I have been wondering for two days what I would want to write about today.  But I can’t think about a fucking thing besides being pregnant and about hopefully not being pregnant anymore very, very soon.  I read things about babies and pregnancy all day (newly in love with The Feminist Breeder, by the way), and I hope the baby is about to come the fuck out of there already all night.  But I don’t want this blog to only be about kids and pregnancy.  I want it to be about tiny hosues and Wagens and travel and dumpster diving and weird recycling and everything else that intersects with my life too.  But there is nothing left in me except for this baby, and until she comes out, I’m not sure what else will get past and onto these pages.

So, behold!  My tallbike!

Looking at that picture is like a big serving of summer nostalgia.  The tank tops!  The need for sunglasses!  The rides aboard my purple giraffe!  Ahhhh.  Summer couldn’t come back into my life soon enough.

The tallbike I built myself, with a lot of help from some awesome folks in Frankfurt.  We spent a weekend building about eleven of them.  Which we then happily paraded around the city like the little kids we all still are inside.  If you have never been on a tall bike, I am here to tell you they are smile-manufacturing machines.  You ride down the street and people stare in awe, they smile, they gasp, they take pictures, and little kids jump up and down and point.  And everyone wanting to know: “How do you get off of it?”  A question which, once answered, always results in another: “But how do you get back on?”  Both of which I am usually happy to demonstrate.  You don’t take a tall bike if you have to get somewhere in a hurry.

If you want to learn how to build your own tall bike, I’ve got detailed instructions up right here.

This week’s dumpster find of the week is from a British fellow who works as an X-ray tech by day, but says that his true calling is “shade tree engineer.” His dumpster find comes from the trash of Virginia:

Here’s what he said about the picture: “Intrigued by your post about the tall bike, I hatched a plan to make one. Very cheaply. So these bikes were trash, found in a dumpster (admittedly not all in the same one). I was amazed how many dumpsters had bikes in them. My wife asked me to stop after bike number nine. 2 or 3 will be in the tall bike, the rest I’ll give away after a good clean and a squirt of oil.” His motto, he says, is “I can make that. Sure I could buy one, but where’s the fun in that?”

Dumpstered bikes are a double bonus. Not only can you avoid the whole money economy by getting them for free, you can then avoid the fossil-fuel industry when you ride them instead of taking the car.

Submissions for “dumpster find of the week”

I’m always looking for more submissions for dumpster show and tell. If you’ve got some sweet dumpster booty you’d like to share, then take some pictures and send ‘em to nicolettekyle (at) yahoo (dot) com with some words about where and how you found the stuff in the picture and what you’re going to do with it. And for safety’s sake, better put “dumpster find of the week” in the subject line.

Tell me a little bit about yourself if you’d like (I’ll keep things as anonymous or blatant as you indicate I should). Tell me about your first time diving, your favorite dumpster, or anything else that seems appropriate at the time. I’ll take your emails and your photos and turn them into a blog post that will show up here, one each Wednesday until one of us stops caring.

Submitting your photos and words to me indicates that you have legal rights to said pictures and words, and that you are giving me legal permission to post your pictures and quote your words on Click Clack Gorilla. If you don’t hear back from me within a week, it means the internet ate your mail and you should try again.

So in the words of the esteemed Dolly Freed: “It’s feasible. It’s easy. It can be done. It should be done. Do it.” Even if we all live too far apart to share our dumpster finds with each other, we can at least ogle each other’s pictures on the internet.

Riding a tallbike does something fascinating to the people around you. Where you once met unfriendly glares or downcast eyes, you suddenly find a city full of laughter, smiles, and quickly snapped photographs. People cheer and clap, children stare and point, and the same question is on everyone’s lips: “How the hell did you get up there, and how are you going to get down?”

Building one yourself takes a good chunk of time–five or six hours at least–but is a lot less complicated than it might look. This is how I do it, but the beauty of the Frankenstein bike is that with enough scrap metal and time you can create just about anything as long as you remember one thing: gravity is not on our side.

Supplies

You’ll need at least two old bike frames, all the parts you need to make a regular bicycle go round (i.e. working pedals, wheels, brakes, etc) plus extra chain, and a metal pole small enough to fit into your bottom frame’s fork (but must not be small enough to fit into the bottom of the top one). You’re also going to need bike mechanic tools (wrenches, screwdrivers, WD-40, etc), a bit of experience taking bikes apart and putting them back together, an angle grinder, and a welding machine.

Step One: Preparing the Frames

Pick two frames out of your pile of junk, and lay them on the ground one over the other, as you imagine them fitting together on your completed bike (see the picture to the left). Now look at the angle between the two frames’ forks. Can you create a straight line between them with your pole? If yes, then this combination should work.

Now get your frames naked. This means taking off all the little bits, from the lights to the wheels and the brakes. Leave the forks on both frames unless you want to change them out or clean them up. You can also save yourself some sweat by leaving the top bike’s handlebar and seat attached. I find it incredibly annoying to remove pedals, but you need to do this anyway. Otherwise you might up melting them during welding and then you’re just fucked.

Step Two: Fitting the Extension Pole, Welding

With your frames bare, you can now affix the bottom end of the extension pole snugly into the bottom frame’s fork (from above), where the rod from the handbar mount goes on a normal-sized bike. On the top frame, where the pedals once lived, is now a little empty metal tunnel. Place this part of the bike on top of the other frame’s “I formerly held a seat” part–these are the two peices you will be welding together later.

Measure roughly how long your fork extension pole needs to be (leaving an extra bit that will disappear into the top frame’s fork) and cut it to size with an angle grinder. Then, on the end of the pole that will be inserted into the top fork, cut two horizontal slits, several inches long. Hammer these now slightly moveable bits together until the top bit of the pole fits into the bottom of the top frame’s fork. Hammer it in as tightly as you can, violence is recommended and encouraged.

In the above picture someone checks to see if the frames will work together. In the picture below the builder has removed the top frame’s fork and threaded the pole through it in an attempt to build a triple decker. She ended up a double decker though, at the end of the weekend.

Now you can weld the two frames together at the top frame pedal tunnel (I prefer to invent my own bike terminology as I go…)/bottom frame seat post, and at the point where the extension pole enters the top fork. Do a sturdy job or prepare yourself for the two-meter fall you will endure when it falls apart.

Step Three: Details

Now that your two frames have become one, you can put all the parts back on that you took off–seat, handlebars, wheels, brakes, pedals. Extend the chain to stretch between the now-higher pedals and the back wheel. To avoid needing extra-long brake cables, I like to use back-pedal brakes. And using a smaller wheel in the front is sometimes a good idea as it helps bring the center of balance back toward the center as tallbikes have a tendency to tip backward. Once you get the hang of it though, having a tallbike with the center of balance in the back makes for a sweet dismount if you’re brave enough to try it. That is, pull the bike forward out from under you, landing with your feet on the ground where your bike just stood.

This is also a good time to use the angle grinder to cut off any extra bits of metal you don’t really need–for example the place where the top frame’s back wheel used to sit or the wings hanging around on the sides of the top frame’s fork. Weld on any extra supports you think you’ll need to distribute your weight more evenly over the frame, and you’re ready for the road.

Step Four: Test Drive

The hardest thing to get used to is getting on. Everybody’s got their own mounting and dismounting strategy. I like to put my left foot up on the left pedal, push the bike a bit, and then hop on once the bike gets a little momentum. To dismount I put my right leg through the top frame (I have a woman’s bike frame on the top for just this reason) and hop off to the side. And remember that riding a tallbike involves planning–are you going to make it through the light, steer over to a sign that you can hold onto, or lean on the shoulder of a friend on a regular bike.

And there you have it. If you have any questions, send away, and I’ll answer them if I can. If none of this made any sense at all or if you have another awesome tallbike building method, let me know that too. Good luck.

Links

Instructabless has a large number of tall bike building descriptions, complete with step by step pictures. If you register with them, you’ll get an even longer list of possibile freak bike building manuals to check out.

Johny Pay Phone has a very interesting article about the history of tall bikes, with mind-blowing pictures and construction ideas, and a video from 1915. (Tandom tallbike, what?)

Atomic Zombie is a gold mine of photographs of finished really fucking tall bikes and Mad Max choppers.

And here The Rat Patrol, a Chicago freak bike group, has a gallery of their tall bike creations.

No experts, no masters. Despite my heartfelt belief that experts are over-rated and diy deserves endless high fives, I was nervous as fuck about giving the tallbike building workshop at the wagenplatz birthday festival in Köln. But, turns out, haha, I actually do know how to build a tallbike, and with someone who knows lots about getting the annoying bits off of bike frames and someone else who knows how to weld around to help, the day resulted in six mostly finished frankenstein bikes that even Mad Max could love.

CONTAINER BIKE/SHOPPING CART BAKFIETS

THE STORK

APOCALYPSE TANDEM

THE PEGASUS (kids frame on top)

THE QUICK CHOPPER (they built this fucker in what felt like ten minutes)

THE “I SWEAR I SAW THAT SAME FRAME AT THE FLEAMARKET FOR 100 EUROS” OLD SCHOOL CLASSIC

I’ll be posting semi-detailed instructions for building your own tallbike tomorrow. I promise. This isn’t like my other empty “I’ll post X next week” promises. This one is already finished and scheduled.