I bought my first one, a black '62, at the Lars show a couple of years ago. That afternoon I rode it up the hill to the old mansion and back down again - tentatively at first, amazed that it worked at all straight out of the vendor's hands. I took it home and cleaned it up a little, replaced the brake cables and the brake pads.

That was all it needed. On a whim I took it up the Minuteman at about three in the morning, as far as Arlington Heights, and I got it. I understood. They had it all figured out: the frame geometry, the gearing, the wheels, the riding posture, even the Dunlop tyres made sense. This was the very essence of Bicycle: the simplicity and the harmony; the art and the engineering; the perfect blend of craft, science, utility and whimsy. It was all here and had been all along, in this case for 40 years, now ticking under me at 3:30 in the morning down Mass Ave in Arlington. The first time I took it to work, fifteen miles away, was a revelation. The damn thing got me there, this bike built before the Cuban Missile Crisis with iron-ingot construction, steel fenders and a chainguard that clanks every time you start up from a stop. What's so great about these things? They just had it figured out, that's all.

There's a reason these bikes worked so well for the English everyman and everywoman, a reason why these were made year after year for almost a century (and why similar bikes are still being made in China and India). The slack geometry and upright riding position make them very simple and unintimidating to ride—perfect for getting you home after the pub. You can swing a leg over the saddle and say, “Take me home, Buttercup!” and it carries you home like a horse carries home its drunken cowboy.

Other 3-speeds showed up on my doorstep. I felt sorry for them and took them in: a brown ladies' frame from the mid '70s - cosmetically OK but mechanically shot. I stripped it for parts anyway, and put the carcass out on the sidewalk. Then an even worse one, a green gentlemen's frame with a bent fork, but in my size. (I can't imagine what the movers must have thought as I had them cart the thing from one basement to another around the corner.)

It started out with the wheel. I thought it would be cool to build a city bike around an old Sturmey-Archer 3-speed hub, so I took the green bike's rear wheel apart, found a suitable 700c rim and built up a new wheel. Then I realized the greenie would make a good frame, too, especially after the Handlebar Fairy left me a new pair of priest-style alloy bars sitting on the bench next to the frame. (I still have no idea where they came from.) The fork was bent, so it needed a new one, and then a headset and a new front wheel to match the fork. And new brakes and levers. Then I found a bad noise from the bottom bracket, so that had to be replaced. After all that, the hub was grinding and clanking, too. So that needed to be rebuilt. Then I built a new front wheel to match the rear one, and fenders and a new bigger cog and a new chain....

I kept diving deeper and deeper, and ended up completely rebuilding the thing. I did all the work myself, with a fair bit of help from the good people at Broadway Bicycle School. What I ended up with was an even more bombproof bike than my beautiful black '62, with much stronger wheels and much better brakes.

That bike taught me everything I know. Now I know about forks and headsets, bottom brackets and cranks and chainrings and hubs and rims and brakes and drivetrains and handlebars from the Handlebar Fairy.

A 3-speed also teaches you that 27- or 30-speed drivetrains and titanium frames and carbon spokes aren't the only way to get there. There is another way. On a 3-speed you can't really pick a cadence and stick with it. Instead, you're constantly changing your stride to fit the conditions and whichever one of the three gears happens to approximate efficient forward progress. That's the best you'll get, but that's OK, because that's all you need. You'll get there eventually, and soon you'll tone up and muscle your way up the hills instead of clicking down and churning them, or you'll maintain something close to a cadence regardless of grade or effort.

I've developed legs like lodgepole pines. I can bound up sheer brick walls and leap from building to building, and crack coconuts open between my knees.

It's a few pounds lighter than my black '62, but it's still a tank. It feels a lot like my old Suzuki GS850 motorcycle (another Big Fat Pig), with the same king-of-the-road riding posture. It rolls over everything. It's heavy and sluggish, solid and true, and safe as all hell. I can take gravel paths and even flat single-tracks without worrying I'll break the thing; it just ploughs through wherever I point it. And it's invisible: Unless you're In the Know, it looks pretty much like any other 3-speed, which for casual passersby and bicycle thiefs doesn't register as a bicycle at all. It becomes part of the lamp-post or parking meter or snow drift, blending in with the urban landscape.

Of course, it needs a big, heavy Ding-Dong bell, and a beer basket on the front. Add it all together, throw on a big headlight, and it feels almost like the velocipedic equivalent of a London taxi: Old World heavy steel, a relentless blend of kinetics and electrics updated and tuned to perfection, ideal for its environment and ideally-suited to its task: a wide yellow funnel of light and the occasional ring of the bell to clear the way home.

(NOTE: Smasher has a much more technical article about updating 3-speeds with modern components at www.smasher.net)