Bikes in Autumn

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My favorite time of the year is at hand. I've done many long-ish rides along country trails in Autumn, including some day trips that had me driving 3.5+ hours into the mountains of WV just for a 7 or 8 mile ride around a cranberry bog, on the bike shown in this image. I no longer have this bike, passing it along to an acquaintance, but it was my first bike build, starting with a cheap Mongoose Beast frame. I called it "Project Beastie Bike". I made so many mistakes building and later modifying this thing, but I learned a lot and had a lot of fun. It was squirrelly as heck to steer at slow speeds, but I did a lot of less technical MTB trails with it, and rail trails, and fire roads. My longest ride on it was 37 miles, and my back side hurt so much by the end of that ride I was lucky to be able to drive home. It was a true beast at 45 pounds, and I thought I had broken my leg once when I tried to bunny hop a ditch and miss-timed it, planting the front wheel squarely in the ditch and sending me over the bars about 10 feet in front of the bike, landing fully on my right leg. It hurt so much I just lay there holding my leg and moaning until the throbbing stopped. Scared the crap out of me when my whole leg went numb on the drive home.

Anyway, enough horror stories. Feel free to post your own Autumn pics. I searched and didn't see any threads with similar content.

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Cool. I was trying to find a good spot for some bike poses on this morning's ride, but we are still in the early stages of our foliage change.
 
Autumn in Savannah. :D

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The return of Big Red

Last Autumn I found an old steel bike frame on eBay, and over the course of some weeks, built it into a 650B mountain-ish thing, doing its maiden ride on Christmas Day 2020. It was a lot of fun to ride, but over the summer I stripped it of a lot of parts in order to outfit the Budnitz Alpha frame. In hindsight, that frame is not as much fun to ride as Big Red was, and I'm thinking of putting it up for sale. But in the meantime, I've been squirreling away parts to refit Big Red, and today it was re-maidened, this time as a sort of 26er, using wide rims and 26 x 2.125 Kenda tires. I had literally just installed the chain and pedals and rolled it out my back door when I took this photo. I hadn't even ridden it yet.

I outfitted it front and back with Tektro disc brakes, hydraulic in the front and mechanical in the rear. It was the easiest brake installation I've ever done. They are smooth as silk, and the fat Kenda tires give a comfortable ride. Gearing is a Race Face narrow-wide 38T mated to a Problem Solvers 17T cog. With the tall 20.5" frame, the bike is a great fit for me. Welcome back, Big Red.

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