Review: Linus Roadster Classic [From 43-200]
"It wasn’t hard to embrace the Linus wholeheartedly as our weekend tobacco-pipe-smoking-cruise-around-the-neighborhood-tweed-ride-bike."
from BA 42-300
At first, we were skeptical of the Linus Roadster Classic because we are sort of aggressive commuters who need to stop quickly and often when riding across the busy city to get to work on time. With just a coaster brake, we’re limited, for safety reasons, to riding the Roadster Classic at only certain speeds and in specific situations (read: slow, ambling circumstances).
The Roadster Classic also doesn’t come equipped with fenders, which is a must where we live, so we mounted those before we ventured too far from home. But! Once we recognized the intents behind the design and build of the Roadster (and got the fenders installed, along with a broken-in Brooks to boot), it wasn’t hard to embrace the Linus wholeheartedly as our weekend tobacco-pipe-smoking-cruise-around-the-neighborhood-tweed-ride-bike.
The bike, it turns out, is perfect for Sunday morning rides in which small puffs of Alder Blend come up around your face and behind the lenses of your eyeglasses. In a light pea coat and a wool cap, for example, it’s true you can feel excellent riding the Roadster. You see, by smoking a tobacco pipe on the Classic, one is kept from riding too fast—because of the natural limitations of lung capacity during the act of smoking and holding a wooden pipe between your teeth with both hands on the handlebars—which means that the coaster brake is never really an issue. One is simply not able, with pipe in mouth, to get going fast or furious enough to need hand brakes at all.
As a singlespeed coaster brake set-up, the Linus makes for a sublime and silent riding experience—in the right conditions and with the right mentality. As in: not too fast, and not too wild. That advice heeded, the Linus Roadster Classic makes for some of the best riding possible: moseying on two wheels to easily escape the hustle-and-bustle of everyday life in the 21st century.
