Soma Fabrications is a company based in San Francisco, CA USA and they are responsible for producing practical, durable, comfortable bicycle frames, parts, and accessories and apparel. One of their frames is called the Buena Vista and I have really wanted to like this frame, but a couple of niggling design points kept me from it. The position of the brake bridge in the rear, combined with the semi-horizontal dropouts, and the position of the brake hole in the front fork made it difficult to mount fenders with normal side pull brake calipers. On Buena Vistas we have built in the past using 700c wheels we ended up using calipers with different reaches on the front and rear just to get clearances. The US distributor told me that long reach brake calipers such as the Rivendell Silver or Tektro 559 which accommodate reaches from 55-73mm will work with 700c tires up to about 28mm wide and fenders, but that is still sort of limiting. The Soma Buena Vista is a mixte design. A pair of small diameter tubes run more or less parallel from the head tube past the seat tube and on to the rear dropouts providing stiffness and strength to the step through frame.
An astute customer and reader of the Lovely Bicycle blog brought to my attention that the frames could be used with 650b wheels with tires up to 40mm wide! Well, I thought, I’ll be dipped in shit and called stinky. The US distributor also confirmed that the frame has always been suitable for either 650b or 700c wheels.
Dry fitting the brake calipers and fenders. The brake pads contact the rims at close to the max 73mm reach. Plenty of clearance for the Berthoud 50mm fenders with Grand Bois Hetre 42mm tires. The rear brake works too!
Yes the bike is complete and it turned out brilliantly, thank you very much. We are waiting for the VO Zeppelin fenders to become available and then I can include some pics of the finished bike. Now I’m happy to recommend the Soma Buena Vista 650b as a capable light touring and commuting machine.
A hub is laced to a rim with spokes and nipples in order to create a wheel. Elementary I know but semantics are important if the aspiring bike tourist is to make him/her self understood.
I don’t want to go into how to build a bicycle wheel because there are hundreds of YouTube videos and several good books available on how to do it. (Jobst Brandt’s The Bicycle Wheel being the paradigm for books)
I will say there are a couple of elements that make a good, strong touring wheel, and these things may not be intuitive. Here is a good touring wheelset: A durable inexpensive wheelset for loaded touring.
Shimano Deore hubs laced to Mavic A319 rims with 36 DT Swiss double butted spokes.
Notice there are a lot of spokes…36 per wheel to be exact. Each spoke crosses 3 other spokes on the way from the hub to the rim, creating a structure of amazing grace, elegance and stability. Some recently popular wheel designs with as few as 18 spokes per wheel rely on the strength of the rim for stability of the wheels which results in a heavier rim. (unless the rim is carbon fiber) Spokes actually are made in various gauges or thicknesses and a visceral reaction might be to assume that thicker spokes will result in a stronger wheel….but not so fast. The spokes flex with every revolution of the wheel, no way around it. So making the middle sections of the spokes thinner than the ends (called “double butting”) allows the spokes to flex and adds strength where they are most likely to fail; at the ends. Get Mr. Brandt’s book if you want to know the excruciating details.
In my experience, based on building dozens of wheelsets, there are only two companies that consistently make high quality rims: Mavic and Velocity. The Mavic A319 rims are a super solid choice for a touring wheelset. For hubs it would be hard to beat the Shimano Deore hubs for value. Steel axles and loose ball bearings make a durable, user friendly combination.
Mavic A319 36 hole. Eyelets provide a wider and smoother bearing surface for the spoke nipple, distributing the load and mitigating galling or cold welding of the rim by the spoke nipple. A good box section rim will have an outer wall and an inner wall creating the “box section”. The eyelets on the Mavic A319 distribute spoke loads to both the inner and outer walls of the rim.
FULL DISCLOSURE:
I built these wheels for a customer who reminded me he has disc brakes. Disc brakes require a disc specific hub onto which the brake rotor is bolted. These wheels don’t have a disc specific hub. That’s right, I’m a professional and an expert. I’ll be selling this wheelset and the customers new wheels are on the way.
The Path Less Pedaled made this video about how bike travel can help the economies of small town America.
Sounds good in theory but I wonder how it works out practically. There is not a large volume of people traveling by bicycle. I know the whole idea of advocacy is to get more people to do it, but it’s sort of like building a community; there needs to be enough “rooftops” before investments in infrastructure like shopping and services make sense. Or like mass transit; there needs to be a critical mass of users to make it viable. To get communities to invest in bicycle friendly amenities or to get them to promote bicycle travel may be putting the trailer in front of the bicycle, so to speak.
Personally, I would much rather ride a bike around town than drive a car. I can use the bike for almost anything I can do in a car. I have more fun too and I can feel superior to the poor slobs stuck in traffic. I also think traveling by bike and living more or less on my wits is a blast. Would I like to see more people doing it? Obviously it would be good for my business if more people were buying from me and if more people used their bikes around town there would be fewer cars to worry about, but those are pretty self-serving reasons.
At any rate, I think the best kind of advocacy is just to be out there on the bike as much as possible. In this country, using a bike for everyday routines is not exactly a mainstream activity. Utilitarian bikers in this country (except Portland) can be categorized roughly as:
-homeless
-court appointed commuters
-hipsters
-wacky hippies
When I spoke to Jobst Brandt (R.I.P.) a few years ago at Interbike and mentioned the excellent crazyguyonabike website he said he would not want to be associated as being a “crazy guy” just because he was using a bike. I think that is key. Until using bicycles is considered a normal, viable way to conduct daily business it will be a fringe activity. Jobst Brandt on the Tenda Road, French Alps in 1989. From trentobike.org
There may be some downsides to more people traveling by bikes too.
One thing I worry about is the popularity of so called “stealth camping, a practice I’ve heard described as “hiding in the woods”. Camping is generally legal on Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service land but when tourists start trespassing, and if they leave garbage and/or cause damage to property, then all the advocacy in the world will not repair the good will towards bike riders.
I try to remember that I am an ambassador for cycling every time I swing a leg over the top tube but I know I have probably not always represented the way I would like. In the October/November 2012 issue of Adventure Cyclist magazine there is a letter from a person who lives on the TransAmerica route and who has provided hospitality to cyclists for over a decade. This person is removing her home from the ACA map and from the Warmshowers site because of a trend for traveling cyclists to be rude and demanding and to have a feeling of entitlement. She says, “It used to be commonplace for the cyclists to notice that the property was a project in motion- stuff being built, painted or maintained in some way. Without exception I would be asked, ‘Is there anything I can do for you?’…….But it seems different these days. Out of the 115 who stayed so far this year, only three people offered to help” Ouch. She goes on to say that not only do people not offer to help but they leave trash strewn about and seem to take her hospitality for granted.
Sorry to be such a curmudgeon. I really like seeing people like Laura and Russ and like Velouria at Lovely Bicycle writing about and promoting bicycles and bicycle travel. And I truly would like to see more people using bicycles. I think it would go a long way to reducing the levels of anger, anxiety and stress we feel in our everyday lives.
The Bike Hermit gets discouraged. Maybe too easily. He knows he’s not the only one. Sometimes the most basic of tasks are hard to get started. What’s the point after all? Typing on the computer is a struggle. The sentences come out short and clipped. What’s the problem ? It appears, outwardly at least, that everybody else takes care of the events their lives have assigned to them cheerfully and without question…..they just do what they do and they are what they are….. la,la,la,la,la. The Bike Hermit knows that’s not true. Hmmm, the Bike Hermit thinks he’s special. He knows he likes to coddle his feelings of self loathing and regret…why is he not more creative? why does he make everything so difficult? why does he sabotage himself? what value is there to what he does?
Sometimes he is functional and ambulatory on dry land. Sometimes he swims in the soup of his own imaginary swamp. Sometimes he dog paddles and sometimes he just treads water. Other times he sinks below the surface and just floats there. He can observe the world outside which seems unreal and unreachable. The landscape out there is flat and the colors are grayscale or sepia. The weight presses him physically and mentally. It is not entirely unpleasant…..sort of like freezing to death, reportedly.(who reported that and how would they know?)
But when the person who is closest to him and who means more to him than anything else is affected by his whining negativity he realizes he needs to start paddling. Blorp, schpew, cough, hack, spit – his head pops out and he reaches for the bike. He strokes toward the door and outside. Up the literal and metaphorical hill he pedals, trying not to be annoyed by the “rush hour” traffic on this stretch of road that used to be mostly deserted before the geniuses in charge of such things decided it should be paved. Up to the trail he has passed before on this ride but never taken.
Turn left
Loose sand with horse hoof craters and horse shit
Get off and push
Leave bike and walk.
Except for the cheatgrass he imagines this landscape as unchanged for hundreds, maybe thousands of years. A long time anyway. It looks benign but it is really quite harsh. The hills are steep and the soil is poor; sand and windblown silt. No trees grow here, just sagebrush. He sees one half of a jawbone of some small animal and kicks it over.
Back to the bike
Walk down to the road
Coast back down
Now there is some light and color penetrating the gloom, a lens of sunset sky suspended over the horizon. Getting cooler and almost dark.
In the morning, puke it out onto the virtual page. That actually feels better. A lot better.
