Bottles And Chains

Don’t be a half arsed cunt! Come along and support something good. I’ll buy you a beer.

Yo. Bottles and Chains sticker packs now availible.  If you want one here is what’cha gotta do.. Send $5 and a self addressed, stamped envelope to:

El Presidente

Bottles and Chains

127 Waterworks Road

Dynnyrne  TAS  7005

Easy. Trick up your pony.

It’s back, bad spelling and all! The annual suffering of the masses hosted by Andy over at Fyxomatosis, the Melburn Roobaix. Each year professional riders jump on expensive bikes and destroy them over kilometers of mud, dirt, cobblestones and grass in France. Meanwhile, on the other side of the globe a bunch of regular people jump on bikes and make themselves hurt on the rutted and bumpy back alleys of Melbourne. Everyone ends up sore and tired, but the Melburn Roobaix participants no doubt end up a lot drunker, and without the comfort of a team masseur. Either way, you know it’s going to be a shitload of fun, and you can win some stuff that’s much cooler than a rock. Click the image below for all the details over at Fyx HQ.

The MTBA National series came to town on the weekend, and BnC were in loud attendance. Saturday saw Hunnibel taking the commentry stand in a fairly offical-like role as the 4X battles were waged on the hill above. Apparently putting in volunteer hours to help out the locals doesn’t give you enough brownie points to get away with drunken actions though. This was proven as the ol’ boy was banned from the event by UCI officials after getting his pasty white cock out and flashing it at XC riders, whilst a bunch of poor, innocent children stood terrified near by. At least the youth of today are getting a good, hard (?) dose of reality nice and early. Drinking is bad for you kids!

Sunday saw a few of us crawl out of bed, stumble into the bottle shop, then haul three cartons of beer half way up a stupidly steep hill. We decided to stop before someone died from heart failure, and set in for a long day of abuse, encouragement and repeated attempts at making guys riding big bikes and wearing funny helmets eat shit into big piles of rock.  Highly succesful for the most part, with numerous complaints, death stares, and muttered insults. It’s all about adding to the atmosphere, and if you want to race pro you’ve gotta handle the heckles. We managed to scare off at least one course marshall, offend a lot of people, and probably educate a few more kids on the woes of substance abuse. The end of the day saw the worst night club in Hobart (Halo) filled with drunken riders, before retiring to the ritzy-as-fuck Monza hotel room for more drinking, and someone threw a tree off the balcony.

Overall, a good weekend. A few people wondered why this kind of thing doesn’t happen at state rounds, and I’m starting to think that the suggestion may have been foolishly made. Any excuse for a beer (or ten), right?

This is a general warning to anyone riding trails around the place, be they singletrack or fireroad. A rider was injured over the weekend by a length of wire strung at head height between two trees. The wire was spotted at the last minute and so the injury wasn’t as serious as it could have been, but there was still damage done. The incident occurred on a descent that is normally ridden at high speed and it was only lucky timing that meant the rider wasn’t going full bore.

There are vigilante morons everywhere at the moment, setting booby traps that have the potential to seriously injure or even kill riders. It’s a sad state of affairs, but one we all need to be very wary of! This is the second similar occurrence in a pretty short amount of time, at two separate trail locations, so keep your eyes open. If you do find something, alert the police so they’re aware of this becoming a dangerous trend.

Please spread the word about this, cheers.

Twelve months have come and gone since my last post on bicycle advocacy (albeit the painting of guerrilla bike lanes in London), so I thought it high time to muse on the subject again. Healthy Transport Hobart has been the driving force behind the revised Critical Mass format, ‘Courteous Mass’, which has seems to be far more sucessfull than the former with numbers of around 150 cyclists joining in. Even the State’s Pollies have jumped on board with the Premier rocking up more than once. I know Timmy and the boys from Bike Tas have done alot to improve cycleways and rider awareness in Hobart (eg: new bike lanes across the Tasman Brigde and the vast improvements on the Channel Highway between the City and Kingston) but the situation for southern riders is still far from perfect. Kingston has just gone through a major redevelopment of the CBD and cyclists were consulted about their needs on the to be revised roads. Cyclists had a small win with lanes being put in where before there were none, but.. where they are needed most the lanes are still absent. Try it, ride through Kingston CBD and see what happens.. Where the road is wide and straight, yep, there is a bike lane but hit the first intersection and, whoa, it’s gone? Same goes for the round-a-bout and where the road narrows, no bike lanes. The Kingborough Council were close, but no cigar. It’s in all our best interest to throw some weight behind groups such as Bike Tas to make sure things do go our way into the future otherwise it could a dark future, similar to that faced by cyclists in Toronto.

A bit of searching unearthed Patriot Bicycles, perhaps the only contemporary manufacturer of BMX Sidehacks. Their frames have a very ‘agricultural’ look, and judging by the tubeset are probably heavy as fk but given their intended use and abuse, justifiably so. The $599.99US price tag (frame only) is probably out of sync with the B’n’C coffers and I reckon building one from scratch or doing a resto job is more up our alley anyway. The search goes on…