The Bike of Doom

“Is it him…” with apologies, once again, to Glamorous Romances (Formerly Dotty} #41 (circa 1949)

This week on my travels round the web I found a couple of interesting blogs with posts about Department Store Bikes.
The first, BikeLoveJones (The true adventures of a gal and her bike), has a nostalgic post from a gal who recalls her childhood riding various department store bikes, and who points out that most avid […]

The promise of a warm spell a week ago came to pass, bringing with it a widespread melt that left streets and sidewalks full of water. Water isn’t a problem, but morning temperatures are still in the -12 to -17 degree range, which means those seas of water become either sheets of black ice […]

 
Only one way to escape … installment #5 of The Awful Bike of Doom. This time, with sincere apologies to … I don’t actually know! I’ll do a little research and update when I find out. It’s in my collection of 1940s Golden Age comic images, so I’m sure it’s circa 1945. (Update, thanks […]

 
As promised, I visited Canadian Tire today to order a replacement shifter for the Bike of Doom. I came armed with the bike part number, as well as my emails from Canadian Tire head office. None of that seemed to make a difference.
The guy manning the Bike Department said he couldn’t order a […]

It’s a year to the day that I bought the SuperCycle 1800 18 Speed Mountain Bike from Canadian Tire. I wrote the first post in this blog on March 14 last year, took the bike on the road for the first time on March 16. My expectations for the bike were low. […]

So, you’ve been riding your department store bike for awhile and the miles are adding up. You’re actually starting to enjoy riding it, or at least that’s what you tell yourself. In your darker moments, however, you wonder if you’re experiencing a velo version of the Stockholm Syndrome. At night, in the […]

 
As hard as it is to believe, there are some bikes just so cheap, so clearly bad, even I wouldn’t ride them. As a connoisseur, of sorts, of low end bikes, I have set myself some limits. A price of $99, for example, would be about the lowest I’d go. A bike […]

Community bicycle programs are nothing new. We had one in Winnipeg many years ago that ran for a single summer. Like many of this type of program, the bikes were available to anybody who wanted them, left at stations downtown. As with many such programs, theft and vandalism decimated the available bikes. […]

Fritz has an excellent article at Cyclelicious about people who ride department store bikes. In his back yard they tend to be immigrant laborers, invisible to the rest of the world. This is similar to what I’ve noted here on Bike of Doom. The people who ride department store bikes in […]