Bye bye Inbred

It's been a long and happy relationship. We've been together 4 years, so the flush of new love and the novelty wore off long ago and we've been settled into a comfortable coexistence for some time. There comes a point though, where the little things begin to annoy, and if you let them, they can grow out of all proportion....

Enough of that twaddle, I've got rid of the Inbred. The fact that it didn't have a disc mount, and that I had to use a disc adapter combined with horizontal dropouts, was getting on my wick. Every time I took the wheel out was a right faff, and dealing with a flat tyre on a night ride, in the pissing rain was made much worse than it already was. I'd persevered with it for too long really, just because I loved the way it rode so much, and felt a real emotional attachment to it, something I have never done for any other bike.

The replacement took some thought. A disc ready Inbred wasn't available right now, that would have been the first choice. It needed to be something quite cheap and simple, my singlespeed is my everyday, bread-and-butter, workhorse type bike. I didn't want something that made me wince every time a rock hit it or a new scratch appeared. It needed to be steel, because that just feels right on a single.

The one that took my fancy was the Love/Hate, an EBB (eccentric bottom bracket) frame by Dialled Bikes. Dialled are one of the newish british microbrands to follow in the muddy footsteps of On One (Cotic and Pastey are other examples). My friend Wayne has just got one, I had a car park spin on it, so knew the sizing was OK, and he was having a lot of fun with it. So off the order went, a week before Christmas. More about it later...

I couldn't sell the Inbred, it was just too shonky. I couldn't leave it in a skip at the tip either, that would have upset me. I asked around if any of my riding pals wanted it, no one did, but then they are mostly bling loving shortarses. I put it up on the Singletrackworld classifieds as a freebie and got quite a few responses. The 'winner' is coming along to pick it up this weekend. I'll have to try and resist behaving like a father meeting his daughter's first boyfriend - "If I find out you haven't been treating her right, there will be trouble..."