why?

Why build a fixie? A fixie, a fixed gear bike, well, is for fun. I'm building mine because I've ridden mountain bikes and road bikes, and think that a fixie would be fun. I'm also a masher so a fixie kind of appeals to me to begin with. You could say that fixies are a kind of hipster thing to do, my friend said that he when he got back to school after winter break the bike racks were full of fixies. And college is pretty hip too.

Sheldon Brown's site has a section on fixed gear bikes, which is very useful for converting or building a fixie, which also has a testimonials page about how much fun it is to ride a fixie. I didn't read the testimonials, but my friend Chuck rides one, and I rode it once, it was weird, but interesting. Chuck says it's really fun though, which is good enough for me.

Fixies are supposed to be cheap. They're supposed to be fun things to just mess around on, it's a fixed gear so you're not trying to climb hills, fast, or steep. They're supposed to be really good for cities (i.e. urban) riding, though if you're in Seattle on Capitol Hill, or really any hilly city setting I'm not sure how well a fixie is in there (I'm sure there are many more citys that are hilly, like Pittsburgh, but I'm from Seattle).

There are lots of fun things you can do on a fixie, like track stands, skid stops and skip stops (all on Sheldon Brown's site), but fixies are a lot more dangerous too. The fact that as long as the bike moves the pedals, chain, and cranks are moving, which means that things get dangerous when the bike is moving. There's pedal strike, where since the cranks have to keep moving around turns and such, they can hit the pavement as you round a corner. Or if you're cool and wear normal pants (i.e. jeans) if they get caught in the chain going into the crank, either the bike stops, or your leg gets screwed up by the bike continuing to move while your pants are caught in the crank.

Also Sheldon Brown has a bunch of gruesome pictures of people's fingers that have been lopped off while working on them and hand pedaling the bike. Those pictures are just gross, so I guess I'm saying be careful and exercise some common sense.

So I guess either these accidents are easy to avoid if you're careful, or they just plain don't happen very often, or they're just ridiculously fun. Regardless I'm building a fixie, and it's going to be up here for everyone to watch.

Speaking of which, I plan for this to be used as a guide, FAQ, whatever, as long as you don't chop your finger off and sue me. I'm building my fixie from scratch, and in addition to just putting new parts on it I'll talk about my decision making process along with any snags I ran into on the way (already ran into one).

Later!