Perpetual change

I'm sitting here with a slightly painful right knee. The health of my knees is very important to me: if I damage them, at best I can't cycle with any intensity, and at worst I can't cycle at all. And if I damage them now, it might make it easier to damage them more in the future. That's why having gone to the trouble of buying a pair of Look pedals with adjustable Q-factor in the hope of getting maximum pedal efficiency from my feet, I've gone back - for the second time - to my SPD pedals. Look CX6 pedals are very very nice it has to be said, and I am amazed at the sort of stability and power you can get from a large pedal-shoe contact area. What I gained in correct foot positioning with the new Looks, compared with my knee-hurtingly narrow original Looks, I lost in release tension. These are race pedals remember, and designed for pulling your ankle apart before the shoe pulls out of the pedal, and the torsional force I needed to put through my knees to unclip was unacceptable. The human knee joint is designed to bend in one axis only while remaining very stiff for all other directions. It is not designed to resist twisting indefintely; skiers who run tight bindings and then fall down have been known to really knacker their knees in the process. A Look pedal binding works in almost exactly the same way, after all ski bindings are what the company originally invented. On an upright bike, you have your body weight helping you to twist your foot and disengage from the pedal, but on a recumbent you have only the twist from your thigh and ankle. So a couple of weeks' commuting with these pedals was enough to tell me that they just weren't right for me. I didn't spend a fortune on them, but I spent twice what a pair of my unremarkable cheap SPD pedals cost. You can't however put a price on your health.

When I said of my Speedmachine, "I think I'm almost done.", I was being generous. Last week I was less than satisfied with the performance of the rear gears, and resolved to improve things. With the bike on my workstand, I quickly discovered that not only was the derailleur getting gunged up with a combination of old lubricant and hair (wonder where that came from?), the adjuster barrel had seized. So it's a simple job to whip off the derailleur, take it apart and scrub it clean, except that the adjuster barrel was of course seized. Pliers and my M4 tap soon sorted that, then I discovered the gear cable strands were snapping. Well one thing led to another, and I ended up replacing both gear cables, rerouting both cable housings, repainting areas of the swing arm, and rerouting the wiring for my lights and my bike computer. Then rather than buy a ready-made "chain holder" (to hold the ends of the chain together when you separate it) I made one from an old spoke and saved £4, and with some music wire from the local model shop I made a new chain tube holder for the bike, since the original one had broken well before I bought the bike and the interim solution was a rather unattractive bodge. While I was at it I cleaned the chain pulley and painted where the tubes had taken the paint off...and then my workstand's clamp wouldn't undo! So after two hours of reading Park service instructions and an hour lying in bed visualising how it worked, I took my workstand apart, got my bike free, and reassembled the stand with a slight modification. And then I replaced the bike's rear shock unit with a super smooth DT Swiss unit that's pressure adjustable. DT Swiss is more known for their quality spokes, so I don't anticipate many problems. And so my Speedmachine is back together, a pound lighter and running sweetly again.

It was sale time at Edinburgh Bicycle Co-operative recently too, and I picked up a pair of mountain biking shoes for hardly anything. If my knees won't tolerate me riding with Look pedals, then I don't strictly need Look-compatible roadie shoes, and certainly less so now that I have the shoes I wanted - chunky rubber treads but underneath it's the same stiff sole that my road shoes have. Plus they have girlie flowing stitching around them, which makes a change from unassuming grey and black all the time!