FOLDING BIKES BLOG
Stories, tutorials, and advice from the Montague Bikes team.
How to Get Around
We've been focusing on urban cycling recently, but what happens when you travel? When you live just a bit further than is comfortable to ride from, for whatever reason: time, distance, infrastructure limitations. The image above comes from the current exhibit as the...
Band-aids
With the influx of cycling and new cyclists in our city and around the world, there are sadly more accidents -and bound to be more - as drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians alike acclimate to the new street dynamic. Our emergency services must adjust as well; from...
Farewell My Sweet Auto
Along with all the Olympics news coming out of London, there has been some cycling news outside of the races. Changes in the great historic city of London are reflecting a change in the times, away from the car-centered past and a turn toward a...
Bumps and Bruises
Yesterday I shared some lessons from my recent car-bike incident. Now to help keep your bike safe. As much as many of us would like to be riding all day long, every day - most of the time that cannot be. Even bicycle couriers have to stop and leave their bike...
Back to the Basics
Sometimes things don't go according to plan and what should have been a routine commute home from work, class, or some other activity becomes a dramatic moment. Accidents happen. Sometimes they occur between bikes and cars, or with pedestrians. Often times they...
Philosophy: Minimalist
What are the necessary parts on a bike anyway? It all depends upon your build philosophy. From a Minimalist Perspective First one needs a frame. A bicycle requires wheels to roll upon (included therein: tires, spokes, hubs, and all that lay beneath these). It...
“Elegant Functionality”
[Image Credit: Ben Gabo Photography] "The Navigator folding bike, for example, is a marvel of elegant functionality," writes Mark Feeney in today's Arts Monday section of The Boston Globe review of the BSA Space show Let's Talk About Bikes. We couldn't have said it...
Bicycle Utopia
Utopia The word utopia comes to us from Sir Thomas More's 1516 work of that name. It means the ideal place or perfect society, but it comes from the Greek roots for "the place that cannot be", or "no place". Being no place in particular means it cannot be defined or...
Drumroll please…
Not just across the pond, but a little further, into a town known as Friedrichshafen in Southern Germany to be precise. Ensconced in the mountains and on the shores of the Bodensee (also known as Lake Constance) stands the district capital of Landeskreis district....
Local Considerations: Commuting gracefully
Yesterday we spoke of considerations from our old friends across the pond in the UK. Today we have local considerations. In a local Massachusetts publication, suitably entitled Wicked Local, there is a handy advice article written jointly by Newton, MA Police...
Past and Future Tense: Health of a Nation
Villages - Were We Started From Once upon a time, we started out in villages. Well, obviously it's a quite a bit more complex than that, but for our purposes we're starting here. In small communities you know the people who pass you on the street, things are near...
Heraldry: Headbages
Hello folding bike: What's in a name? Or a symbol for that matter? How about a head badge? Some sort of heraldry? Way Back When Human beings have been using symbols as signs of solidarity for millennia. From before Roman times when military units could be...
Just Charming: A Commuter Interlude
In between all of this CX build business I end up coming upon things that work marvelously for a commuter build. One of these is the do-it-yourself classy charmer, the wine cork fender spacer. Fenders come in many forms, from easily removed race blades to long-term...
Montague Bikes for Iron Maiden
The life of a rockstar is one of travel; touring the world to put on a show in a new city every night. When your shows are on the 'world tour' scale, they're no small production. It takes a lot of work and a lot of manpower to set up the stage, props, lighting,...
I Want to Hold Your Hand: Handlebars
Part 5 in the “CX First Timer Custom Build Experiment” Admittedly the name handlebar is a little misleading; they're actually tubes, only the very early bikes had an actual steel bar - think how heavy that would be! So Many Flavors Handlebars come in many flavors,...
Paradise City?
We're in the Paper! An article entitled "Biking to the Future in Boston" by Peter DeMarco appeared in the recent The Boston Globe Magazine.... ...and guess who's representing on the front? Team Montague (denoted by the fuchsia arrow)! [Copyright belongs to The N.Y....
The Bicycle as Art
We each have that dream bike (or bikes), the one that makes us sigh and take leave of the moment to dream of cycling uninhibited through whatever cycling dreamscape we each keep in our hearts (the Alps, the urban jungle, Pacific Coast Highway along Big Sur - whatever...
Gearing: Cyclocross attributes for Commuting
Part 4 in the “CX First Timer Custom Build Experiment” What's in a gear? When doing a build it's a very important question to ask. Just what is this bicycle going to be doing, where is it going? My regular bicycle is a fixed gear - it is used for urban transport...
