What I've Learned About Ballbearings

Ball bearings are important. Maybe, you've spent an evening drinking wine and thinking, "Gee, I really need to repack my hubs." So you do, but then while you're tapping the bearings out of the old, disgustingly filthy grease, they drop into your cup filled with degreaser but then bounce out and roll around and get lost. So then, you say, "Man, fuck this. Bearings don't really need balls."

Incorrect. Without balls, you've just got metal rubbing against metal. With balls, you've got metal rolling against metal.

If you're like me, you've wondered if there's a golden rule or two for how to get yourself from a crappy bearing interface to an awesome one. If you're occasionally like Evan, you've forsaken research in favor of finding out some functional guidelines:

1. Phil Wood's Waterproof Grease. Jesus, this stuff is:
a: greasey!
b: slippery!
c: tenacious!
2. Slick Honey, another grease, does not taste:
a: like honey.
b: delicious in any way.
3. You should not stick too many or too few balls in a bearing assembly. Too few means that the weight of, say, your bike, is being born on a weak, unstable setup. Too many will overload the interface and provide you with a terrible, terrible bearing assembly. What is too many? Put bearings in your cups until you can not fit one more in. Then, take one out. This is the right number.

What am I getting at, in my wordy manner? That I got a wheel for free because it sucked, and I made it awesome.

How To Break Stuff: Bicycle Edition part 3

The staff of How To Break Stuff has been hard at work on figuring out new and unique ways to break things like bodies and machines that don't run on blood and oxygen.

After years of research, I've determined that racing an alleycat for track bikes with no breaks in the middle of winter, just a few days after a snowfall, would be a terrific way to break my body, my bike, or both.

It's called Monster Track and it holds a special place in alleycat lore as the biggest, most infamous, most prestigious race there is.

The first section had 160+ riders hauling ass up 1st Avenue in Manhattan. I was lucky enough to be included in a little bit of sweet helmetcam footage, which can be found in better, non-Youtube style here and, of course, here:



However, the research did not pay off, and I managed to break neither body or bike during the race. Data from the afterparty remains to be analyzed.