The Urban Biking Handbook: The DIY Guide to Building, Rebuilding, Tinkering with, and Repairing Your Bicycle for City Living (Paperback)
Description
Cyclists are everywhere, the cautionary bumper stickers tell you. More than ever before, bicycle culture is everywhere, too: from Portland, Oregon, to Portland, Maine, city planners are making big changes to city infrastructure for the increasing numbers of people who are leaving their cars at home (or deep-sixing them altogether) and upgrading to two wheels. Biking in the city is no longer just for bike messengers with a death wish.
Biking's benefits are myriad: better fitness, smaller environmental footprint, quiet and low profile, cheaper, greater accessibility. For each new, non-competitive cyclist in the consumer marketplace, there is at least one bicycle that needs to be fixed, maintained, and customized. Cyclists are looking for communities of like-minded people to learn the basics of repair and maintenance, the tricks of the trade, and get some super inspiring ideas for making their bike reflect their lifestyle choices.
Quarry's The Urban Biking Handbook: The DIY Guide to Building, Rebuilding, Tinkering with, and Repairing Your Bicycle for City Living is a hardworking, illustrated guide to the cycling lifestyle. Not only does it teach tons of repair and maintenance techniques, it shows such popular skills as converting a multiple-gear bike into a fixed-gear bike (or fixie), building your own wheels, and how to build a Frankenbike from parts scavenged from several bikes. All the techniques and projects are framed by spotlights on urban bike culture worldwide: profiles of bike mechanics, bike builders, bike artists, and more.
About the Author
Charles Haine has been a bicycle mechanic for over a decade. He learned to fix bikes at a bicycle co-operative at Oberlin College, followed by stints at several bicycle shops in his hometown of Washington, DC, including Blazing Saddles and Citybikes, and time at both the Bike Spot and Bikecology in Los Angeles. He is currently the chairman of the Bicycle Kitchen, a non-profit bicycle education space in Los Angeles, California, where he has also been a volunteer for 7 years. He has taught beginning and advanced bicycle mechanics to countless numbers of both the general public and also other volunteers at the Bicycle Kitchen to help them hone their mechanic skills and better serve the community. In his spare time he gets into arguments about how to properly address brake squeak. Visit him online at http://www.bicyclekitchen.com.
