Categories: The Bikes

Does a Bike Have a Soul?

Colnago Master. Photo: Cicli Berlinetta

Does a bike have a soul? I can’t make that argument, I don’t think I do either, actually. But we do invest a lot of emotion, pride and dare I say love in our bikes. We form emotional bonds to inanimate objects all the time. My favorite old dead car had to sit in the driveway for another year falling further into rusty disrepair before I had it towed away. On an American call-in radio show Car Talk, a caller asked if the engine was a car’s soul and if the car had a new engine put in, did the car lose that soul? This led to a discussion of where else its soul might be and I was more than amused to have them suggest the soul resides in the headliner of the interior.

My Merlin, with its recently discovered hairline crack can’t go into a dumpster when finally put down. It would be like throwing your dog’s corpse into a dumpster. Hopefully there is a market for alloyed titanium and it can be recycled, re-smelted, reborn as a (gasp) golf club. Or does it go over the mantle? Or out to stud? Or a desperate last ditch back alley surgery?*

Do pros bond with their bikes? They can’t, they are on new bikes every other week. There would be a lot of weeping at the service course if they did.

I’m not quite in the market for a replacement but I could be heading in that direction and it brings me to conundrum number two: what are you buying when you buy a new bike? In the old days if you lusted after a steel Colnago Master you ended up with a steel bike made in northern Italy. You were buying into an Italian artisan fantasy aided by the fact that the coolest professional you liked rode a Colnago. Many years ago a American friend did just that and found out the Colnagos shipped to the USA were made in a second Italian factory, more the apprentice shop. My friend’s Colnago’s rear dropouts were misaligned by almost a centimeter, rideable but not the Italian ideal. Ernesto was not working on his bike. Truth be told, all these bikes were made on some sort of assembly line made by underpaid possibly bored workers. What coming out of a factory isn’t?

Now if I want a Colnago, there is a very good chance it will be made in Taiwan on an assembly line by underpaid possibly bored workers. The same factory will also be knocking out Giants and Scotts. The good news is the rear dropouts won’t be out by a centimeter. They will be close to perfect. My point, if I have one, is the euro-fantasy part of this is gone.

If you need your frame to have a soul there is still hope. I’ve been lucky in that my last two bikes were made in shops I actually walked in, looked at the racks of tubes, spent a little time breathing the air in there. My steel bike was built in a one man shop, a standard 60 cm frame but built for me for $350, a sum at the time which was outrageous to the non-velominati. My Merlin was second hand but I went to the factory and spent some time there helping to restore its luster and put on new decals. If bikes had souls they would be imparted by the builders who put a lot of effort and some love into transforming some uncut tubes into something as fantastic as a frame. The soul might still be there in the small shops like Cyfac in France or Moots in the USA where the person who selects the tubing might be the same person as the one who joins the tubes and worries over that frame’s details. But they don’t have souls or spirits, do they? Native Americans believe inanimate objects do. If a rock does, if a stream does, maybe a bike does. Or more likely I’m full of it, a frame is just a hunk of carbon or metal and it’s all a matter of design, execution and price.

If your Colnago EPS is built in Italy it would be in this place. Does this add or subtract to the euro-fantasy?

*the little known bottom bracket-ectomy, where the old BB is milled out and a larger BB 30 is neatly welded in, voila, ridable bike!

Gianni

Gianni has left the building.

View Comments

  • @Skinnyphat

    Not sure if bikes have souls, but I still feel guilty for turning my #1 Wilier in my #2 when I bought the Look.  To make up for it I bought her (the Wilier) a nice set of Carbon Clinchers and turned her into my crit bike.  She's happy again.

    if bikes do have souls, you sent the Wilier's to bike heaven when you made her #2. Close to bike homicide......

  • If anyone's read Phillip Pullman's dark materials books, the characters have Daemons -  animals that share the character's 'souls', and reflect the emotional state of the character at that time. That pretty much sums up what I think a bike has re. soul.

  • @minion

    If anyone's read Phillip Pullman's dark materials books, the characters have Daemons -  animals that share the character's 'souls', and reflect the emotional state of the character at that time. That pretty much sums up what I think a bike has re. soul.

    fun books to read also. to bad the movie sucked.

  • @harminator Thanks, I guess it's all my years of being a hobo/graduate student.  The nice folks at Alchemy Cycles did the work..  They're excellent and unless you were really looking for it, it's invisible.

  • EricW, get a aluminium record group for that frame!  SRAM on there = no soul, and  black cable routing. ;)

  • @Stefan Haha, yeah I toyed with that thought for a long time.  Sram ended up on there for a number of reasons.  1) I hate shifting with my thumbs, 2) The bottom bracket is a 68mm Italian (trust me I measured) and SRAM locates the crank using only the non-driveside bottom bracket cup, allowing me to use spacers to get the BB "close enough" to 70mm, 3) The Italian purists were gonna scoff at me stripping off the paint anyway, so I might as well piss them off completely, and 4) I hate shifting with my thumbs.  I also kind of like how everything that's not vintage Italian steel is black.

    As for the cables, all my bikes run white cables, so I'm just matching across bikes.  The Colnago is actually going to get a single mismatched cable -- Molteni Orange housing for the front shifter -- to constantly be asking me "What ring would Merckx be in?"

  • @Mikael Liddy

    huh, interestingly that last closing tag seems to disappear in the transition from the preview window to the post being published...I wouldn't worry too much though Frank, my money's on it being the rubbish browser my work's IT department foists upon us.

    Could be; I nevertheless added a new embed button which I hope works a little better. But it does appear that perhaps what's happening is that the code is being stripped out for some reason in the backend. Funny thing is I can't manage to reproduce it myself so its one of those things that makes it hard to debug.

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