Sometime on Christmas Eve I’ll close early for Christmas and I won’t return until the following Monday.

Locals, please note I will only be open by appointment from Christmas until January 4th. Call the shop or e-mail me if you need to stop by.

Web orders will ship during this time, and for long-distance customers everything will run normally except that I might be a little harder to catch on the phone. I’ll still be shipping orders and building wheels.

After a long period of unavailablity, Bobike Mini child seats are back.  Don’t forget a windscreen, which helps keep your little one a little warmer during cold winter months. Even at a moderate cycling speed of 15mph wind chill can drop the temperature by 8-10 degrees. Unlike you, your child doesn’t have the extra warmth provided by the work of pedaling. Properly bundling up often-less-than-thrilled-to-be-bundled small children can be frustrating, the windscreen makes getting on the bike a little less hassle and a little more comfortable.

We’ll receive our VO Polyvalent Frames on Monday. Until then I’ll have to refer you to the VO website. The dealer frames are shipping with a Gran Cru aluminum threaded headset. Frame, fork and headset will be $425, which saves you $15 on the headset. If you don’t want a headset, that’s fine. $400 for frame and fork alone. If you want a complete bike, I can of course build the framesets up with anything in our webstore, but I’m happy to special order anything we don’t regularly stock for complete bike orders. You’ll likely want to take advantage of the wheelbuilding special mentioned below if you need some 650B wheels to go with your Polyvalent.

Update: Frames are here, but I won’t have time to build a sample bike or add the frames to the webstore this week. If you’d like a frame or a complete bike please call me at the shop. I’m happy to answer any questions you might have about sizing and frame features.

Through the end of the Christmas season wheelbuilding labor will be almost free–$5. This means you’ll save $50 on a handbuilt wheelset. The offer extends through the entirety of the Christmas season, so you have to the feast of the Epiphany (January 6) to take advantage.

As usual, if you’d like a wheel built with components you don’t find in our webstore, simply contact me. I’m happy to special order hub or rims that I don’t normally stock to build the wheel you want. The $5 labor offer is only good for wheels when all the wheel components are purchased from us, sorry. If you send me a hub to build up you’ll pay the normal $30 charge. To shop for wheel components start here.

We’ve added two new rims from our webstore, both are high-polished models from Velo-Orange. You can find both here.

The Terry website has posted a podcast interview with Bicycle Quarterly editor Jan Heine concerning tire performance. For years, bike geeks have believed that hard, narrow tires are significantly faster than wider tires or narrow tires used at lower air pressures. This understanding was confirmed by rolling resistance drum tests, which isolate the rolling resistance of tires on a hard, smooth surface. But rolling resistance alone doesn’t explain tire speed. Suspension losses need to be factored in when evaluating tire performance. Even on smooth roads, suspension losses are considerable, and tires (whether narrow or wide) with supple casings perform better than those with stiff casings (whether narrow are wide). Tire construction and proper inflation have much more to do with (actual, not perceived) speed rather than width, and tires that are too narrow (no matter how well constructed) are slower than the same tire in a wider size because of the excessive suspension losses of tires that are too narrow. All this and more in the podcast above, including why hard tires feel fast precisely because they’re inefficient.

Bicycle Quarterly has been experimenting and reporting on tire performance for the last couple of years. The interview will recover some of the finding for subscribers, and provides a concise summary for those who haven’t read the reports on the experiments.

On a related note, those who don’t subscribe to BQ can view Frank Berto’s tire pressure chart, republished in the magazine a couple of years ago. It’s a good resource for the home or shop.

Charlie Cunningham in the Autumn 2009 Bicycle Quarterly on the inclination of component manufacturers to make well engineered parts:

They don’t care any more. Today, what matters is who has the cheapest manufacturing and the best marketing and distribution, it doesn’t have a lot to do with the parts themselves. . . . They have to sell new stuff. How do you do that? You add features and you add materials, and if you can put a story behind it and make people think that it is better. . .  A lot of people buying that stuff don’t think about it much, perhaps they are not technically sophisticated, and they buy [the ad copy] hook, line, and sinker.