Wired Cola

It is mostly finished.

Urbi et Orbi, my nonsensical idea for a city bicycle with very, very long legs.

It combines a flat bar (nice for town) with an aero bar (nice for long, fast rides) for a bicycle comfortable in a wide range of conditions. Early theories included a set of bar ends, but I judged them messy and unnecessary.

The drivetrain is an Alfine gearhub. There's no practical reason the bike requires one, though they are attractive, and it gives the bike a clean appearance, all-weather shifting perfection, and a perfect 4th (direct-drive) gear.

It is not quite completed: gearing needs to be finalized, and there's a lot of rather shoddy beer-can-shimming keeping parts of the cockpit together. The current weight is about 25 pounds, if my bathroom scale is to be believed. One may think of that as a very heavy road bike, or a very light city bike. Either attitude is acceptable.

The bike does not feel like an easygoing city bike in my quick test ride. It has a sharply-configured cockpit (at least for me), and in the tri-bars, the bike feels fast. The flat bars make for easy handling, but they are narrow, so things are fairly frantic, steering-wise.

It's a fairly ridiculous bicycle, and I think I like how it turned out. Future plans include a chainguard and fenders, maybe. It's not really certain yet.

I fantasize that this is a bike from a parallel universe, where it was Italy (not England) that developed a TT culture, and that 8-speed gearhubs and aero bars arrived about forty years earlier than in our timeline. The result would be something like UeO, a practical bicycle one could use for commuting every day, but also for time trialling on the weekends. It is retro, but for a past that never existed.