Ploafmaster General

Finished the red-eye leg of our return trip. Now we loaf (ploaf?) around BWI for nearly 4 hours before the short hop back to Richmond.

This new fixed gear short film from FOAD Gang is sick: youtu.be/Z4JzGVDDT…

Here at LAX with hours to go before my red-eye flight home, I’m working through everything that we did this week. We only just buried my mother-in-law near the end of March, but my wife decided we should use spring break to visit my grandmother in California while we still can. So off we flew across the country a week ago in order to sit in a car for so many hours and miles in LA County traffic.

The kids loved the trip, and my wife and I largely enjoyed it. I’ll have a few follow-up posts about particular activities, but for now, here are some highlights:

• Lots of excellent time with my grandmother, laughing and reminiscing. We treated her to lunch late in the week, and got to see my great aunt Anne Marie who also lives in southern California.
• My rental car: a 2023 Hyundai Ioniq 5 electric car. My whole experience with this thing was excellent, and really want one (or something similar) when I get my next car in a few years.
• The food and coffee: unsurprisingly good, at least relative to what we have in my far-smaller and less diverse home town. We had terrific Latino food, dumplings, ramen, and even some solid Italian food. And the coffee! I’m already missing Loquat in Silver Lake.
• Tye people: I didn’t have any negative expectations about the people here, but I felt like folks were pretty friendly across the board. Retail employees, security guards, random folks making small talk, etc.

I plan to post some photo-heavy follow-up on visits to Joshua Tree (too short), Griffith Observatory, and the Neutra House, but that’s it for now!

Spending the next several hours at LAX mentally processing our family trip out west, sifting through photos, watching YouTube, charging devices. As ever no matter how good the travel, it’ll be great to return home.

Yippee-ki-yay…

I just had what may be some of the best tonkatsu broth I’ve ever tasted.

I will have much more to say and show about Joshua Tree National Park later, but lemme say that the Joshua Tree Rivian Outpost is a terrific fast charging location.

My rental car this week in LA is a 2023 Hyundai Ioniq 5, and lemme tell ya, I am in love with this thing.

SUPER hyped that I got to visit The Cub House #bike shop in San Marino. Everyone was mega friendly and helpful, and the whole vibe of the place was chill and welcoming.

At 12:18 AM Pacific Daylight Time I hit the pillow, nearly 11.5 hours after leaving my house in Richmond, VA this afternoon. I’m wiped.

The USC men’s baseball team is on this flight heading back to LA.

Almost finished with our layover at BWI, ready for the long flight to LAX. My 9YO’s first flight, and everyone’s first time to LA except for me. Not keen on the long trip, but looking forward to seeing my grandma.

I have a few invite codes for neko.maison and if you know me and I know you, maybe you want to try it out, too?

After 10 miles riding the Maxxis DTH tires on the old Trek, I totally get why folks love these tires. I really wish they made them in 27.5.

I have contempt for people who walk up to a counter, order coffee, and pay, all while on a phone conversation.

I mean, I had to try them, didn’t I?

We can have a state funeral in a sewer, right?

I feel like I’ve crossed some kind of funny line in my home bike mechanic journey: I’ve ordered a tap handle and M5x0.8 tap (in this case for tapping a threaded hole in a BB shell, but I could also use it to chase bottle boss threads on old frames).

Sitting on the porch in near perfect weather while my 12.5 year old practices a gymnastics floor routine to Earth, Wind & Fire’s “September” in the front yard. Maybe only a frosty beverage could improve the situation?

I swear, people in Richmond selling stuff on Marketplace have a really inflated sense of what their bikes are worth (especially that one dude in Mechanicsville who floods Craigslist, too). And for the love of cheese, include drive-side photos.

Yes, Paul Components are pricey. But their products are of impeccable quality, made in California, and sometimes Paul himself answers your questions by email with helpful advice. Some costly things are worth it!

I’m noodling over this idea in my head where I’m comparing Art History as a degree program to something like English/Creative Writing. One is usually from an art school (when an institution has one) and the other a liberal arts program. But I feel like there’s a conceptual kinship between them.

Just…just look at that sparkle and shine. All I did was clean it with some Simple Green and use some Goof Off to remove some weird residue on a few spots. I still plan to use some of the gentle car polish and it’ll be blinding.

Got my replacement BB for the Crust and replaced it. So uh…I blew out the non-drive-side bearing and there were loose balls in there. That’s what I get for being a big chungus who mashes hard on the pedals with the $17 Shimano dealie.

Maybe time to get that high grade Tange BB with huge caged bearings 😜

Forgive the frankly terrible photograph of an otherwise beautiful bike. I was in haste to capture its current state in the sunlight. Even without having cleaned it, this bike’s “sugar plum” paint job sparkles. The seller on Marketplace, asking $75, was the original purchaser, having bought this for his wife in Syracuse, NY in the 80s. It has been kept in his basement and barely ridden at all. Everything is original except for the tires (perhaps tubes?), stem, handlebar, brake levers, and grips (as sold it would have had a Sakae polished aluminum stem with drop bars and appropriate levers).

I have been following this bike for many weeks and finally was able to make the trip up to Fredericksburg to take a look. I want to make this a chill, mostly upright bike for my wife to cruise around with me on pavement. After ensuring the seat post and stem weren’t seized, I forked over the cash and gleefully loaded it into my car. Why am I so excited about this particular bike?

This is a 1986 Raleigh Olympian - a model in the Raleigh USA lineup. The catalog, for reasons lost to time it seems, mis-states the frame material as some Raleigh-rebranded double butted CroMo steel (“Raleigh 555”), but the decal on the bike itself indicates a different variant, Raleigh 575SL (SL = “super light”) triple-butted. Digging through some bicycle forums confirms that the decal isn’t specific to my 1986 example, and while Raleigh may be pretending at some Reynolds-style branding, it does at least seem to be some very nice steel. The bike model itself wasn’t necessarily one of their top models in the whole lineup, but it appears to have been the top of the Sport Touring range. It includes some really nice touches:

• Shimano Light Action front and rear derailleurs with ratcheting friction shifters (goosebumps here) on a stem mount
• lovely Sakae cranks, 110/74 BCD that should allow me to make the gearing a bit easier
• Sakae fluted alloy seat post
• Suntour freewheel that still feels pretty nice
• Dia Compe caliper brakes with a quick release on the front (the rear on the mixte doesn’t have this because it’s bottom pull)
• Sealed bearing hubs, special seals on the BB cup (even though it has caged bearings) and caged bearings in the headset, but everything is smooth spinning with no apparent notching

Anyhow, I’m currently disassembling the bike so I can give it a good clean and check out the inside and treat it with rust prevention. Then I want to give the whole thing a gentle polish to really bring out that sparkle. Long term plans include a Nitto quill stem and some VO or Riv handlebars, easier gearing, and probably a 650B conversion (folks have made it work on this exact model with Tektro R559 long reach brakes) so I can squeeze some 42mm tires in there. Fun project for me, nicer and more comfortable bike for Valerie!