'll be posting here very frequently, but I've got a few ideas a-brewin', and I'll keep it updated more-or-less regularly.

Fair warning: this is going to be a wordy blog, full of complete sentences, respectable syntax, decent grammar, and even a fair vocabulary. I'll try to throw in a photo or an image every so often, but by-gar, this isn't a blog for people afraid to commit more than 30 seconds to a post. Remember reading? It's what people did -- sometimes -- before the Internet. You know, during commercial breaks. 

You won't be seeing ads, endorsements, reviews, or any other such distractions. Google keeps wanting me to "Monetize" my blogs, and I just can't think of an uglier way to say it. But that's just me. What you will find here, simply, are my reflections on bicycles, which in my considered opinion, remain among the most revolutionary, beautiful, and effective devices at our disposal, even after more than one hundred years. Seeing bicycles through my eyes, I hope, will encourage and inspire others to make them a bigger part of their lives.

Enjoy it please, and visit as often as you like.