Today's bicycle content

It rained overnight and even a bit more early this morning (hard to tell that morning has occurred when you have dark rain clouds in November). Now at about 2pm the sun has come out and it is a very pretty looking day out there. The bicycling issue is, of course, with the weak November sun we will be lucky if TOMORROW the streets are dry.

No bicycling today.

The title of yesterday's post reminded me that I was still riding on the tire set that I installed on that bicycle last winter. 2,004 miles is quite a large number above the number of miles I generally get on a set of tires. The good news is that in cooler temperatures tire wear is very significantly improved. The bad news is that this time of year would be a horrible time to be making on the road tire repair.

So today I fixed that.

Note that the new tire is actually an old tire. And also note that, yes, I have big giant industrial strength steel tire levers. And, OK, go ahead and note that I now need to sit down somewhere while doing tire repair.

The deal with the old/new tire is that the rear tire on a bicycle, as the primary weight bearing wheel/tire, is subject to a considerably higher rate of wear than the front. When I install new tires I save the considerably less worn old set front tire. When the new set rear tire reaches the end of its useful life I replace the new rear with the old front. The old front will be good for at least 500 or 600 miles. In this way I get 2.5 sets of tire wear from any 2 sets of tires.

Much like the observation of the Romney campaign worker on discovering that his campaign issued credit card had been cancelled between the time of the concession speech and the attempted payment for the cab ride home later that night, I would describe this plan on my part as "fiscally conservative".