Weekly Video Roundup: Seattle visit, how carbon wheels are made, midpriced bike torture


Welcome to the weekly video roundup! Last week was busy, with a train trip to Seattle for a no-friends no-family Thanksgiving. So I’m back to playing catchup – there are about 60 videos in the queue for next week already. So this week’s entries are on the short side, but they are still great!

The video above is from ‘Bike Kill NYC’, which is … I can’t summarize it any better than Gothamist: “a few hundred bike punks riding mutant welded art-cycles and throwing weird shit at each other in an endless counter-clockwise beer gyre while onlookers partied to the searing riffs of live metal bands”.

Our friends at Path Less Pedaled went to Seattle for Cranksgiving and toured Metier, Peloton, Electric Lady, and Swift Industries.

GCN got a factory tour of Zipp (carbon wheels):

Phil of ‘Skills with Phil’ is back, putting the $1200 2017 Raleigh Tokul 3 through a torture test. Skip ahead to 4:15 if you want to see a quick snippet of the bike’s success or failure.

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This looks like a great day/weekend of riding, though I’d probably need a nap. I love the smooth slo-mo on the jumps.

BicycleDutch covers the well-designed Royal Welshbrug (bridge), aka the “golden fishnet stocking”. It’s a monument to WW2, which is discussed in the video.

Racing

There’s a pile of great videos from local cross racing- here we go:

RCB’s Barton Park video from Nov 11/12. There was another video in last week’s roundup.

Elsewhere:

This has clips of a gravel century in Waverly, Alabama. The terrain fascinates me- though I wouldn’t want to be on those roads in the rain.

More elsewhere: epic demolition derby ‘parking rage’ in Southern California, dumb pass (‘MGIF’) (and reverse view), car driver right-hooks, aggro passenger (warning, language).

Honorable Mentions

This week’s honorable mentions: minimal ad from Giant for a kid-oriented CX bike.

Inclusion criteria: If I’ve missed something, post it in the comments! I prefer videos published in the last week or so. Note if there’s a specific point in a long video that is worth highlighting. Also note if there is colorful language. I will delay videos containing pro racing spoilers by 7 days.

– Ted Timmons, @tedder42

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Mike
Mike
7 years ago

I like the Bike Kill NYC as a relief from the normal giddy and upscale bike stuff we usually see. Of course, these Bike Kill NYC-ers may be giddy and upscale too, but taking a ride on the wild side.

How about it, Portland. Rise to the challenge?

Spiffy
7 years ago

when I first saw the Bike Kill NYC static video image I thought “cool, the Chariot Wars made it to the roundup” and then realized it was a different group doing essentially the same thing we do here…

awesome!

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=mini+bike+chariot+wars

B. Carfree
B. Carfree
7 years ago
Reply to  Spiffy

It looked a lot like the old UC Davis Picnic Day Parade featuring the Davis Whymcycle Society, except that we just had kids dusting us with silly string rather than tossing junk at us.

Amusing aside: the first year the DWS asked to be in the parade, the organizers said “no way!” The second year, they reluctantly let us in. In subsequent years, they would call to make sure we were coming.

bottom bracket
bottom bracket
7 years ago

The Bike Kill NYC video did indeed look like a bunch of punks. Not the image of cycling that will attract most folks. The air in that room had enough particulate to be an explosion hazard.

CaptainKarma
CaptainKarma
7 years ago
Reply to  bottom bracket

Mad Max of Bikerdome. We are gonna need ways to blow off steam in the coming age of Ubermann.

Lester Burnham
Lester Burnham
7 years ago
Reply to  bottom bracket

Weird isn’t working (my favorite bumper sticker).

B. Carfree
B. Carfree
7 years ago

I enjoyed the tour of bike shops by Path Less Pedaled. Perhaps the next time they do bike shops in Seattle, they can do R+E, aka Rodriguez. It’s a very old shop, but their lower floor machine and fabrication facilities are simply awesome with their converted WWII-era machinery. It’s particularly awesome that at least one of the parts they manufacture and hold the patent to, the Bushnell eccentric, is produced in the shop and (mostly) shipped to Asia for assembly in bikes that are subsequently shipped to the US.

IanC
IanC
7 years ago

Oh, man! I could use me some Bike Kill right now. That looks like just the thing for where my soul has been for the last 3 weeks…!

Anne Hawley
7 years ago

The video about the golden fishnet stocking bridge in the Netherlands makes me long for such beautiful separated infrastructure here.