Polly

This is Polly.

She is my new fixed gear bike!

I won a set of wheels at a bike polo tournament (yes, it's really what it sounds like - polo on bikes. They play on an outdoor boarded hockey rink, 3 players to a team). If you take a good look at them, you will see they look a bit different. They're custom made by a guy in Calgary whose signature is the twisted fork. He takes two forks and twists them 3 times before putting them in the wheel rim. And, he does it in a way that the integrity of the spokes are not compromised. For me, I saw they were pretty. It was a raffle, with procedes going to funding the tournament and Jerry gave me all the tickets to hang onto since he's way too disorganized. And then when we won, he gave them to me. Yes, I know I'm spoiled terribly.

So, I was going to put them on Charlotte.

After they presented them to me, Steve (Jerry's old roommate who got married this past summer) told me he had a frame for me. He picked it up for himself but it was just a bit too small for him and would be the right size for me.

And that's how Polly was born.

I've been working on her for the past couple weekends and that's why I haven't been posting recently. I was hoping to get her finished to introduce her to you. The delay came from her fork. I originally could only find a threaded fork so Jerry & I went up to an old-school bike shop near his place to see what they could do. In the end, I ended up buying a threaded fork and had it cut down to make it threadless. So, basically, the fork is the part that attaches to the front wheel. A threaded fork uses a threaded headset. There's pros and cons to both but both Jerry & Steve recommended a threadless fork. With a threadless fork, you need to customize the stack height (which is the part that sticks up and intersects your handle bars. Jerry cut it to the correct height and I assembled her.

She's still a work in progress. The gold lettering on her will go - they're stickers and she still needs her pink bar tape. I've also just ordered some stickers (fairies and butterflies) to make her pretty. The paint job is already nice. It's a sparkly black. I'll be adding all of her safety accessories this weekend.

It'll be a bit of a learning curve as I've only ridden a fixed gear a couple times. The difference between Polly and Charlotte is that although both only have one gear, Polly's pedals continually turn. You can actually pedal backward and go backwards. I have a brake on her but you can also brake by throwing your weight on the pedals and skidding. I'm not skilled enough to do that yet.

And wow, was she ever fun to test ride! You have so much control! She was more manoeuverable than Charlotte and the speed control was fantastic. You could regulate how fast you went using the pedals rather than with the brake. As well, amazing accelleration. I think she will be a lot of fun.