the purple bicycle: Introducing... Charlotte

So, not long after posting about my bicycle cl addiction, I succumbed to my disease and purchased another bicycle. Note that I do not say "a new" bicycle, but "another bicycle." Without a doubt the least aesthetic bicycle I have ever owned, she is an old Free Spirit, now known as Charlotte.

Damn, girl. Them's some ugly.

Charlotte is a horrible tan color that places her squarely in the 1970's. When I got her, she was was accented with equally horrible red stripe stickers.

Sort of like the makeup on a teenage whore.

After many hours of work, I've managed to remove most of these. I'm aided in my endeavors by the fact that I fully intend to repaint her (Would you keep a bicycle this color?!). This means that I don't have to pay really any attention to the paint underneath the sitckers, and can scratch it up as much as I want.

Charlotte is a single-speed in the same spirit as Eileen--someone got rid of the derailler and gear shifts and slapped a smaller chain on her. Very half assed. In any case, I've decided to work Charlotte back up to a ten-speed, and leave Eileen as a single speed. I bought some new bars, and I'm (eventually) going to put them on Eileen and move her drops over to Charlotte. Eventually. I've gotta buy new brake levers and some grips before I do that.

Charlotte might not be a pretty bicycle, but she's got a ton of character, and I'm secretly in love with her and all of her crappiness.

The first thing I did was remove her fender. I'm not going to throw it away or anything, but it's really not my style, and it wasn't installed particularly well in the first place, resulting in a ceaseless metallic chatter. It was driving me nuts, so I solved the problem.

A sad story, the fender has been shunned by even my mop and her boyfriend, the burned pot holder.

Both wheels needed air when I got her, so after removing the fender and reattaching the rear wheel, I proceeded to try to pump the pair of them up. After laboring for a number of minutes with the cheap inefficient Schwinn handpump my father gave me for my birthday, the wheel was approaching ridability, when suddenly my ears were greeted with the sound of rushing air. "Noooooooooo!" I let go of the pump and laid down on the carpet defeated. "What happened?" Charles asked, and reached for the pump, only to start laughing. Turns out I'd pulled the valve completely off the tube. Oooooops. Well, it probably meant I needed new tubes anyways.

Really, I'm just that strong.

Speaking of the rear wheel, perhaps the greatest thing about it is the high pressure tire she's equipped with. How do I know the tire is high pressure? Because it tells me so, baby.

I'm singing Queen in my head now, are you?

"Damn!" you're probably saying. "How high pressure is high pressure?" Let me tell you: Charlotte's rear wheel clocks in at an impressive 90 PSI. High pressure, indeed!

The front wheel, although not self-admitted to be "high pressure" has quite a fabulous (and utilitarian-looking) reflector.

As cool as this reflector truly is, it has nothing on the one mounted on the front of the bike, which really can't even be described in words:

Next best thing to a headlight.

Moving slightly upwards, the greatness continues. Charlotte's got incredibly wide handlebars--"like a cruiser-mountain bike!" Charles and I joked.

I know nothing about Picasa, but as far as I can tell, it doesn't exist for Macs and my photo is staying sideways.

Somethings should be more than 2 feet long, but not handlebars.

But what's even better than the absurd width of these bars --and perhaps my favorite part of the bicycle--is the fact that the grips don't match . Although the brake levers don't match either, this isn't quite as remarkable. Many people buy brake levers one-at-a-time, but grips?! I don't even think you can buy those one at a time. How Charlotte ended up with two different grips, when they're sold exclusively in pairs, is a mystery I doubt that I will ever solve.

I guess it's sort of like having one boob a whole lot bigger than the other. Or one nad. Or whatever.

Beyond the brake levers, though, the handlebars have an interesting paint job. Obviously completed some time ago, judging from the number of scratches and nicks in the paint, someone was an incredibly lazy painter. While it's not unheard of by any means to leave your handlebars attached to your stem so that you don't scratch the new paint as you reinstall them, generally those who do this are careful to tape the stem. This is not the case on Charlotte--whose stem is painted, and whose bars are scratched to hell. Poor girl. But it definitely gives her character!