creating a monster

I have a number of Youtube channels I follow. One of the bike-y ones is Spindatt. His motto is "Ride Reasonably-Priced Bikes", which is right up my alley, even if his nose ring and ear gauges aren't.*

*I'm sure, being Mr. Wears-A-Necktie-And-Gonna-Be-65-In-A-Couple-Weeks, that I'm one of the ones who are supposed to be put off and horrified by the extreme jewelry. In the interests of mercy, I assure you I'm horrified. I certainly wouldn't want these folks risking hurting themselves by doing anything really risky to get my attention!

Spindatt has a shed full of bikes in various states of repair, maintenance, and upgrade. One of them, he calls the Rawnstercross, which name reference I sort-of got: it's more-or-less a "cross" (cyclocross) bike made of some pretty raw parts.

But then, why not just "rawcross" or something like that? Is there such a thing as Monstercross?

It turns out, there is. It's apparently a thing. From one of the linked articles:

Monster cross is a bike designed to fill the gap between a cyclocross bike and a mountain bike. A true do-it-all bike that rides singletrack, pavement and gravel well. Key features are rather simple: tires between 38-45mm tires and dirt drop handlebars.

Note that other references indicate that road drop bars work fine, too. And one of the suggested frames is the Surly Cross-Check.

Now, about five years ago, I built up a bike on a Surly Cross-Check frame, with drop handlebars. I intended it to be for a trail-and-road bike, and put 30mm tires on, much wider than the 25mm tires I was running on the Yellow Maserati road bike. I call it the Krakow Monster, partly because The Excellent Wife (TEW) was in Krakow when I built it up, and partly because of the original Krakow Monster.

But I never really loved it. Recently, I did a number of upgrades to it, and I like it a lot better.

But after seeing Spindatt put 40mm tires on a bike that he was building up, I thought maybe I hadn't gone far enough with the tire width. Well, my favorite bike shop needs some business; I'll order a pair of cheap 40mm tires, throw 'em on the Krakow Monster, and see how I like it.

Oh. My. Stars.

I took it out this past weekend on some of those paths on which I rode the weekend before. There were more people out this week, and, to maintain my safe social distancing, as I came upon them, I'd ride off the path and onto the nearby lawn, or into the woods a bit, or whatever.

The Monster just handled it. And with those wide tires (only inflated to about 50psi, as opposed to the 100+psi I run in the road bike), the ride was smooth like buttah.

It's not fast, but it does OK. Just to prove I could, I took it up Coppermine Road (which goes up about 400' in about .8 of a mile, unless it doesn't), and came down Old Georgetown. It was slow goin' up (although I got up over 32mph on the steep part of the downhill).

But it's a great ride. And it goes over a lot of surfaces without complaint. I could just as easily ride it in work pants and flat shoes as I did in full bike-y regalia.

Club riders (when we ever start riding again) will probably see me on the titanium road bike. I'll save this one for solo rides, local chores, and rides at lower paces.

But now I know why I built up this bike.

(Incidentally, the joke among bike-y folks about how many bikes you need is N_CO+1, where N_CO is the number of bikes you currently own. I adhere to a different rule: the number to own is Q_SD-1, where Q_SD is the quantity of bikes you've bought that will get you separated or divorced. I'm currently at that number, apparently.)