This is completely the truth.
[eyes bug out]
Sitting at the coffee shop down the street from work I just watched the price of a gallon go from $3.58 to $3.72.
Balls.
[/distraction]
I used to rebuild bikes for friends from garage sale wonders. Back in the mid and late ninties mountain bikes were the rage and old road bikes were 10-40 dollars or FREE. A cheap hobby it was. And I have kept a box of parts from the left-over bits. Spare handlebars, deraillures, cranks etc. Which make up the SBR, for those times when bits are needed in a pinch.
Now I have a spare frame: an old Schwinn Continental.
You never know when a spare something will come in handy. Shannon says there is no such thing as a spare frame, that it makes up too much of bike to considered a "spare part." I say anything that is not ridable for want of other bits is a spare part. This frame lacks a front deraillure and wheels, making it unridable.
Maybe if I took the handlebars off she will accept it as a spare part...
3 comments:
Seriously, the frame will never be a spare part...a frame is integral to the identity of the bicycle entity, and as such cannot funciton as a "spare part" because a spare part by definition is something that can be added or subtracted from a bicycle without changing the bicycle's identity. A frame cannont be added and removed from a bicycle without changing the underlying entity's identity.
Think of it this way: if you built the Continental up with the components from, say, Frenchie and Sir Walter, the resulting bike would not be Frenchie or Sir Walter or even a combination of the two (Sir Frenchie? Frenchie Walter?...no!) it would be the Continental, and the dessicated corpses of Frenchie and Sir Walter would still be Frenchie and Sir Walter, albeit stark naked and starving.
By the same token, I can swap out Sir Walter's derailleur for one out of the mystical spare parts box without changing the identity of the Raleigh. That's the nature of spare parts. They come and go, but the identity of the bicycle remains, because it's tied to the frame. If I swapped the frame, however, the bicycle in front of me would no longer be Sir Walter. If I replaced Frenchie's frame with a pugsley frame, would the bicycle in question still be Frenchie? no! It wold be a giggly monstrosity!
So that's my very longwinded explanation of why the Continental frame cannot be considered a spare part. Also, (and most importantly) it doesn't fit in the spare parts box. ;)
La dee dee 1 2 3 it's Eric the half a bee.
But seriously, it doesn't need to fit into the spare parts box since it has been sent to the place where old Schwinns go to die, my parent's garage rafters. The Dirty American hung out up there for years before coming down.
I'd also like to try painting frames, and what better way than with a rusty old thing I don't mind screwing up.
And if something unfortunate happened to one of the other bikes we could still continue biking without much effort or investment till we figured out a more permanent or elegant solution.
But, it would be on a different bike...thus making the continental a spare BIKE, not a spare part...mwahahahaha...
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