This summer I participated in the RatRodBikes.com Bike Build-Off 3, an online competition for custom-built ratrod and hotrod styled cruisers. There were 58 finished bikes, of all different styles. Voting wrapped up last week and the winners were announced:

1st Place: Madd Hammer (68 votes)

by MonsterMetal – Final Build Pics

2nd Place: DevilWing (65 votes)

by JoeyMac – Final Build Pics

3rd Place: Pay It Back (41 votes)

by Karfer67 – Final Build Pics

3rd Place: Maldwyn the Flying Merkel (41 votes)

by Boardtrack Fan – Final Build Pics

click here for a Gallery of all the bikes

click here for all the Final Build Pics

click here for the Build Diaries

It was a lot of fun to be a part of the competition, and a great honor to have my bike included amongst so many awesome rides. And an even greater honor for my bike to come in second place :)

Cheers to all the bike builders, everyone wins… an awesome bike!

Anyone who knows me knows that I love my Spaceliner, a bike I found rusting outside of a barn last fall and brought back to life. Since I fell in love with that bike, I have always been secretly lusting after a fabled “All Original” Spaceliner with every single original factory part still intact. They are hard to come by, as any all-original bike from the mid-60s would be. My chances of getting one for cheap weren’t good either. But somehow one showed up on a popular internet auction site listed simply as “collectors bike” and located in New Hampshire with no intention to ship. I happen to have a good friend who lives a half hour away and was coming to visit in a couple of weeks. So, long story short, I got the bike for a steal with free shipping, all I had to do was buy my friend dinner. Once I got it, all I had to do was pump up the original allstate whitewalls (!), spray a little lube on the chain and hubs, and take it for a ride! It felt like it just came out of the factory! I must have put a dozen or more miles on it in the first weekend, and a few days later commuted 10 miles round trip to work with a side trip to the LBS by way of the post office. Here are some pictures!

The day I got it, I put a bell on it and cruised the hood for a couple of hours.

At the post office. I had a 24″ rim to be laced with a Sturmey Archer hub at the LBS, my next stop.

Outside Renaissance Cyclery, a nice little LBS. They have a vintage pennyfarthing outside the front door, which I took a picture of, but my camera didn’t save.

At the bike rack outside my building at work. This past week has seen a lot of new bikes in there.

Down Low Glow, ACTIVATED!

on the way home

It’s definitely a head-turner. That’s my favorite way of livening up my commute, to ride a fun bike that will get noticed. And cars definitely see me, most often they are slowing down to check me out! I can’t do the single-speed-up-hills thing every day, but every once in a while it’s definitely worth the extra effort. It makes me smile :)

After an extra week of waiting while my DLG kits were shipped back to california because of a mix up at the fed ex office, they were kind enough to overnight them to me. I installed them in about 5 minutes before work, on my recently acquired and refurbished late 60′s Sears Spyder 5-speed 24″ muscle bike.

I had to wait until my dinner break (around 8PM) to fire them up, but it was worth the wait. I definitely got some weird looks riding around, cars slowing down as they pass to to figure out why my bike was glowing. I didn’t get a stream of comments from people like Jason did, but one lady in a car said, “That’s a good idea!” to which I replied, “It’s a great idea!”

I took pictures on the way home at the end of my shift.

My good camera still has a broken lens so I have been forced to use the little digital point and shoot the last couple of weeks. Best I can do for now. More pics after I get a new lens!

Riding the same route to work every can become dull, I like to spice it up every once in a while with a alternative route. From my apartment, there are really only a couple of roads that go to my company campus, but I have found a couple of off-road options that are pretty fun, and gives me a reason to ride the mountain bike to work. I found this one a while back (while there was still snow on the ground!):

I start off by going east down pine, past this park with this pond. Back in those trees there is an adventure trail complex that is accessible from Birch street.

I guess youth groups come here in the summer for team building exercises. There were things like wooden walls to climb and rails to walk across (I didn’t get pics of that stuff).

This bridge crosses a narrow point in the pond, and leads to more adventure (trails). The other side comes out on a soccer complex on the main road I normally go to work. I can go that way or back through the trails and get to work down birch.

Another route:

These power lines run along the crest of the hill behind campus. I tried riding there from this point near my house (after a healthy climb up the hill). This part of the trail is pretty rough, so I gave up and looked for a different point to jump on. I found it on Redstone Hill Road:

This isn’t some sort of public multi-use path or anything, it’s obviously a service path for the powerlines, but I could tell that people had brought bikes and atv’s through here before.

Eventually, I emerged from the trail, behind campus, next to the satellite farm. But there’s a fence there!

To keep me out or to keep the satellites in? I guess I could have assumed I couldn’t get through this way, but wanted to try. I ended up going around the satellite farm.

I found a weird little trail that cuts off from the powerline trail through the woods next to the satellite farm, with religious markers nailed to the trees, as well as a statue and big cross in a clearing…

The trail took me out to the main road, right next to campus. I couldn’t find anything there that marked it or gave any indication that there was a trail there. Weird.

on campus, the other side of the satellite farm, they look so little from down here. Campus is actually pretty nice to ride around.

I work on the 3rd floor of the building you can see over the parking lot. And here is a legless coyote:

They’ve installed a few of these around campus to help scare away the geese that take over campus every summer. I don’t think the geese are fooled though, there were definitely still some geese hanging around about 20 feet away.

A bike rack conveniently located right outside my building. The Univega road bike on the left and the Roadmaster mtb on the right have not moved since I started three months ago, and probably several months before that. The wheels are flat and the chains are rusty. But that Trek just started showing up in the last couple of weeks since it got nice. I am no longer the only bike commuter on campus! Hopefully more soon, with bike-to-work week coming up, I have a friend who is helping to push it as a company-wide initiative.

Anyway, I hope that if you ride to work every day, you can find at least one or two fun alternative routes to get there, and live it up!

So I work from 4PM to 12:30AM. I usually roll into my apartment around 1AM. I have been having a hard time actually getting to bed before sunrise most mornings. So sometimes I head out at sunrise for a “midnight snack”. Last week I did just that, riding to stop-and-shop for a few groceries at around 7AM. I brought along my little digital point-and-shoot camera.

Bob, my trusty hybrid commuter

no bike rack at the stop-and-shop. So I used their empty garden display rack.

It was turning out to be a beautiful morning so after I got some groceries I stopped at dunkin fatpills for some breakfast, then earned it by riding up the hill to Page Park to eat it.

there were ducks.

It’s amazing how nice weather can change a quick trip to the grocery store into a 2-hour bike adventure. After I finished breakfast I ended up going farther up the hill from the pond in the park…

Till I found probably one of the highest points within the park:

extreme commuter bike!

Now some people might cringe at the thought of big hills, and I admit I was spoiled in Rochester by the relative lack of them. But since coming to the hills of Connecticut, I am re-discovering the fundamental truth. If you go up, you get to go down :)

photo by Whittiker Owens.

Last sunday I was lucky enough to find myself in Rochester, with friends, a bicycle, and a boombox. Unfortunately I am back in another state now, but the cruise goes on in Rochester, check them out on wednesday nights:

www.flickr.com/photos/whittikerowens/2404142061

My girlfriend Caitlin drove down to Bristol from Rochester for the weekend to visit. The weather was nice so we decided to go for a cruise. She especially likes riding the Silver Bullet, my first bicycle, what I learned to ride on:

Cakeland ready to cruise

I was riding my Father’s first bicycle, what he learned to ride on, which I just finished refurbishing last week:

Me on my Dad’s ’57 Schwinn

We cruised up the street to the schoolyard, quiet on a Saturday afternoon:

We went down the path from the schoolyard through the woods to a bridge over a creek:

My first bike with my Dad’s first bike. Like Father, like Son.

I went back up the path on the silver bullet and raced back down, to see how long of a skid mark I could leave on the bridge:

It was the perfect time of day for cruising:

Cake tried out my Dad’s bike, and liked it!

At the playground I practiced some of my zipline spy moves:

Getting late, heading home:

The next day we went cruising again because it was even warmer and Cakeland wanted to ride the SpaceLiner across America:

And I wanted to ride the Silver Bullet down a big hill:

I miss Rochester and all my friends and loved ones there, but as long as ROC keeps visiting me and I keep visiting ROC (like this upcoming weekend), I will keep it in my heart. And it’s always more fun to cruise with a buddy, so bring a friend or two, or seven :)

See y’all real soon. Till then, keep flyin’ the friendly skies

It has been cold and wet the last couple of days here in Bristol, but today was beautiful. Sunny and a little chilly, but still warm enough for me. I am down to single layers on my rides now, and can even leave my gloves at home. So today was a perfect day to ride, and I had just refurbished a dry, cracked Brooks saddle that I got a while back from the folks at R Community Bikes in Rochester. After a soaking in motor oil and being threaded with wire and wrapped in burlap (the Rat Rod way to do it), it was ready to ride.

I rode up the street to the nearby schoolyard, empty on a Sunday. I stopped for a cross-country tour.

I took off down the path through the woods from the schoolyard, as seen in the background of that photo. It leads to a bridge over a creek.

A good day for a cruise, and the neighborhood has some cruisable parts. There are still plenty of hills so I am thinking about an upgrade to a 3-speed. This one was fun to go down:

So I still miss the cruisable Rochester streets, but I am making the most of the streets around here. And as it gets nicer out I think I will be out more and more. I needs to cruise!

You really can’t have just one. I’ve got a big empty apartment out here so I’ve been compensating by filling it up with bikes. I keep coming across sweet vintage rides begging to be cleaned, lubed, and ridden. I do what the bikes tell me. They have taken over.

I am particularly proud of last weekend’s find, the red bike in the lower left foreground. It was my father’s first bicycle, a Schwinn that has been hanging in a garage for decades :)

soon to be ridable again, as well as a couple others. Now I just need to find people around here to ride them with me… :/

People often ask me “How do you do grocery shopping on your bike?” It’s as simple as this:

This is the way I do it, but you could always get racks, baskets, panniers, or even an xtracycle like Jason’s. But I can get a week’s worth of food in my backpack and I don’t have to get any bags at the store. How do you do your grocery shopping on your bike?