What's Going On With Me And My Bikes
I started getting into flatland over the past couple months. Just as I started to get into rhythm of it, it snowed like crazy. So now there's nowhere to ride. All the good parking lots are all wet and snowy. So the tires just can't grip the ground enough to do anything worthwhile. I finally started pulling time machines too!
I'm building a Haro Blammo dirt jumper. I made parts list of what's on it. Check it out. It also has the parts list for my Zippo. But the Zippo is mostly stock parts. The only real thing that isn't stock is the rims. They're really nice ones.
Lately I've been doing a lot of gap jumping and street riding. I found out that the best place to street ride around my house, is at the community college about a block away. They have tons of stairs and ledges and rails and gaps and all sorts of stuff to ride. I need to take some pictures of me doing stuff off them. The only problem is avioding hassle from the campus police. I try to avoid them, but sometimes there's just no getting around it. And then they tell me that the college "isn't for that fancy BMX riding." But I come back 20 minutes later and do the same stuff.
The most stairs I've ever jumped off is 8. I've been trying to 360 down them. But I've only been able to land it twice. I usually just crash or almost crash. I blew out one of my tires doing that. I've been trying to do a lot more 50 50 grinds down the rails too. The only problem with doing those is that they are slow, and look like crap. The last time I tried to do a really high speed grind, I wiped out bad. So that's a problem.
In particular, there's one ledge I really like to jump off. It's about 4 and a half feet up. I've been pulling a few tricks off it. Nothing really spectacular, but it still impresses the old people across the street. I can pull an X-up, a barspin, a one footer, a one hander, and various other technical tricks off it. I've tried to pull some of the technical variations of the barspin, X-up, and no-hander stuff (such as a tobogan, X-up to X-up, truckdrivers, turndowns, no-hander seatgrab, nothings, bodyjars, suicides, straight out no-handers, etc), but every time I try to do one, I either don't pull it completely, turf it, or just wuss out of doing it. I've been able to pull suicides and straight out no-handers without a hitch. I've almost got seatgrab one handers, but I'm nowhere near seatgrab no handers.
I've been using my Haro Zippo to street ride with. It's pretty good for street riding. I just wish it were a lot lighter. It's one heavy son of a gun. Not like the Haro Blammo I've been building. I'm going to use it for dirt jumping. It has better parts on it. Although right now it only has a dinky set of one piece cranks, I plan on upgrading to a nice set of 3 piece pretty soon. Maybe a Redline Flite, Profile, or Poverty set. I'm going to need ot for dirt jumping though. I air out a lot. The worst thing I do, is ditching my bike in mid-air and having it fall from about 15 feet up onto the ground. That'll mess up your cranks pretty quick. You should take a look at my bike setups. My Zippo is almost completely stock parts. But my Blammo isn't. It has great parts from all sorts of different companies.