Read Online It's All About the Bike by Robert Penn - Free Book Online Page B

secure place — the cerebral equivalent of a safe-deposit box in a steel vault beneath a bank in Zurich. Or perhaps it’s to do with the fact that riding a bicycle fits so perfectly with the human software that our molecular layer interneurons can encode the motor skills and guarantee that the files won’t be corrupted for the life of the user.
    It may also be to do with how incredibly well balanced the safety bicycle is. It’s so well balanced, it doesn’t need a rider at all. If you let a well-aligned, riderless bicycle, with freely turning steering, roll down an incline, it will remain straight and upright, up to a speed which depends on its design. A riderless bicycle can even automatically make the small steering motions necessary to right itself after a bump or disturbance of some kind. Physicists call this ‘intrinsic stability’. It is often written that the gyroscopic momentum of a bicycle’s spinning wheels alone support a riderless bike, like a spinning top. This is not true. The gyroscopic effect is one of several subtle concepts, including geometry and the distribution of mass, behind a self-balancing vehicle.
    With or without a rider, a bicycle does need a well-balanced and maintained steering system to remain upright. This comprises the handlebars, the handlebar stem, the front forks and the headset. The forks have a steering tube, which passes through the headtube of the frame; the stem and handlebars are clamped to the steering tube. The headset is principally made up of two bearing assemblies or cups that are pressed into the top and the bottom of the head tube of the frame. The headset permits the forks to rotate independently of the frame, for steering and balance.

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    â€˜We think of it as an initiative test,’ Chris DiStefano said, greeting me with a big handclap at the door of an unmarked, unassuming factory down the end of Nela Street, a dead-end road that had neither a sign nor any road markings, at the arse-end of a large industrial estate in north-west Portland, Oregon. Finding Chris King Precision Components had taken half a morning. I’d asked directions two dozen times: ‘Nope. ’Fraid I ain’t never heard of that place,’ came the reply every time. It seemed strange. The company has a reputation for making superbly engineered bicycle components — hubs, bottom brackets and, most notably, headsets. That reputation has reached around the planet and yet people who worked a block away had never heard of Chris King. Hell, they’d never even heard of Nela Street. It was confirmation of something I learnt a long time ago travelling on a bicycle: if you want local knowledge, don’t, forGod’s sake, ask a local. In the end, I’d found it, as one first finds equilibrium on a bicycle, by trial and error.
    Chris DiStefano is the marketing director at Chris King. When I’d first emailed him with an outline of my project, and the idea that I might visit the factory to see the headset for my dream bike being made, the shutters were snapped shut: no comprehensive tours, no photography of the facility allowed, no ‘walk-up orders’ for components. An interview with Chris King himself was, Chris DiStefano wrote, ‘not an option. Bummer, I know, I’m nothing but bad news.’ Thankfully, by my arrival, Chris had warmed up, though meeting Chris King was definitely not going to happen: he was ‘on holiday’.
    â€˜Everybody else’s tour ends here,’ Chris said, standing in the door between the reception and the factory. He was lithe, like a committed amateur cyclist, with the long arms of a boxer and the unpredictable gesticulations of a stand-up comedian. ‘But because it’s your
dream
bicycle,
and
you’ve come all the way from Wales, we’ve decided to invite you beyond the red door.’
    We walked through the finishing and component assembly area: headsets were being stacked and