Turning our old Trek Earl back into a fixed-gear bike
Over the course of this year, I slowly disassembled, rebuilt, and reconfigured my husband's old bike, an orange Trek Earl he'd had for a decade.
This Trek was a single-speed bike, probably produced in 2012. It used retro branding - the old Trek logo, which I think is much cooler-looking. The font is fun and to me genuinely looks less dated than the modern logo. (It just screams 90s to me!) The seat tube has a very fun sticker graphic of a bike mechanic, styled like the characters on a playing card.
The Earl also comes with a split top tube. The top tube has a little metal bracket on it which can be used to help hold a U-lock in place. You slide it in and let it hang; the bracket keeps it from sliding forward as you ride. But even better: the bracket is a bottle opener!!! This is the ultimate cool-guy ride-around-town bike.
After years of commuting to Glitch City and beyond, this bike was pretty beat-up and well-loved. After he got a bike with gears (a State 4130 All-Road) my husband didn't need to the single-speed as much anymore.
So I wanted to turn it into a fixed gear! I had never ridden one before and I was curious about what it was like. A guy I'd run into at a bike event in LA told me that it was sometimes safer to be on a fixed gear in a large, crowded event like Critical Mass, because you can modulate your speed more finely and avoid crashing into people. I was curious if that was true (after building the bike, I still don't know, haha). So I disassembled the bike and started cleaning it and removing all the ancient stickers.
This was in late 2023. I spent a lot of the holiday season cleaning the bike and buffing rust off with tin foil and water. In early 2024, I brought it into Bikerowave, a bike co-op in my part of LA, for a full disassembling. At Bikerowave I removed the cranks and chainring so that I could clean them, then discovered that the headset was shot and took that off as well. I ordered an extremely cheap replacement online (I think it was $15 USD?). The only challenge remaining was getting a fixed-gear rear wheel.
The difference between a single-speed and a fixed-gear bike is all in the rear wheel. Single-speed bikes have a freewheel, which allows you to coast. The term "single-speed" simply refers to the fact that the bike does not have additional gears. You cannot use a shifter to make climbing a hill easier. But once you do get up the hill, a single-speed bike WILL allow you to coast down the hill smoothly, without moving your feet.
Fixed gear bikes, on the other hand, have a rear wheel cog which does not permit coasting. If the rear wheel is moving, your feet MUST move. Your feet are connected directly to the rear cog, and the cog is connected directly to the hub of the wheel, and the hub to the spokes, and the spokes to the rim, and the rim to the tire. Everything is a solid system... and if you're riding safely, your feet are also strapped to the pedals with toe clips, straps, or a locking system attached to the sole of a bike shoe. This prevents the pedal slipping out from under your foot and whacking your shin.
You can find a fantastic explanation of the differences between these two types of bikes here, on Sheldon Brown's website. If you are looking for a lot of plain-text bike information, Sheldon's website remains the best there is.
So... to swap Brendon's bike from coastable to locked-in, I needed to replace the rear wheel. This bike was, however, originally sold with a flip-flop back wheel - a wheel that can run as either single speed OR fixed gear, with a cog on each side. One cog allows the hub to move freely, which permits coasting; the other cog is bolted to the hub with no freedom of movement. To change modes, you just take it off and turn it around.
This kind of wheel is super cool and flexible, and makes bikes a lot easier to share between people with different riding styles. It also means that the bike was a pretty good deal when it came on the market - features like this were rare to have in a bike that cheap. But when my husband purchased it, the rear wheel had been replaced with a more cheaply-constructed wheel, which came with a single-speed hub only. It's likely that the bike was sold to him second-hand, so either the original owner kept took the flip-flop wheel because they knew how nice it was to have... or the store took that wheel off and moved it onto another bike.
The place where he bought the bike in 2012 or 2013 is extremely unusual. They sell two things: bikes and bibles. It's a notoriously strange place in this part of town - every time I tell an avid cyclist or bike co-op member "my husband got his old bike from the bible place," they know exactly what I am talking about. Please, check out their website here. It is a shallow but funny little rabbithole.
At the front of the store you will find the books that will give you a new way of living, thinking and seeing things in a positive and inspiring way. Our books include favorite titles such as,
"The Holy Bible"
"Battlefield of the Mind"
"Your Best Life Now"
" 5 Love Languages"
and other books that can transform your life. We also said we can help with your health and that of others. It is only found here and in Whole Foods Market. If you need information about it, here it is. The name is APPLE CIDER VINEGAR BRAGG This can help you deal with any sickness. All you do is take a cup of water and pour two spoonfulls of Brag in the cup( if you are not diabetec you may add organic honey to it. ) Or add it to your favorite juice or tea. Then you drink it ( of course ) and your body will begin to restore physically.
They then go on to recommend that you check out the Focus on the Family website.
It is absolutely incredible that this store has existed for so many years in Culver City, of all places. This is an expensive part of town, and there are several other competing bike stores within a 15 minute drive of this shop where people will treat you more normally, and refrain from selling you a bible when you want a bike - or from recommending hard-right-wing propaganda sites to you. Somehow, despite its eccentricity, the shop is still hanging on.
People sometimes suggest to us that it is a front for something, but I think they probably just got really good at selling extremely cheap used commuters. I also think the name of the store - "Bikes and Books" - does a pretty good job of concealing its true nature. How interesting, you might think - a place that sells both bikes AND books, two things I love! Then you'd go inside and get jumpscared by "Battlefield of the Mind".
Anyway, the bible people either took (?) or never received the GOOD rear wheel that came with my husband's bike when it was manufactured. So we needed a new one - probably just a fixed-gear wheel without the flip-flop feature. I assumed buying an extremely cheap, used pair of wheels in LA be easy... but I was wrong.
It's a weird conundrum. You can find some pretty normal fixed-gear bikes for extremely cheap on places like OfferUp - a fixed gear bike that is safe to ride and Does The Job is easy to get for less than 200 bucks. But if you want fixed-gear wheels alone, they are all suddenly much more expensive. It is actually cheaper to buy an entire fixed-gear bike off of a classifieds site in the spring in LA than it is to buy just the fixed-gear wheels. It is a nightmare out here!
The problem, I think, is that anyone who can take a bike apart is probably able to accurately assess how much the bike is worth. People who cannot take the bike apart are more likely to sell the entire bike for less than it is worth. So you end up with a lot of classifieds sites where, for $150 USD, you can either get an entire bike, or two wheels. It is bonkers.
I got real bogged down at this point in the process. It seemed as if I'd need to buy an entire fixed gear bike and just take the wheels off it to get what I wanted, which felt pointless and irresponsible to me. I became increasingly disgusted with myself for how I'd left a half-finished bike in the middle of our tiny apartment for so long.
In the end, I just decided to buy a whole wheel set with a flip-flop back hub, and restore the bike to its original utility. We'd be more likely to keep it if it had that feature, because it meant we could "turn off" the fixed gear qualities and share it with someone who might be visiting us or biking with us. While a lot of people learned to ride fixed-gear bikes as kids or teens in the 2000s, most adults are not as confident on a bike with foot retention.
Here is the bike! I got wheels from Retrospecs, a decent direct-to-consumer online bike store. The grips are orange Ourys, and the saddle is from Charge. The tires in the picture are the ones that shipped with the wheels, but the tires I have on it right now are the same old Gatorskins my husband has been running on this bike for nearly a decade. Please forgive the (unused) rear brake still on the frame in this picture - we were still at the time unsure whether we wanted to leave it in fixed-gear mode.
As of now, it is. I've enjoyed learning how to ride this bike, but I am still not entirely confident enough to take it all around town in traffic. I will sometimes take it out in my neighborhood late at night, however, and bike around the block for miles, listening to podcasts... I'm surely skilled enough to go to a big group event with it at this point, but I'm a bit nervous still. Fixed gear bikes require different instincts than geared bikes. You must react slightly differently to different situations - in particular, the situations involved in stopping the bike! I do run it with a front brake, but it's still different enough to make me doubt myself a bit.
If I did this again, I think I would not try to do it in the spring. I am certain that the time of year affected my ability to find cheap wheels. I was trying to build this bike at the same time that everyone else in the city was getting ready for the summer.
Luckily, though, we will probably never do this again. We have our fixed-gear bike now... I just need to get brave enough to take it to Critical Mass.