Gravity

Today I was reading a discussion about commuting routes, and in particular how hilly our terrain was.  Most seemed to be using Bikely for plotting journeys and calculating the changes in elevation, but since the site was either down or busy, I had a play with a speedy little site called BikeHike instead. Marvel at my mighty four mile ride to work.  That dip at about 0.6 miles ought to be good for 40mph if I really went for it, and 30mph can be held along the level on a fresh legged Monday morning.  Up to about the two mile mark I can sit at 30mph if the traffic is light, but there are rather too many places along the way where other vehicles might emerge so normally I'm feathering the brakes and in hyper-observation mode.  Total time: about 14 minutes, reducing to 12 minutes in exceptional conditions and up to 18 minutes in winter traffic jams.

But I greatly dislike this route when riding home again, for the Great Long Hill is a 9mph slog amongst eager homeward-bound motorists in silver Mercedes, black BMW X5s and red Ford Focuses (Foci?), so my preferred route is carefully designed to take in the delights of ornate 19th century flats and a relaxed wheel along refreshing tree-lined parkland.

 Apart from the early downhill run to 1.6 miles, where I would normally expect to hit 30mph and hold above 25mph, it's deceptively uphill. It has to be, of course, but the circuitous route allows a few opportunities to give my bike its head.  It's a 7.6 mile ride that is just long enough to get a workout and with plenty of diversion options if I'm feeling tired or adventurous.  I might, for example, ride right through the middle of the city, down past the Scottish Parliament and up around Arthur's Seat and out past the currently, and sadly, closed for refurbishment Royal Commonwealth Pool.  At the 5-and-a-bit mile mark the land drops down off a ridge, one of two marking the Colinton Fault that stretches from Torphin Hill by the southwest of the city, under the West End and all the way to Leith Docks and indeed into the Forth.  This section could be another speed test if only the tarmac was mended once and for all.  But I like this route enough that it's become my standard ride home.

On a slightly more grandiose scale, and just for fun, this is the elevation graph from one day of my all-too-short cycle tour in the summer of 2008:

That evil spike at about 27 miles might be remembered by intrepid cycle tourists as much for its gradient as its dank scenery.

"Halfway up the tarmacked cliff I came to a church, set a little back from the road, and I eased off the pedals ready to stop for a rest. My momentum carried me on ever so gently though, as I took in the mossy grey stone walls and the wooden gateway, stained brown and and green from years of damp, shaded exposure. The church was very small, its windows dark, and it looked as though it hadn't seen a service in thirty years. I wondered idly as I passed if nature might be reclaiming it gradually for herself? The organ perhaps home to families of Great Tits, nesting amongst a miniature New York skyline of square wooden pipes. The gas lights long gone, their supply bright with verdigris. The pews, surely carved two hundred years ago from deep brown oak, turning a pale green with mould, an occasional shelf of beige fungus hanging from one end. Perhaps it was because it was a Saturday and the lights weren't switched on."

It was the secondary spike at about 29 miles that nearly finished me off, marking the first and last time I tried a day's touring on a full Scottish breakfast!

Before and after

An entry in here devoted almost entirely to the minutia of recabling a bike feels a little like making you listen to Tales from Topographic Oceans. I'm sure the album was the product of 30 year-old musicians' ambition and bloodymindedness, and has some great themes, but it's not without merciless filler. The intention behind that album was to embrace nature, all its lifeforms, and the whole planet, condensed into about 80 minutes or, depending on your point of view, sprawling across four whole sides.

I pulled the Speedmachine out of the garage this week for riding to work, for couple of days anyway; I'd gone with my faired P-38 at the beginning of the week because it was so cold and I fancied the weather protection, and the next day switched to Annie for some errands in town. Were I treating the gear shifter experiment scientifically, I'd not have changed everything at once, for now I don't know which aspect gave most benefit. But something is working: the ability to change gear accurately was something I'd kind of taken for granted on my P-38 and I'd been putting up with things on the SpM the same way I had put up with Speedy's formerly finger-tearingly stiff brakes. I'd never had drum brakes before and, naïvely, had assumed they were full of incredibly strong springs and simply felt that way; only later did I discover the truth, which -- rather predictably -- led to much renewing of rusted cables. It turns out that I got the ergonomics spot on for my thumbs and index fingers, and the slightly closer position of the handlebars, probably my most major change to the cockpit since I bought the bike, actually feels better than before. The shifters are up to Shimano's usual high quality for its XT groupset: solid, chunkily minimal, and precise. I'll leave "svelte" to the collection of adjectives ascribed to XTR components. The addition of new cables and housing I think has made as big a contribution. I've been harbouring plans, hinted at last time, to replace the Campagnolo chainset because I'd been continuously frustrated with the bum shifting, despite pinned and bumped teeth geometry. FSA makes exceedingly good chainrings and a simple swap might be easiest, but Campy has its own rules and only Spécialités TA seems to make anything compatible. I've used and worn out a number of very pretty but cheeselike TA chainrings. There's also the hugely embarrassing aesthetic clash of silver cranks against an otherwise all-black bike, and FSA or Middleburn would be ideal there. But the new cable and shifter has transformed the front end of the bike: I can be accelerating up from 15mph to 35mph and not have my thoughts occupied with wrenching on the Gripshift enough for the chain to make the big chainring but not so much that it overshifts onto the crank, thus requiring nursing back into place.

One trait that remains though is the aggressive up-changing on the rear of the bike. Knocking the Gripshift a click or two around under hard acceleration, with momentary pauses in pedalling effort to allow the chain to switch sprockets, produced quite a lot of noise from the rear end. While the XT's little release lever has a much softer action, the result is the same. I think it's the combination of a strong dérailleur spring, a gently restrained section of power-side chain tube and the characteristics of the shifters that does it. Both the small S's Gripshift (and Triggers) and the big S's Rapid Fire shifters employ fairly heavy duty ratchety shapes inside and when you click up a gear, the cable tension is released sharply and the dérailleur snaps across the cassette. Good old fashioned bar end levers don't have much of a mechanism inside: just some indentations and a spring-loaded bally thing, and you can control the lever (and cable) movement completely. Less of a kak! kak! (Gripshift) or ka-chick! ka-chick! (RF) and more of a thd thd sound.

It's been steadily warmer the past few days and reached a balmy 6.5ºC a couple of days ago. Only the clumps of orange-brown grit clinging to kerbs and pavements, and the occasional great mound of compacted snow left behind by the shovel, betray the cold white landscape we had but a month ago. The long-sleeved Helly Hansen, overlaid with a Polartec fleece mid layer and covered with Gore-Tex jacketry is gradually giving way to the short-sleeved Helly Hansen, fleece and jacket, and yesterday, only the long-sleeved top and the jacket. But then, I was riding quite hard. This winter has been by far the coldest, snowiest and most protracted for more than 20 years, and I feel quite happy that by and large, I've suffered much less from the cold than even last winter which was, quite literally, a wash-out. In years gone by I would wear my thin lycra tights with shorts underneath, a t-shirt and my (original) Gore-Tex jacket, perhaps with some waterproof trousers on and a pair of snowboarding gloves, but my fingers always had the last word in discomfort. I've softened. Now I'll have my winter weight Thermolite tights on top of lycra 3/4s (that is, knee length on me) and I'll do everything I can to keep my torso warm, and thus my core temperature up. I also finally started putting on my Buff under my helmet because although my ears don't feel the cold, my forehead does. And some days I'd have to ride slower than I'd like, just to keep my head warm! Keeping my middle warm to the point of slightly too warm has had a measureable effect on my hands. Only twice this winter did I resort to my old Specialized Lobster gloves, instead managing quite well with a pair of original Altura Night Vision gloves that I bought cheap in a sale. Of course, the latter are my preferred winter gloves because, being covered in swathes of reflective, they're that much better for signalling if vehicles are following me. Black fleece gloves by themselves don't show up too well. But with the slight temperature increase, I don't always need the Night Visions with their "Thinsulate" insides, so I'm still using reflective ankle bands on my wrists (as well as my ankles). My fingers, remember, can turn white and numb just by listening to a January weather forecast.

I've also been enjoying a new pair of cycling sunglasses. My ancient Oakley Mumbos (pre-M Frames, readers) broke a year ago, and then while still vaguely working, broke a second time. A pair of Smith V-Ti specs has been doing the job since about New Year, and I'm very happy with them. The lenses are distortion-free, they swap out easier than the big O's, they deflect wind from my eyes better and, dare I say it, they suit my face better too.

Every little thing

While the dynamics, the kinematics if you will, of bicycles are a little beyond me, the mechanics are fairly well understood. I've been at it long enough and I have quite a lot of reference material without recourse to 'teh Internets', Sheldon Brown and so on. So when I'm asked what bottom bracket and chainset is needed for a vintage ten speed, of whose provenance I have no idea, or whether I can get away with running a V-Drive 22/32/44 and a roadie cassette and still maintain the sort of gearing range I'm used to, I can make informed guesses at worst, and straightforwardly find the answer at best. The only real problem I've seen is that the going rate for a bicycle mechanic, even a workshop manager, would mean a pay cut. One makes more money, presumably, by designing instead of maintaining. Maybe that's why in my gradually-falling-asleep-in-bed time, I come up with brilliant ideas for bicycle designs and modifications, but have no way to fabricate them.

Note to self: buy an oxy-acetylene kit, a lathe, a milling machine, and a bunch of tubes.

So when the idea occurs to junk the increasingly recalcitrant Sram Rocket Gripshifts on my Speedmachine and replace them with Shimano Rapid Fire triggers, it's perfectly easy. Whip off the handlebar grips, extract the gear cables, lose the Gripshifts, bung on the triggers, thread the gear cables back through, install that spare pair of handlebar grips left over from another project, and set up the dérailleurs again. Of course, this is my Speedmachine, that tour de force of Teutonic recumbency, and I should have known that nothing would be simple.

I already planned to replace the rear gear cable because the strands were unwinding and I wasn't sure if it was contributing to the poor gear changing where I'd been having to click down two and back up one to get onto the next largest sprocket. I've also generally disliked Gripshift, especially on upright bikes; I like my handlebar grips to stay in one place. On a recumbent bike where you place very little pressure on the handlebars, they work much better and are in fact one of the preferred systems, along with the brilliantly simple bar end gear lever. However, Shimano has traditionally used a 1:2 ratio of cable pulled to dérailleur movement, while Sram designed its components to use a 1:1 ratio which is more tolerant of squiffy alignment and mud-caked cabling -- but with the tradeoff that twice as much movement is needed at the handlebars, not generally a problem with the twisting action of Gripshift. And since my shifters were controlling Shimano front and back they had the 1:2 ratio, and it doesn't half make them hard work. I've been using Rapid Fire levers for nigh on 15 years on Annie the Blue Bike and the Rockhopper before it, so that was my intention for the Speedmachine. By way of reference, my P-38 uses bar end levers, while my V2 uses Gripshift but controlling a Sram rear dérallieur, and by and large, both systems work beautifully (until the 2500 mile mark at which one's P-38's rear cable will break -- a slight design flaw which I'm going to have a shot at fixing).

It wasn't long before I came up against the first hurdle: the curves of the handlebar, which give it a real handlebar moustache shape but actually designed for leaving space for one's knees when pedalling. The ideal position of the shifters was quite far inboard with the brake levers mounted to the outside: the opposite of what Gripshift dictates. The curves meant that the rinky-dink gear indicator on the top of the shifter stuck up at a rather silly -- and slightly knock prone -- angle, simply because Shimano designed it for flat handlebars. Then I discovered that the hydraulic hose to my brake lever wasn't long enough. Moving the shifter further inboard was an option, but then my knees would bash its lower trigger when I pedalled. I could extend the telescopic the stem towards my chest, but that would use up valuable millimetres of the hose length. Perhaps tilting the brake lever away from me would free up some of the length, as long as it was still comfortable to operate. But I couldn't tilt it very far without it trying to occupy the same space as the shifter, which I'd angled to be comfortable for my thumb and forefinger... So I decided that since I was a grown up cyclist, I'd remove the gear indicator and, not having the little grey bit of plastic that Shimano would have no doubt sold me at inflated cost, I improvised a cover with waterproof tape.

But extending the stem meant I now had to unpick all the tape and cable ties that oh so neatly tidied the two gear cable housings, the two large wires for my headlights, the wires for my headlight switch (which had to come off anyway because the other side's brake lever would need to go there), and the wires for my cycle computer's speed and cadence sensors. It was about 3ºC outside, and not much warmer in my garage, so this was all being done with a selection of numb fingers. Still, after about four hours I'd got the right-hand shifter in place, sans indicator gadget, plus the brake lever, I'd cut about a centimetre off the end of the handlebar to accommodate the grip (having first managed the impossible task of locating the pipe cutter) and the gear changing felt pretty good. So it was a straightforward job to repeat this for the left-hand side.

Hah. The Speedmachine has a very neatly routed front gear cable which runs down the outside (formerly the inside, until I changed it) of the stem, loops around below the headset bearing and then enters the boom of the frame. It runs forwards inside there and emerges, via a rather tight bend, from a hole just below the front dérailleur. I didn't like this at all: too much of a risk of kinking the cable housing and I was fairly sure this had happened and was making it harder than it should've been to change up to a bigger chainring. It got worse. I discovered the existing gear cable was equally kinked when I pulled it out, so I took out a new one. When I tried to install it, it went in halfway and stopped. I pulled and pushed again, it stopped and then kinked in front of my fingers. I tried again and it just wouldn't go in, and by this time the end was fraying as quickly as my sunny mood. So there was nothing for it but to replace the entire housing as well, and within moments I'd hauled it all out. It was kinked in two places and worn where it entered the frame. Fortunately I'd bought lots of spare housing last time around. To get new housing installed though, I had to remove the front half of the boom completely which wasn't something I'd do lightly because the plastic shim had already been cracked by the bike's original owner and when reinstalling the boom, it has to go back in exactly the same amount as it was before, otherwise you upset the distance to the pedals. And of course, it has to be straight.

Then I had an idea: left over from building my P-38 was one of those little curved steel tubes that are used on V-brakes to route the brake cable out and upwards; I could use that inside the boom to replace the tight bend! Well after an hour of trying, I decided it wasn't worth the effort. I could only insert the little tube from the outside, but since it wasn't attached to the cable housing -- it simply located the end of the housing, and used the cable itself to keep everything aligned -- the housing had to go in from the inside. That was more difficult because the boom was now in two halves. I threaded an old cable through in reverse to tie everything together but couldn't quite hold it while I reinserted the boom. And then I realised that once I installed the new gear cable, it wouldn't push the old one out at the end: it would just push the cable housing away from the little tube. Rant, rave, stomp, sigh.

'Right then', I growled to myself, 'I'll just do it the normal way after all.' And so it was that I managed to get new housing threaded through the two parts of the frame, the boom reinstalled and the new cable threaded through to the dérailleur, clamped in place and the excess chopped off. All that remained was to tidy up the cables and wires along the stem, and with a few cable ties and some more tape it was all about done. The last item on the agenda was to reattach the cadence sensor next to the crank and run the wire along the boom and up one one of the light's wires.

Naturally, I discovered I'd made too neat a job of tidying up, and didn't have enough length in the sensor wire to attach it in the right place and run it back to the stem as I wanted. When you're pedalling miles and miles with your thighs in very close proximity to delicate wiring, you pay attention to where you route your accessories. So I unpicked everything again, got the sensor in place and then little by little tidied up. Click click click, spin the pedals through the gears and tweak the cable tensions to perfection. Ta daa! Finished!

Well, almost. I hadn't ridden the bike since well before Christmas when the snow, and the salted grit, had arrived, and the water in the hosepipe had frozen solid. There was about a month of lightly festering salt crystals on the brake calipers and the rims were covered in grime, so today was the first chance to wash everything properly. I should have made do before, as I'd done with Annie while riding through the worst of the roads, with a bucket of hot soapy water and another to rinse. But I'd obviously been somewhere between lazy and preoccupied until now. The bucket was enough to clean up both Annie and the P-38 too, and it's really quite satisfying knowing that once again you've washed off all that nasty salt and grime.

I owe myself about £90 in bicycle mechanic time. I think that calls for a beer, don't you?

I've seen all good people

I wouldn't be a real cyclist if I didn't have at least one mishap per year, would I? I remember many years ago I lived not so far from a patch of wasteland that perhaps 150 years before had been the wilds leading to a quarry; flat for the most part and bounded by the natural rolling slopes of the area, while the quarry itself was not of rock but of sand and soil, for ground level was in fact the top of those rolling slopes: moraine left behind from the last glacier. We would take our bicycles on adventures to this made-for-stunts place: a network of humps, bumps and trees that would've made Danny MacAskill have kittens; and it was a place of names handed down from generation to awed generation: The Devil's Elbow, the Velodrome, Route 66, Strawberry Hill, River Rapids, the Juke Box ... and I'm sure there are another couple I can't remember now. 'Can you do Devil's Elbow?' we'd be asked, and skilled and wise beyond our years, we'd demonstrate to the younger ones. Of course, tales abounded of horrible crashes involving trees and handlebars; I remember watching a friend leaving his bike mid-descent from ill-placed tree roots, and I certainly remember seeing two instances of falls ending in mild concussion. I'm sure blood was spilled at least once, too.

Despite this superbly tomboyish lifestyle, somehow I escaped my childhood with no broken arms, legs or wrists. I remember a succession of painful pedal-shin interactions (at least, until the advent of mountain bikes and toeclips), some grazed hips and elbows from one too many skids, and the occasional bent pair of forks. Indeed, my left shin still wears a ten inch-long line of little dents left behind by a genuine old school Wellgo BMX pedal, the aluminium slanty ones with eight horrible spiky studs for extra grip.

And then it all went quiet: they cut down all the trees growing in the quarry, built a load of houses there and on our playground, and a generation of children was immediately deprived of somewhere to go to prod frog spawn, to go wading when everything flooded, to build jump ramps from bricks and random pieces of wood, and learn how to fall off a bike without getting too bashed up. Growing up these days must be no fun at all.

As one's skills in bike handling improve over time, assuming one rides frequently, the number of bumps should decrease. The same goes whether one rides offroad through the hills to take photographs for Flickr groups, offroad on downhill courses where people use ten inch wide tyres and pepper sentences with words like gnarly and sick (I'm presuming, of course, that rad is as passé these days as purple anodising), or in the cut and thrust of rush hour traffic. I've had a few moments in my time, I have to admit. I rode down a short but steep slope in my wasteland days and went over my handlebars, across the pavement and into the side of a van. While riding home from university one day I lost my front wheel on a slippery piece of tarmac, which set my confidence levels for steering back at least ten years. More recently while piloting my Speedmachine recumbent in the early frost of a winter, my front wheel skidded sideways, then gripped again as my back wheel skidded out. I was flung to the ground in an instant and left with a series of bruises. A motorist T-boned me on a roundabout whilst I was riding home once, after which I was hurting in about ten different places. And although it's technically outside the scope of this blog, a year ago I did finally break some bones. There's a bit of a pattern here I think, or possibly two: older people break easier and hurt more; and the more road riding I do, the more accidents I seem to have.

Last time I wrote it had been snowing for four or five days; the snow is now melting rapidly in the sweltering 3ºC heat of yesterday and today, although they think another flurry is due. My local bike shop's sale came along after New Year as I expected, but my plan to buy some big knobbly tyres didn't work, what with prevailing trends for low-rise knobbles (for which read 'worn out looking'), and I ended up buying spiky tyres at full price. If I'd done more research I might've discovered the Schwalbe CX Pro, a chunky but narrow tyre for cutting through the snow in the same vein as the venerable Panaracer Smoke Lite; but I needed tyres urgently because I didn't trust the ones I had, so I bought a pair of Panaracer Fire XC Pros. Initial impressions were good: traction aplenty and steering was remarkably precise considering the churned up snow and slush I was riding through. I managed to last without an accident until about four days ago, with the irony that it was nothing to do with snow and ice at all.

In fact, it wasn't that much of an accident really, except that afterwards I worried for two days straight that I'd broken my shoulder again. With the assistance of a thousand kilograms of car, in one of those combination moves that elude memory, I found myself flying slowly through the air and over my handlebars, heading for the gutter. I landed on my hand and shoulder, possibly with my fall broken by my rucksack and the snow on the ground. I remember my bike flying slowly through the air and about to land on top of me as I attempted to deflect it, and I remember tucking my head down as I rolled onto my back. Some small presence of mind prevailed, as I lay still for a moment to check vital systems like arms and legs, and as I picked myself up I was annoyed that I might have ripped my good cycling jacket. My shin hurt, I noticed, and for a moment I took in the line of cars waiting behind and thought to myself, 'I'm afraid you'll just have to wait', while I realised that they were now spectators.

The driver of the car hurried out to my side, apologising. I wish I'd had a little more restraint, to be honest, as I gave her a piece of my mind about road vehicle behaviour. I would have quoted Highway Code rules too if I actually knew them by rote. I pointed a lot, shouted a bit, or at least to the extent that my too-cold mouth would let me in minus several degrees Celcius. Then she actually offered to drive me home, and to get me checked out. I was so surprised that I nearly agreed, before deciding that although I only hurt in one place and was likely to hurt in several more later on, nothing was broken and therefore I could probably ride home. In the event, perhaps I should have gone to get checked out, if only because I didn't know if my shoulder was now weaker or stronger than it was originally. I was still intent on brushing off the slush from my jacket, and I hauled my bike onto the pavement to give it a quick once-over. Spin the wheels, try the brakes, a quick fingertip examination of the frame joints and headtube. My bike seemed to have survived. It was only a little somersault, remember, and mountain bikes were made for being bumped about. In the information overload of the moment, my speed of thought had slowed down and I clung to my mantra of 'Get details'. My arms and legs all worked and I thought some more, brushed my jacket again and I remembered how much I'd been enjoying being out on my bike up until then. I decided that it was probably worth the risk and that details would only complicate the day. While I was still a bit shocked from the spill, it was obvious that I was handling it the better, as great big tears welled up from her eyes and she wobbled in the realisation of what had happened in only a few seconds. What did I do? I put my arms around her and gave her a big long hug.

Presently she climbed back into her car to resume her journey, while I readied myself for the remaining ride home. No-one had come to our aid, and I was sore, but I left the scene hoping that some sense of forgiveness had been shown and that anyone else watching might have taken heart.

Circumstances

You have just two and a half days left if you want to look for any last minute bargains. Borders, the bookshop people, is closing down. It's a crying shame, actually, because never before was the phrase 'all stock must go!' so starkly marketed. And by stark, I mean 80% off remaining titles, and rows and rows of totally empty shelves.

It's a crying shame because Borders was a good stockist of Ordnance Survey maps, and the remaining stock of those isn't being spared, or even being held and re-sold to another. Owing to too much work recently, and extreme laziness when not at work, I didn't visit my local branch until yesterday, and most of the trusty Landranger 1:50,000 maps had already gone. I did however pick up four of the Explorer 1:25,000 maps, two of which were in rather splendid 'Active Map for all extremes' laminated copy. And those ones, marked originally at nearly £15 each, were also 80% off. Some people were buying armfuls of maps, which I thought was a bit greedy, but if you're not fast, you're last, and I was close to being last so I couldn't really complain.

I did however manage to find a few Landranger titles for Mum and Dad, thanks to them giving me a rather impressive list of every edition of every OS map they already had. Of course, were I in their shoes, I think I would've used a database rather than a spreadsheet.

It started snowing on Wednesday morning, just as I was preparing to ride to work. That coincided rather inconveniently with the wiring on my P-38 for my halogen bike lights suddenly not working; I can't ride to work in pouring snow with just a little LED flashing light, can I? Well, I can, if I act like many other everyday cyclists in town, and it was fortunate that I had only just bought a new LED light to replace my Cateye EL200 which had, in its seven years, been dropped, cracked, disassembled, soldered and reassembled, soaked and thrown across my bedroom. The soft plastic used for the bracket had worn down to such an extent that it'd cracked away at one end and allowed the light to bounce up and down on the handlebar, and having to reach forward to switch it back on a dozen times on a ride home recently was the last straw. Cree, Luxeon and Nichia-powered torches are quite popular these days for seeing, but don't have great side visibility. I'll upgrade my halogens when it's appropriate, but for now I bought the little Cateye EL135. It still has three LEDs, but since it runs off two AA batteries rather than four it's a lot lighter and that should help with reliability - and it's meant I can easily attach it to the top of my helmet.

The lighting problem meant that I wouldn't ride my Lightning, and instead I took my Speedmachine: the bike with the thinnest, slickest tyres and the lowest riding position. I couldn't use Annie because I hadn't put the knobbly tyres back on; I couldn't use my V2 because the disc brakes squeal viciously when they get damp, and my Dahon needs its handlebar bag to use my halogen lights ... and I'd stolen the light brackets to put on the V2! Nevertheless, I slipped and slid my way to the main road, where everything had already been salted and gritted, and I managed just fine.

I later discovered through a process of elimination that it was the electrical Y-connector on my P-38 that had broken. And I at least had the foresight to buy several extras of those, in the days when you could actually buy Vistalite spares. Having taken my Dahon out for a couple of rides, including a freezing Sunday morning in town to experiment with the new tram rails, its gear cable has decided to stop working properly, so that needs fixed now as well!

For Friday I took Annie out in the snow, shod with the old tyre combination of a Panaracer Duster Pro and a Specialized something-or-other. Old is the right word, and both are well overdue for replacement, so I'll look for something in the next round of sales. But it made a change to scrunch my way through the snow and not be too worried about traction, and I took a circuitous route home to get away from the roads and into the dark wooded cycle paths. I'm still not sitting comfortably on an upright bike but I can manage for ten or fifteen miles. Part of me is hoping that the snow melts away quickly and the temperature stays above freezing, if only for my poor fingers, but part of me would really like it to snow like crazy. There's barely enough in my garden to build an igloo for Barbie and Action Man.

Arriving UFO

The hot news is that my Terracycle Tailsok arrived. A tailsok (sic) is I suppose primarily an aerodynamic device, designed to reduce the negative pressure zone that forms behind the rider of a bike, or the bike itself in the case of a reclined rider. One might say the pressure zone sucks, because its existence pulls energy from the forward movement of the bike, and that means more energy is needed from the rider for a given speed. Of course, since air is a fluid, the effects of all this are more pronounced the faster you go, and on the level, 25-27mph is about as fast as I can go with a naked bike. And that's based on having enough smooth tarmac at my disposal; otherwise it's on the steep and all-too-short hills that I encounter, where I might touch 40-45mph before hauling on my brake levers. But on the other hand, those same hills I often have to tackle in the opposite direction later on, where 10mph is a good speed! At those speeds, less of my biological energy is used up pushing the air apart and more of it used in gaining potential energy, and aerodynamic devices are not much more than expensive extra weight.

I also have a front fairing for my bike. I bought my HP Velotechnik Streamer a few years ago from Bikefix, in London, and it sat for two or three years after I discovered that the mounting system was incompatible with the front of Speedy's chassis. I bought my P-38 with an express purpose of being able to use a fairing on it. But having more or less discredited the go-faster theory, given how much of the time I spend gaining elevation, rather than elevated speeds, why am I bothering? Because a fairing on the front also keeps the weather off you (or at least, my feet and shins) and a fairing on the back is highly visible if you make it out of brightly coloured stuff. Note that I'm only saying visible, in the pure colour sense; it would be unwise of me to state outright that bright yellow for example equals safe. A lot of the time, you make your own safe, depending on how you ride on the road. There's also a school of thought that suggests motorists give a wider berth to something they don't know about, and something that's thin and half the height of a normal bicycle and rider, and with a pointy-out bit at the back and no pedal movement, is a bit strange.

My tailsock is bright yellow -- not quite hi-viz vest yellow, because it's probably faded in the sun in its former life -- on the upper half, and reflective black on the lower half. I've always been partial to reflective black, ever since spending £12 on a piece of A4 vinyl with 3M watermarked on the back. My new helmet is black, but tastefully adorned by me with great big strips of reflective black, lovingly cut by hand. On the positive side, I commuted two days running this week with the tailsock and early impressions from the behaviour of my fellow road users were good. However, the aluminium framework over which the sock is stretched, like pulling on a sock over one's foot, manages to obscure just enough of my pannier rack that it's a Complete Bloody Faff to attach my rack bag. And that's quite apart from the additional faff to unhook three of the four corners of the sock just to get at the rack. Speedwise I'm not sure there's much in it; my commute, even when it's right across town, which it usually isn't, involves just a bit too much starting and stopping at traffic lights, jinking around potholes, and dabbing the brakes and scrubbing off precious momentum as the car in front hesitates a fraction of a second longer than I would like. A better technique, I've learned, is to leave in the morning before everyone else clutters up the roads. You can reduce your commuting time by up to 13.2 percent that way.

The second test was in pouring rain: the sort of precipitation that collects in the folds of my Goretex jacket, then seeps underneath the storm flap (which W.L. Gore frustratingly designed with itty-bitty pieces of Velcro, rather than a single long strip à la Freestyle) and through the zip to give me a rather lovely damp tummy; the sort of weather for which a fairing is really rather good. But while the fairing is polycarbonate and thus shrugs off water, my tailsock simply went soggy. Of course, these things are usually designed in California where it never rains without permission, and all the roads are long and straight and smooth, and everyone rides to work carrying only a credit card and a CO₂ canister and has no need for bags or racks. Since it was raining, and November, and my fleecey gloves were lying on the shelf below my old Roland synth in my house, my enthusiasm for speed records was ... dampened, shall we say, as my fingers cheerfully turned white as they poked out through the holes in my mitts. There was also altogether too much traffic and traffic lighting, interspersed with buses and roadworks. The Lothian Road to Tollcross area of Edinburgh, it has been said, has had continual roadworks since about 1970. In fact, I'd go so far as to say continuous, and not just continual; it certainly feels like it when I ride through town most days.

But what with the elements, traffic management and the urge to experiment, I digress. Having both the Streamer and the Tailsok in place, my P-38 begins to look every inch a human-powered vehicle, with road presence in spades, and I think that size is a big, big chunk of being safe on the road. The person who invents a bicycle-portable opaque hologrammatic projection of a Leibherr LG1550 will be raking it in. Goodness knows they travel at the right sort of speed.

So now that I'm armed with weather protection and aerodynamic bright stuff, today I rode my none-more-black Speedmachine instead. I rather fancied the suspension, to be honest.

After my summer holiday's unexpected output of the bottoms of my larger panniers being ground along the ... ground, and thoroughly worn through, I bought a pair of Arkel RT-40s for more capacity and to sling under the seat on my RANS V². There's no substitute for cubes, as they say, and these have plenty of those, shared on each between a decent-sized main compartment, a decent-sized pocket on the outside with stretchy mesh on the outside of that, and a little end pocket with a quirky but effective diagonal zip. I used my pair of Edinburgh Bicycle universal panniers constantly from about the beginning of 2003, in which time they'd been soaked, gritted, stood on, stuffed with spiky things, and towards the end of their hitherto exciting but unforseen short lives, turned inside out and attacked with a soldering iron, electric drill and pop rivet gun (Carradice hooks - 1; Rixen & Kaul hooks - 0). They featured just a big main compartment and a low-riding outside pocket, which was invariably home to my puncture repair kit and multitool, and perhaps a mobile phone, pedal/headset spanner, etc. When one makes the transition to new panniers, it is a very good idea to:

1. mentally note the number and location of each new feature; and
2. mentally note into which pocket you place each precious item, lest one of them apparently go missing over a weekend, leaving one with rather more grey hairs than one had before.

It just wouldn't be cricket not to mention another top secret bicycle-related project, would it? This time though, I've enlisted the help of someone who has better tools than I do.

Seasons change

Spring forward, fall back; and as of last night there is one hour less of daylight in the evening. It won't be very long before the gloom penetrates the morning, but never fear, I'm prepared.

Recently I attended a seminar held by Philips Lighting: the same parent company which makes all those toasters and televisions. Heralding new developments in LED lighting were a number of presentations, in which we learned all about semiconductor theory and practice, phosphor deposition tolerances, dispersion patterns, heat transfer and luminous efficacy. Naturally, Luxeon was the operative term, and to a smaller extent, Nichia, but I did get an opportunity to ask about Cree too. What with the old guard of cyclists swearing by their Vistalite and Lumicycle halogen systems, the new breed waves its lithium-ion powered death rays; some sporting the supermarket's latest LED torches and minor handlebar bodgery, some adopting the brand name approach: Cateye, Blackburn, NiteRider, Dinotte ... and a whole bunch of others whose names I can't remember. Speaking of developments, how does a four inch diameter, 12V white LED grab you? My eyes! My beautiful eyes! I have yet to adopt this newfangled technology, except for my battered Cateye EL200 (the old, silver-coloured one), and pulling out the spare parts for Vistalite lights that I bought a while ago, I finally made something with them.

Rumour has it that in the creation of its seminal Nightstick range of lights, Vistalite used the bodies from Blackburn Mammoth Mountain pumps. And it's a good rumour, because I have one of those pumps. I suspect that the aluminium tubes were simply from the same supplier, and while Jim Blackburn was busy machining threads onto the ends of his, Mr Choi-Hancock was stuffing rechargeable cells into them. My original Nightstick set was pretty good: a 2.2Ah Ni-MH battery powering 5W and 10W halogen pods. Of course, I was way ahead of that idea in 1994, having drilled a hole in my Cateye HL1500, soldering a long wire onto the bulb contacts and using a battery pack from a radio controlled car. I overvolted the bulb as well, for more photons, if also more visits to Maplin for spares. In a curiously ironic twist, both Vista and Blackburn were later bought out by Bell Sports. So with a couple of spare battery tubes, I followed the onward march of Ni-MH technology until this summer when I bought five 4.6Ah cells from Vapextech. Four and a half ampere-hours! Vapex has been a good name in battery circles for more than 15 years now so I wasn't complaining. After a new soldering iron tip and a couple of evenings' work, I had a second power pack for my lights and the ability to run all 15W of light on my bike. Hurrah! I'm still using the excellent (if now superceded, by the Cavalier I think) Pro Peak Prodigy digital charger.

Of course, lighting wasn't much of a problem in August, with hours and hours of lovely warm sunshine for cycling. Scotland wasn't having any of that, apparently; I was in the USA, riding the entirety of the Erie Canal Trail. I first had a few days with my friend in North Carolina to reset my body clock and acclimatise to 95F temperatures, and then jetted up to Albany to meet my best friend. Not only was I doing all 400 miles of the trail, but I was also doing it the wrong way: into the wind. I hurt my left knee on the first day, recovered by the fourth; got bitten through my Buff by flies on steroids; chanced across Don Saito as he was triking his way around America; bumped into Dale and Nina Oswald on their Vision R82 tandem while I mended a flat tyre in Jordan; I destroyed two tyres, two inner tubes and ultimately the bottoms of my panniers; and singlehandedly I caused a statewide shortage of Oreo cookies. By Niagara Falls there was time to spare, and I found bike shops run by men with names like Wayne and Bill and Chuck, with their embroidered name patches and petrol station appearance. Then, with a display of multimodal transport infrastructure that would have made even ScotRail's Steve Montgomery weep, 50 cyclists from across Buffalo, Tonawanda and beyond (and me) -- and 50 bikes and trikes -- boarded The Bike Train at Niagara Falls for Toronto. Louisa, Justin and Peter were super enthusiastic and the operation ran like clockwork. Hanging out at the Hi-Toronto hostel was a whole bunch of people from BentRider Online: Tom Barone (who'd organised the Canadian trip) on his titanium Bacchetta; the remarkably prolific Jim Artis on his RANS Citi crank-forward bike; Joe on his Fold Rush; Dana and Carmella on their ICE trikes; Nancy and her dad Richard ... and so many more people whose names escape me right now. I visited Ray and Martin at bluevelo for a spin around the waterfront in a Quest velomobile, and later tried out the rush hour traffic on Pape Avenue; and then all of us took off from Queen's Quay to Burlington, and I ended up thoroughly soaked from a mid-afternoon thunderstorm, which was enlivened by a chance meeting with a man riding a Tour Easy who knew the quickest way to the Holiday Inn. The day after took us from Burlington to Niagara-on-the-Lake, and there was much fun to be had with the 'roadies' from Buffalo and their insufferable paceline jargon. A late afternoon sprint back to the Canada border in an even worse thunderstorm, and a two hour wait in a bus station, was followed by a relaxed drive back to Albany. With 515 miles covered by Beckypower alone, if I could have carried on riding, I would. Absolutely I would.

The wheels I mentioned last time around were for Victoria, my latest acquisition. My lovely RANS Velocity Squared Formula 26 came with the most bombproof wheels I'd ever seen, and I fancied something a little lighter. I added a Terracycle Easy Reacher underseat rack and an Inertia Designs seat bag, both of which performed brilliantly. And with some tweaking of the seat angle and handlebars, and once rid of the pedal extenders fitted by the previous owner, I was completely comfortable for miles and miles and miles. I wrote very positively of my P-38's seat before, here and in print, and I still do; but despite its weight, the RANS seat is a thing of beauty. With a mesh back that doesn't sag when it rains, and a thick foam pad atop a polypropylene base with cutouts for the thighs, and endless tarmac and canal towpaths, I was in heaven. Victoria is also about eleventy feet long, which was entertaining in stairwells and a right bloody pain in lifts. In the streets of Edinburgh, one feels a little out of place: it's kind of like riding a Goldwing to the supermarket. Once I add my Terracycle tailsok and Mueller fairing, Edinburgh won't know what's hit it.

Annie the Blue Bike is now sporting some new riser handlebars, in an attempt to alleviate the shoulder pain I get if I ride too hunched over. There is still hardly a better bike for commute-or-die riding and lugging stuff, but I need to adjust my position. I think I need to buy a taller stem as my initial experiment with a quill-Aheadset adapter and my old Race Face stem isn't quite enough. After trying an ICE trike fitted with Schwalbe Big Apple tyres, I'm quite taken with their ability to smooth out the roads and yet be so easy running. I've used Panaracer Paselas for years, but since my holiday I've lost faith in them somewhat, and although they're light and fast, they've never been the best for wet weather riding or bad tarmac.

And finally, though it sounds awful to preface it with such an abrupt yet wearisome phrase, Speedy has gone to a new owner. The girl who thought it ridiculous and madness to own two recumbent bikes had found herself with four. I think three is a nice round number. One for the rough roads, one for commuting and hills, and one for distance. Do I really need the rough roads one? The jury is currently out.