Shopcast

What: Tiny Bikeshop Concert

Where: Perennial Cycle

When: 6-8pm Tonight

Who: Brianna Lane

We're celebrating spring at Perennial Cycle with friends and music (maybe even a few cookies and lemonade).

Banjo Brothers is a Minneapolis based multinational company that make a wide range of well made, value minded bike bags for a wide variety of uses.
Brianna Lane is a local musician with the voice of a songbird and guitar playing skills that will knock your socks off. Bring it all together and you have a Tiny Bikeshop Concert.

Here are some of the things that will be happening:

- Brianna will be available (with her beau Greg) to talk about cycle touring (they did a music tour last fall with Peter Mulvey and on the tour did 8 music gigs in 8 days all on bicycle!).

- Eric of Banjo Brothers will be available to talk about carrying gear (milk, laptop, tent, you name it) on your bike.

- Luke and Derek will be available to discuss long distance “event” style riding (they did a 24 hour 315 mile ride last summer).

- There will be someone from O2 Rainwear available to talk about dressing for foul weather riding.

- Special Tiny Bikeshop Concert Pricing will be worth coming by to check out

- Dunn Brothers next door will be offering coupons for bean discounts as well.

Curt Goodrich of Curt Goodrich Bicycles pulled out an amazing job on a gorgeous road bike this winter. The job was to instal S & S couplers on a vintage Eddy Mercxx 7-11 Team Edition Bike. That part is the easy stuff. Then the customer wanted the bike painted in full-on original Eddy Merxx 7-11 Team Edition paint scheme with the decal kit (sourced in Switzerland). This is a Team Edition bike that would have been the team bike in 1989 and 1990.

I knew that Curt was meticulous in all his work, but this was an entirely new level.

After years and years of building some of the most respected steel bike frames in the world he is a master when i comes to building bikes. We all know that and marvel at the achievement.

Painting is something that Curt brought in-house just a few years ago. This bike proves to me that he has mastered the art of painting a bike frame.

Curt Goodrich is a super hard working guy that is making some amazing things happen with bicycles. Perennial Cycle is fortunate to have such a great business relationship with Curt.

The harshness of winter riding is undeniable for any Minnesotan (or the bike of a Minnesotan). We've had a lot of snow this winter and with the snow comes a lot of ice in the gears. Frequently I find that the chain won't engage a gear I shift into because there is too much ice on it. The technique for dealing with this is to pedal rather gently to shave off the ice. If you hammer down on the pedals you'll likely just skip over the gear and never get the ice off the gear.

One way to deal with this is to skip the multiple gears and go with a single speed set up. Local customer (nationally known musician) Ann Reed went the single speed route this fall.