Out With The Old, Back In With The Old – Bike Snob NYC

Last week I flatted a tubular tire on the Cervino:

Since all my spares were bad and I wanted to return the bike to rideability as soon as possible, I put in an order for some new tubular tires–almost immediately after which I opened an email from a kindly and generous reader who offered to send me “several unused, gently aged tubular tires.” Naturally, I accepted. I didn’t even think to ask him why he wanted to send me several unused tires of high quality, mostly because I just assumed like most people he’d come to his senses and realized tubulars are a pain in the ass. I thought the same thing many years ago when I found a whole cache of vintage tubular rims in the trash on a Brooklyn sidewalk–that the owner had finally snapped, announced “Fuck these things!,” and threw them away. (I kept them for years for stretching tires and stuff, only recently getting rid of them myself when I figured I’d probably never deal with a tubular tire again…and here we are.)

Then I realized, “Duh, why don’t I just put a pair of modern clincher wheels on the Cervino?,” which turned out great and made me realize I didn’t really need to deal with the tubulars at all:

Still, what’s the point of owning a classy vintage bike if you don’t at least occasionally ride the classy vintage wheels that came with it? And with an ample supply of tires for it on the way (which among other things will allow me to ride with spares that will actually hold air) there’s really no reason not to keep them rolling. Most importantly, they should provide me with ample opportunity to make an ass of myself.

The freebies are still en route, but the original pair I ordered just arrived, so the first thing I did was call in an expert:

Though I’m sorry to report things didn’t go well:

Just kidding:

Obviously things went fantastically.

In any case, I’m not sure I’ll use these or the freebies, but it’s always exciting to get new bike stuff, so I figured I’d at least put them on the wheels without glue in order to stretch them and check them out or whatever. Back when I raced and had a pair of tubular wheels I mostly used Continental Sprinters, which seemed like a good compromise between light weight and durability–until the inevitable flat, of course. (You always swear by a tire until the moment you get a flat at which point you swear never to use it again.) Nevertheless, I recently learned there’s now such a thing as a Continental Gatorskin, so I figured I’d give that a try:

The lingerie-like black base tape was different from the Sprinters I remember, but the tread that serves only a cosmetic purpose was still there:

Next I went to the wheels, the rear still wrapped in that sorry, structurally unsound spare:

Speaking of obsolete technology, in case you’re wondering, the freewheel is a Suntour Winner:

It’s a 13-21, so with the 42-tooth little ring up front it nets me the same “low” gear I used to conquer barely survive the Swiss Alps.

I’m torn between changing it to something a little lower and leaving it on there forever so I can keep congratulating myself.

Before gluing whatever tires I eventually end up using next, I had an important decision to make with regard to the front wheel:

As everybody knows, you’re supposed to put the tire label on the drive side of the bike. Furthermore, the logo on the hub should oriented so that it’s legible from the saddle, and the logo on the rim should be legible from the drive side of the bike. However, back when I first received the Cervino, I noticed that, yes, the tire label and the logo on the rim were facing the same way as they should:

But the actual stamped branding on the rim was facing the opposite way as the sticker:

Also, with the front wheel on the bike with the tire label and rim label facing the “right” way, the logo on the front hub was facing the “wrong” way:

So when I mount the new tire, what do I do?

Basically the sticker and the tire currently agree, and the hub logo and the rim stamp currently agree, but there’s no way to make them all agree. So do I follow the hub logo? The rim sticker? The stamp in the rim? Do I peel the rim sticker and try to stick it back on the other way to make it agree with the stamp and the hub logo? And if I do orient the hub so the logo is legible from the saddle as it’s supposed to be, that means the wheel will be spinning in the opposite direction it’s been spinning all this time, and everybody knows the sudden reversal could cause the bearings and races to fail catastrophically:

Just kidding.

Obviously I’ll just be throwing the wheel away and getting a new one.

Next I peeled off the front tire:

I hadn’t really noticed when peeling off the rear tire since I was mostly just focused on getting back on the road, but I realized now that the tire was coming off very cleanly indeed, at which point I realized Paul had probably used tubular tape, which I’d never tried:

Given how tidy it was, I realized I probably should have just ordered some of that instead of a giant tub of glue I’ll probably make a mess out of and that I’ll never get through anyway unless I get a hankering to re-tile the bathroom:

So I figured I’d do at least one smart thing to make up for all that. During the flat debacle I’d learned the hard way that one of my spares would not hold air. I intended to use the tire I just removed as a spare, so to make sure I didn’t mix it up with its flat counterpart I wrote “good” on the sidewall:

Unfortunately it looks like it says “Gooo,” and I can almost guarantee that I’ll forget doing this anyway, which means that in a few months I’ll wonder why the hell I have a tire that says “Gooo” on it, conclude the tire is somehow bad, and use its flat counterpart with no ambiguous markings on it as the spare. And the cycle will continue.

(Yes, I could just throw out the flat one, but part of using tubulars is deluding yourself into thinking you’ll repair it one day.)

As I say, I’m not sure which tires I’ll end up gluing, so I mounted the Gatorskins dry to see what they looked like in situ and to give them a good stretch:

They went on quite easily and seemed nice and straight:

Best of all they have labels on both sides so you don’t really need to worry about which way you mount them after all:

Like me, they have no direction.