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In this issue, you may have noticed that the new pages look much bigger on your monitor screen. We're not exactly at the techno cutting edge around here, except for kustombikes, of course. But we've noticed that most everyone, including us, tend to have larger monitors nowadays. Therefore, many people, including us, now set our screen size to 1024 pixels wide by 768 pixels deep. When we started out, back in '98, the typical screen setting was 600 X 480 pixels, as was fitting for a 14 or 15" monitor screen size. Our very earliest pages are still at that size. Fairly soon, we went to 800 pixels wide, and have stuck with that until this issue. One would think that would be a fairly simple change. One would be wrong, however. Sure, making new pages that width was a piece of cake. However, when I looked at our older pages, with the monitor set at 1024, I was horrified to see that there was a wide strip of grey alongside an 800 pixel-wide page. Not only did I find this distracting, but it was also pretty damn' ugly. Around here, we try to avoid ugly, as best we can. So, I started changing every article page over to 1024. Nothing else on the page, aside from the background, is bigger, of course,. but at least the limbo strip is replaced by the page's usual background. For those who've used a larger screen width for a long time, our apologies for taking so long to discover how irritating that limbo strip must have been for you.

A normal site would probably just have its IT smurfs ("interns") totally redesign every page; but BRK, with its huge Article and Gallery archives makes that almost impossible, without a large staff. With our current in-house staffing of one (me), it's going to take a long time. While working on this issue, I managed to work in changing the setting of the article archives. However, time did not permit tackling the Gallery archives, which consist of literally hundreds of pages. So, for at least the run of this issue, most of the older gallery pages will still have that annoying limbo strip in place. You could still set your monitor screen width to 800 pixels wide if you set out to do a long stroll through the Gallery. During that process, I viewed our new 1024-wide pages at 800- Uh Oh! I sort of assumed they'd look somewhat different, but it never occurred to me that at 800, a 1024 page would be cropped on the sides, and be unreadable. For those who've kept their monitors set at 800, because they like things on the screen to look bigger, I apologize sincerely. Sure, it's easy enough to click on "control panel", select and click on "display", then select and click on "settings", then choose "1024 X 768". It takes hardly more time than reading the sequence, but I'm still sorry to put you through the effort, just to read an article without having to scroll from side to side. I must admit to being chagrined in the past by having to do that for some site's pages. Now I know why. Of course, the maximum screen setting is 1600 X 1200. I haven't dared check that one out, as everything would probably look like total hell, and I might kill myself in frustration.

While filling time between other tasks, I made a start on correcting the setting on Gallery pages, starting from the most recent and working backwards, and got about halfway through the gallery (I hope). The job is fairly simple- it's a matter of opening up a given page in the page-building software, changing the page width setting from 800 to 1024, saving the page, publishing it again, and Bob's your uncle. When dealing with hundreds of pages, though, it can get somewhat tedious. However, in the case of Gallery pages, it was actually kind of fun, as I don't go back through older Gallery pages unless it's to call up a particular one from the Index for some research purpose. Going through lots of them in this case, I was reminded again of just how many really great bikes we've added to the Gallery over the years, since Volume One~Issue One, which had something like three or four bikes. And those weren't easy to find by any means, as there was absolutely nothing on the web dedicated to our particular subject back in 1998, unless you count lowrider bike or early "rat" chopper sites (which I don't- not that there's anything wrong with those, of course; they're just not what our types consider "Kustom with a K").

B I K E B U G B R O T H E R H O O D N E W S :

You may recall our interview with Mike Schneider, probably the foremost living authority on the Tanaka bike engine kits of the '70s, most commonly called "Bike Bugs". Not only is Mike still involved with those little beauties, he actually formed and heads an organization for fanciers of the marque. One aspect of the club's activities is the promotion of positive contributions by members, via Bike Bug, and acknowledgement of their good deeds through The Bike Bug Brother of the Year Award. Here's the story behind this year's award:

"Charles Allen of Columbia, Michigan performed a labor of love for his good friend Matt Schultz, who lives in St. Petersburg, Florida. Charlie rebuilt a bike and a Bike Bug Bicycle Engine for his friend. Matt has been afflicted with poor eyesight recently, and has had to give up his Florida auto driver's license.'

'Charlie set about researching parts for the bicycle engine and found www.bikebug.net on the Internet. Charlie carefully reviewed the Repair Pointers and determined what parts he needed to restore the engine. He contacted Mike at sales@bikebug.net for advice, and the two determined what was needed to get this little jewel running again. Some of the critical items replaced were specially-manufactured fuel pump parts - supplied by C.T. Gaskets of Houston, Texas. Cory Jackson with C.T. Gaskets researched various materials to build the components from, and finally arrived at ones that have proven to work better and last longer than the originals. Charlie spent several weeks working on the engine and brought it back to life. Charlie tested out the Bike Bug on his own mountain bike. He tooled around the boulevards of Detroit and made quite a few heads turn. His favorite places to ride were the parks and the large flea market they have in Detroit.

He mounted the engine on an old Schwinn bicycle that belonged to Matt's 92-year-old dad- Ed. Ed Schultz used the bike to pedal around the Detroit area. Ed owns a trucking company in Detroit where Charlie has been a faithful employee and adopted family member for over 35 years. Charlie also rebuilt the bicycle and added several accessories supplied by Bike Bug for the project. Charlie added mirrors, horn, brake lights, turn signals, radio, and a basket to the Bike. She turned into quite the machine- puffing her way down the boulevard.

Charlie had the bike shipped from Detroit MI to St. Petersburg, FL for Matt, who was totally thrilled with his new Bike Bug/Schwinn. He routinely uses it to run errands and shop in his local neighborhood; Matt also enjoys getting "The Wind In His Face" at various parks and community hangouts. The Bike Bug has allowed him more freedom to do things that he could not do without personal transportation. At today's gasoline prices, the 200 mpg the Bike Bug delivers definitely helps on the budget too. Since Matt doesn't need to have a license, inspection, insurance, or tags, the Bike Bug is a blessing he will enjoy for many years. He reports it is a real head-turner and he enjoys the waves, thumbs-up, whistles, claps and cheers from local friends and people wanting to know, Where did you get that bike?"

Charlie and Matt are being named "Bike Bug Brothers of the Year for 2010". Their friendship is one of those that we all cherish, and wish them many "Smiles Per Gallon". It is always wonderful to honor Bike Bug Brothers who go that extra mile for a Brother.

Charlie, Matt and Ed will be presented with "International Bike Bug Brother T- Shirts", a special decal for the bike, and congratulations from all of their "Brothers In The Wind". M.S.

This issue contains John Brain's coverage of last summer's FBI Meet in Amsterdam. Sorry for the delay, but John and I had produced so much material for the last issue, for so long, that the issue was already way behind schedule. It takes a lot of time for both of us to produce this sort of article: John to do his part of writing-up, then selecting and pre-processing the photos, and for me to do final image processing, copy-editing, and page-making, that we decided to put the issue to bed, and hold off on that one. The issue already had more content than usual; and we have a finite amount of expensive server space and bandwidth before our already extremely-expensive web hosting becomes even more expensive. This is a sensitive issue at the moment, as we just paid to renew our deal again.

Ironically, maybe it's for the best that we have this coverage of FBI'09 in this issue, as we don't have coverage of this year's FBI in this issue, as neither John Brain nor Frank Russo our Associate Editors, who have covered the event in the past, were available to do so this year. I consider this to be an indicator that we don't have enough Associate Editors.

Anyone who took sufficient (good) photos for an article on FBI'10 is cordially invited to write up your impressions and send it along with the photos, for the next issue. Like I said, we need more Associate Editors.

This astounding vehicle is "Berzerker, Trike Of Death". It was built by Scott Cocking/Department of Spontaneous Combustion, with help from various friends/consultants. It appeared and created a stir at the Burning Man Festival in 2006, and the Arcata CA Kinetic Sculpture Race in 2007. Fully-loaded, it weighs 1000+ pounds and is entirely human-powered. Notable features include those 4-foot diameter wheels using 15" car rims as hubs, and an interesting pair of propane-fired flame cannons. Scott calls them "puffers", but more common terminology used by others for similar rigs is "poofers". I can see Scott's rationale, as "poofers" might sound uncomfortably like "poofters", which is a disparaging slang term, favored by Aussies, entirely unrelated to this sort of manly project.

Nice instructional documentation on Scott's site shows how the "puffer rig" is built, as well as two versions of the wheels. The wheels, in either version (conventionally-spoked versus 1/16" aircraft cable serving the same function) were incredibly tedious to accomplish, but really cool-looking once finished. I'm glad someone did this, as it's a magnificent human accomplishment; but I wouldn't have tackled it without at least a platoon of unpaid interns or fanatically-indoctrinated cult victims to do the multitude of tedious tasks involved.

Berzerker is steered through its single rear wheel, accomplished by a cleverly-routed cable system involving lots of pulleys (12). In theory, it's similar to the steering system used in traditional outboard motor boats, except much more complicated, of course.

P R O J E C T N O T E S : P H A T C Y C L E S C H O P P E R

Recently, I felt the need to take on a new bike project. I'd given my old street beater- a typical 3-speed Ross Eurosport "citybike" to one of my daughter's girlfriends, due to lack of space. It was replaced in that space by my HEAT chopper. Unfortunately, that bike is longer than most, and pretty heavy, which means that it's a pain getting it from my fourth-floor studio down to the street. So, I wanted something simpler, and hopefully shorter, for everyday street use.

Like most players of our game, I keep a pretty good-sized pile of frames and components on hand. As I'm also very frugal, I wanted to use as much stuff as I already had, with the minimum of expenditure on new parts.

Since I'd already decided to build up my Phat Cycles chopper frame as an E-bike, and already had the electro-mechanical components on hand for it, I decided to do that one as a pedal-powered street machine first, to be converted to Electro/pedal drive later. This frame is ideal for E-bike use, due to Gary Silva's design; and it's pretty cool-looking, too. Directly below is the initial buildup, after I gave it a Yellow Krylon paint job and hung the basic components on it.

The only new component purchases, at this point, were the old-school Stingray-style apehanger bars, new grips, the double-legged kickstand, a new chain, a shim set to adapt the seatpost to the slightly-larger seat tube, and a new cantilever brake and lever for the front end. Additional expenditure was for welding an extension onto the steer tube of the suspension fork, to match the frame's very long head tube.

Once I finally had the fork locked in place, and the bike up on wheels. I realized that the head geometry was going to be problematic, due to the radical head-tube rake. Past experience with frames of my own design led me to expect slow-speed wobble. The first road test down NYC's Broadway showed that my expectations were accurate- extreme front-end shimmy at normal Broadway traffic speed. I suppose a real man would have stuck with the machine as-is, and developed forearms like Popeye the Sailor's from dealing with it. As I'm not that kind of guy, I chose another approach.

As the problem with the steering was mainly a jerky wobbling oscillation of the front wheel, it occurred to me that a motorcycle steering damper might do the trick, as that's what they're for. I hit eBay and ran a search for one. There are many expensive aftermarket ones available, of course, which are very tunable. While that would be nice, the idea here was to do it on the cheap, so I started searching under the "lowest price first" search setting. I ended up getting one for a Suzuki Hayabusa rice rocket, in almost new condition, for about $20, including shipping. I found several similar ones, so presumably as soon as a lot of people buy a rice rocket, they buy the expensive aftermarket unit. The OEM unit has no adjustability, other than the way it's mounted. I plan to mount the sliding rod part to one of the fork legs, and the hydraulic cylinder to the frame. I'll let you know how it works out. If it's successful, I'll write up the adaptation for our next issue.

Coincidentally, in a recent E-mail exchange with our Contributing Editor, John Youens, I sent him the above photo and mentioned the steering problem and my proposed solution for it.

Here is his comment:

"The bike looks great! Nancy had a Phat bike with a set of straight forks and it was also a pain to ride. I fixed the trail problem with a pair of lowrider bent springer forks (see photo). It put the head tube in perfect alignment with the contact patch of the tire. This may have been the first time a bent springer ever helped the steering geometry of a bike!"

I love having engineer friends! So, if the Suzuki damper doesn't do the trick, I have an alternate cure for the problem. I'd prefer the hydraulic damper, if only because it would work better with the "Moon Equipment" look I'm going for with the bike, but the bent springer fork certainly wouldn't look horrible, by any means. But, the additional wheelbase length might make it as long as HEAT, negating the space benefits. We'll see what happens.

This is the JourneyMan Mobile Shelter Bicycle Trailer, designed by Tony Hoar and manufactured by his company- Tony's Trailers. It's described thusly: "While shelters are provided by many agencies, there are people living on the street who prefer their independence. Others who take advantage of the shelters offered would benefit greatly from the security of having a rolling means to make their living, along with protection from the elements should they need it."

Presumably, the "rolling means to make their living" refers to the collection and redemption of empty beverage containers, the commonest source of income for jobless/homeless people. We heartily commend Mr. Hoar for his altruism in developing this solution to an all-too-common need. The list price of this clever device is $771 USD, which represents, at 5 cents each, the redemption of 15,420 empty beverage containers.

Fortunately for the genuinely homeless, according to Mr. Hoar, they get theirs for free. Everybody else, start collecting.

Seen at left is John Brain's latest project bike: "Diamante". The photo showed up in my In-Box today. It's another stage of his fairly recent work, in that it's extremely sculptural.in form, and intricate and elegant in design. John is taking frame design to a definitely-higher plane of aesthetics. In musical terms, I would compare it to the later and arguably most succesfull work of Pink Floyd- such as Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall. Both are considered masterpieces by the most discerning of critics. Interestingly, and coincidentally, I also learned today that Alan Parsons, the engineer/sound designer of those particular Floyd works and significant works by other musical artists, has introduced a new multi-media course on his unique approach to the subject.

While I love the work of Pink Floyd, and bought DSOTM several times in vinyl, and later in CD format, another of my favorite, more

recent musical artists is Mr. Jack White, of White Stripes and numerous other brilliant side groups/projects. While Mr. White's work is considerably different from "Mr. Floyd's", being of a stripped-down almost "garage band" style, I consider his work to be equally brilliant, in its own way. Most people have a fairly diverse set of "favorites" of almost anything, whether it be music or bikes. Often favoritism of the moment depends upon immediate circumstances. Having built several grandiosely overscaled/comparatively heavy bikes, I've recently wanted to add something smaller/lighter to my stable. The progress of that project may be seen a bit above, based upon an early "factory chopper" frame by our old friend Gary Silva. Built from "Hi-Ten Steel" tubing, the frame is surprisingly light considering its size and complexity. Most of Mr.Silva's more interesting bike designs since then have been fairly complex and, presumably somewhat weightier, than a typical street bike.

In a further coincidence, today's E-mail also contained a message from the same Gary Silva, with a link to a YouTube video of another project. The video's title is "My Bike. Riding on air. Super lightweight 3 speeds". The bike seems to be sized about the same as a typical compact MTB machine, similar to one my friend Carlos Montoya just built up based upon a lightweight aluminum-framed Giant or whatever, of which I'm envious due to its light weight and compact speediness. Except Gary's, unlike Carlos' machine, has graceful curved top and down tubes, as well as seat stays. It makes considerable use of carbon composite components wherever possible, including Fork legs, Crank arms, Rims, Seat post, Seat Clamp, and Stem.

I'm sure it's fast, light, and would probably fit into my elevator easily. Once again, I'm envious as hell. I'm almost tempted to make my next bike project a carbon composite over foam machine, as in my Project Minotaur design concept of years ago, except elevator-sized.

At right is shown a jetbike I'd never seen before, it's from a motercycle blog site called "New Cafe Racer Society" I don't spend much time there, but BRK friend "$5 Frank" Webster does, and frequently sends us leads to interesting stuff there to do with our line of interest. This obviously is. Unfortunately, the images there are usually sent in by people even lazier with information transmission than some of our less forthcoming Gallery submitters. This one was found under the site's "jetbikes" heading, which shows mostly motorcycles with jet engines. This one, having cranks and pedals, is much more our cup of meat, to use one of $5 Frank's favorite Frank Zappa-derived expressions.

The engine is obviosly a turbojet unit similar to the one Wayne Springe uses on his considerably more kustom-styled Biohazard bike, however this bike has possibly more whimsical charm, in a Dr. Seuss/Sonia Delaunay sort of way. Whoever built it should be kudoed for the immaculate construction, clean execution and component layout displayed. Our hat's off to the so-far nameless creator of this sweet little techno-puppy.

The Fix Is In:

You may have noticed in our previous issue's new Gallery entries lineup one by Emmett Gross: a sweet-looking "Kustom Fixie". For the benefit of those of you out of the loop regarding cycle fashion, a "Fixie" is what used to be called a "Track Bike"- a simple minimal-weight racing machine with fixed (direct) gearing designed to zip around a velodrome as quickly as possible within a scrum, but preferably ahead of, similar bikes driven by velo athletes. Such machines have no multi-gearing or brakes, and are incapable of coasting, unless the rider unclips his feet from the pedals, which totally negates whatever stopping ability the bike normally posesses.

Way back in the day you'd never have seen one of those bikes actually ridden on the street, due to things called "practicalities" to do with "safety". I don't know when bike messengers here in NYC started choosing them as their steeds of choice, but the local news media started noticing the trend in the early '80s. Their conclusion was that it showed how crazy bike messengers were. I'm not saying the media was wrong, although even then they usually were, but there's usually some sort of reason for anything even crazy people do.

Ironically, even as the job openings for cycle messengers have plummeted, due to the internet or maybe the availability of better anti-psychotic drugs; the popularity of track bikes for street use by non-professionals here has skyrocketed in the past few years, among 20-something youths who don't need to have dangerous low-paying jobs to live here, or safe high-paying ones either, come to that, due to having trust funds resulting from being scions of indulgent parents who support their "careers" of pretending to be writers, artists or musicians. The media have dubbed this demographic "hipsters", which I find offensive. The late Terry Southern and Lenny Bruce were real hipsters, and Paul Krassner still is, these kids are what I and some others prefer to call "Trustafarians", based upon the source of their income, and one of their favorite hair styles (whitelocks). But, I'm pretty fond of looking at their so-called"customized" track bikes, and study them at every opportunity, which is quite frequent in my neighborhood. Although they mostly live in Brooklyn's Williamsburg section, they all seem to socialize around Manhattan's Union Square Park, which is also my neighborhood stomping grounds. While I mostly just consider them silly johnny-come-latelies (I proudly owned a set of bongo drums in the early '60s, when the real hipsters and beatniks were still alive), my favorite bike blogger- BikeSnobNYC absolutely despises them, along with other total dooshes of the cycling world. Fortunately, he's an amazingly humorous writer, along with being an ultra-incisive culture critic. This makes for a blog which I can guarantee to be the most reliably-hilarious of any to do with cycle culture. I'd be tempted to send him a link to BR&K, but it's probably best he doesn't know about us.

That plug out of the way, here's another: Gary Silva (again) has always had a knack for seeing future trends before anyone else. Remember, he's the guy who introduced the first "factory chopper bicycle" (see above) of the modern age, slightly before there was a kustombike webzine (this one) to plug it. He also introduced the "Stepper fitness bike" several years before the currently-hot ElliptiGo, which seems to work on the exact same bloody principle. I hope he's getting royalties; if not, he should consult a halfway-decent attorney.

That said, Mr. Silva has made another marketing prediction, and is backing his instinct with an actual new 3G product line. His prediction is that the bike style favored by urban daredevil minimal-wage professional traffic victims, as emulated by rich-kid culture vultures will be the next big thing for fashion-suggestible middle-class youth. With his canny track record, I'd be a pitiable fool to disagree with his prognostication.

The video below shows some of the interesting amusement possibilties of Mr. Silva's new design. Who would have thought that the capability of riding backwards was a desirable bike attribute? In that respect, we can think of this bike as a "2-wheeled unicycle" for "trustafarian wannabees". Not that that's a bad thing, of course.

Ease of popping Wheelies has always been a desirable capability within our little niche, naturally.

Frame-styling-wise, the most obvious kustom touch on this frame is the sweet slight curvature imposed upon the lower half of the seat tube, following the outer circumference of the rear tire, which suggests a shorter wheelbase for superior directional agility over the traditional Bianchi, et al track bike frame pattern. While track bikes are pretty much perfect for zipping around a velodrome, zipping around nimbly in street traffic is another task entirely, which this bike seems designed to fulfill.

It is easy to visualize this machine being a natural step up from the BMX "trickbike" pattern for young adult urban cyclists.