Thanks To Kryptonite Locks

Often when Roll It Forward donates bicycles to folks in the Boston area, those bicycles are accompanied by safety training and U-Locks. And thanks to a really good deal from our buddy Daryl at Kryptonite, we now have some high quality Kryptonite Keeper Locks to donate.

Did you know that Kryptonite is a Massachusetts-based company? Just another reason why they're awesome. 

Thanks Kryptonite!

We'll Get By With A Lot of Help From Our Friends (At Cantabrigian Mechanics)

 At Roll It Forward we get some real, uh...gems sometimes bike-wise. We spend a lot of time playing the role of alchemists, attempting to turn lead (or something else) into gold. The other day we were working on a Free Spirit "OUTRAGE" and the cable stops for the rear derailleur broke off during "pre-stretching." Pre-stretching is where you kind of tug on the cables lightly to settle the ferrules (housing end-caps) so that they don't do it themselves during use, causing the derailleur adjustment to go all out of whack. The cables don't really "stretch" at all.

The lifespan of a Free Spirit with a busted cable stop is about that of horse in the old west with a broken leg...

usually.

Except for when you have friends like Ricky DeFrancisco from Cantabrigian Mechanics to help you out. Ricky offered to braze a new cable stop onto our otherwise doomed OUTRAGE so that it could get fixed up and donated to a deserving Boston resident. Cantabrigian generally does very high end, high quality work, but they took time out of their busy schedule to get awesome on a maybe-not-so-awesome-bike for the Roll It Forward program and we appreciate it greatly. Thanks guys!

Thanks To Eastern Mountain Sports

 

Roll It Forward relies on various partners in the Boston area to provide the program with bikes, Eastern Mountain Sports is one of those awesome partners. EMS encourages their customers to donate their old bikes to RIF and thus far they have have been incredibly successful — collecting countless bikes, many of them in phenomenal condition!

 

Big, HUGE thanks to EMS for their support of the Roll It Forward program.

Thank You JRA Cycles

A lot of businesses help the Roll It Forward Program do what it does. One of these businesses is JRA Cycles in Medford, MA. They handle the ordering of all the parts used to get our bikes ready for donation. And they're great guys. Recently, when we stopped in to pick up our parts order, the crew at JRA was in the midst of handing out Halloween candy to trick-or-treaters, and getting a little goofy while doing it.

Thanks for being awesome JRA!

Big Thank You To Pedro's For Their Support of Roll It Forward

We just wanted to give a big shout out today to HUGE Roll It Forward supporter, Pedro's Bike Care. Pedro's has really thrown itself behind cycling advocacy on the local and national level, supporting all sorts of great events and programs. The Roll It Forward "Bike Mines" are fully stocked with an array of Pedro's products, from Bike Lust to Chain J., to ratcheting wrenches and vise whips. Pedro's is based out of Haverhill, MA. We say, when it comes to bike tools and lubes...buy local!

Volunteer Night At The Boston Bike Mines

The Boston Bike Mines (the warehouse where RIF bikes are stored) can be a lonely place...a dark, damp, lonely place. Once, while working down there in "the cage," I overheard two men talking as they walked by, "Yup, there's nothin' down here but rats and roaches..." He stalled as he caught a glimpse of me at my bike stand working. He didn't finish his sentence, but I knew what he would have said, "nothin' down here but rats and roaches, and...that weirdo working on bikes." But last Tuesday night the mines were not a lonely place; they were full of life. Our friends from Dot Bike, Boston Cyclists Union, Harris Cyclery, Cambridge Used Bicycles, and elsewhere showed up to help prepare a massive pile of used bikes for Roll It Forward donation. 

More photos of the event after the break...

LIFT Bicycle Giveaway at City Hall Plaza

On Wednesday June 1st, Roll It Forward got together with LIFT on a beautiful, sunny day at City Hall Plaza to donate bikes to a group of folks from Boston's homeless community. It wasn't so much a donation as payment for services rendered — all the recipients earned their bikes through performing community service and many of them listed volunteer work as one of the reasons why they needed a bike to get around in the first place. 

Read more...