• 44 Posts
  • 1.25K Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 9th, 2023

help-circle
  • My other favorite bike was a 24" Mongoose Element, I think it was a 21 speed. The lowest gear ratio was the kicker, it literally had a 1:1 gear, slow as molasses, but very high torque.

    No, that’s definitely not my preferred riding gear, but when Hurricane Katrina hit and we had almost four feet of flood waters for about two miles, it sure made it a lot easier to get to the grocery store!

    Sadly, someone stole that bike a few years later, never seen again 😞


  • LOL, and you’re not wrong either.

    It’s just kinda hard and tends to be pretty expensive to find a proper 20" BMX flatland worthy bicycle that’s suitable for a full grown adult to ride and have enough space where your knees don’t hit the handlebars.

    On my bike, that seatpost isn’t stock either. That’s actually a 1979 Cooks Brothers laid back and braced racing seatpost. Last I looked those up online, just that seatpost alone goes for around $300.

    Yet sadly, that seatpost apparently doesn’t fit newer bicycles, I’ve tried it, different size tubes these days.

    Regardless, I do have a spare wannabe BMX bike, it’s about a piece of shit though. But luckily the frame happens to be long enough for me to have plenty of leg room, and the gearing is at least close to what I like.



  • My SuperGoose happens to be a chrome plated version, but I’ve also seen a 1979 nickel plated version as well.

    I won’t lie though, when I say 81 SG, that’s damn near only the frame. I lost/broke/swapped lots of parts on it over the years.

    The only true original parts are the frame, the lower steering tube bottom bearing cup, and the seatpost clamp (minus the original clamp bolt).

    There’s a lot of sentimental history to my bike, 95% of the parts came from either dump sites, trading, dumb luck on awesome deals, or just straight up tearing down half a dozen busted rims to reassemble two perfectly good rims.

    Most of my bike isn’t stock, it’s totally custom. And the frame, original forks and crank only initially cost me $10. I bought it at age 15 as a carcass of a legendary bike, for only $10!

    Even as broke down as it is now, I still consider it my best investment ever!




  • I’m 42, the bike itself is 43. So not far off either way, but luckily I’ve never broken any bones.

    Can’t quite say the same for my bike, it’s a 1981 Mongoose SuperGoose. It’s not exactly totally broken, but I started to take notice about 5 years ago where certain stress points started developing stress cracks.

    They were made to be super tough for the riding style of the late 70s and early 80s, but I don’t think they were actually designed for the odd rotational and sudden stop forces of the tailspins and other tricks of BMX flatland as they evolved in style over the years.














  • Try decoding the ‘savegame’ format from Lord Of The Rings for Super Nintendo, from the year 1994.

    It’s not even a battery backup save, you gotta manually write down 48 characters, then manually re-enter those 48 characters when you want to restore a ‘savegame’

    Turns out it’s in base 32 format, and uses the CCITT CRC16 hash algorithm to verify the data integrity.

    Guess what? If you punch in 3P53P53P53P53P53P53P53P53P53P5

    You start off with all the characters maxed out (prolly more maxed out than intended), and also bypasses the checksum, as it zeroes out.

    Yay base 32!

    Don’t ask how long that took me to figure out…