[CR] Was Snubbed on a Sunday afternoon - Now Fixie?

(Example: Events:Cirque du Cyclisme:2004)

Date: Mon, 23 Mar 2009 13:28:49 -0700
From: Jerome & Elizabeth Moos <jerrymoos@sbcglobal.net>
To: <classicrendezvous@bikelist.org>, <sbryne@comcast.net>
In-Reply-To: <1199094634.158831237833985406.JavaMail.root@sz0070a.emeryville.ca.mail.comcast.net>
Subject: [CR] Was Snubbed on a Sunday afternoon - Now Fixie?


Since I have lived in rural areas most of the last 5 years, I'm not really very familiar with the young fixie scene, of which I take it bike messengers are the most visible but not the only element. I've been meaning to ask whether most of these riders actually ride Fixed Gear in the sense we speak of it in regard to track bikes. That is, is the cog directly threaded onto the hub, with no freewheel? Or do some significant percentage of the so-called Fixie crowd actually use a single-speed freewheel? I suppose that would still be Fixed Gear in the sense that one has only a single fixed gear ratio, but that's not what I generally understand the term to mean.

Of couse, unless one is truly crazy, the use of a single-speed FW will then require one to have at least one brake, as one can no longer brake with ones legs as it were. Not sure if the typical setup is no brake, fixed gear, no FW, or front brake with or without FW. Hard for me to learn this first hand, as there aren't a lot of bike messengers to hang with in Big Spring, Texas.

Regards,

Jerry Moos
Big Spring, Texas, USA