Are you sitting comfortably?

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

2011-10-28T21:38:00.000Z

A little while ago I was on a training course at work about writing economically and effectively and efficiently. Clearly there's a need to use plain english to aid the understanding of an audience whose familiarity with a topic could be close to zero, but indeed also serving, without overt oversimplification, an audience possessed of no little prior knowledge: an audience who quite rightly could feel offended at having to wade through ridiculous baby talk. They also encouraged us to construct short sentences. And, as part of the process that any half-decent writer ought to undertake before putting finger to keyboard, or as is my wont, pencil to recycled paper, how to write a plan—a brief, if you will. But I'm not at work, and I'm writing for the hell of it, so my plan involves only the words 'Brompton' and 'saddle', plus an answer to the question, Am I Sitting Comfortably?

The answer, for those of a more fragile disposition who might prefer as little suspense as possible, is a resounding No. More correctly perhaps, the answer is No, Well Yes, Well, Kind Of. And actually, sometimes I become just a little bummed out about the whole thing.

Many of you I expect might remember the halcyon days of bicycle accessory catalogues, when suddenly everyone had forgotten about Brooks and Carradice, but before the market became rad and funky and well crucial, when clothes turned from the nice, CTC-approved muted hues of blue and grey and greeny-beige that you could eat while enjoying cucumber sandwiches to the fluorescent assault of Bula and Chums and Oakleys with red lenses, alongside Cannondale's sideline in hot rod t-shirts with piranhas on the front. John Grafton probably hadn't yet graduated with his degree in numerical control part programming; your choice of consumer suspension forks was just one: an inventive upstart called Rock Shox; and Ground Controls were still the hot tip for riding up mountains. This was the day of the Selle Italia Turbo saddle.

It was one of those designs that seemed to fit everyone, and every kind of riding. Crusty old men with beards and saggy panniers who weren't using Brooks were probably using Turbos. Thirty-something men were using Turbos on steel Saracen Blizzards and Specialized Stumpjumpers for cross country mountain bike races, and twenty-something men were using them to ride to university. If you were a bit Brookish but liked the Turbo, you bought a San Marco Rolls instead. Women didn't have much choice but to use a Turbo or a Turbo-like Terry, because saddles with holes hadn't been invented.

I never even had a Terry. I had to make do with a horrible Matrix saddle at first, which became replaced along the way with an almost as horrible thing, a Selle Cattivo or Cuscino Basso Costo or San Luis Obispo, or something foreign-sounding like that. People with money later branched out, like the manufacturers who'd suddenly discovered elastomers and gel and computers, so you would see them perched on Turbomatics, Turbolites, Turbobios, Turbo Gels and Turbo ProTeams, or perhaps it would be something more deviant like a Vetta TriShock or Specialized's ProLong and Joe Blob saddles. By then, us girls could sit on Joe's partner, Betty. Really. Of course it all changed when someone invented titanium and the Selle Italia Flite was born. The original box had a picture of one in flight set against a cloudless sky, which I thought was brilliant. A saddle was now more than just something to sit on: it was a style icon of curves and expensive materials, and it was something that delighted the weight weenie brigade. For quite some time, the Flite was the coolest thing I'd ever seen. Later ones had Kevlar corners for gnarly stuff, or cheaper Vanadium rails which broke. They even made one out of carbon fibre but it was about a million Pounds and no-one bought it.

I did buy a titanium Flite though. I remember it cost as much as a nice pair of SPD shoes but I'd more or less destroyed the not very good stock saddle from my mid-90s Rockhopper and I needed a replacement. Well shoot but wasn't the Flite just the most comfortable saddle I'd ever tried? In fact, for at least ten years it was; it was absolutely perfect. The black leather top became polished to a brown sheen, the natty red stitched lettering gradually turned a pleasing shade of patina and it lived through summers and winters. Then one day it became the most unbearably uncomfortable thing and I just couldn't stands no more.

I did put on a little bit of weight, after all that sort of thing happens to people from time to time. But perhaps I simply wore out the poor thing; I certainly covered enough miles during that time, and what little padding it did have might have broken down under my super sharp sit bones. Perhaps in discovering the incredible and bizarre world of recumbent bikes I lost my hard-won toughness. Yes, that's it, I blame the recumbents.

I hadn't counted on the weather, though, to blunder in with its size twelves and ruin it all. With Speedy being my main machine and my rusty Rockhopper having died and been replaced with Annie the Blue Bike, complete with inherited Flite and living more and more in the garage complete with cobwebs and soft tyres, everything was metaphorically cool. The weather hadn't been so cool, because snow had become something that happened for a few days each year and was nothing much to bother about, but then it changed and I needed a go-anywhere bike that could plough through winter crud and snowdrifts. And I wanted a saddle with a hole in it. So one day I sat on some memory foam and found myself a Specialized Avatar with rinky-dink gel inserts, and it felt tolerably comfortable, at least when coupled with a bit of padding; it was ostensibly a bloke's saddle but frankly I was hard pressed to tell the difference because by then apparently blokes also wanted saddles with holes, and it was good enough to manage a few weeks' winter riding. But ride a recumbent bike for a few years and you really do begin to wonder why anyone in their right mind sits on an upright bike for hours and hours. Think again, and you realise that there is an awful lot going for crank forward designs, like the RANS Zenetik, Citi and Alterra. Somewhere in my (n+1) list is one of those.

So it's not terribly surprising that buying my Brompton, that most practical of little bikes, was to no little extent contingent upon the saddle and by extension the general riding ergonomics being anything more than just tolerably comfortable. Few would argue that the original Brompton saddle was a hideous piece of sticky black plastic covering a piece of foam whose non-Newtonian dynamics meant that the density changed from cotton wool to concrete upon application of any pressure greater than a fingertip, but the current iteration is really not too shabby. It does however have a major failing in the three-panel pretend leather top, whose twin rows of stitching are placed precisely to wear away at one's skin, largely independent of cycle shorts. This is probably why people buy the genuine Brompton-specific Brooks saddle. Obviously I am the exception that proves the rule because the Brooks is a massive and expensive hunk of gleaning brass and leather, and my Brompton is already well on the way to shoulder tearingly heavy. A Brooks would probably result in the formation of a blue hole and another rip in the bicycle-time continuum.

You may remember me luxuriating on such bicycles as the Lightning P-38 and the RANS Vsquared, with their highly engineered foam cushions and mesh seat backs. So why, in the name of all that is sensible, did I think unearthing a 16 year-old Flite for my Brompton was a good idea? The perception of absent things often improves in the fullness of time, and the feathery slip of leather and the mythical grey metal had long lain in a box to gather dust, and possibly spiders. I actually felt as though I missed the thing; somehow feeling sorry for casting it aside for some cheaper replacement. And of course, every bicycle improves when you add something made of titanium. An evening spent fiddling with seatpost clamp bolts and carefully eyeballed tilt angles and studied hip-knee-ankle ergonomics suggested I was good to go, so the next day I headed out on my commute.

'Oh good grief, it's hard as nails!' I complained, as I drew up to the main road after a couple of minutes' riding. Did I really ride this thing when I was younger? I must've been mad. It actually reminded me of those hard plastic saddles that were standard equipment on your Mag Burner, Falcon Pro, Supergoose, and pretty much any other BMX in 1980. Then I realised my riding style used to be all-out, where anything less than 20mph—uphill, into the wind, in the snow—was naturally hugely embarrassing. That kind of riding takes some of the weight off the saddle and carries it on the great force from your legs. By the end of the day I arrived home with a further 15 miles done and, amongst the swearing and the realisation that my riding position was suspiciously stretched out by about an inch because I hadn't cranked down enough on the clamp bolts the day before, I was ready to throw the infernal thing away. Good riddance to bad rubbish, I thought . . . but...those rails are titanium!

My masterplan of buying a cheap second seatpost in order to experiment with my collection of saddles without upsetting the finely tuned original Brompton setup took a bit of a crash after that. It might not be my preferred steed for reeling off 60 miles every day, or even 20 miles, and in fact it isn't, full stop, but 1500 miles on the clock and a bunch of relatively happy outings up and down the country does rather suggest that if the disarmingly friendly little bicycle ain't broke, don't fix it. So I won't, once I've given my Rolls a quick try-out, that is. And when that fails, because I'm sure it will, I'm going to get rid of them all.

I always knew there was a reason I liked recumbent bikes.

It's not how fast you can go

2011-05-17T22:05:00.000Z

Three days since my last entry and I'm writing again? Not since the heady days of the lamented According to Bex has this happened, so something must have happened. Something good, for goodness sake; woah, somebody's coming!

Who's coming up behind you is in fact a black clad rider on her fully armed and operational Lightning P-38.

I jest, of course. On my way home from work today I tried chasing down two roadies with calf muscles the size of pint glasses, astride carbon fibre bikes and working a cadence seemingly so slow as to suggest complete nonchalance towards speed, but my body was having none of it as I enthusiastically created whole clouds of weather around me while battling something slightly gunky inside my throat. I'd breathed in and swallowed a fly earlier in my commute, but had at least the presence of mind to wash it down as quickly as possible with a generous helping from my water bottle. There were actually four people on upright bikes taking on the long hill, a slightly chopped up three-quarters of a mile with 140 feet of climbing, and I dispatched the first one easily after my patience ran out at 7.5mph. The second I could have caught but my exit arrived before that; the roadies by that time had cleared off and were a further few hundred metres up the road. But to be fair, neither of them was carrying any luggage beyond perhaps their house keys, and my bike wasn't made of plastic and soot. I had also not cycled yesterday, owing to a commute on the VFR which itself had been pressed into service to let me recover from Sunday's bicycular theatrics. My knee is almost behaving, too, but Tabitha and I have been apart for the best part of eight months. Victoria's done her best to keep things in check, but she is a touch more slight on the Q-angle and on the crank length. 170 or 175? Aluminium or carbon? 3500 miles on the latter says it works for me, but only time will tell.

Having spent longer than I expected on Saturday fixing up the P-38's boom and front brake, and with the bike sitting with its full lightweight race pack, consisting of a custom made front light mount constructed from a Dremel'd-into-submission Busch & Müller fahrrad-rückspiegel bar end mount attached to 90mm of the lightest handlebar I could find, replacing the undoubtedly massively overbuilt and overweight Topeak Spacebar of the previous four years, and the dispensing of the curly Vistalite extension wire, we were now ready to burn rubber.

In the morning I headed over to The Bicycleworks to meet Andy, David, and whoever else intended to turn up, but strangely although I was on time as usual, no-one else was around; even more unusually even TBW didn't seem to be open. Perhaps they've gone to Peter's Yard, I thought, so I pottered through the Meadows in covert monitoring mode. There were some bikes parked outside but not any I recognised, and nor did I spot anyone familiar inside, so I parked up against a tree and watched and waited. Just then David came flying down the path so I waved and caught up, and we headed back to TBW whereupon Andy appeared. On the citycyclingedinburgh forum we'd had a slightly ridiculous discussion about Edinburgh's steepest roads, everyone making suggestions and the list being reduced to the top 10 or 20, along with what Gugol's maps and spreadsheets thought were their respective gradients. Obviously the roads had to be tested for cyclability, and Andy suggested a route that took in twelve of them. Some I was familiar with from being driven up them, another one I'd cycled once or twice (actually, probably a hundred times), and others I'd never visited at all. I had my GPS to record the day's ride to get some Real Data, and to show the planned route. In the absence of proper GPX route planning skills, that seems to have become my standard workflow for cycling with my GPS. I'll knock up a basic track using something like BikeRouteToaster, roughly following the planned route rather than letting it auto-follow the roads because that creates more than 500 trackpoints which, once I've navigated the execrable RoadTrip™, makes my Garmin shrug its shoulders and proclaim that it's truncated my lovingly prepared track. I can have the city map onscreen as I ride, with my nice green line showing up, and all I need to do is follow it. I even added a dozen waypoints with cute little names like 'OldFishMkt' and 'Gloucester', although the chances are that I would recognise a bloody steep hill when I got to it.

We quickly arrived in Blackford and had a brief warm up as we ascended Maurice Place, before turning right for Blackford Hill Rise, and rise it certainly did. The switchback brought us out onto Observatory Road, so it was only fitting that we cycled to the top to take photographs and carry out a little breath-catching. So far, so good, though I suddenly realised that there were another eleven to go. Retracing our steps we headed west through Morningside, Craiglockhart and out along the Water of Leith path to the former Colinton village railway station. A short loop brought us to Spylaw Bank Road, which I think I'd only been up before on my motorbike. Andy approved of the wall of tarmac, hemmed in by tall greenery, and put the hammer down a touch to leave me opting to take my time in my lowest gears. 'Aye, it's a wee toughie, that one!' I exclaimed at the top.

With the obligatory photographs taken we looped back down to the village and turned towards Bonaly and a short hop to West Mill Road, part of my "longer than usual, just because" commuting route back in my university days. We entered at the top and rode down, so naturally we had to ride up it for it to count, and then rode back down again.

Taking the back way out past the luxury flats built on the site of Mossy Mill and crossing the Water of Leith on an early Arrol bridge, we climbed up to the Lanark Road and took the fast road north through Wester Hailes, Sighthill and Corstorphine village. Kaimes Road was next on the list. less than half a mile long but about 250 feet of climbing. And it felt like it went on forever. As expected, Andy was first to the top, and I chugged away in 1st gear, sometimes reaching the heady speed of 6mph. After taking in the view and watching the Inverness to Kings Cross HST making its way towards Murrayfield, we descended. But only halfway, because Corstorphine Hill Road, the next block over, was also on the list. That one was pleasantly short, but just as sharp.

A careful descent took us all the way back down to the main road, and heated up my front brake just enough for it to start squealing. Crossing back towards Corstorphine we joined the old Pinkhill and Corstorphine branch line to Balgreen and Murrayfield, then followed the Water of Leith path to Roseburn, and up and onto the Roseburn railway path that is still mercifully free of trams. A slight navigational failure took us through Ravelston Dykes which meant that Bells Brae, the long, subsided, bumpy, cobbled climb from the old ford crossing of the Water of Leith in Dean Village, was met at the top. So we rode down it, up Hawthornbank Lane which David suggested as a bonus hill, back across to the top of Bells Brae (it would, of course, have made more sense to turn around...), down Bells Brae, pause for photographs, then up Bells Brae for it to count, then back down Bells Brae for the third time whereupon my bike fell to pieces. It didn't really, although my mirrors were making rattling noises. We took to the Water of Leith path again and turned off at India Place, just near the newly made allotments that would provide each budding gardener with a poky plot that was possibly more double bed than flowerbed. Enough to harvest a family-sized crop of potatoes, though, if the sunshine can penetrate the clouds.

Gloucester Street was up next, another long, subsiding, bumpy, cobbled climb up to Gloucester Lane, which was even worse, and which climbed all the way up to Heriot Row, which itself is on the way to George Street at the very top of the valley, with the Water of Leith at the base and Ravelston Dykes on the far side. Andy and I took ourselves up the hill while David took photographs, and then we took photographs of David hightailing it up on his superlight recumbent bike. From there, the onslaught of cobbles continued as we made our way to Drummond Place and Scotland Street -- possibly the very worst example of Victorian road surfacing in the whole of Edinburgh -- and to the bottom of Dublin Street: a ruler straight ascent up the side of the remnants of the glacier that carved out Princes Street Gardens. Dublin Street, being a not uncommon commuting route for me, and in fact part of National Cycle Network Route 75, is actually shallow enough a hill to be climbable on a six-speed Brompton with standard gearing, albeit at 4mph, and on my P-38 it disappeared in fairly short order.

After recordeding our ongoing success we took to the main roads of York Place and the mighty Picardy Place roundabout. I say mighty, in the sense of cyclists who say, 'It's really dangerous!' and 'Ooh, I never go there!', but not mighty in the sense of impressive, and possibly gutsy road engineering as befitting, for example, the multiple mini "Magic Roundabout" in Swindon. But it was Sunday anyway, and the traffic was minimal, which was a fleeting disappointment to us three intrepid riders who eat roundabouts for breakfast.

And so to Calton Hill. Cobbled, bumpy, short, and very steep. Closed to traffic, too, for many months not so long ago but more for nearby demolition and building work than being too difficult for the poor little cars. I can't remember who took it on first, but it might actually have been me. First gear, feet on the pedals and go, go, go. A few cars decided to make the ascent even more technical by trying to come down the hill at the same time, but I was having none of it and steered around them without missing a beat. All too soon the road levelled out and I turned around, parked my bike and fished out my camera. Andy was there too, and David came up shortly after. After a quick break we carefully made our way back down again, picking routes that hopefully avoided the worst of the tyre-sized gaps between cobbles, we raced down Lower Calton Road, swung right to pass under the East Coast Main Line, and right again and across more chopped up tarmac that in most places was doing an entirely bad job of covering the old cobbles underneath. Cranston Street was another short little climb, this time up the side of the 'tail' on which the High Street was built, and to which the 'crag' is Edinburgh Castle. David and I went up together in record time, neither of us even bothering with our nine smallest gears. Andy took his time, having photographed the route from the bottom, and then really put the hammer down as I did my best to capture the moment. Two more to go.

Down to the Cowgate, via a quick pitstop for me to buy a banana and Jelly Babies, and along the dank corridor of arches, rock clubs, pubs, slightly dodgy looking hotels, and innumerable closes with dank staircases. Daylight reappeared as we reached the Grassmarket, and we casually took ourselves up West Bow and Victoria Street, going up past Long Tall Sally, assorted 20-something shops with black t-shirts and skater clobber hanging in the windows, the tattoo place, the coffee place and so on. Victoria Street was so common and easy a route for us that we'd turned left and cycled across to the Mound and not taken a single photograph. The final assault was Ramsay Lane, a cobbled, bumpy, short and extremely steep little road that seemingly runs right up the side of the Castle Rock. It used to be open to cars whose drivers wanted to avoid the traffic lights of the High Street and George IV Bridge, but they've sort of closed it these days. Tickling my bike into its lowest gear and with my back firmly against my seat I set off. After Calton Hill I wasn't quite so scared and in fact I zipped up, barely breaking a sweat. It's pure skill, I'm sure. City of Edinburgh Council had even been so good as to paint a lovely double yellow finishing lane across the end of the lane and we stopped right there with a quiet little whoop and a possibly more obvious punching of the air from the mysterious black clad rider with the long hair.

Twelve hills in one day! Twelve and a bit, actually. And according to my GPS, a total of 2000 feet of climbing and we hadn't even left Edinburgh. To celebrate our incredible achievements we parked up at The Hub, all of 30 metres away, and spent the remainder of the afternoon enjoying a late lunch of hot chocolate, coffee and chips. David parted ways and aimed himself at the pub, while Andy and I rode out of town a little way before I took off for some more hills and my old standard of a three-quarter mile drag with bumpy tarmac.

Don't go braking my heart

2011-05-14T22:49:00.001Z

Victoria, my monstrous American recumbent, originally came with a pair of cable-powered Tektro disc brakes which in the hot dry conditions of the Erie Canal towpath were plenty powerful enough, and nicely progressive feeling. Even when racing downhill with a touring load there was about enough in reserve for shedding the miles-per-hour, but once in the Canadian thunderstorms the brakes squealed so badly that car drivers in front probably thought I was giving them both barrels on an air horn. Once back in the cold and damp of home, and in the close proximity of Edinburgh roads compared with the vast airy four-laners of Schectenady, the problem seemed even worse. It was downright embarassing actually. Dismantling the calipers, attending to tolerances and using copious amounts of copper grease behind the brake pads ended up, to my great bicycle mechanic chagrin, making no difference whatsoever.

In the end, I found a pair of second-hand Hope Mini hydraulics and promptly doubled their value by replacing all the pads, buying several metres of hose and the requisite unions, and rebuild kits for the brake levers. I'd had Hope Minis on my Speedmachine, and those ones worked superbly, so I had plenty of reason to assume these would be just as good. Mmm, no. I actually had to file down the diameter of the front disc because for some bizarre reason it was jammed in the caliper. But since then, the rear caliper has been dismantled, rebuilt and bled three times now because the pistons insist on extending more on one side than the other, resulting at best in a plaintive-sounding rubbing as I ride along, and at worst a stronger and stronger rubbing on the disc until it barely turns. If I'd had a modicum of sense, I would have rebuilt both brake levers and both calipers with new seals all round, but in my earlier enthusiasm I left things alone if they seemed good enough at the time. And when it rains, the Hope discs still squeal just as much as the Tektros. In fact, if I'd had any sense whatsoever, I would have bought Avid BB7 cable disc brakes right at the start.

I might've attended to the rear caliper pistons today, but I had more important things to do. I haven't been out on my Lightning P-38 since late last summer, after the frame clamp bolts distorted the aluminium boom. I'd had to install a new seat mesh because the original one started coming apart where the eyelets were pressed in, and the new wrap-around design actually shortened the distance to my pedals by about half an inch. Not much, you'd think, but half an inch is a big deal on an upright bike, and most recumbent seats have a fairly well defined sweet spot too. The raft of knee problems a year or so ago meant I was also trying out some shorter cranks, but that meant needing to lengthen the distance to the pedals as well. But the stubby little boom that Lightning supplied when I bought the frame simply wasn't long enough. So I mothballed my bike, and put the miles on Victoria and Henrietta instead.

But this week I finally received my replacement boom, in shiny black cro-moly steel rather than aluminium and a full two inches longer than the original (Lightning marked it as "XXL" - this being installed on my already XL bike!). I had to bash a former into the frame tube first to expand the distorted clamp, although I'm not sure it made an appreciable difference. Then I left my brain in neutral while trying to install my FSA bottom bracket. Back to front. The worst thing was that I was nearly successful in screwing the left-hand threaded half of the BB into the right-hand threaded side of the BB shell. Pedals are easy: right-hand pedal, right-hand thread; left-hand pedal, left-hand thread. Bottom brackets: right-hand side, left-hand thread; left-hand side, right-hand thread.

It reminds me of that old sentence for remembering one's right from one's left. "I write with my right, and the one that is left is my left." But I, being left-handed, had to turn it around. Thus: "I write with my left, and the one that is left is my right." Well it's obvious, isn't it?

With the boom installed approximately, the bottom bracket, the cranks and the pedals quickly followed, then I cleaned up and installed the front dérailleur and the cable, and finished off with a few goes on the track pump for 85psi. A quick spin up and down the road told me I needed the pedals further out by a good half an inch, and this time there was boom length to spare. But look, the front brake pads are nearly worn out too! So on went a new pair of pads (peculiar orange and grey Ashima cartridge for V-brakes) too. Something wasn't right, though, and I realised that Ashima, like Clarke, has decided to make its pads twice as thick as Kool Stop does. My beautifully aligned pad holders then had to be realigned to take account of the wider spread of the V-brake arms, which then meant that my brake cable was just barely long enough to reach across. Perhaps I was being too much of a perfectionist but I think I revisited the pad holder positions about four times, trying to avoid the tyre sidewalls while setting precisely the right amount of toe-in and angling them just right so that they wouldn't drop off the bottom of the rim sidewall as they wore down. But with great serendipity I discovered in the bottom of my bag of spare parts my very last pair of Kool Stop pads! So the Ashimas went back on the shelf, and with the Kools in place I re-aligned the pad holders for a fifth time. After inspecting the brake cable I decided it probably ought to be replaced too, so I handily stole the original teflon-coated brake cable left over from my Brompton handlebar project. And heck, if I'm pulling out the cable I might as well replace the cable housing too and fix that missing inch on the length that's annoyed me for the last four years... After far too much fiddling -- I even regreased the little bolt that holds the inner and outer dérailleur cage halves together -- I think my P-38, the machine that was designed to be my flagship bicycle, is ready to hit the road again.

Meanwhile, little Henrietta Brompton, who lives in the corner, recently notched up her first 1000 miles. She's already sporting four new brake pads, a new rear rim and a miscellanous new spoke in the rear wheel as well. After work a few days ago I took a trip down through the Meadows, down the Innocent Railway path, past Portobello golf course and down to Portobello beach to pedal along the promenade and look at the big houses.

I finished up at the Dalriada Bar, having a mug of hot chocolate and a huge piece of lemon sponge cake, and sitting next to the open fire while reading my book for an hour or so. Of course, fold-fold-fold and Becky and bike went inside together. As I had expected and had prepared for by packing a jacket in my pannier, it was pouring with rain when I left to cycle home again. The Bar wasn't serving meals and I hadn't fancied eating in the Porto Café, which was both empty of other customers, and about half an hour from closing time when I looked in earlier, so I pottered the ten or so miles home on what felt like the most inefficient bicycle ever invented, finally giving up halfway to peel off my portable sauna of a Goretex jacket and opting to get wet instead. I was down on energy and I wasn't enjoying the saddle very much, but while my Brompton often feels too heavy, too slow, too undergeared, and too bumpy, the rest of the time it's so unbelievably convenient and disarmingly friendly that I always seem to end up forgiving it.

So many different connections

2011-04-21T20:54:00.003Z

The past few weeks have been lovely for cycling in Edinburgh, down to long-sleeved Helly Hansen temperatures at times and almost no rain at all. The only problem is, I've been battling a cold (like everyone else I think) and then battling a cold that turned into a cough, which went into my lungs and into my sinuses. By the end of last week riding every day was getting to be just too much, when my usual chestfuls of fresh air were met with coughing fits and and endless supply of tissues. I would've admitted environmental defeat and taken to the VFR, but it was still in a garage having its exhaust mended.

But never mind my health, I wanted to support Laid Back Bikes in only their second proper public display at a bike show. I missed the more local show at the Royal Highland Centre near the airport, but I did make it through to the SECC in Glasgow. Having been a fairly frequent visitor to the Weege in recent months for other bikey stuff involving Bromptons, ferries, trains, snow, and beer, it was a pleasant but headwindy two mile ride from Queen Street railway station down a mobbed Buchanan Street to the River Clyde, out past the Meccanotastic Finnieston Crane and along to the venue. I was last at the SECC for a camping, biking, boating outdoorsy show, so long ago that I was writing about it in English class at school.

Being a clever little girl, I had already researched the bicycle parking facilities, revealing them to be somewhat limited: a couple of racks at each of the main doors, and each rack good for half a dozen bikes at the most; not that much capacity for somewhere hosting a bike show, I thought. But I rode my Brompton, so I didn't need to bother with all that tedious locking up outside stuff, or worry about security. It turned out that they had actually set aside the entirety of Hall 5 for cycle parking inside, but even by my fashionably late standard of 12.30pm it wasn't what you would call stowed out. Like most exhibitioney places, the SECC is well served with car parking, but unlike Birmingham's NEC, which is convenient only for powered transport, you can actually walk to the SECC very easily, or you can take a brisk half-hour walk from the railway station, or you can take a bus, or even hire a bicycle. The SECC was built on the old filled-in Queen's Dock, which is on a fairly central and therefore accessible bit of the Clyde, instead of being a barren patch of tarmac eight miles from the city and on the wrong side of an airport and railway line.

Fold-fold-fold-fold and in I went, left the little bike under guard and collected my ticket. I'd paid £7.50 in advance rather than £10.00 on the door, which felt like good enough value to me, and so I wandered over to Hall 3 to visit Laid Back Bikes. And y'know, maybe check out the other stuff going on there too. No sooner than I'd arrived and unpacked my camera than I bumped into my friend Susie, who'd already been round the exhibition and was just leaving. Then after two shots my flashgun's battery died, which at least lightened the load on my neck; unlike the outspoken Ken Rockwell I'm still using the undoubtedly awful standard Nikon strap, which to his credit is actually quite uncomfortable. Laid Back Bikes was doing a roaring trade by all accounts. I said hello to David and Irene and was about to wander somewhere else when I bumped into George the Cameraman. I didn't recognise him at first, but we'd met six years ago when I helped out (she says, modestly) with a video he was making with Laid Back Bikes. And then I bumped into Keith, the very happy new owner of my infamous Speedmachine. I miss that bike, actually, even though my knees don't. On display at the LBB stand were two trikes and three bikes: I'd seen the silver Challenge Alize trike before, parked outside The Bicycleworks back in Edinburgh, and enjoyed its 'jet plane' looks. The dark red ICE Sprint possibly stole the show, though, even alongside a bright orange Challenge Fujin SL. Of course this was Laid Back Bikes, and the Nazca Fuego -- almost David's signature bike now -- was on prominent display and resplendent in a deep blue that was like looking into a river.

So I went wandering around, past Ironwood's build-your-own-wooden-bicycle stand and past some slightly anonymous and not very memorable stands demonstrating roadie stuff (too much carbon, not enough money) and BMXey stuff (too much radicaldudeness, not enough gears) and arrived at The Bike Chain's display, and bumped into Adam who'd much earlier furnished me with a long-handled allen wrench for my Brompton; TBC's owner Mark was flitting around between bikes and customers and being busy as, well, a bee. I like The Bike Chain a lot. By then some of the Edinburgh contingent from the citycyclingedinburgh forum bumped into me and we powered around the place, taking photos of the BMX area, complete with a quite impressive ramp setup and some daring riders. I only saw one accident in which the unfortunate rider landed backwards and fell hard onto the floor on his back. There wasn't an awed silence from the crowd, half of whom wouldn't have seen it anyway, nor from the riders themselves, who were all well hard. I did wonder though if he would be wearing a back protector in future; that's something that's on my shopping list for motorbiking to replace the foam thing in the back of my Hein Gericke jacket, and the excuse for a foam thing in the back of my leathers.

Later on two more of the Edinburgh forum arrived, having cycled all the way, and into the wind, and we decamped to the back of the arena to drink fruit juice, eat incredibly sugary, fattening things, and try out some of the Electra crank-forward(ish) bikes. Not as crank-forward as RANS builds, but enough that you could immediately feel the sit-up-straight, shoulders-back, relaxing riding position. We took turns to ride to and fro, while taking photographs and smiling and shouting encouraging things.

After being shown how to clean my sprockets using some very hi-tech long flexible bristle brushes with fleece woven into them (I think someone actually invented them a century ago, and called them pipecleaners...) at one stand, and being really impressed by Trakke's locally made messenger bags (like Crumpler without the sexist, vulgar advertising, or Carradice with cheery primary colours), and had I not already bought my Timbuk2 bag I would've been very tempted to buy, I ended up back at the Laid Back Bikes stand and chatted to a lady who was most taken with the ICE trike. She told me all about her cycling history and how much she'd enjoyed riding her custom built touring bicycle back in the day.

I still hadn't had any lunch though so I visited the little cafe for a hugely overpriced chicken and mushroom pasty ("D'ya wannit warmed up, luv?" "Yes please.") which I promptly discovered was so warm it burned my tongue, although it was actually very tasty. After leaving a pile of pastry flakes on my napkin and saying a farewell to some of the Edinburgh people, I was back in the sunshine on Henrietta Brompton and rolling along towards the station again.

Next year for the Scottish Bike Show? Probably, but to support local businesses more than anything else. Apart from the Trakke bags, I wasn't tempted to buy anything at all, or put in an order for anything. To tell the truth, these days I kind of have everything I need for cycling these days. But 2011 was the very first Scottish Bike Show, and the organisers took a pretty good stab at it.

I disregard the writing and I play just what I feel

2011-02-14T00:15:00.000Z

With the odometer sitting today at 676 miles, I have to say that I'm getting on really quite well with Henrietta Brompton. I haven't really written much about the little one who lives in the corner, but to be fair, I haven't written terribly much about anything of late, except perhaps how to justify owning more bikes.

After the false start in 2009, when the bike-to-be turned out to be no more than a potential collection of components, my Brompton arrived at the end of June 2010 with the help of Biketrax, here in Edinburgh. I'd previously test ridden several bikes in order to try to decide what options I would like: a two-speed with the low, flat handlebars was pleasantly light and stiff, but while Londoners get by very well with the minimal gearing, we have hills; a six-speed with the classic handlebars felt pleasantly tall, which was good news for my neck, and rather too flexible, which was bad news for my muscles; and in any case I found myself hopeless lost with the unusual gear changing between two sprockets and three in the hub. Over at Kinetics in Glasgow I'd tried a titanium version and marvelled at the weight reduction compared with steel, and I took myself around the block on a bike with the multi-position handlebars. I'd bought my Dahon with the intention of occasional folding and frequent riding, probably at some speed, and having decided that speed and distance was a recumbent bike's domain, my Brompton would stay in the court of more gentle and genteel trips.

I wanted to like the 'P-type' touring handlebars, with their controls on the top level and a narrow, low-level position for riding into the wind, but it felt like steering the top of a door. I quite liked the classic 'M-type' handlebar arrangement, but its two-inch height advantage over the flat 'S-type' bar also meant it used a shorter and more vertical stem. If I ever decided that I wanted lower handlebars, I might struggle to find medium-high rise conventional handlebar. On the other hand, with the S-type bar the riding position was low but not stretched out, and potentially good for cranking along and hill climbing within the range of acceptable power output for the bike. And if I ever decided that I wanted the handlebars a wee bit higher, or further forward, an aftermarket adjustable two-inch riser could be fitted, perhaps in tandem with mountain bike riser handlebars. I opted for the flat handlebars.

Gearing was really a no-brainer. Single-speed? No way. Two-speed? Aye, on a 1 in 7 hill? Three speed? Getting there but needs more range. Two-speed, and then fit a double chainring? Potentially a good idea, but it worked out about the same weight as the six speed. So, six speed? My final decision was for the six using the wide-ratio hub and a smaller chainring, which would get the bottom gear around 29 inches which is sufficient for most places in Edinburgh, and on the top end presumably I could simply freewheel if need be. Mudguards were required for weather, and I didn't need any lights because I had them already. I had planned to get Biketrax to order me an aluminium telescopic seatpost, as I had found that even the extended seatpost was laughably short for me. But when I discovered the price of it, and after I'd picked up my jaw from the floor, I decided to stick with steel and hang the extra weight.

And so remained the most important decision of all: the colour scheme. I spent literally hours playing with NYCeWheels' color picker page, and to tell the truth, I came up with several combinations I really liked: Race Green extremities (that is, fork, stem, swingarm) with Apple Green frame, Apple Green extremities with Race Green frame, Cobalt Blue extremities with Arctic Blue frame, White extremities with Arctic Blue frame ... and I tried other combinations to invoke national identities. How about the Cobalt Blue frame paired with White extremities to recall the halcyon days of Ecurie Ecosse motor racing; or the Race Green frame with Yellow extremities for Team Lotus. I even tried the vaguely camouflage colour scheme with the Race Green frame and Sand extremities. In the end, I chose the Arctic Blue frame with Sand extremities, since Sand was the closest colour to the lovely cream colour that Brompton formerly offered. Blue and Cream was, of course, the colour scheme of the English Electric DP1.

That was then. An early modification was to replace the foam handlebar grips with Ergon GP-1s for more contact area. Victoria already had them, and I liked them a lot. I also added some stubby bar ends, wrapped with bright blue tape to match the frame. A cheap Cateye Micro wireless computer from eBay seemed to do the job, and I installed one of my Smart 7-LED rear lights under the saddle. The hard plastic trolley wheels soon made way for a pair of Brompton's excellent Eazywheels, and I added my otherwise spare carbon fibre bottlecage to the stem. Before very long, I took the homemade aluminium rack that I'd built for my P-38, I prior to its Blackburn EX-1, and fashioned it into a frame to take a second pair of Eazywheels at the back of the bike. The Brompton rear rack would have done, at the expense of even more weight; my frame wasn't designed to be structural. Now the folded bike could be rolled along with aplomb.

For 500 miles and more that was my bike. But those S-type handlebars while fine for my hi-NRG commuting were just too low down for more than 15 or 20 miles at a stretch, and something had to be done. A sidenote in an edition of Velovision had shown the adjustable riser, ostensibly for tandem stoker bars, and JD Cycles the only apparent stockist. Having hummed and hawed for months, they were out of stock when I actually wanted one. At long length I found one on the ThorUSA site, and at even longer length found one on the eBay arm of Practical Cycles in Lancashire (where both Hope Technology and Carradice reside). And from the sale at Edinburgh Bicycle I came out with a carbon fibre riser handlebar. The big changeover wasn't quite that easy, because all of the cables on a Brompton are fairly specific in their length: too short, and the bike doesn't fold properly; too long and the pedal or the crank or your foot will catch on them; put them on in the wrong order and the bike doesn't fold properly... With the riser and the handlebar, two brand new gear cables and two brake cables, plus four lots of housing, it was a day of measure, test, check, measure, check, cut, and four times at least. But it all came good in the end, and with the handlebars cut down to the same width as those of the Dahon, and my original Onza bar ends installed at last, I was in business!

And then while riding to work one day, I had my first flat tyre on the bike. Naturally, it was the back tyre, and I hadn't rehearsed the procedure for removing the wheel. It wasn't terribly far, so in the interests of saving money by not catching a bus or a taxi with my bike, I trudged home and went out on Victoria instead. It turned out to be a tiny arrowhead-shaped piece of grit that had gone through the Schwalbe Kojak's tread (if you can describe a slick tyre as having 'tread').

The rear wheel process turned out to be very easy once I'd looked at the pictures in the owner's manual and ignored the text -- after all, it wasn't rocket science: second gear, bike upside down, remove the hub toggle chain, remove the window nut, fold the wheel, detension and unship the chain, remove the tensioner whole, loosen the axle bolts, wheel out. The only picky bit is setting the cable tension on the gear cable, which is simple with a torch: in second gear the end of the screwed rod lines up with the end of the axle, as you look through the little window nut.

But 676 miles later, today I was finally fed up with the notchy, self-centring steering, the gritty front wheel bearings, and the rattling fork hook. So I took everything apart, replaced yucky brown grease (where there was some) with shiny black Castrol Moly Grease, and put everything back together. The headset's locknut washer decided to rotate as I tightened things up, which didn't help matters, and the cones on the front axle were seemingly either gritty and tight, or rattley and loose, but I bent them to my will in the end.

Next stop: tweaking the cones on the rear axle, and eliminating the monumentally annoying rattle of the Brompton 3-speed shifter!

With our wild kinetic dreams

2011-01-12T22:13:00.001Z

The correct number of bicycles one should own is determined through a mathematical formula well known to internet-savvy cyclists. Stephen Hawking resolved not to include any formulae in A Brief History of Time because he felt each instance might halve his sales, although he did eventually relent and quote one from Einstein. I however am not out for sales, and anyway, it's only a very little formula:

C = n + 1 [1]

where C is the correct number and n the current number of bikes.

So there is supposedly always another bicycle required to fill that little functional gap. It's about the need to transport a couple of bags of peat from the garden centre when you don't have a car and are too cheap for taxis; it's the need to travel with a bike on a train and take it into a hotel, and not worry about bookings or raised eyebrows; it's the need for something stable and unfalloffable for snow and black ice; it's the need for a really lightweight lowracer for smoking those roadies; it's the need for something with an all-enclosed multi-speed drivetrain and weatherproof brakes for hills and salt-encrusted winter weather; it's the need for a decent mountain bike with disc brakes and nicer front end geometry because you're tired of wearing out rims and getting a crick in your neck after 15 miles of trails. Own only one bicycle? That's crazy talk, man.

On the Team Estrogen forum there are various suggestions in the thread Do I need two bikes or one?: 'You need at least two bikes; three or four is even better.', or simply that one needs three or four. One contributor even owns the seemingly ideal 3.5 bikes (the 0.5 apparently being crash-assisted).

In the discussion Is the perfect number of bikes REALLY always N+1? on Singletrack's forum, one contributor stated that 'Four bikes is all I need, and I think that's indulgence. Couldn't go below three though.' Clearly, owning only two bikes would simply make life impossible.

During 2008-09 the Cyclechat forum hosted the discussion How many bikes should a cyclist own?. The first suggestion was the beautifully disarming 'as many as necessary'. Another view was that 'five bikes are quite sufficient, unless you like off road biking in which case you need a couple of MTBs too.' Despite six pages and 80 posts, there was little agreement reached over what the correct number of bikes was, except that the formula itself was correct, more or less. For some a more appropriate version was (n+2) or perhaps (n+3). Indeed, a contributor on the London Fixed-gear & Single-speed forum noted that multiple bicycle ownership, whether realised or aspirational, was 'worse than crack'.

The Blasphemous Biker, writing in December 2010, explained his rationale for needing three bikes. These would, in his opinion, comprise a road/touring/Audax bike, a mountain or mountain-type bike, and a bike to use in cities and in bad weather.

In fact, Peter Walker of The Guardian picked up on the (n+1) movement and the Cyclechat thread in July 2010, in his article Confessions of a serial bicycle buyer. Walker himself said 'I now own four bikes ... it makes perfect sense.' The 69 comments on that article quickly demonstrate the relatively few people who own only one bike, though one commenter (commentator?) came tantalisingly close to a magic single machine with his Rohloff-hubbed multiple-tyre optioned Thorn Enduro. At least one person picked up on the dichotomy of need vs. want, and considering the environmental impact of owning many bikes, but until it's proven that four, five, six bicycles has a greater environmental cost than one car -- especially a modern 5-seater petrol hybrid -- I remain on the side of the human power movement even with its ongoing materialism.

Fortunately there are already rules in place to help govern such desperate soul-searching and financial husbandry. Within The Rules: the simple truths of bicycle etiquette, and under Rule 12: Fundamental Principle of Bicycle Ownership, it is stated clearly that three is the minimum acceptable number, with the correct number calculated using the (n+1) equation. The three are explained in greater detail in the Badass By Association: Winter Riding discussion and may be summarised as i) a rain bike; ii) an inclement weather bike; and iii) a nice weather bike. However, one contributor helpfully pointed out that road surfaces, frame materials and frame types should be additional considerations, and '117 bikes per person' was therefore justified.

But as we saw from The Guardian, if we start to distinguish between want and need, our happy 'correctness' goes out of the window; that is to say, correctness tends towards optimality. We might, therefore, look for an empirical solution, N, to the equation

N = n + (F_d * F_e) [2]

in which the absolute desirability factor, F_d, would include subjective things like price of a bicycle (or multiple bicycles) divided by expected mileage, peer group rarity, size, total inertia, and total rolling resistance; and the enabling factor, F_e, ranges from -1 to +1 and includes measures of household or relationship stability, price divided by expected salary, security of rarity, and available space.

This is all fine and good, but such empiricism requires hard numbers, not just statements and good ideas. While the correct or ideal number of bicycles is clearly 'one more', we can look at reported ownership to determine a real-world optimum. Obviously it will be at least one, and presuming it to be fewer than infinity, and on the available data being post-limited to personally owned bikes rather than including those in the garage/hall/shed but belonging to other people, we must consider not just the bog-standard average but all three statistical averages, that is, is there a normal or offset-normal distribution of the results, and where are the peaks? Also to be borne in mind is the possibility that all reported results are skewed by all the I'm-not-a-cyclist, I-only-ride-to-the-park single-bikists steering clear of internet discussion forums and little surveys, and indeed, pottering around completely oblivious to the value of their collective bike usage. In fact, the oblivious might make up a statistically significant proportion of bicycle owners, if not in the absolute numbers of bicycles.

Davis, in California, reputedly has 2.1 bikes per person. A census on the DavisWiki website, with returns from December 2005 through to November 2009. suggested that across 132 wikizens there were on average 1.9 bikes per person, which is a pretty good result. Ownership was perhaps slightly adrift of statistical rigour, because the numbers ranged from one bike to as many as 18 (though perhaps understandably, not all 18 were high quality mileage machines, and not every contributor gave a precise breakdown of bikes per household member.

Closer to home, the Cyclechat discussion referred to above saw returns from 39 people and counted a total of approximately 133.5 personally owned bikes (the 0.5 referred to a tandem, whose other rider seemingly didn't participate). The average number of bikes owned was 3.4 per person, with both a median number and modal number of 3 bikes per person.

A more detailed survey, How many bikes are there in your shed/garage/house?, conducted on yACF in 2008 covered 91 forum members (accounting for repeats and updates) and a total of 511 personally owned bikes. In this survey, the average number of bicycles owned was substantially higher, at 5.6 per person, with a median number of 4 bikes, but the modal values occurred at both 3 and 5.

And on .citycyclingedinburgh, the small but succinctly named question How many bikes do you have in your possession currently?, asked in late 2009, has had at the time of writing returns from 29 people, who together own 79 bikes. Including one forum member who reported being particularly well-wheeled, the average number of bikes owned was 3.9 per person, and again both the median and modal number was 3.

So perhaps there is some truth in the Velominati definition. And in fact, the eternal question isn't limited to only pedal bikes. A Kawasaki KLR owner goes with three motorbikes as the optimum: 'One to do this, one to do that, and one you are trying to sell so you can get another one you crave to do the other.' A member of the Suzuki SV650 forum said that his significant other 'failed to comprehend why on earth I might want more than one bike at a time. The optimum number of bikes to have is four, no less.' Honda VFR owners, on the other hand, are clearly the most financially comfortable of the group (or are the most adept at finding examples that are roadworthy but ancient, and therefore cheap), suggesting that the optimum number of motorbikes must be at least six, according to one owner, to as many as nine according to another.

While a small proportion of riders manage perfectly well with only one bicycle or motorbike, the evidence for multiplicity is compelling. It may all be summarised neatly using the definition of resilience.

"N+1 Redundancy ensures maximum uptime and continuous availability."

However, UPS units and RAID arrays and duplex cabling are not normally associated with familial harmony. An additional criterion is the number of bicycles, s, at which your significant other will announce an intention to leave you if you bring home another bike. This threshold limit is normally defined as:

C = s - 1 [3]

which of course is the simplistic form of equation [2], and appears as a qualifer in Rule 12. The threshold limit appears in a reworked form in another suggested modification of the original equation, again on the Singletrack forum. Known as the CHB Bike Theory of Everything we account not only for the number, n, of bikes owned currently but the number, a, of bikes made redundant by the additional two, and the number, b, representing the difference between n and the number of bikes one's significant other thinks you have. Thus:

C = n + 2 - a - b [4]

If a is found to be greater than 2, there is generally an error in the types of bicycle which one might aspire to own. Clearly C must be greater than n for all n, otherwise one might reasonably assume that there is a significant risk of a rupture forming in the bicycle-time continuum.

Jill Homer, a cyclist in Montana, owns five bicycles and, worryingly, says she doesn't actually enjoy it despite each having 'a particular function that I Can Not Live Without.' But she redeems her alarming thought of selling one, in order to make space for another, by modifying it instead. She sounds a lot like me, actually.

Perhaps at the root of 'one more bike' is our desire to try new things and competitive spirit encourages us to go faster, further, longer using less energy. You can ride bumpy, wet offroad trails using skinny road tyres on a frame with no mud clearance, but you might slide and fall off. You can ride on tarmac using tractor tyres and full suspension, but it'll be hard work. You can carry planks of wood and tow bicycles on almost any upright two wheeler, but a load bike or a trailer lets you carry more, more safely. You might be able to take your long wheelbase recumbent bike with four panniers into a hotel room, but a folding bike could make it a lot easier. Indeed, three was the Magic Number which De La Soul referred to in the 1990 single, and it looks good for cyclists and motorbikers too.

Finally we come to Bob Gannon, a photographer in Pennsylvania, who in a comment to Jill, elegantly summed up the growing awareness of Bicycle Acquisition Syndrome: 'I think you should resolve the issue by getting a larger apartment.'

Guidance systems break down

2010-12-21T00:05:00.003Z

Well here we are in the depths of almost-winter. It's still only December, and in my mind, winter should start on January 1st. Three months per season please; and none of this 18 inches of snow before the end of November, thank you.

The big 6V 4400mAh battery I assembled lovingly for my Vistalites several months ago has been powering the 5W and 10W pods very happily, until today. First the centre terminal in the socket wouldn't contact properly, requiring much wiggling of plugs and mild swearing. This evening I've had half a dozen false peaks in succession on my Pro Peak digital charger, and cranking the charge current to 3A, in the hope of shoehorning more electrons in before it noticed, didn't help either. This is a slight problem.

My original (and hitherto backup) 2200mAh battery is now being recharged for tomorrow's snowbound adventures. I'm going to have to pull apart the big battery and test the cell voltages, because it sure as heck isn't playing today. How fortunate, you might say, that I designed the battery to be taken apart with greater ease than its predecessor.

As I'm patently failing in my duties as a blogger, and even a rare one at that, perhaps another précis of events is warranted:

Henrietta Brompton, who lives in the corner, joined the august ranks of Becky's Garage back in July. We've been on the train to and from Glasgow many times, she's been stowed in car boots, and in October we spent four days pounding the roads of London. Henrietta is perhaps the single most useful bicycle I have ever owned.
The Stealthmachine, that big black beast that was party to so many bizarre encounters with the motorists of Great Britain, went to live with a new owner. It's still in Edinburgh, though, and so I shall smile broadly if I happen to see it on the road with Keith at the controls.
Speedy remains with me, and we've been out on the road three times in as many months. While the ride is as bone-jarringly rigid as ever, the sheer chuckability and guaranteed stability is, in these icy days, quite the treat. The SKS/Moulton mudguards I adapted have not fared so well, with every one of the pop rivets having corroded into powder. Even the aluminium layer between the plastic had corroded and split.
Tabitha, the P-38, isn't very well with a distorted front boom resulting from over-tightened pinch bolts, which themselves resulted from the boom being too short. Tim Brummer will have a little explaining to do.
Victoria, the monstrous American recumbent, is even more monstrous with her Terracycle tailsok in place. I've drawn the line at a front fairing, for now. Using some spare carbon fibre plate and four Cateye multi-fit mounts, I also knocked up a pair of Terracycle-esque accessory mounts to run my headlights on the fork blades. That would be the headlights for which my big battery isn't working, then. Sometimes a bunch of AAs and another Cateye EL135 seems the way to go.
And Annie the Blue Bike, ah, dearest Annie, is into her 20th winter and still going strong, mostly. For a few days we dabbled with a stripped-back, mountain biking guise, but full length mudguards and a pannier rack were just too useful to do away with. Riding in -10ºC didn't exactly work wonders for my Scottoiler, as the lubricant froze in the reservoir, the delivery tube fractured, and the valve inside the squid dispenser broke. And of all the unusual things to happen, the chain broke! Well, nearly, as one side of a link had peeled open while I was riding along Edinburgh's foremost highway: the bus-filled, thronging, yet slightly shabby, Princes Street. Of course, I'd already detected a regular-irregular ticking through the pedal feedback and mentally traced it to the chain and immediately reduced my pedalling effort, so I was spared any traffic light hyperacceleration plunging-to-the-tarmac accidents. I've never broken a chain before.

And what about me? The first day of snow, and I nearly broke my ankle as I slid, lost my footing, found the ground, lost my footing, and fell into a snowdrift. Three weeks (or is it four weeks?) later, I'm still hobbling, still lacing up my hiking boots as tight as possible, and still cycling. Another eight days and I can put my feet up for a while.

Tender timing

2010-09-17T20:43:00.001Z

"Wanker!"

Of course, riding an odd looking bike through a conservative city's inner suburb is always going to elicit a range of wild and imaginative comments from the public. The perceptiveness of different age groups is quite interesting to note, given that my usual attire in the lessening sunshine of a late afternoon in September is frequently a nonspecific black. Black socks; grey and black shoes; black shorts; black fleece, perhaps enlivened with a hint of a shocking pink or muted blue t-shirt lurking underneath; black even is my headwear which may equally involve polystyrene or a microfibre cotton-poly mix. Eyes formerly hidden behind reflective sunglasses now plainly observe the world through UV-A and UV-B rated polycarbonate with 85% light transmission. Small children on their way to school, accompanied by their mother or father keenly restraining any bemusement, express mild wonder in their unabashed enthusiasm for the lady on the funny bike. The need to keep one's side up, however, in the cut-throat internet- and Big Brother-educated worldly socialism of both pre-teen and teenage cliques and social circles rides roughshod over any such earlier innocence and, it appears therefore, the ability to tell boy from girl. The w-word, my foot.

If such playful misidentification wasn't enough, so many times while commuting and in hot pursuit of no-one in particular, I find my onlooker to be posted on the other side of the road. I find that most annoying, in fact. In the hustle and bustle of traffic and with me moving at anything from 10mph to 30mph, it is rarely a simple matter to jam on my brakes, mirror-signal-manoeuvre, and swing around in a glorious U-turn of canted-over control of tyre versus road. And even if I could, my retort of instant, withering wit would surely and inconveniently desert me in my moment of triumph. In today's otherwise ordinary ride through an ordinary city street, a street perhaps a little worse for wear in its grubby stonework, its tracksuited, shopping bag carrying denizens and its cut-up tarmac displaying a once-proud red painted cycle lane, on a low brick wall there lay in wait a threesome of grey-clad twentysomethings. I wondered, as my head flicked around upon that single shouted word to be met by three toothy, vacant, beer lubricated grins, if they were new to the area, for Victoria and I were certainly no stranger to those parts. But, my great inertia carried me onwards without a moment's hesitation even as I held their gaze for a second longer.

I held my tongue, too, not entirely out of politeness but out of the immediate failure to conjure up that deadly verbal barrage, contrived precisely to penetrate the slow thinking mind with a short, sharp expression, while simultanously retaining a suitably supercilious delivery aimed squarely at the bows of said physically unlikely suggestion, and designed to confuse and embarrass in equal measure.

Once home of course, and with all the time in the world for such fancies, my mind started constructing the proverbial arrows.

"Feck off!"

That most endearingly sanitised insult still sits somewhat uncomfortably as a rather unbecoming turn of phrase, and would do little to further the benign reputation of a majority of road users. However, such concerns might be moot in the present company, and one must certainly admire its minimally syllabic pointedness and the effectiveness of an almost unrivalled speed of articulation.

"Tosser!"

Right back atcha! One would however still be plumbing the depths of good taste, and with articulative speed no better than before the receipient would be equally far back along the road. However, the extended û sound of the last syllable provides for a splendid lingering delivery as one speeds away.

"Takes one to know one!"

Too commonplace I think; impossibly clichéd, and even in jest would be intimating fault where in my surely holier-than-thou manner none existed. Through its everyday manner any desired insult is diluted beyond reasonable effect, and it borders on a delivery time that may be measured as 10 metres or more of tarmac, by which time the guilty party is already long gone, hidden by later vehicles and falling off one's immediate attentions.

My mind started working on effusion instead, incorporating half-remembered snatches of comedy sketches involving a man coming to repair a harpsichord, and an adaptation of litarary greatness that would have Jane Austen herself blushing furiously.

"Fair Sir, I fear not. I do find however that a strap-on is quite unable to deliver the same wonderful sensations with which I'm sure you yourself are so intimately acquainted."

Traffic lights notwithstanding, I would be quite tested to carry my voice 160 metres for the final words to my most expressive acquaintance. In the heat of the moment, I decided that in order to minimise further reaction time I should merely direct at him a look combining amusement and superiority, and thus the half-smirk, half-glare was created. The effectiveness of this approach is highly debatable, yet as I continued on my happy journey I detected no subsequent laughter.

Except mine.

An ill wind comes arising

2010-07-10T21:07:00.003Z

On a rather ratty looking piece of paper, already adorned with some vaguely technical-drawing sketches of rear light mountings and a scribbled-upon photo of a rack, and printed on the reverse side with some stuff from the Illinois Department of Public Health concerning lyme disease, I've been doing some little sketches of pedals and booms. Frankly, I'm not really sitting comfortably, and I was jolly well going to find out why.

For about five years now I've had problems on and off with my left knee. When I did all my riding on my old Specialized Rockhopper mountain bike and Flite saddle, I noticed the peculiarly assymetric way my thighs scuffed the leather top and how my knees sometimes clonked the top tube as I pedalled. I spent many a minute looking in the mirror and observing the odd alignment of my knee joints, from my femurs to my tibias. For a long time I thought it was just me, for this was in the days before The Internet, but indeed the third paragraph on Wikipedia's page about the tibia agrees with the comment from a friend that in women, the tibias tend not to be parallel, to compensate for more angled femurs. Of course no-one told my pelvis, which stayed narrow. The upshot of this was that my knees like to be close together when I pedal, but slightly to the left. Indeed, my Flite is more polished on the right-hand side but it's been so long since I rode an upright bike every day that I can't actually remember which knee would hit the top tube.

It didn't become obvious until 2005 when my Speedmachine arrived on the scene. I'd tested one in 2003 and around the same time that I bought my Windcheetah, and only rejected it because I was finding it so difficult to balance. By 2005 my thighs had put on weight, except I hadn't really realised, and all of a sudden the frame around the headset -- a meaty two and a half inches across of metal tube and cables -- seemed very wide. The bike is fast, comfortable and well reclined, but also relatively heavy, and hard acceleration to which I am no shrinking violet allows a lot of force to be put through my legs. By mid-2007 I was riding my P-38 most of the time, a bike which instantly felt "right" ergonomically. But the suspension of the Speedmachine is so beautifully, wonderfully capable, which was why I could never part with it. Bouts of riding the P-38 felt great, while bouts of riding the Speedmachine sometimes left me with sore knees and particularly my left; a situation normally rectified by some rest and riding my little lightweight Dahon. But not altogether an ideal set of circumstances: was I too strong, somehow?

Well, in the summer of 2009 I acquired Victoria, my monstrous American RANS V-Squared, complete with remarkably wide-feeling pedals. That was down to a pair of pedal extenders, a good 5/8" of extra Q-factor to each side, as fitted by the previous owner. I figured I'd give them a go, as my friend and I set out for the Erie Canal, but after the first day something in my left knee didn't feel right. By the end of the second day I was feeling serious pain in my left knee; halfway through the third day I bought an adjustable spanner and threw the pedal extenders away, and iced my knee that evening. After that, the pedals felt remarkably narrow, but not at all uncomfortable. The only gripe was the Truvativ cranks, whose fairly straight profile allowed less inwards heel movement than the FSAs on the P-38, the cheap Campag cranks on the Speedmachine and the Middleburns on Speedy. It didn't stop me notching up over 500 miles over the two weeks, and in fact only two or three days after junking the pedal extenders, the bike as a whole elicited my comment, 'You know, right now I feel absolutely comfortable.' My knee, which had been rapidly swelling up to the inside and becoming intensely sore to the touch, calmed down within days.

This year however, something went wrong. An earlier suggestion of a collapsing arch in my foot, an opinion seconded this year by my local running shop, combined with various part-diagnoses of pelvic misalignment caused by my feet, and my widely reported shoulder pains perhaps caused by my lower back and by extension, my pelvis, led me to a chiropractor initially. The motorbike crash, while not related, put me off chiropracting and shoulder pain put me off riding upright bikes. All of this led to me trying some special insoles. Rather than go clever and expensive with custom-fitted ones, at least initially, I was recommended an off the shelf pair of Superfeet. Superfeet come in various colours designed for different activities, foot shapes and so on and I came out with the orange ones, designed for big-footed people who spend a lot of time on their feet: running, walking, standing. And you know, with those inside my shoes and me clumping around, my feet had never felt more comfortable!

For about two months I happily swapped the insoles from cycling shoe to cycling shoe, to hiking boot, to trainer. They did feel strange for cycling, at first, but the arch support and heel location felt great. Then during another bout of enthusiastic riding of my Speedmachine, my left knee began to really, really hurt. In fact, it was so bad that I had to spend a week and a half not cycling at all, while grimacing every time I had to push the clutch pedal in my car, while vigorously burying my finger into the side of my knee to relieve the pain and massage the tendons. I also spent most of that time with an elastic bandage on my knee and several evenings with a bag of frozen peas in place. When my knee started to feel a bit better, I took the pedals off my Speedmachine and buried the bike behind Victoria in the garage. I put the Superfeet back in their box and put my original insoles back into my cycling shoes (how wise of me to keep them all!), and vowed to ride only the bikes I knew wouldn't hurt me again: my P-38, the V-Squared and, though it was still sitting clean and tuned up but unloved next to its American stablemates, Speedy.

Taking it gradually, my legs began to feel better. Every ride home is still punctuated early on by a solitary but solid click as my kneecap moves into place, and I try not to go breaking records unless I have a tailwind or a hill. Following a physio appointment last week, my knee has been hurting again. I think this was due to the poking and prodding he did to make an initial appraisal, and believe me, he certainly found the source of the pain as I yelped. More physio beckons, with some exercises to practice meantime. But something was nagging at the back of my mind: why did my P-38 always seem to feel right, and why did my Speedmachine always seem to be behind the outbreaks of pain? The physio mentioned words like "patellofemoral" and "meniscal", unhappily followed by words like "damage". I then realised that perhaps the accident in early 2006, in which I was broadsided on my left-hand side by a car whilst navigating a roundabout, and a subsequent accident in which I slid on the bike in winter, landing on my left side, might have contributed to some twisting shock to my knee.

So to return to the point of sketching pedals and booms, I spent this afternoon vernier calipers in hand, measuring my bikes. The findings are very, very interesting. I use Shimano SPD pedals, both PD-M520 and PD-M540 models, and Speedy has a pair of PD-A515 roadie SPDs. Happily, every one of these measured 54.5mm from crank face to mechanism centre. I then measured the boom diameter at the point at which the pedal axles pass, and the distance from the boom to the outer face of each crank where the pedal abuts. From this, I can determine the Q-factor for each bike, for both the left and right-hand sides. Knowing these measurements also lets me vet any potential pedal replacements, such as Crank Bros Eggbeaters, or Time ATACs.

Bike	Q-left	Q-right	Cranks
P-38	135.0	133.0	FSA Pro Team Issue, ISIS
V-Squared	127.0	131.0	Truvativ Elita, GXP
Speedmachine	141.0	138.0	Campagnolo Veloce, ISO-JIS
Speedy	137.8	137.8	Middleburn RS7, JIS

Is it any wonder I've been having problems since 2005, when I more or less stopped riding Speedy every day and started on the Speedmachine? Is it any wonder my riding position on Victoria is off-centre and that it felt so narrow? Only the machine built in a small workshop in Manchester by one man, a machine designed by the master himself, Mike Burrows, a machine with a CNC-produced bottom bracket axle and whose cranks hail from the cream of British manufacture, Middleburn, is exactly symmetric in its Q-factor. My lovely P-38 with its full complement of FSA bling is two whole millimetres out. The V-Squared is a whopping four out. And not only is the Teutonic tour de force itself an uncomfortable three millimetres out right to left, it puts its pedals a whole six millimetres further out on the left than my P-38 and five millimetres on the right. The Campag cranks were never designed for the bike's JIS-taper FAG bottom bracket at all, and in my accelerative exuberance of pedalling and unwillingness to address the issue by disposing of the Campag cranks, my knees have probably paid the price. Fitting JIS-tapered cranks of the same profile would see the pedal centres move inboard by up to 4mm, according to the late Sheldon Brown, and this is consistent with the existing gap between crank and bottom bracket cup that is quite obvious when examining the bike, and consistent with the results I saw when I tested the Middleburn cranks on the bike instead (an experiment which, perhaps due to its dramatic effect and consequent lack of perseverance, was short-lived).

But more issues abound, too, such as why my left knee has the tendency to move inwards to brush the steering column of my P-38 at its maximum bend, despite that side being 2mm further outboard. As near as I can tell, the left and right cleats on my usual shoes (Shimano MT70) are identically aligned. There is the ergonomic difference of the riding positions of all four recumbents, where two of them enjoy 175mm cranks and two enjoy 170mm, leading originally to my theory that in a more closed riding position I preferred longer cranks for slightly greater torque, and shorter cranks on a more open, reclined riding position to allow me to spin the pedals better. Now that I have some hard numbers on (mis)alignment, there are even more variables at play, and it's making it almost impossible to draw any firm conclusions without having the wherewithal to conduct a series of tests such as varying the crank length alone; varying crank length while adjusting the gearing to the rear wheel; varying the torso-hip angle against crank length, and so on.

All I know right now is that my P-38 is fractionally out of alignment but not desperately so, to the extent that I do most of my riding on it; it's clear that my V-Squared needs a bit of work (I blame Truvativ's ridiculous GXP bottom bracket design, myself) with some washers and things; and if I'm to keep my Speedmachine and enjoy riding it again, I have to sort out those cranks.

I'm only in my 30s, and cycling is my life. If I damage my knees now, I will never forgive myself.

Into the lens

2010-05-10T16:51:00.004Z

What would a bicycle ride be without photographs? Now that the world has advanced beyond the standard chunky SLR film camera and pokey little Instamatics, we have digital technology practically being given away in breakfast cereals, hiding inside phones, on top of baseball caps and bicycle helmets, or inside your computer screen frame. But you can't wield a MacBook webcam back-to-front for holiday snaps, nor can you buy huge hunks of magic glass for your mobile phone, even if it does have eleventy billion pixels behind its pinhead-sized lens. So as always, you trade off ease of portability for performance, compactness for versatility. Until last year I was making do, quite well on the whole, with my little Olympus with its whizbang 2.1 million pixel capture. It's still capable of taking perfectly good photographs and its feature set, good for its time, includes full manual control and an IR remote that does much more than simply activate the shutter. However, its slowness in focussing betrays its era and requires the user (i.e., me) to help it along when the action is quick. That was why I moved to the world of digital SLRs.

But now I have a problem: my Nikon has moving parts inside it; little fiddly, shiny, polished components that were aligned precisely by people wearing white suits and breathing masks. It's also bigger than my Olympus because it has a great big lens on the front, an angular-shaped flippy-up bit on the top, and it needs special batteries and everything. My have camera, have bicycle, will travel requirement hasn't changed though. My fun-sized D40 came with a LowePro TLZ1 bag; well, I say bag, it's more of a triangular pouch really. It's the ideal convenient size for the camera with the kit lens, and just small enough and padded enough to throw into a pannier alongside my usual paraphernalia. Underneath its zipped lid hides a small pocket for memory cards and remotes and so on, and a front pocket is available for batteries and remotes and a purse or wallet perhaps.

The slippery slope of photography, however, is not one to be ignored, and my little TLZ1 immediately lost out when I wanted to carry any accessories. For a time I was making do with my regular rucksack which is more than large enough but has no padding or other protection whatsoever, and that wasn't a good thing at all. Moreover, my telephoto lens came without a case, and the case the camera shop had thrown in for free (after my having to haggle, naturally) had turned out to be too small. In supporting local businesses rather than super purchasing power websites like Warehouse Express, I had paid full retail price, so I decided they'd had their chance. I needed a bigger camera bag.

I visited the larger but less local camera shop to see what was what. My soon-to-be sister-in-law, a freelance photographer, uses LowePro to contain some very expensive hardware and that was a good enough recommendation for me. I started by looking at small cases like the Cirrus 140, which was big enough for a camera plus either (and only either) a second lens or a flash, thus needing accessory bags; the Stealth Reporter D100 and D200 were neat and versatile, capacious, but big and square; and the Fastpack 200 was a very neat rucksack top half, and camera case bottom half. I was quite tempted by that one, actually.

But the more I thought about it, the more none of them seemed to fit the bill. Of paramount importance was a bag I could use while cycling, whether to put inside a pannier or to carry on me. However, I wouldn't be able to wear a rucksack while recumbent, and the height would preclude hanging it over the seat frame. A smaller shoulder case to fit inside a small 12 litre pannier wouldn't be big enough anyway, even though the camera hardware on its own would easily fit the pannier. A larger shoulder case could go inside my very biggest pannier (21 litres, plus or minus) with relative ease, but not all of my bikes are equipped with a pannier rack, and the boxy style with just a shoulder strap wouldn't work for riding. But then I found the Inverse 200 bag, which was a cross between a sideways Stealth Reporter and Specialized's ancient Power Pack 2 bumbag. That one disappeared off the shelves in about 1990, around the time bumbags went out of fashion, but featured a central square bag of decent size flanked by two waterbottle holders.

LowePro's Inverse 200, the grown up version of the 100, has a biggish single compartment that'll take a professional (read: big and heavy) DSLR with a medium zoom lens on it, plus another couple of lenses, and maybe a flash squeezed in there for good measure. The front panel of the bag has on its inside a thin expanding pocket for cables, remotes, keys, Powerbars, chocolate bars, and so on, and the panel itself can expand outwards to hold bigger stuff like notebooks, sandwiches, mini tripods or a Gorillapod perhaps. The very front (or the rear, I suppose, when you're using it) of the bag has a webbing loop on which you can hang an LED bike light. The bag also comes in a seawatery blue and a clovery green that I actually prefer to plain black.

The lid opens up with a pull on the finger loop, and to its underside are a couple of pockets for memory cards. The soft material is expertly placed to keep the screen of your DSLR happy and dust-free. As expected, the centimetre thick foam dividers of the main compartment are all adjustable for position, and are held in place with some of the strongest Velcro known to man.

By way of example, the modest collection of hardware contained within the bag includes a Nikon D40 with its standard 18-55mm lens, a Sigma 70-300mm telephoto lens, a Nikon Speedlight with a case, a second battery pack, and a couple of remote controls. The bag is actually big enough that I can put my camera inside (lens down, of course) whether it's wearing the telephoto or not. A 70-200mm f2.8 might be a bit long in that orientation, but would certainly go in if laid flat.

Turn the bag around and upside down and things get more interesting. The Inverse has an enormous waist belt with huge amounts of padding and wicking mesh material all around, and a great big quick release buckle with its own straps for adjustment. The sides of the belt have their own adjustment straps too to keep the bag tucked into the small of your back, and are perfectly placed to grab and pull. These are especially important if you add weight to the bag and bend forwards on the bike. But there's more; two D-rings at the top of the bag let you add a shoulder strap, which provides excellent three-point stability for walking, running, hiking, and even cycling. The waist belt, faced all around with two inch webbing, also includes two flattened loops for LowePro's 'Sliplock' accessory pouches which hook onto those loops and are secured with slabs of Velcro. You could alternatively hook on other accessories such as a mobile phone, a few karabiners, a torch, and so on.

To one side is a waterbottle holder made from stretchy mesh and with the usual strongly elasticated top and a firm base; to the other side is a smaller version that's not really designed for a bottle. It'll stretch to accommodate but the bottle will interfere with the lid of the main compartment. It's more of a pocket for stashing things like lens caps, chocolate bars or your glasses case.

Along the bottom edge of the front panel, where the orange label lies, is yet another pocket. Two strips of Velcro keep it snugged down, and lurking inside is a full raincover. LowePro has arguably missed a beat here by selecting a shiny grey colour instead of hi-viz yellow, but you'll find as many adherents to each colour scheme as detractors. The raincover is permanently attached to the lining of the panel which makes it a little more tricky to dry out, but does keep it handy.

Underneath the bag you find two more straps, this time with rather neat buckles combining quick release and locking adjustment, and there are Velcro tabs for orderliness. Here you can sling your monopod or tripod. A useful addition which LowePro has missed out would be a non-slip pad to help prevent a tripod sliding to and fro, though some rubbery material could perhaps be added to the tripod's legs instead. My tripod is 25" long (or wide) fully retracted, and is actually a little on the big side for manoeuvrability. Of course, it doesn't have to be a tripod; you could probably stuff a rolled up lightweight fleece there too.

So what's it like to use in the real world? I've done about equal amounts of hillwalking and cycling with the bag and it's very comfortable. I particularly like using the waist belt and shoulder strap together because it feels similar to my messenger bag and super stable. I could probably rely purely on the waist belt but I haven't tried it. To access my camera, I simply undo the belt and swing the bag around. I pull open the lid with my left hand and grab my camera with my right. The camera, the lenses and accessories slide in and out quite happily thanks to LowePro's standard interior of smooth grey polyester.

The front panel is a bit odd, I have to say. It's held in place a bit too well: by its own quick release buckles, the side straps to the waist belt, and the small sections of elastic at the base which prevent small items falling out. The zip to the inner pocket is on the inside, so it becomes a bit of a faff to access things. The waist belt with its luxuriant construction is almost impossible to stow away, although with some fiddling it can be buckled together behind the lumbar padding.

And were I designing the Inverse 200 mk2, I would line the base of the main compartment with twice as much high density foam, or with some stiffening. With the telephoto lens on my camera, the base of the bag sags and it's always the first bit to touch the ground. The Inverse isn't really designed for 1.2kg of camera and 1.3kg of lens, but it ought to be happy with my 0.5kg + 0.6kg combination.

But those are all niggles rather than outright failings. It's exceptionally well thought out and ideal for outdoorsy-type people who want faster access to their camera than a rucksack might provide, and a safer and more comfortable package than a regular shoulder bag. I'm keeping mine.

State of play

2010-04-25T16:15:00.002Z

On occasions all too rare I get to leave my svelte black trousered desk jockey life in the office and, in a whirlwind of flying lycra and Coolmax, turn myself into SuperBex: the hardened cyclist, train passenger and enthusastic geographer. So when the question was asked whether one of us ought to attend a three-day exhibition in Birmingham, I volunteered. The first step was to look at the map and find out where I was headed. Strictly speaking, it wasn't really in Birmingham at all but on the periphery, squeezed in alongside an airport, a motorway, a dual carriageway and a railway. Immediately my thoughts turned to the logistics of getting there and back again. I certainly wasn't going to drive, and I wasn't going to fly because my environmental conscience wouldn't let me for so frivolous a distance. And at any rate, the closure of an ash-filled UK airspace was yet to happen. Taking a bus, even from home to Waverley, would undoubtedly leave me distinctly green and unwell, so bike + train was the happy solution. More mapping took place as I measured various routes from New Street Station out to the National Exhibition Centre, and I felt that a nice eight mile bike ride could open each day nicely. Of course, that depended on where I was to stay; I could keep it simple and look for a hostel, or a bed-and-breakfast perhaps, or I could leave it to the travel agent and end up invariably in a nondescript, functional travel inn somewhere.

Anyone can catch a train from A to B, even me. Of greater organisational prominence was taking my bike onboard unfamilar trains and, at the destination, knowing where to park it. The trains to Birmingham as I was already aware were Virgin Voyagers and Pendolinos, which have a cupboard with little hooks to hang your bike vertically, instead of a handy driving van trailer with tandem and recumbent-friendly bike racks. But for sheer convenience I decided I'd use my folding bike in case I needed to take it inside somewhere.

Given its location I supposed that it would have a lot of amenities for visitors, but the NEC website only told half the story, falling over itself to tell me how much car parking was available, the range of bus stops and coach rides, the ease of access from Birmingham International railway station and Birmingham International airport, the proximity of hotels ... and nothing whatsoever about cycling or walking. And yet the website for the exhibition itself asked everyone to travel by the most environmentally sound method that was practical. Not to be outdone, I e-mailed the conferencey people at the NEC to find out about cycle parking availability and, wonder of wonders, they had some! That is to say, a grand total of nine bike spaces compared with 26 thousand spaces for cars, and with the rack located in one of the car parks somewhere. Can you see where this is going wrong?

Having gone to town with paper maps, internet maps and both aerial views and bird's eye views I knew where I was going and when. I was to be staying in a hotel within walking distance of the event which wouldn't involve crossing any big roads but did involve walking through an industrial estate. I decided I'd leave my bike in my room, except for the last day when I would need to get straight onto the train afterwards; I would have to check out that morning too, so I could either look for the mythical bike rack or take my bike inside the hall with me. I needed to decide on my luggage, too. The bike doesn't have a carrier rack, which meant using my messenger bag and handlebar bag, a combination that saw me down to the York Cycle Show and the National Railway Museum two years ago. With my nice leather boots taking up most of my bag, and conference paperwork being most of the weight, I pedalled down to Waverley and jumped onto a SuperVoyager, hung up my bike (noting that all of the webbing tie-down straps were missing from the cycle bay), met my friend, went to Wolverhampton, jumped onto a different SuperVoyager and arrived at Birmingham.

Finding the hotel was the easy bit: the signs showed the route I'd already worked out on paper. After a bit of a rest, my friend and I wandered around the NEC, finding the big hall for the exhibition being still set up but not finding anywhere to buy food. In fact, the place looked unsettlingly closed for business. We walked full circle around the place and headed across to the railway station, but could only find a Subway. To be fair, the food at the branches of Subway in America when I was riding across NY was quite good. But eating at a bunch of pressed aluminium patio chairs, wood and Formica tables, in a station concourse wasn't quite what I was looking for. Surely the airport would have somewhere to eat, we thought, since there could be lots of travellers there. We boarded the little SkyRail elevated train that's now a disappointingly conventional steel rope-hauled, rubber-tyred system compared with its hi-tech predecessor that, in 1984, was the world's first mass transit Maglev train. Of course, the airport was shut too, so we took a train into the city for our meal.

Thus was born the new slogan for prospective tourists:

"Visit Birmingham NEC, there's f**k all there!"

Day One of the exhibition the next day went without a hitch although my feet were tired by the end, and it was rounded out by another trip into the city for food that evening, during which time I took in the sights of Birmingham's marvellous Town Hall, looking for all the world like Edinburgh's National Monument on Calton Hill, but actually finished, and the Selfridges Building, which is one of the most superbly unlikely and out-of-keeping places I've ever seen, like a blob covered in drawing pins.

For Day Two of the exhibition I wafted out of my hotel after breakfast, determined to find the bike parking. What I discovered first was that my lovely assymetric black skirt was a little too floaty to successfully combine cycling and wind with modesty. Fortunately the perimeter road was quiet, and after a brief inspection of the southern entrance to the NEC to make sure that every expense had been spared on cycle infrastructure, I caught up with Car Park E. It was obvious to anyone who knew where to look. I could tell by all the motorbikes parked in front of it, and the absence of any bicycles.

Surveying the scene, it all becomes perfectly obvious. The rack is a simple set of nine wheelbenders, attached to the ground or the adjacent wooden fence by methods unknown. Bicycles, as one knows, are relatively fragile to the onslaughts of hacksaws and bolt cutters and thus relatively stealable, or at the least, damageable. Unlike a motorbike whose weight is a signifcant factor to a single person with dishonest intentions, a bicycle is rarely so heavy it cannot be lifted. A bicycle's wheels are designed to carry the weight of a rider and a bit of luggage, and to be lightweight but strong in the direction of expected forces. A wheelbender rack merely encourages other forces to dominate with predictable results. A motorcyclist has equally far to walk to the NEC entrance as would a cyclist, so distance is not the main problem: I already mentioned weight and ease of theft. A bicycle must therefore live closer to oneself, or at least be secured either through a fit for purpose rack or in a place that is covered by CCTV and in reach of security. The ideal bike rack should encompass all three factors. I measured the rack as being 360 metres' walk from the nearest entrance, and over 1km from my hotel using the shortest route through the buildings. When I'm in a hurry for my train, I don't have time to run that far to get to my little insignificant toy and ride it back.

But a folding bike has by definition one advantage over a cumbersome, so I wheeled myself straight inside and handed a compact package of tubes and wheels to a very bored looking cloakroom attendant whose sole raison d'être appeared to be her mobile phone. I opted to spend the day wearing my bike shoes and several times other conference-goers remarked on my sensible footwear and my undoubted wealth of experience of conference-going. Sensible, yes, but not quite as stylin' as I'd been.

There was one moment however when my footwear choice was ideal, as I paused at one of the information stands. Their draw was one of the new Boardman bikes set up on a turbo trainer, which was in turn hooked up to a wattmeter and a computer. The objective was to cycle as far as possible up a predefined gradient profile, with the resistance (and thus pedalling effort) accordingly controlled by the computer which measured one's overall power output and distance covered in 40 seconds. In proper Top Gear tradition, there was a leaderboard too, all shiny steel with white strips of magnetic rubber listing those who'd set their times already.

'Roll up! Roll up! Try your pedalling prowess on our patent velocipedometer!' cried the cheerful man at the stand, or at least, that's what I imagined he wanted to be calling out. 'Miss, are you going to have a go?' he asked me as I watched two people taking their turns at maximum effort.
'255 watts!' he exclaimed as the girl slowed her pedalling to a stop and climbed off the bike.
'That's hard!' she breathed. 'I couldn't do that for 40 miles.' Her partner in crime took the bull by the horns for a seemingly all-out sprint.
'Woah, you're nearly taking off!' cried the cheerful man as he put his weight on the turbo to hold it down. '328 watts!' he exclaimed a minute later as the man recovered from his exertions.
'Is that all? That's rubbish!' he replied wearily. He was obviously looking at the top score, which was over 1000 watts.
'You're still here, are you sure you won't have a go? See the board, we've not had many women on the bike.'
I clenched my quads and calves quietly as if to warm up without being noticed. 'Yeah, I ought to have a go, really.'

I thought back to the Arthur's Seat Challenge and my 2km, 279W output, I looked at the leaderboard and hoped I'd match some of the men in the high 200s. With the seat adjusted I climbed on, cinched up the toestraps and spun the pedals a little. I'd never been on a turbo before. It felt pretty easy though and I thought I might have a chance after all, so I knocked it into a moderate gear and readied myself.

'Are you ready? Three ... two ... one ... go!' I hauled on the pedals and took off. Get the cadence up, change up a gear, another gear, shift onto the bar ends for more power, grab another two gears, keep the cadence, grrrrr.
He started calling out the power output. '400 watts!' '500 watts!' Hey, I might just do this. '600 watts! Go for it!'

By half a minute I was going at it hammer and tongs and my thighs felt the resistance ramping up quickly. I stood up on the pedals to rock the bike but realised my mistake immediately and found myself in too high a gear, and slowing down by the 40 second mark.
'Nearly there! Three ... two ... one ... Finished!'
Bloody hell, I thought to myself, my throat'll feel that later. 'Our survey said?' I breathed out loud.
'Wow, 522 watts Becky! Puts you in ... fifth place!'
Hah, that'll show them. Another two women were hovering there as I passed by the stand again late in the day, and by now I was the star whose score was met with incredulity. One managed a very respectable 350-odd watts while wearing wholly inappropriate footwear (and my fleece top tied around her middle for modesty) and the other in the low 200s. 'Do you cycle a lot?' they asked me.

I'm sure that smugness is an unappealing trait but I was still enjoying my fifteen minutes of fame even as I changed out of my conference clothes and back into my travelling clothes, and catching my connection into Birmingham New Street. Only the train's cycle compartment, securely locked to the public, dampened my spirits for a moment as I stowed myself in the carriage vestibule. That is one manoeuvre that Victoria the V2, all eight feet of her, would never manage! Onto another SuperVoyager and I hooked up my bike again for a couple of hours, and then a small regional train took me back to Waverley.

So to anyone thinking of cycling to the NEC, my advice is to take your folding bike, take your motorbike or better still, take the train and a pair of trainers!

Undivided

2010-03-26T21:57:00.004Z

'Don't get me wrong. I'm an avid cyclist but ...'

Mikael Colville-Anderson talks about 'people riding a bicycle for utility/transportation', in that 'most people who cycle are hardly avid. Do they cycle in the dark? Do they always cycle on the road? Do they cycle in any part of the city? At any time of year? The answers are an emphatic no.'

And he goes on to ask, 'Why bother making the city a better place to cycle if the only people who will do it are the ones who are already cyclists?'

Copenhagenize is a big word that's gradually becoming entrenched in cycling minds. But as far as I've seen -- not being a Guardian reader I suppose -- it's still largely being promoted to those who already cycle, perhaps in the 'baby steps' approach of drip feeding the idea to less frequent or non-cyclists. I cycle quite a lot, and I would have no hesitation describing myself as 'a cyclist', in the sense that my life is geared very much around my bicycle. I do have a car driving licence and a motorbike licence, but I wouldn't say I was 'a driver', because I don't really like driving and I don't do that much of it; I was coming around to being dual-mode and applying 'motorbiker' to myself and perhaps once my machine is repaired I will try again on that front. Until I read Mikael's article, I would also have happily described myself as an avid cyclist, or an enthusiastic cyclist; a dyed-in-the-wool cyclist, a if-you-cut-me-open-I'll-have-'cyclist'-written-through-my-middle sort of cyclist. You get the idea.

But now I'm wondering: do the residents of Copenhagen, or Amsterdam, or any of the other Holy Grail cities, refer to themselves as cyclists? And of those who do, is it to distinguish or distance themselves from those who don't? Or is it, I might suggest, with cycling so pervasive and everyday an activity there that it is literally the majority of citizens who cycle, and the minority who drive? Are the online newspaper articles followed by dozens of comments from irate cyclists who think drivers should be given the boot? The problem is, that scenario can't be easily compared with anywhere in the UK, save for perhaps parts of Milton Keynes, because in many places over there, cyclists and drivers don't share the same roadspace.

Starting in 1900, build two towns, both based around the horse and cart for 20 years. Then in true SimCity style, over the years, adjust the planning of the roads and railways and taxes and so on with one town giving the car priority and the other pedestrians and cyclists. Run the simulation through the baby boomer period, the swinging sixties, the efficient eighties, the noughties, and what do you have? Two cities with equally densely developed CBDs and arterial and peripheral transport routes. Now without bulldozing left, right and centre, or spending bucketloads of money, turn Motor City into Human City. Crank up the taxes and the population will vote against you, but will probably pay up. Bulldoze your heritage and the population will vote against you, if the Government doesn't haul you over the coals first. Haemorrage money by making roads anti-car and the car loving majority will vote against you but the car ambivalent won't.

While Copenhagen did things from the top down by becoming essentially anti-car, another historic city went the other way. Copenhagenize as both an idea and an ideal seeks to change things from the bottom up, and in encouraging more people to ride a bicycle instead of driving a car, we have to show that riding a bicycle is the normal thing to do. That needs:

Making riding a bike ordinary, without lots of special aspects like yellow jackets and helmets and lycra.
Making riding a bike ordinary, but tailoring it to the specific cityscape.
Making riding a bike ordinary, and less of an urban competition.

When I think about how I descibe my own cycling habits, it's invariably about the clothing or about the bike, and while I would like to treat them completely separately, the more I consider them the more intertwined they become. The third option, floating awkwardly in the middle distance but still tenuously intertwined, is mindset. So let's think about it.

When I ride to work, traditionally I wear x, y and z.
When I ride to the supermarket, on the occasions my local shops don't have something, or are closed, I wear x and y, and probably z too, but that depends on distance.
When I ride on a cycle tour, I wear x, y and z, but also pack at least two of a, b, and c.
When I go out for a meal without any notion of cycling there, I'll almost always want to wear a, b and c, but otherwise perhaps a carefully concocted a-b-c-x-y-z hybrid.

So why, when I go to the shops or to work, don't I just wear a, b and c? Maybe it's because sometimes it's too uncomfortable. Or it's too impractical. The real reason is because too many of my clothes are actually type x-y-z.

My waterproof cycling jacket for instance, with its respectable dark blue and black hues a hundred miles from traditional hi-viz yellow, is, strictly, a cycling jacket and is designed and shaped for that purpose. It's also a hundred miles from the beautifully styled (if nauseatingly but understandably London-centrically named) offerings from Bspoke, such as their Angel jacket. There's something that really should fit the bill for cycling: it's waterproof with sealed seams and a bum flap; it has armpit zips and it's a shell, so you won't overheat in it. But dammit, look at it. It's a coat I'd wear very happily to the shops, to a concert, to a restaurant. It's also £130 in a world where the old standard, the Altura Nevis cycling jacket, still hits the shelves at £50. At perhaps £80-90, I'd really be thinking about buying it.

It ties in with the way my cycle clothing preferences have changed over the years. In the old days, I thought nothing of riding my bike whilst wearing jeans and hiking boots and a casual jacket (although I'd fallen at the first hurdle by already using toeclips on my pedals, and buying the jacket from a bike shop), and generally doing about 12 miles a day. But as the months went on I tired of regularly wearing out the backs of my jeans and so I graduated to wearing lycra shorts, lycra tights and proper cycling shoes with proper clipless pedals: stuff to make cycling more efficient. I carried on hauling everything around in a great big rucksack because panniers were akin to beards and leather shoes, tweed skirts and stockings. With dedicated clothing that flexed rather than rubbed, didn't flap and didn't let cold air down the front of my neck, I actually found myself riding even more. I stopped bothering with cotton t-shirts and went for cycling jerseys made out of fossil fuelled technical fabrics. That none of this was particularly fashionable was of no concern because I didn't do that much socialising, and I didn't care what anyone else really thought. On my bike, I was just part of the machine, and speed and efficiency was everything.

But using a bike for social transport, rather than commuter transport, places different demands on the rider. At least here in Edinburgh, a city built on seven hills, and not unlike other places such as Sheffield, you either ride slowly to avoid exertion or you wear something that won't stay soggy after you park your bike. How do you combine the two? You buy clothes that don't look out of place on the city street, but still function as effective cycling attire. Cycling tops with half zips and rear pockets and reflective panels can be eschewed for simple wicking t-shirts in plain black, grey, or whatever the prevailing colours are. Lycra tights make way for lightweight walking trousers, or if it's not too cold, ordinary tights in a nice heavy denier, coupled with a short practical skirt (or a kilt, if you're patriotic and rock hard). And in the summer months, lycra shorts can be replaced with their baggy and pocketed equivalent or simply covered with that same skirt.

As I became fed up with sweaty back syndrome, the rucksack of my younger self eventually went the way of my jeans, and a single pannier took its place. It was joined soon after by another pannier and, when I realised that heavy panniers weren't much fun to carry around off the bike, a vented rucksack designed for hard working cyclists. And followed various other bags contrived to maximise luggage carrying or symmetry or portability when on foot. I've never tried to bring my leather handbag with me on the bike, because I'd say I can't carry it reliably. What about that practical solution of a handlebar basket, so popular abroad? It's not for lack of availability, that much is true. What about laying it on my rear rack, held down with a bungie cord? And I could well ask myself, why indeed not?

My own excuses would include:

Because the bag is a bit too nice to spoil with the harsh elastic of a bungie.
Because it's not waterproof and I don't want to get road grime on it.

To which I would say that occasional use in this manner isn't going to harm it that much. And putting it in a plastic bag, later to be stashed underneath the saddle, could probably keep a shower at bay. I think it's leather, anyway. It's made of lots of offcuts all stitched together, so while a cow wasn't used mainly for making my bag, it still isn't a vegetarian's delight.

Because it's not big enough on its own.
Because I don't want to spoil it with sharp/dirty/leaky/awkward things.

For what purpose? Carrying my camera? A pot of paint from B&Q? A bottle of shampoo? It occurs to me that the times I bring my handbag are the times I prefer to look least like 'a cyclist' anyway, so logically to use my bike for transport on those occasions instead of taking the bus, we're back at a clothing problem rather than a luggage problem. Leather handbags aren't really set off by cycling clothes, to be honest. Though there are exceptions.

Because I've got lots of special bike bags already, and I don't want to put a stupid basket on my bike.

Ah, now we're getting somewhere. I thought panniers were stupid, once upon a time. I think that means I'm too much of a bike snob, too much of the 'avid cyclist' Mikael writes about. I don't own a single pair of shoes that does me for every activity (although my current cycling shoes are coming perilously close), and I don't own just one bike. The recumbents like to stay set up for distance (and by extension, speed and efficiency) and a dose of touring practicality, but my town bike could very well have a basket on the front if I wanted. But it already has front and rear racks and all the other commuter accoutrements. Perhaps if it was a basket made of carbon fibre and sort of rounded for aerodynamics and... But bicycles with baskets aren't normally made for breaking speed limits, so it must be a fashion thing, and it's a superficial mindset that says I must not be a Serious Cyclist if I have a basket on my bike. Are we really that vain? Am I?

On the other hand, everything that Copenhagenize strives to show is that someone who regularly uses a bicycle for practical journeys *is* by definition a serious cyclist. It's no less important an activity than the rider who tears up centuries on a bike that weighs three grammes, but cycling is an activity that has for decades been about effort and energy, and this can't but build a pecking order. I can cycle faster from A to B than you, for longer than you, with more skill than you, therefore I am better than you. Pottering around town wearing a flowing coat and carrying a bunch of flowers in a basket doesn't quite compare with slamming a tough little BMX around a concrete park every day, and that doesn't really compare with strapping a tent on the bike and setting off across the glens, or chugging across the town with a load bike full of garden centre. In fact, aside from using a bicycle, none is comparable with another.

The average speed of cyclists over in Denmarkcityland isn't breakneck, but then their terrain is relatively modest. The lie of the land in the wilds of Scotland naturally places different demands on a rider, his or her clothes and the bicycle. Going up hills requires expenditure of energy - there's no getting away from that - and unless one is either extremely fit or extremely slow and relaxed, energy generation and expenditure requires working one's muscles, and that generates heat. Heat likes to be carried away at a specific rate: not too fast or muscles don't function at their best, and not too slowly or you get too hot. To make reasonable progress in a city in which the car is still king, fast is safe, as Richard Ballantine and John Franklin would over-simplistically put it. While Edinburgh has a useful selection of flat railway paths, they don't serve every part of the city, especially anywhere south of the middle, and hills are something one simply deals with. It is a bit like using a computer from 1995 in 2010: it still crunches the same numbers but it is no longer considered good enough for the prevailing needs of the user. A nice woollen three-quarter length coat might be a good piece of clothing for cycling at 10 mph in a flat land, but it isn't as suited to cycling in a hilly land at 15 mph, or 20 mph.

Vexed with continually breaking parts of his increasingly modified Ford F-250, it was his friend Jim Kramer who said to Bob Chandler, 'Why don't you just keep your big foot off the gas?' While my component breakery hasn't reached those heady heights, I have asked myself the same question from time to time. Another school of thought came from a Tour de France rider, that increased fitness didn't make cycling any easier: he just went faster. Simplistically, I cycle fast because I can and because I have big muscles from years of putting the hammer down. Although fast is often safe, Ballantine and Franklin actually meant that safety can be improved when the speed differential between rider and motorist is minimised. This holds true for most environments but particularly so in cities where cyclists and motorists share the same roads. But I often cycle fast when there isn't other traffic around, which suggests that the optimum force and speed of my leg muscles is due to a profusion of fast twitch fibres which, much like the chicken and the egg, have been developed and trained by years of trying to ride fast.

This excuse for not being able to ride at a relaxed pace is, of course, complete balderdash. There are other factors at play, including safety inasmuch as one tries to maintain motor vehicle speeds in an urban environment in order to actively influence the behaviour of other road users, and the notion that cyclists are constantly engaged in a war with motorists, resulting in one's efforts to avoid any inferiority complex by maintaining motor vehicle speeds and thus defend against claims by motorists of being held up (as they race to join the end of the next queue). I like to present my road behaviour as that of a bona fide vehicle, not as an obstacle to be passed at any cost. This marks me out as a legitimate presence, which is only necessary because of the current attitude towards 'bloody cyclists', which is due in part to the paradox of Government ambivalence coupled with the dichotomy of Government policies, and in part to the potential cycling population being discouraged through the constant reminding of the fact that cycling is somehow not ordinary and everyday. Let's hear it for a Slow Cyclists Movement, a cross between Tai Chi and a peaceable Critical Mass that promotes safety in numbers without the demonstrations and the aggressive beat of a portable PA.

Right now we have to share the road more than do the cyclists in the Enlightened World. We need speed more than they do, or at least we think we do. We have more terrain to deal with. We have to spend more time saving our own lives because the majority is allowed to act more dangerously. We don't, as yet, have the ability to collectively slow down on the road and work together. Universal promotion of flowers and dress trousers and bicycle clips and leather bags isn't going to work straight away. The idealology is perfect, but it needs fine-tuned. The 'edinburghchic' cyclists already look slightly different from 'londonchic'. It gets colder here, it snows more, and the roads are made of holes. We don't have much in the way of underground transport. We like mudguards and bigger tyres, and springy saddles. A lot like continental bikes then, but all ridden with those tensed shoulders and hair trigger eyes.

To call myself 'an avid cyclist', rather than simply 'a cyclist' is nothing more than creating a sense of smug superiority. We're all cyclists -- people who like the freedom and flexibility of a bike -- we only exist in different flavours. But even that isn't enough: 'I don't always want to look like a cyclist' she bleats, but that is one phrase I imagine is seldom heard in Copenhagen. In a city or a country where just about everyone is a cyclist at one time or another, it simply doesn't matter.

Shoot high, aim low

2010-02-21T21:53:00.001Z

Great Britain: a name only accented correctly by either a stiff upper lipped, handlebar moustachioed flying ace from 1944, or The Queen. A name evocative of motor cars handbuilt with the natural understatement of lashings of cowhide and burr walnut; of green liveried steam engines with red pinstriping; of complex machines controlled only by rods and levers and valves; of a land where everything stops for tea. I'm British, and therefore I crave disappointment. Far be it for a train to arrive or depart exactly on time, like the trains in Japan do to the millisecond. For the fact that we, the British, invented train travel two hundred years ago in a land of hills and consequently have no geography-be-damned racetracks, the challenge to surmount the Cheviots, the Pennines, Exmoor, the Lake District, is such that control of time is at best limited by human experience. British trains should not run on time: it isn't wrong, but we just don't do it. And there is a legend, however unqualified, that during those fateful two and a half hours in April, 1912, in the ensuing scatter of organisation, disproportionately fewer British passengers were rescued than American passengers because we queued politely to board the lifeboats.

Britain does not have icebergs, nor does it have seasons; it only has weather, in the sense of outbreaks of sunshine turning to scattered showers in the southwest, heading north, temperatures dipping down to freezing and rain turning to snow on higher ground. Drifting is likely in exposed areas with snow lying elsewhere but dying out eventually, heavy showers expected in the west and hail to the north, turning to sunny spells for a time but staying overcast in most places, ten degrees (50 Fahrenheit) across most areas, reaching 25 degrees (77 Fahrenheit) in the south -- warm for the time of year. That is the weather forecast for the year ahead, but equally it could be tomorrow's forecast.

Despite this, they've worked out that statistically the average British commuter cyclist will be rained on just twelve times a year. Although my records began in 2001, no notes were ever taken with a view to proving or disproving this theory, but a back of a fag packet calculation suggests it's not far from the truth. Of course, a proper British bicycle has to be designed for more than 12 hours of rain a year. That's why hot-dang Sram hub gears stop working with their oil and grease gradually turning to inky black salt while Sturmey-Archers, being made of sterner stuff, keep going. It is entirely possible to use a dérailleur geared bicycle year-round, as long as one keeps one eye on the jockey wheels, one eye on the parallelogram pivots and one eye on the cables, but technology can help. The eponymous Scottoiler, invented by a Scot called Fraser Scott, has its beginnings in the grimy M6 motorway between Manchester and the Weege, saving the lives of many a motorbike chain. One of its derivatives lives onboard Annie the Blue Bike, which when coupled with spiky tyres becomes my snowbound winter transport. Too many people, mostly those with carbon fibre road bikes I think, scoff at having a little dispensing device on their bike instead of just carrying a bottle of Triflow. I think it's rather better because it's self-contained and puts the lube exactly where it's needed whenever it's needed. Some say it's nothing more than chainsaw oil, and I couldn't comment with any certainty, but it's a device that is suited perfectly to weather where it rains in the morning, washing your chain clean, only for the sun to come out at lunchtime and bake it dry, or when you're ploughing through slush and grit and you just know that it can't be good for your bike. Hub gears with their innards hiding away are ideally suited to British weather. So suited, in fact, that for some reason none of my bikes has one.

My brash American upstart of vélo origami, known more fondly as the Little Dahon, hasn't weathered the weather quite as well as one would wish. Its back wheel went bang one winter when a single spoke, one of 16 strung so tightly their voices bordered on ultrasound, let go, the salt of the roads having set in the rot in the cavity of the rim drilling. Its rear dérailleur, itself a product of a company which when only two years old sued the mighty Shimano and won, reacted equally badly to salt ingress. Of course, some time and some careful workshoppery solved those issues. But most of all, while indeed a brilliantly lightweight machine for handling both the zipping around from home to railway station to workplace and car booting for assorted trips, its original purpose of accumulating mileage has been taken up by its recumbent siblings. For an almost car-free (and to all intents and purposes, also motorbike-free) owner, foldingness is becoming important, and three bicycles must come to the fore: Dr David Hon's beautiful Dahon Curl, Jon Whyte's mechanical Mezzo, and Andrew Ritchie's resolutely British -- nay, English -- hub geared Brompton. The Curl, notwithstanding occasional forays into Taipei bicycle shows, maintains an almost mythical status that has bettered even that of Philip Brook's Canadian GoBike. The Mezzo, coming from the man who for a brief year was the star XC mountain bike designer, promised a future of gunmetal grey angularity and clever frame design and somehow delivered an uninspiring whole. And yet the Brompton bicycle, first brought into being more than 30 years ago and refined ever since to a refined audience by an uncompromising engineer who crafted the ultimate compromise, still ranks at the top of smallness and convenience. You may have any colour you like for free, as long as it's black. Or black with red bits. That the most recognisably national edition, painted in dark green, is a custom colour currently asking of you up to 50 of Her Majesty's British Pounds is to me a singular mistake. One can only assume that Ritchie was not an ardent international motorsport enthusiast, or that quite simply black paint was more readily available in the early days on which tradition must be based.

I am not, as you will be patently aware, a Brompton owner, but this was supposed to change at the turn of this year. I was looking forward to it greatly in fact, for I had my red, white and blue Union Flag sticker poised and waiting to be applied; I had everything mentally planned for rail journeys free from mucking about with bicycle bookings; and like Juliane Neuß, Harry Bickerton and countless engineers before them, I had a series of ideas to improve upon something that was good but not quite good enough. My Speedy, another bastion of British cycle industry (in the loosest senses, admittedly) had gone to live with a recumbent dealer, and everything was set. All I had to do was wait for my brand new little Brompton to arrive. Like a proper British citizen, I had patiently waited eight, then twelve, then sixteen weeks, calling in for occasional updates and being assurred that all was well and forthcoming. And then came the call. The problem was, it seemed, that the shop with whom I had placed the order -- and henceforth the custodian of Speedy -- found itself quite suddenly cast adrift from London's folding bike maker, and there wasn't a bike with my name on it.

A bit of telephoning around revealed that not only was there not a bike with my name on it, there wasn't even a pile of parts in the factory with my name on it. But I could have my Speedy back if I wanted, or have the shop sell it for me. A number of e-mails plied the information superhighway, in one direction only it transpired, and a lot of telephoning around to Government organisations and much studying of sales legislation revealed that I had a case, but somewhat frustratingly not much of one. I picked up the telephone again. I sent more e-mails, and I waited. Days passed. Since my efforts weren't being reciprocated for whatever reason, I picked up the telephone yet again. More e-mails circulated, this time with more success.

Twenty-three weeks -- nearly half a year -- from my original order, the big yellow and silver cheetah has made its way back to the tall athletic girl who seven years ago looked kindly upon it, tended to its front paws and made its insides all better. Unfortunately, while Annie might have been missing its low-slung friend, Tabitha and Victoria have no such qualms, and they were quite looking forward to meeting their new British stablemate.

But the cat came back, it just couldn't stay away.

Gravity

2010-01-24T22:01:00.006Z

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

2010-01-23T16:52:00.004Z

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

2010-01-17T17:14:00.009Z

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

2010-01-11T21:02:00.010Z

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

2009-12-20T10:41:00.004Z

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

2009-11-04T20:32:00.005Z

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:

mentally note the number and location of each new feature; and
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

2009-10-25T20:57:00.007Z

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.

Magnum Opus

2009-07-20T20:53:00.007Z

The Bicycle

Once upon a morning cloudy, I set out, still with head so drowsy,

In search of legends known to some - Chuffy, Kathy, the mighty Si.

At length was heard the sound of squeaking, then a breathless voice was speaking,

A tall girl pulled up, nearly reeking, reeking from her valiant ride.

"'Tis some visitor" is muttered, "seeking all of those inside." -

-- "Is this Cake Stop?" I replied.

"Unclip thyself from thine recumbent", such disapproval surely unmeant?

Still questioning as one went through the door and being eyed.

Worrying of little matter, flapjacks laid on yonder platter,

Forsooth a dish ne'er lush or fatter, fatter from the sweet inside -

and thirst to quench through foreign teas, none I'd seen or ever tried -

-- This be Cake Stop, I decide.

And the lycra-clad sodality sporting hellbent road mentality

Scared me - dared me with their verbal sparring and intrinsic pride;

Then the door, it opened quietly, Redshift of recumbent piety,

"'Tis some visitor" - indeed, a friend and sometime wheeled guide.

In quest to seek heroic roadies from whom mortals cannot hide -

-- Cake Stop here I shall reside.

Gradually, 'spite fear retreated, hesitant I would stay seated,

Diffident towards the others, except the one who sits alongside.

Confidence I'd gain with meeting, acquaintance though appearing fleeting,

Riders busied with their eating, eating all would Clare provide.

To that end we tarried, chatting, equating our machines beside -

-- A Cake Stop curio implied.

Long I listened, growing obsessed, tales recounted; century conquest,

Sometimes venturing opinions - rarely shared and quite untried;

And at length although still learning, certain topics found returning

Certain stories held me yearning for the open road outside,

"Chronicles" enthralling all, the Authoress clearly in her stride,

-- The Cake Stop listens open-eyed.

Such adventures rife with action, heroes battling fuelled faction

Mighty foe of many number, set against one raven-eyed.

Armied and of worthy fight, her grip on evil ever tighter,

Petrolled pallor ever whiter: "Curse thy cycling fiends!" they cried

As the Priestess most revered, o'er the land she would preside

-- Thus was the Cake Stop story plied.

All at once the air, it altered, drink containers gripped and faltered,

Then were voices loud and craven - "Wasn't me!" Evil Chuffy tried,

The League of Gentlemen agreed with haste to confiscate his steed,

When in weighed Ronstrutt, the stampede halted, quick it would subside.

Presently an "Is red faster?" argument would soon divide,

-- Cake Stop opinion: opened wide.

All the while they sat debating while I pondered colours, waiting,

For so surely would the discourse vitiate itself I sighed,

"How may painting have such bearing?" said I, noting tempers flaring,

Chuffy resolute, declaring "Disbelief be cast aside."

Marching through the cafe door his countenance seemed almost snide,

-- No more would Cake Stop be defied.

For a moment the assembled cyclists stared, then slowly trembled

As intention dawned revealing -- dawned, the danger to who'd try;

For the Authoress allknowing of the changes undergoing

Standard time perception slowing of the speeding hero ride --

His velocity increased and rend'ring space and time untied,

-- Gone! The Cake Stop, mesmerised.

How the shifting shining portal seemed to access no mere mortal,

Vanishing an instant after, folding in itself inside,

Only one appeared unfeeling; other minds were brought to reeling --

Many more had started wheeling aimlessly, and some to hide --

"Be this scene a warning, let us hasten for the safe inside..."

-- "To the Cake Stop!" she applied.

"Danger is our friend doth chasing, this unstable reckless racing,

Relativity", said she, "will mean our time now we must bide."

There we waited, hours I reckoned, 'til a strange disturbance beckoned

Waiting not a single second more did certain members try

'scape the confines of the room, lest all be caught and certain fried,

-- Then did Cake Stop two wheels spy.

Slowly, as if quietly rending all of Nature's laws to bending,

Out of nothing came a shifting sense of bike and man and pride;

Soon I heard a frightful braking, felt the heat of Aztecs baking,

And the words: "Mine legs are aching!"; one more clue he would provide --

To that hastening emergence, black as soot his frame astride,

-- The Cake Stop door! Would he collide?

With the awful sound of smacking, "'tis but polystyrene cracking"

Thought I, turning round: the space of man and door did coincide;

Little left on ancient hinges, panelling reduced to fringes,

Chuffy rued his hamstring twinges, someone tending to his side,

But her ferret unbeknownst had slipped away, it seemed, to hide,

-- The Cake Stop too preoccupied.

No, the daring devious creature -- drawn to that unworldly feature,

In such sparkling twisting beauty was an awesome power belied.

For a moment, waried, stalling, curiosity drove him crawling

Instinct bent so on exploring, onwards, inwards through this eye.

Such investigating saw him find himself quite soon inside.

-- A Cake Stop voice just then outcried.

"Rosencrantz! My rash Putorius! 'Til thine end my overcurious

wretch!" wailed Kathy, racing over to the strange space-time divide;

Barely did the gateway's random form betray its grasp - her tandem,

Leaping back in fright did pandemonium break out in stride --

Holding fast her steed the portal closed abruptly just beside,

-- Cake Stop left with half her ride.

"Rosencrantz!" she wept, dejected, "Carelessly left unprotected!

To say nothing of my cycle: neatly rent in two!" she cried.

"Strength my lady." the Adonis offered; -- "Thou art surely honest

but that duty", Tim admonished, "'tis but mine alone!" he vied;

"Let us once adjourn, to that ambrosia surcease inside."

-- "To the Cake Stop!" she replied.

"What then" said I, "stays of forum? Thine peculiar decorum --

such intoxicating practice! Cast thy recklessness aside!

Let this day's unbridled lesson check thy coloured speed obsession!

Let there be no doubt or question! -- Leave such fancy at thy side!

Take thy steeds unto the road, and take thy stable ventures wide!"

-- To the Cake Stop: I decried.

And the Authoress, still is telling, Chronicles quite so compelling

That the audience unwav'ring eagerly awaits with pride.

And the kindred still inviting tales of audax, wheels and lighting,

And the Cafe still exciting those who'd perch on saddled hide;

And the legends of my searching certain to be found inside,

-- Cake Stop, there would all reside.

One little victory

2009-07-13T20:08:00.008Z

Gosh, it has been a while since I poked this blog, hasn't it! Before skimming the last post here I had almost no recollection of what I'd written, so perhaps a synopsis of events over the last two years (two years?) is in order.

I built my P-38 in the late spring of 2007, started to ride it at the end of August, and put maybe 200 miles on it until about November. Then I found myself unable to ride for a couple of months. Sometime around the following February or March I was getting back into the swing of things, still not feeling totally fit but I was working on it.

The seat of the P-38 is a lovely design, with a single piece of nylon mesh stretched from one end to the other, a foam pad sewn to the horizontal bit, and the whole thing cantilevered out for passive suspension. It didn't quite agree with me at first, but that didn't stop me from enjoying the potential of the bike. So much potential in fact, that I wrote a review of it for Velovision magazine. Around the same time, I replaced the bike's rear derailleur, acknowledging that eBay bargains are sometimes not all that they seem. A new Shimano Deore XT (RD-M771 SGS) unit was fitted, and to be honest, I think it's is one of the best derailleurs I've ever used.

The 2008 York Cycle Show was held at the tail end of June, and for the first time I didn't use a car to get there. With a tentative pedal up and down my road on my little Dahon folding bike, for I was missing being able to put weight on myself on an upright bike -- and with the riding position of Annie being bit too aggressive to risk -- I decided to take the Dahon to York on the train, with me weighed down under my Timbuk2 messenger bag and my Landranger map and camera nestling inside my handlebar bag. The cycle show was rubbish. It rained; I got cold and wet and miserable and lonely, and left early to ride the several miles to my B&B to the west, and relatively cheerily ignoring the Velovision evening pub ride which had been my primary reason for attending. The next day was brighter and I followed the pub ride route in reverse, through Askham Richard, to Copmanthorpe, following the old railway path to Acaster Malbis and the pub; I stopped to visit the Naburn swing bridge and a little skate park that had been built underneath the A19; visited part of the scale model of the Solar System; and then rode northwards through Bishopthorpe and back to the racecourse at Knavesmire. I had no intention of wasting more time at the show, and instead spent my lunchtime and a pleasant afternoon wandering around the National Railway Museum before heading home.

Flushed with success of my new upright endeavours, I decided to buy a new saddle for Annie and retire my ancient Flite. Buying the right bicycle saddle is an almost impossible task, but at least I knew what width I needed, thanks to Specialized's 'posterior measuring device'; this was actually nothing more than a thin piece of memory foam that one sits on, and the corresponding depressions from one's sit bones indicate the width of the saddle and the positioning of the padding. Blimey: recumbent seats look like child's play in comparison. Unfortunately all this upright riding wasn't doing me much good, and it hurt my shoulders and wrists for which I'd been riding recumbent bikes in the first place. :-(

July was spent having a lovely summer holiday, cycle touring. The weather was beautiful, the scenery was inspiring, the locals were unreservedly friendly (almost) and my P-38 and I arrived home with 200 more miles on the clock.

Then I changed the bike's 35-622 Panaracer Pasela TG and 35-406 Primo Comet tyres for Schwalbe Marathon Racers, the latter in a slightly fatter 40-406 section. These, as you may recall, were in my original blueprint for the bike but had proved fiendishly difficult to obtain. The roadholding of the Racers is outstanding, especially on tarmac in damp and wet weather; the Pasela tyres while equally fast are a little skittish in those conditions.

In September I rode Pedal for Scotland again, completing the ride in slightly over four hours and riding about 65 miles altogether. I was doing the ride purely for myself this time: no team, no friends, no time restrictions; just two litres of water, half a litre of Irn Bru, three bananas and a packet of flapjacks; Irn Bru is chock full of energy and it doesn't clog my throat the way Coca Cola does. I did see David and Jane from my work on the ride though, and afterwards I bumped into Anth, editor of .citycycling magazine, media tycoon and all-round good guy, and his girlfriend and her Dad, who'd all done the ride. Eric the Trike also did the ride, but I'd taken the train through to Glasgow and gone for a later start than last time, so I hadn't seen him.

By about Christmas time though I was riding my motorbike to work more than I was cycling (the shame of it all), and my fitness was flagging. But it didn't matter because shortly after New Year a broken left hand and a broken right shoulder put an end to my fun, and very nearly put an end to my beautiful motorbike, which is still to be mended. Two impatient months later I was making tentative rides on my P-38 and Speedmachine, which culminated in riding to work. And from then on, while nursing a recalcitrant group of fingers and a hugely unfit pair of legs, it was onwards and upwards. In fact, quite soon after, I broke my record for days' riding to work. Not for two years had I managed to ride to work on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday in one week, and I did it almost at the first attempt. I did it the following week, and the next, and the next. Hurrah! I've been adding the miles to my legs as much as I can manage, and the lovely weather in March and April certainly helped. It's now July, and "absolutely stoatin' doon"; of course, one is just as apt to declare, in the Queen's English, or indeed the dulcet tones of Maggie Smith, that there is a quite remarkable degree of precipitation today.

I've rejuvenated my visits to The Bicycleworks, out of which Laid Back Bikes operates, and once again have been helping out David with some of his customers. Although primarily a Nazca and Challenge dealer, he now also sells ICE trikes. But the star of the show really does seem to be the Nazca Fuego, a bike of similar proportions to the Challenge Fujin and the earlier HP Velotechnik Speedmachine, with the now-common 20" (ISO406) front and 26" (ISO559) rear wheels. It has adjustable rear suspension geometry to pop up the rear end for a modestly upright riding position or to slam it down for speed demons; it has very nicely made tiller steering; and the frame is bombproof. LBB is also selling the new front wheel drive Raptobike lowracer; I've yet to take it round the block, but David reckons "it fairly belts along!"

But to bring myself right up to date:

My P-38 is now sitting with 1,925 miles under its wheels, and a pair of stealthy black wheel discs on the back for (probably incremental) aerodynamic gains. With the new(er) rear derailleur, everything on the bike is working absolutely beautifully.
My Speedmachine is sitting at 1,844 miles, although I think there might be a missing 700 or so because I reset the computer by mistake once. I didn't make a note of it, unfortunately.
Annie, being somewhat older but underused these days, is still topping the chart with 2,770 miles since about 2004, which when you think about it isn't very much really.
Speedy lies dormant in the shadow of my motorbike. It's still hugely entertaining to ride, but I also still have plans to sell it.

And, it would seem, you can't keep a good cyclist down. I have another project. It's a bit different this time, but so far has involved the following yummy parts:

Mavic XC717 rim, laced 3-cross to a Hope XC front disc hub with DT Revolution spokes;
Mavic XC717 rim, laced 3-cross to a Hope XC rear disc hub with DT Revolution spokes.

Open secrets

2007-07-22T09:44:00.003Z

It's here! My new frame arrived just a few days after I last wrote, a courier company man turning up at the door with a surprisingly long cardboard box. All the way from California in fact, festooned with customs documentation and mailing labels and an interestingly spelt address, but they got the postcode right fortunately. The exchange rate was rather nice to me, but don't ask how much the shipping was...

So I already had a ton of parts all ready to go, a pair of wheels I'd built at least a month earlier, and...no headset tools. Being the happy DIYer I am, I thought I'd probably just get hold of some steel tube in the right size and bang the parts in myself, rather than paying the bike shop to do it for me. A headset isn't quite like a cartridge bottom bracket where you screw it in and everything lines up because it's all one piece. The two headset bearing cups have to be exactly lined up with each other, and the bearing piece that fits onto the fork crown also has to be exactly right. I started out not being able to find any metal tubes that were the just right match for the crown race bearing, until I had a brainwave and pulled out the main seatpost from the little Helios. It was almost the right size! But it wasn't exactly the right size and my bearing started to go squint as I hammered it on, and then it stuck. Now that was a slight problem, because although it was steel, any squintness might permanently put it out of round. So I hunted and hunted all over again, and eventually I got silly and tried the steerer tube from the forks of the Rockhopper, which were still sitting in the garage having been turned into a makeshift wheel truing stand at some point. Well wouldn't you know, the "Avenger" sized steerer was an exact fit over the "Standard" steerer of the new fork! So I sawed it off and filed it all nice and square and...it wouldn't slide all the way on. The tube was butted inside! Ok, so I'll file out the insides a bit, I thought. Well good quality Tange cro-moly tubing is tough stuff! I resorted to using an internal grindstone on the electric drill, which seemed promising until the grindstone broke. No biggie, there's a spare one, so I had another go and was making progress. Then that grindstone broke off too. I had one more spare so I carried on and tried a different movement with the drill. By the end of the afternoon I finally had a drift tool that would work. Of course, the tool was three inches too short but I was able to use the Helios' seatpost as a secondary drift. A bit of preparation with a hammer and screwdriver straightened the bearing out a bit, and then it was all systems go. It was the tightest interference fit crown race bearing I've ever seen. But it went on eventually, to my relief.

After that I wasn't going to take any chances with pressing the bearing cups into the frame though, and my new headset press made light work of the task. It cost at least as much as a shop would charge to fit a headset, and since Annie needs a new headset at some time as well, it made sense to buy the tool. "Quality is remembered long after the price is forgotten", said the uncompromising Henry Royce.

The rest of the assembly went very easily, for the most part. I did have to file off some of the paint from the frame's dropouts so that the axles would actually fit. I had some gear cable housing spare, plenty for the build, but when I came to trim it to the right lengths, it was like trying to cut through armour plating. My wire cutters couldn't do it, my pliers couldn't do it, my electrical wire cutters couldn't do it, and I blunted a chisel trying as well. Come on! So I spoke to the guys in Edinburgh Bicycle's workshop and asked what cutters they were using, and decided in the end to buy the same: Park Tool's CN-10. Wow, talk about power! They'll last me a lifetime too.

The Lightning P-38 owes its design to their short wheelbased X-2 streamliner originally, back in the early 1980s, and is a more rider-friendly evolution that hasn't really changed in 15 years. It was one of the fastest bikes on the track at one time, especially in its F-40 guise, until lowracers came onto the scene and wiped the floor. But like the Windcheetah or the Brompton or the Moulton spaceframe, the P-38 was fundamentally right from the start, and good designs only evolve over time. It's not as aerodynamic as a lowracer or even some of the highracers like the Challenge Seiran, it's not full of carbon fibre or jawdroppingly light, but it's acceptably light, made of proper 4130 grade steel and it's very stiff. The riding postion is also more closed than most. For that reason, it's still regarded as one of the best recumbents for hillclimbing, and I have to say, I spend a lot more of my time going up than down. My Speedmachine is no slouch on the whole, but hauling 13lbs less metal up a hill should be nice.

There's no suspension on the bike, but in line with recent trends away from super narrow tyres, I've put bigger tyres on it than I'd usually use; it has a mesh seat rather than solid fibreglass, and the padded seat base is actually a cantilever and flexes when you sit on it. There are no disc brakes, because the bike was never designed for them (discs put huge torsional forces around dropout areas) but the v-brakes I've selected are well recommended by the people throwing themselves down mountains. The mesh seat should let my back breathe much better when I'm riding, since a) I practically create my own weather when I ride, and b) "sweaty back syndrome" is well recognised for recumbent riders. I kept an eye on the weight of all the components, but I've not gone too light where it matters: I know from experience that I need strong wheels, and that means touring rims, good tyres and more than a handful of spokes. With my basic LED lights fitted, I weighed the bike at 27lbs, compared with Speedy at 36lbs and the Speedmachine at 40lbs.

This does mean that Speedy is going to be leaving me. I've been its custodian for four of its 13 years and it's brought me into contact with a lot of cool, likeminded people. Like my friend Liz, they're people who are genuinely a bit offbeat at a basic level, rather than people who like to run against the grain as an occasional diversion from normality.

My remaining task is to be able to ride a bike again, but fingers crossed, I'm making some progress.

Stationary traveller

2007-07-06T21:53:00.001Z

It's getting just a little bit frustrating, thinking of the good weather and the places I might have gone to, while still being stuck in the office.

I haven't written a whole lot recently, so I haven't mentioned my new wheel truing stand that I picked up for a song on eBay. It's made by Ultimate and resplendent in anodised red aluminium and black cast iron. Ok, it's no Hozan, but it's solid and being one-sided it makes the wheel that bit more accessible. The trueness indicators have spring loaded tool steel tips, so you can spin the wheel and see where it graunches, without worrying about cutting into the sidewall. Having built all my previous wheels using the bike frame as the guide, it's light years more convenient having a proper stand. I also splashed out and bought a proper ergonomic spoke key; my three-way one is versatile but really uncomfortable to use. Like my Park PRS-15 workstand, having the right tools for the job really does make a difference. My Look CX6 carbon pedals had been sitting in a box and doing nothing since January, and after all those knee problems I have no intention of using Looks again. BentMikey bought them from me for his Hurricane upgrade project and he likes them a lot. I've actually been very happy with my el cheapo Shimano SPD pedals, which are on both the Speedmachine and Annie the Blue Bike, but they're a wee bit heavy and seem remarkably rust-prone, so I'll be looking for stainless hardware in future.

Meanwhile...

The big project begins and I'm excited! So far I have in front of me the following yummy parts:

FSA Carbon Pro Team Issue chainset (in hard-to-get 175mm)
RPM ISIS bottom bracket
Shimano XTR front derailleur [1]
Shimano Deore XT rear derailleur
Shimano Deore XT 9spd cassette
Sram PC-951 chain
Shimano Dura Ace bar end gear levers
Shimano Deore LX SPD pedals
Mavic A719 rim, laced to a Hope Mono hub with DT Swiss Revolution spokes
Sun CR-18 rim, laced to a Hope Mono lightweight hub with plain gauge stainless spokes
Kore lightweight stainless QRs
Avid Single Digit 7 v-brake
Avid Ultimate v-brake
Shimano Ultegra cartridge headset

Half of the above is actually second-hand, but a carefully chosen second-hand. I'm quite happy to pay £6 for a bottom bracket that's only done a few miles, but I'd only buy a brand new headset. I don't have the tyres yet, but they're on order. They're a new model from Schwalbe and apparently quite difficult to get hold of. I've also got some more 3T cork bar tape, the same as I used on the bar ends on both Annie and the little Helios. It's super comfortable and is nice to hold even in the rain. I also have some very solid padlocks, just in case you're having other ideas.

The frame...well the frame's still top secret because it hasn't arrived yet. None of that aluminium nonsense though. Steel is real, man.

[1] From the days when XTR was burnished blue and aluminium, and looked like jewellery for bikes. I think it's one of the loveliest components they ever made.

Speedmachine front suspension disassembly

2007-05-23T22:59:00.000Z

I've written this page to be as much of a parallel reference as a standalone. Alex Rice detailed the disassembly of his Speedmachine's suspension fork and I used his notes to aid the disassembly of mine. The moving parts of the fork are inside a rubber boot and inside the frame, so nothing is visible for the uninitiated.

Alex noted that the HP Velotechnik boys are very good at designing bikes and not nearly so good at writing instructions, and I agree. I have the instruction manual for the bike and for the fork it provides no diagrams and no real clue as to what might need to be adjusted, and why. It goes so far as to say:

The adjustment of the fork play requires special tools and skills. Please have your bicycle mechanic perform this maintenance work. The following section refers to the expert.

Many years ago, I was a paid bicycle mechanic. I also have an engineering masters, and I still found the instructions difficult. I have therefore created some illustrations [1], so that one might have a better idea of what lies within before doing any unbolting of things.

There are three main issues you might have with the fork: it can squeak for unknown reasons (as did Alex's, and Dave Larrington's), the movement can become stiff and reluctant, and it can start to wobble as might happen with a loose headset. Mine was wobbling a little, enough to be disconcerting when powering uphill with the front of the bike moving around.

How does the fork work? How does it adjust?

The fork is essentially very simple, but made slightly more complicated by having externally adjustable damping. The fork itself has a long steerer and it slides up and down within a larger tube. Sandwiched between the two tubes are a plastic sliding bearing at the bottom and a teflon [2] sliding bearing at the top. The larger tube rotates inside the two headset bearings, and protrudes at the top where the handlebar stem is attached. So that you can actually steer, the steerer tube has a set of splines which engage with the inside of the plastic bearing, and the plastic bearing is splined to fit inside the end of the larger tube. This way everything turns together.

Friction damping is provided by two flat doughnut-shaped pieces of foam. The larger one is sandwiched between the two tubes, and the smaller is pressed against the inside of the steerer tube. The damping is made adjustable by the black control cap at the very top of the larger tube; as you tighten the cap down, it compresses the larger piece of foam.

The coil spring in the fork sits inside the steerer tube. At the bottom end it sits on a tube and is retained by a washer and a large circlip, and at the top by the base of a small tube which is connected directly to the black cap. As the fork compresses over a bump, the steerer tube slides upwards through the larger tube, and the spring is compressed because the black cap stops it moving upwards and the circlip stops it moving downwards out of the fork. The small tube ends in a flat section where the spring butts up against, and when the fork is at maximum extension, the flat section butts up against a circlip at the top of the inner steerer. Got all that?

If you need to adjust the fork, you can (in theory) do it without removing it from the frame. I couldn't tell what I was really adjusting when I was trying to adjust-out the slight wobble, so I removed the fork from the frame and took it completely apart to find out. Once you've removed the stem and the front brake, the fork can be tapped out of the frame by using a soft mallet on the top of the steerer. Mine was quite tight the first time.

Once you've hammered the fork out of the frame, have a think through the X-ray view here and the following pictures. You won't be able to take the fork apart further unless you remove the spring first so that you can slide the inner steerer into the outer to access the small tube. And you won't be able to hammer the fork back into the frame properly unless you remove the spring first, because the suspension will do its job of absorbing shocks, and do it rather well. So for disassembly, the first thing you should do is remove the spring, and this can be done whether the fork is still mounted in the frame or not. There is a slight preload on the spring: a couple of millimeters, according to the book, so be careful when you remove the circlip from the fork crown. This isn't the time for bodgery, you'll want proper internal circlip pliers.

What's inside, and taking things apart

With the fork removed from the frame, it'll look like this:

Peel the rubber boot down from the top and you should see the splines, the locknut, and the adjusting nut which bears directly on the bottom edge of the plastic sliding bearing:

For reference, here are the components which are sandwiched between the inner and outer steerer tubes:

You can see that if the outer steerer is held tightly in its big bearings, the inner steerer can wobble if either or both of the plastic splines bearing or the teflon upper sliding bearing are worn. The lower bearing is slightly tapered externally, and by turning the adjusting nut to force the bearing upwards into the outer steerer tube, it contracts fractionally onto the splines of the inner steerer, thus taking up any wear. The locknut is then snugged down onto the adjusting nut. I found it impossible to make this adjustment with the fork still in the frame, and very difficult to make the adjustment even when I could see everything. One might use a very time-consuming trial-and-error approach by adjusting the bearing pressure, reassembling the fork in the frame and checking for movement. I set the nut pressure just short of when the inner steerer became stiff to slide up and down inside the plastic bearing. Personally, I think Cannondale's Headshok needle bearing approach might take out some of this guesswork. I used Park Tool's HCW-5 lockring spanner.

That all said, the inner and outer steerers won't come apart until you unscrew the damping control cap from the outer steerer and you then unscrew the top bolt from the small tube that will be visible having unscrewed the cap. You'll need pliers on the small tube to hold it. The cap will then be free and you can slide the outer steerer up and off the inner:

Ok, not much to see there, but that's the inner steerer exposed. It will be a bit greasy and any grit that gets into the splines won't do them any good. Without the spring in place, the small tube can drop out of the bottom of the inner steerer and you'll find attached to it a chamfered teflon piece [2,3] and the second foam doughnut. Here is what's inside the inner steerer before anything is taken apart:

Reassembly

In true Haynes manual fashion, installation is the reverse of removal. More or less. With the spring out of the fork, reassemble the inner and outer steerers with their components, and with the outer steerer in place, check the plastic sliding bearing for the correct tightness. If it's ok, hold the small tube with the pliers and reattach the damping control cap and screw it a few turns into the outer steerer. Remember that it is one of several components that takes the full load of the suspension, so screw it back in until all the thread is hidden. There will still be a few turns of adjustment available and you may not need it screwed all the way in. Slide the fork assembly back into the frame and it'll wobble around until the lower bearing begins to seat itself. You will then need a drift such as a 1/2 inch diameter pipe, 18 inches long or so. I used a piece of lawnmower handle. Put the drift up inside the inner steer and carefully, but firmly, hammer the fork back into the frame. It'll go in anything from 1/4 inch to 1/2 inch more, and you can tell when it's fully seated as the sound of the hammer hitting the drift will raise in pitch and the blows will suddenly feel solid.

You can then put the spring, the spring cap, the tube, the washer and the circlip back into the bottom of the fork. You might want to use the drift again to preload the spring while you put the circlip in place. With the wheel in the fork and the bike on the ground again (you were using a workstand, weren't you?) you can press on the frame to make sure the fork is seated, and snug the stem as far onto the steerer as it'll go. The upper headset bearing cover should be vaguely stiff to turn. This is my main criticism of HP Velotechnik's design; the whole assembly is largely the same as any Aheadset setup, but without the starfangled nut by which you apply the correct preload before clamping the stem. No starfangled nut, no preload - other than pushing on the frame. With the fork in place, bounce the bike a few times and re-check the movement. If it still wobbles, for example, I recommend jumping up and down and swearing, before taking it all apart again. You might get away with knocking the fork halfway out of the frame, until the bearing locknut is visible, but on my bike the bearings were already out of their seats at that point, and the fork wobbled in the frame.

Where did that bit go again?

For comparison purposes (and just because I was on a roll with Adobe Illustrator that day) here are two cutaway views of the fork:

[1] I made some sketches as I disassembled things. I only made one measurement, so the illustrations aren't completely to scale. They're near enough, though.

[2] Well, I'd like to think it's teflon. It might actually be Nylon 66 or something.

[3] I didn't sketch everything, however. Some of the internal components such as the pressure cone I drew from memory and so might not be quite right. I didn't take everything apart again, just to check.

Pause for thought

2007-05-23T22:55:00.004Z

All things considered, I've decided I don't like finding myself in hospital very much. A day would be tolerable, but a whole week! Still, least said, soonest mended.

In the meantime though, if I can't be working out on bikes, at least I can be working on them. After a good while scouring tool shops and bike shops and eBay, I finally managed to buy a lockring spanner (the old sort, shaped like a hooked 'C') which meant I could adjust the fork on my Speedmachine. It was with some trepidation and much reading of one reference webpage that I took it apart. It's sufficiently involved to the newcomer that I'm going to write an entire piece about it.

I have another project in gestation too, but it's top secret.

Perpetual change

2007-01-24T23:20:00.000Z

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!

Welcome to my truth

2006-12-31T22:34:00.002Z

Thanks to six weeks off the bike while my body repaired itself, it's a slow slow process getting back to the level I was at before. The weather hasn't been terribly good either: it's been pouring with rain or blowing a gale, and usually both, so there hasn't been the drive to simply put miles in. At the moment, riding six or seven miles to work and the same home in bad weather is about my limit. For someone who does a lot of exercise, you'd think I'd be really fit and healthy, wouldn't you? I guess even fit people have things go wrong sometimes.

So without having really done many miles since I last wrote, I've been adjusting and maintaining instead. Annie was in dire need of a wash and some new brake blocks, Speedy was completely filthy after a few days of commuting on frosty - then gritted and wet - roads, and some of the wiring for its lights had died. Then this week I discovered that the Stealthmachine's front disc brake had become almost useless for some reason. So a scrub and a hosedown here, a few deft tweaks of an allen wrench there, new brake pads and new battery plugs and I think I'm almost done.

And now for something I've been meaning for months to post here: it's an interview-cum-questionaire which I actually took part in during the summer last year, but I'd forgotten all about it, probably because I got wrapped up in mending something. A writer and cycle contributor was asking various cyclists about their own experiences on the road and what their opinions of rules, regulations and learning were like. You can probably second-guess some or all of my answers depending on how well you know me and how much of this page you've read!

June 6th, 2005

Would you tell us a little about yourself, to start us off? Do you cycle much? What sort of cycling do you do?

Hello. I'm Becky and I live in the rather hilly city of Edinburgh. I ride a bike fairly often, it's mostly how I get around the city. I do have a car as well but it doesn't get used all that much, it's more for long distances or for transporting something. There's a pretty good bus service here too, I don't catch the bus very often either because I can usually cycle into town quicker. I'll bus it or drive if I need to look more respectable and less windblown!

You're already sounding like you might be more than a leisure cyclist who only rides in the summer. Are you more of a practical cyclist? Do you race as well, or go touring?

I'm what you would call a utility cyclist, I commute on my bike a lot, I use it to go shopping or for any other minor journey really. I don't do racing or anything, I'm not nearly fit enough for that. I did go through a phase of mountain biking about ten years ago, but my bike started to have road tyres on it more often than the knobbly tyres, and riding up really steep muddy tracks started to feel like too much hard work! I do like to go to events though, do little group rides and meet other people. That makes a change from riding by myself all the time.

I'd like to ask you about your cycling experiences, good and bad. It doesn't matter where you ride: roads, paths or wherever, but generally speaking, do you feel safe when you ride?

I think so. I ride on roads a lot and I feel at least as safe as when I'm driving, but there are more escape routes available, if you need them, simply because a bike is that much smaller. But I've been cycling for most of my life, my first bike was given to me when I was about six and I've never been without a bike since. I did my cycle proficiency when I was at primary school and I learned to ride on the road. I had a few times - well, more than a few I think [laughs] - where I made mistakes in traffic and cars beeped at me, and for me that was always really, really embarrassing, but you learn from that. I still make mistakes now and again, but I like to think that I'm pretty safe on a bike. Actually, I think car driving made me more aware about anticipation of things because you're often going faster, and that's something I've definitely got better at on the bike in the last few years.

What, if anything, makes you uncomfortable?

I can think of a few things. I don't like those awkwardly designed mini-roundabouts on T-junctions, the ones where traffic on the main road behaves as though it was a regular T-junction, without any traffic lights. The problem with that is that even though it's supposed to work like a roundabout, it automatically takes away any priority from small vehicles who want to enter the main road from the side road, the traffic doesn't give way in the way it should. I've had quite a few bad experiences with those. I also don't like cornering on wet road surfaces because it can sometimes hold a layer of oil that you don't always see. Slow cornering is usually fine, but the times when I find myself cornering hardest are on roundabouts! If your wheel slides out, you might catch it or you might not, and that can be pretty scary if there's a lot of other traffic.

Do you consider yourself to be a skilled cyclist?

Yes, I think I'm pretty skilled. I mentioned learning to anticipate things, and that's one of the skills, one of the main bits of my awareness when I'm riding. So I feel I'm able to avoid a lot of the situations that might lead to an accident, and I ride in the rush hour traffic if I need to. It's not like I see all these other cyclists crashing into things! But if I'm following someone else on a bike, I'll notice the way they maybe don't look over their shoulder before they pull out to pass a parked car, and when they do pull out it's quite late on. I'll already have checked behind me and made my manoeuvre when they pull out.

Something else that I've picked up on, it was after reading a book on cycling techniques, is putting myself more in the middle of the lane. I've got quite...particular...about my own safety and I make more decisions about when it's safe for car drivers to pass. I think being skilled is really about making yourself safe, but to do that sometimes you need to be the boss and not let car drivers walk all over you if that's going to put you in danger, or if it could put you in danger. That's the key really, it's knowing what could happen as a result of one thing and thinking ahead. That makes cycling sound like a real chore, doesn't it? And really dangerous!

The people you see on the road, pedalling along nice and slowly and relaxed, they might just be taking their time, or maybe they're not very fit, or maybe they're just not confident enough about riding, so they go slowly and close to the pavement. Sometimes I'll see someone riding along but a bit...erratically? That sounds awful to say! But it makes their movements hard to predict, so that's probably the other part about being skilled, it's making your intentions obvious to everyone else. You might be on a bike and be an obstacle, but at least you can learn to be a good obstacle.

Did I answer the question enough?

Just about! You've spent quite a lot of time on your bike, obviously, so what is your average weekly mileage?

I'd say it varies between about 40 and 75 miles. If I ride to work every day, it's a minimum of about 45 miles, but I tend to ride a bit at the weekend too.

Ok, this is one of the big questions. Do you strive to obey the Highway Code? Are there any parts you would rewrite, if you could?

You know, I think the Highway Code is all good advice if you treat a pedal-powered vehicle as a vehicle. Sometimes the word 'vehicle' is assumed to mean something with an engine, and that's not really correct. A bike is still a vehicle, it's just sometimes very slow. I don't know the Highway Code rule numbers off the top of my head, but there's a section about reflectors on bikes, and they're actually referencing the Road Vehicle Lighting Regulations. They say that your bike must have the front and rear reflectors, and it must have pedal reflectors. So first I'd rewrite that bit in the Lighting Regs so that people who ride recumbents aren't automatically breaking the law, and then I'd rewrite that bit in the Highway Code.

It also suggests that cycle routes can make your journey safer, and that you should use them wherever practicable. Well, sure, if you're a cyclist who doesn't enjoy being amongst cars and lorries then it's good advice. But there's a whole undercurrent about cycle lanes and paths that the Highway Code doesn't talk about, it's only giving advice remember, and when they say 'safer', they mean safe from vehicle dangers. What about frost and ice, or wet leaves? Or thorns? I think the roads are a lot safer when it comes to being kept clean. So I'd rewrite it to say you should use them wherever it's convenient.

There's also a bit about how to use roundabouts, I think roundabouts are the best and the worst thing for cyclists, personally. If they're clear, you can sail round without slowing down too much, but when they're busy you need to really be on top of things. The Highway Code suggests that you might feel safer to go around roundabouts on the outside, even if you're turning right. That's dangerous, because that's not how roundabout protocol works. Someone following you will think you're leaving the roundabout if you're right on the edge and if they happen to be leaving at the same exit, you might well be hit if they turn and you don't. You need to be able to get some speed up to match car speeds, and if you can't then at least take the whole lane and be really obvious to everyone what you want to do.

But do you obey the Highway Code?

Of course I do. If you think about it, if everyone on the road and every pedestrian followed the Highway Code, there'd probably never be an accident. There's always going to be a bit of ebb and flow in terms of how people interpret the Code and how accurately they hold to it, but I've read it often enough and I'd like to be respected on the road. You can't demand respect, you can only earn it.

Have you ever had a serious accident? If so, who do you think was at fault?

I've had one accident, a car driver turned left directly in front of me. She'd only just emerged from a side road on my right, turned onto the main road and then turned left onto another side road. I went straight into the side of her car. I still remember what she said afterwards, she said: "I just didn't see you!" [4]

You've only ever had one serious accident? What about at other times, do you often have close calls? And if you do, do you blame the environment and other road users, or your riding style?

I have to say that most of the time I'm quite patient and aware. Usually I'm not in a real hurry, so I tend to chill out a wee bit. It's much easier to let the impatient car drivers have the blood pressure problems! Though sometimes the red mist comes down, over my eyes, and I do some sort of manoeveure I wouldn't normally try. And I usually think afterwards, "Becky you bloody idiot, what were you thinking?" I think close calls usually happen when the traffic is very dense but still moving quickly. On a bike sometimes you have to have the bit between your teeth and go for it, so that you don't get squeezed out on a railing or end up taking the wrong lane, and if you're riding towards your limit, that's when mistakes can happen.

And complex junctions, that's when things can get a bit fraught. Maybe that's just me, I don't like to feel like I'm holding people up on the road. I probably ride quite assertively, I wouldn't say aggressively, usually, but now and again I get it a bit wrong and try to fit through a gap that isn't quite there. I could say: "Oh, it's always everyone else's fault!" but I'm too honest really! [laughs] It's probably about equal, other people on the road and me, on average.

So would you be willing to take instruction to improve your road skills? Would an experienced cyclist like you consider herself 'trainable'? And, do you think there's a male/female divide in willingness to accept instruction and possible criticism?

Oh yeah, I might have been cycling for quite a long time but I'd never say that I knew everything, every technique going. I suppose you'd get some people who are set in their ways, [affects old woman voice] "I've been cycling for 90 years and I've never had an accident!" but you know, there's more traffic on the roads than ever and times change. People talk about how you should have to resit your driving test every so often, and it's kind of the same thing. Do you think you're good enough? And are you good enough? And do you want to improve yourself?

Two or three years ago I bought that book about cycling techniques, here was me doing a dozen miles every day and not getting killed, and as far as I know, not annoying car drivers all the time, so I thought I was doing ok. So Liz said to buy this book and I did, and there was a lot in it that I realised I was doing anyway. But there were other ideas and examples where I thought: "Oh, that's really sensible! Why didn't I think of that?" or "Well if [Franklin] can do it, why can't I?" That book definitely made me ride my bike more...bigly? I mean, taking the road more, when you need to. Being in front of car drivers' faces, rather than always being hidden on the left in someone's blind spot.

And the male/female divide?

I would say that younger males tend to have the more stubborn or cocky outlook when they're let in control of a vehicle. The insurance companies know that sort of thing backwards. Although I think it's probably as much about self-confidence as anything. You'll get some girls who are really tough and confident, and some boys who aren't. I think it takes a certain level of experience, or perhaps an accident, to appreciate the idea that you're not invincible after all, and maybe, you know, maybe you should be looking at yourself in a different way.

Talking of invincibility, do you wear a helmet all the time? Where do you stand on the issue of compulsion?

Ooh, that's a bit controversial! Well I have a helmet and I wear it most of the time, I think of it as insurance against potential knocks and bumps. But I also feel quite ok to ride in the rush hour traffic without one. I think I can see situations happening and try to avoid them, but you know, it's only polystyrene, it's not like some magic forcefield, so I'm riding along knowing that if a car hits me at 30 or 40mph, it can only take the edge off the impact, and the rest of the impact might still be too much. It's a bit morbid isn't it? If I ride along in the winter and I slide and hurt myself, that's my fault. I want to be able to ride along and know that I have the basic right not to be hit by a tonne of metal, rather than the law saying I have to protect myself against other people's actions or I'll get fined or something.

I remember when bike helmets started coming into the shops, I think I was about the third person at my school to buy a helmet. I was doing adventurous things like riding up and down hills on my mountain bike, so a helmet seemed like a good idea just for that; I wasn't being Little Miss Aggressive in traffic or anything! The sort of riding I do now is quite different actually, tarmac is a lot harder than grass and mud. So I've always been anti-compulsion and pro-helmet, as long as people realise that there are limitations to polystyrene.

Do you have any other safety tips?

In traffic, fast is safe. Because you're not having to be overtaken as much, and you can flow with the traffic rather than the other people on the road having to flow around you. That - in theory anyway - means that you're not exposed as much to potential danger. I know not everyone can do fast all the time, and slow is fine as long as you make allowances for it.

One of my bugbears is lights, though. Get some half-decent lights, and ones that work consistently! They're not even very expensive nowadays so there's no excuse not to have some for the dark. Then recharge them frequently so that they don't die on you halfway home. In fact, I would say it's best to have a backup light too. You can do the Christmas Tree approach with lights everywhere, but that can end up being confusing to other people as to whether you're definitely a bike or maybe something different. A bike has a definite signature to it in the dark, so it's a good idea to try to keep to that. And reflectives, get some yellow ankle bands for the dark, they show up much better than little pedal reflectors, and that's if your pedals have reflectors at all. I've started to use the ankle bands on my wrists too, to help car drivers see my signalling - my gloves are black and they don't show up too well at night.

What else...pedestrians! People can and will walk on the bike path without realising it, so be extra aware and be ready with your brakes. Actually, there's a shared path near my work but there's so little signage or colouring to remind you which side is which that the dividing line might as well not be there. Even I forget which side I'm meant to use! And if it's a path next to a busy road, people will tend to walk on the side that's furthest from the road - even if that's the bike lane and it's a different colour, with little bicycles painted on the ground. I think that's more down to human instinct than anything else but you can't go flying along just expecting everyone to be walking in the right place. So basically, be ready to expect anything.

Do you enjoy yourself on your bike?

Every day is filled with terror and I come home dying on my feet! No, seriously, I really like cycling. Once you've got yourself to a basic level of fitness and have a waterproof jacket, you've got the fresh air, the wind, you can hear the birds singing, you can use the roads to get from A to B efficiently or you can use canal paths or whatever to have a change of scenery. Sure, sometimes it's a faff with padlocks and bungies and carrying clothes and things, but when you get into the swing of it, and cycling is kind of just what you do, it doesn't matter in the end. And for me there's the feeling that I've gone all this way under my own steam. Me, a few muscles and my lungs, and a few bananas.

I think many of us would agree with that sentiment. Is there anything else you'd like to add before we finish?

I'll speak from experience here! Don't have more than one bike, really, don't. If you have more than one, it just makes you spend more time fiddling and adjusting things, and it makes it harder to choose which bike to take out each day!

Well, thank you, Becky, for being so generous with your time. I wish you safe riding.

Thank you.

[4] Authoress's note: Little did I know what the following March would hold.

I spoke for a long time because I wanted to expand on a lot of things. It was fun to do and really made me think about what I do on a bike and why. Next time though, I'm getting someone quicker than me to type the audio transcription!

The machine stops

2006-10-10T20:33:00.000Z

As an update to last month, in fact I raised about £215 altogether from doing PfS. As a team of five from my work, we raised £1500 for Leukaemia Research. How about that? The guy on the blue trike was of course Eric, and the guy with the grey Speedmachine I think was Phil from various online places including Velovision, and he was from Montrose, or Arbroath or somewhere else Scottish.

More maintenance this month. This time it was Annie the Blue Bike whose chain wear was way over the precise numbers I talked about a year or so ago. The amount of stretch meant that every time I cranked away on the pedals, the chain skipped over the sprockets, in just about any gear, so for a couple of days I had to ride very gently! Since adding the Scottoiler to the bike, the chain had been staying pretty clean and I'd been lulled into a false sense of everlastingness, and I hadn't bothered to measure the chain in over a year's commuting. In the end I bought a new chain, then discovered that it wouldn't engage because the sprockets were too worn as well, so I had to buy new ones of those too. One day I'll learn, given the way I'm putting the miles on.

The big news was that for the very first time ever, I bought a workstand. Edinburgh Bicycle was having another sale, so as well as picking up some new Endura shorts, the mountain bikey ones I really really like, for half price, I decided that the half price workstand was too good a bargain as well. I don't plan on buying another workstand, ever, and hopefully I won't need to given that this one's made by Park. It has a bright blue vice-shaped clamp that opens wide enough to accommodate the big tube of Speedy, and the even bigger tube of the Stealthmachine. It's equally happy holding Annie or the little Helios at various unfeasible angles. It makes such a difference not having to kneel or crouch on a concrete floor all the time when you're fiddling with brake block alignment or trying to thread a chain through a derailleur!

My trusty Cateye Mity computer, as fitted to Annie, and formerly to the Rockhopper, and to the Trek 850 before that, is still (mostly) working but its bracket and its sensor finally gave up the ghost this month. I was quite sad really because it was only 15 years old, but can you buy a spare bracket nowadays? [3] The computer attached to the Helios is a Cateye Enduro 2 which I really didn't like at first, save for the nicely chunky cable, but I eventually got used to the different way it worked and now I quite agree with the reasoning of grouping just distance, time and average speed together, with the odometer and the clock and things shunted into sub-modes; after all, the first three are the modes you tend to use most. So I hunted around on eBay and eventually found a second hand model for really not very much money. A few minutes' work and it was nice to know my speed and distance again.

[3] Actually, you can: SJSC sells them. But when you can buy a newer second-hand computer plus bracket for less than a replacement bracket by itself, what are you meant to do?

Time and motion

2006-09-03T11:42:00.000Z

All things considered, I shouldn't have had any particular worries about not completing the Pedal for Scotland ride, after all I've done that sort of distance plenty of times before. And I did it again on August 27th.

A very early start for me: 6am! I arrived at the railway station in town just after 7am and stood around waiting for the others in my team to turn up. I was doing the event with four other people from my work, at least one of whom was fitter than me, and we intended to stay as a team through the ride. There was a bit of waiting and faffing about with hundreds of cyclists needing to get their bikes into the fleet of lorries, the Stealthmachine went first into one of them so that it would be well protected during the journey, with two sides smooth panel van to two sides bits of other bike. The train journey was uneventful, save having to sit on the floor for most of it because it was so busy. Then it was out into Glasgow and to find our bikes.

There was a route guide in the PfS entry pack and it mostly made sense. I'd followed the route on Google Maps, then cross-referenced it on Google Earth in case any of the road junctions weren't quite as the mapping suggested. Then I'd gone a bit silly and made a scrolling guide out of Lego and attached it to my handlebars. As we rode out of George Square and past the start line, I heard the commentator saying into his microphone, "She's even got satellite tracking on that bike!" Well, I was on a recumbent after all, I already looked unusual!

The pace was relaxed with so many cyclists on the road, and while we had no intention of breaking records, even we found ourselves overtaking people. One tends to forget that for every full-on, lycra clad cyclist with carbon wheels and no luggage who overtook us, there was probably another cyclist who only went out when the weather was good and never rode more than two miles. So while 50 miles isn't to be sniffed at even for me, there are a lot of people for whom this was a real personal challenge. After less than an hour's riding was the first rest stop, so we decided to stop anyway. They were giving away free bananas and chocolate wafers for a start! I hadn't seen any other recumbent bikes so far, and wondered if there were any given the amount of glances mine attracted back in Glasgow, but I spotted a grey Speedmachine, of all bikes, and had to park next to it. I had a brief chat with the owner whose name I forget, but then a man rolled up on a blue trike and it was one of the guys who'd tried out my Windcheetah as part of his buying research with Laid Back. I forget his name too.

Duly refilled and warmed-down, we set out again to pass through Airdrie and east towards Avonbridge where the next stop was. That was a church where they were serving cake and other yummy food, though I ended up chatting to the trike owner again for a while, and then once the others in my team reassembled and we'd decided it was time to move on, they went round one side of the building with their bikes, I went the other, and promptly lost them! I'd assumed I'd got to the road first and waited for them. And waited, and waited. Then I decided to head on up the hill and waited for them again at the top. Eventually I decided that so many cyclists had gone past that they would be miles ahead, so I rejoined the throng and for a change put my foot down (so to speak). With a bit of a tail wind I was flying, and overtook many people who'd passed me ten minutes earlier. After a long downhill and some wonderful corners, I caught my team up, as they were waiting for me! As a complete group once more, we soon arrived in Linlithgow for the lunch stop. Pootling into the playground David called me over; I knew he and Mark were doing the ride on their recumbents but I didn't know when they'd started. So I chatted to them for a while and returned to my group. N returned from the dinnerhall with tubs of hot pasta so we sat in the sun having a jolly nice lunch.

From Linlithgow we pressed on through Winchburgh and Kirkliston, rejoining the usual route back into Edinburgh, with which I'm very familiar. I took the opportunity to have some fun on the long straight, but waited for everyone at the flyover near Cramond Brig, and from there it was a gentle ride along through Barnton and onto the old railway path again and into the park next to Murrayfield Stadium. Smiles all round and a bit of hugging and we joined the long queue to 'deregister' with the organisers. One by one we dispersed and I met up again with David and Mark, and located Kevin who'd also done the ride. We carried on talking about everything and nothing really, and eventually decided to head home as the temperature was dropping a bit. I still had a few miles of uphill to do, and my legs were quite tired. But I made it home, dropped myself into a chair and had a cup of tea.

I covered about 57 miles altogether, on a bike I dared not weigh! I also raised £135 for Leukaemia Research, and I think that made it all worthwhile. I shall probably be doing Pedal for Scotland next year as well.

Countdown

2006-08-19T23:44:00.000Z

My preparation for Pedal for Scotland has so far involved riding more miles on my way home from work each day; about three times as many actually. I also went on a sort of training ride with the people from work with whom I'm doing the event, and that came to about 46 miles altogether. I rode the little Helios for that, and I was very uncomfortable after 30 miles or so. I think it might have been as much the baggy shorts I was wearing over my lycra shorts, as the saddle on the bike which is not bad as saddles go, but it's not a Flite. When I was in Brighton and London three weeks ago, riding around the latter with Charlotte from ACF, I did about 40 miles on the first day and 20 the next, and managed ok, but the comfort issues remained. So, I think that I'll bring the Stealthmachine to Glasgow and ride that. I've found that if I jump between bikes day to day or maybe week to week, my legs never really get in tune with whatever I'm riding and my performance suffers. So it's been pretty much the Stealthmachine for all my activities so far, until this past week when I managed to hurt both my legs by riding too enthusiastically / aggressively / hard / fast / etc. Recuperating by riding my very lightest bike, the Helios, has probably put me out of shape again! But my legs are feeling better.

The good news is that the seatpost on the Helios, despite the bike being folded and unfolded a lot during the weekend down south, has remained blissfully silent. The bad news is that the new creak is still there and I simply cannot work out where it's coming from.

With my weekends of late being swallowed up with other things, I haven't done much of the promotional and fun stuff. I missed out on the Edinburgh Festival Cavalcade for one thing: I really wanted to join in this time around and boost the recumbent numbers. I missed out on the Tallbikes while they were in Edinburgh because I was at work. I missed out putting in a presence at the TryCycling stand in the Meadows on Fringe Sunday too.

But I went on the latest Laid Back ride at the weekend, where we had a good showing of the silly bikes, Kevin on his Fujin, David on his trusty Focus and his wee one on a Bevo, Martin on a hired Nazca, me on Speedy - and Graeme on his Speedy, having come all the way from somewhere near the border. It's been about two years since I had the chance to ride with another Windcheetah rider, Liz at Cyclefest and Mark at the EIHPF. With the numbers on bikes and the split of abilities, I led "the Spud Crew" [2] out of the city and to Heriot-Watt university and to Johnsburn for lunch. I hadn't led a group before (even just three people), and I was nervous. I rode probably rather faster than I ought to have done, but I was afraid of holding the fast guys up! Still, it was fun to blast along for a while, while David led the less experienced riders in his group. Lunch was good as ever at the Inn, and us fast ones rode a circuitous route back to Heriot-Watt while the others went more directly. Graeme left in town, and Kevin and I went to the Meadows to see what was happening. A lot was happening but no TryCycling and no Tallbikes, so we went our separate ways. My total for that ride was about 35 miles. Next time I shall try to eat mid-morning to stop me going wobbly just after lunchtime.

[2] Spud, as in SPD pedals. You could tell the fast recumbenteers because they were all riding clipless.

Surely I've done some modifications too? I'm afraid so. This time it was necessary however; the rear gear lever on Speedy was quite old and although it's indexed, it was getting rather vague and it would slip out of one gear and into the next by itself. So I finally bought some new levers and while I was at it, a replacement rear derailleur. The original one of course had been put in the bin after it went very wobbly, and the replacement was only temporary since it was bent, apparently. And of course, you can't have a machine like a Windcheetah with cheap components, can you? So I've put a second-hand Shimano XTR unit on and the gear changing is feeling much better. So, just the rear wheel to retrue now!

This land is mine

2006-07-12T23:13:00.000Z

All mine! Except that there's nothing to which you can lock your bike: no Sheffield stands, no wheelbenders, not even a raggedy old fencepost. Quite what the manager's expectation of visiting cyclists is, I don't know, except perhaps to wait for them to start looking around for a hidden Candid Camera. This is a beautifully converted car parking space at the Wetherby Whaler, a fish and chip restaurant on the outskirts of York. I don't imagine they get many cyclists turning up, considering that the restaurant is just off the rather busy A1237. I suppose one could park a velomobile in the space, or perhaps a group of cyclists could create a mass tangle of bicycles all locked to each other. There is a plus side, the fish and chips at this place is really good.

It's early days but I've done a fair few miles on the Helios with its new tyres, and I can tell the difference over the Stelvios already. They're a wee bit more grippy and they definitely ride tarmac better. What their longevity is like remains to be seen, but they're standard equipment on current Windcheetahs so I'm hoping for good things. I'm also suddenly enjoying the Helios all over again and I'm having a minor crisis: the Stealthmachine is by far and away the most comfortable bike I've ridden, ever, but the Helios is such a fun little bike and if I can sort out my comfort in cycling shorts, I might yet ride it for Pedal for Scotland after all.

One other reason for this enthusiasm is that, fingers crossed, I've sorted the incessant creak-creak-creak of the seatpost as I pedal. I resolved, once and for all, to check everything that could be a factor: the saddle clamp bolts, both seatposts, the shim into which the seatpost fits, the frame tube into which the shim fits. I looked at the wear pattern on each component, I looked for any major or minor surface defects and sanded them smooth, I cleaned everything with white spirit and greased everything except the seatpost-shim inferface. Well something worked anyway. The commute the next day saw the seatpost making no sounds at all, but an entirely new creaking sound developed from another part of the bike! I think this might be the infamous Re-bar joint, but I thought I'd fixed that months ago. So, more tinkering required then.

Between the wheels

2006-07-06T07:06:00.001Z

It's been a fun-filled few weeks on the bike front. I've been busy mending things (again), reading things, meeting people, and hey, even becoming a star of the big screen. Kind of, anyway.

What galvanised me into repair mode was that I was planning to attend the York Cycle Show this year and this time I had a choice of two recumbents to ride on the day. Well, I would once I'd properly sorted the problems Speedy was having, so I was on the phone to AVD a few times to ask about bearings and kingpins. The upshot was that the DIY approach didn't sound all that difficult and would avoid me having to bring the trike down to Manchester, so I got some parts and DIYed. Out went the old metal steering bushings, in went new nylon ones, out went the tired drum brake internals, in went shiny new bits from ICE. Then I set to retrueing the front wheels which wasn't an easy job at all - the spokes hadn't been touched in at least three years. But the wheels were soon better. I made an extra layer for the seat cushion then discovered I'd run out of sticky velcro to attach it... I also repaired a mucky but good rear derailleur to substitute for the lovely and still shiny but very worn out Deore XT unit. The gear changing was becoming very imprecise and it turned out the derailleur pivots had gone wobbly, so I stole all the good bits from it and put them into the replacement derailleur. Speedy was now almost done, only needing such luxuries as a new gear lever and some tweaking of the steering joint.
I also had to attend to the little Helios because having built a nice new wheel, the miles I then put on it resulted in some of the spokes loosening up, some a little, some a lot! I perhaps hadn't tensioned the wheel enough the first time, so I spent an hour or two redoing it. Then not long after while hot-footing it across town to the garage where my car was having its MOT, I had a puncture. No biggie, but really not the best time for it to happen! I had it mended in short order and was on my way again. After attending to MOT matters I was heading over to David's house to attend to some bike matters, and got another puncture! Not only that, the sidewall of the tyre had blown apart. I had the inner tube fixed again quickly and then set to mending the tyre with a big patch which had been languishing in my repair kit for months. I ordered some new tyres that evening - Continental Grand Prix, rather than the Stelvios which have been getting a trifle annoying with their inconsistent reliability. While I was buying tyres, I chanced across a copy of Encycleopedia - from 1995 - which for £1 was too good value a piece of history not to buy.

Two events were happening on the weekend of the 24th-25th of June. One was the York show, the other was the Bicycle Film Festival. It was an idea David had, I think, to produce a short film of recumbent riders in Edinburgh, having fun and being generally enthusiastic and offbeat. Well, he asked if I was interested and I couldn't really pass up a chance like that could I? So on a very wet morning we gathered in town and went for a coffee until the rain stopped. Then the four of us, David, George the cameraman, Stuart (from the Rannoch ride last year) and I headed out for a day's filming. What a lot of fun! Take after take, round and round and round the roundabouts, swooping and swapping sides, up and down the roads (which were conveniently closed for another event). Several days of (probably frantic) editing by David and George and the video made it to the Film Festival just in time!

I didn't see the showing, of course, because I was busy driving down to York. With the Stealthmachine hugging the back of my car I cruised the 200-odd miles to the same B&B I stayed in three years before when I first went to the York show. I brought the bike this time because although Speedy was ready to go, the garage at the guest house didn't have room! Nor would my friend's little shed when I was to stay with her afterwards. So on the Sunday I rode the five miles to the event, bought myself a programme and started to get acquainted with the layout. I rode around the campsite, the cafe tent, the First Aid tent, the children's try-out bit, and ended up at the BHPC tent where I met "wobbly" John, who recognised me from Cyclefest and previous York shows. I chatted to him for a while, then went off in search of other people I knew, and ended up back at the BHPC where I met Andhar the Wheel from Aberdeen, with his little Edinburgh-born Aerobike recumbent. I made my way into the trade arena and pottered around, said hello to Peter Eland at his Velovision stand, and shortly after that, bumped into fellow forummers Tony, Alex and Joan, from ACF. We chatted for some time, then Joan and I went off to eat lunch. The rest of my afternoon was spent at Joan's tent while we disassembled it, then Tony came back and we sat talking for another hour or so. They later headed off to the railway station and I headed back to the B&B, the five miles going by very quickly indeed with a bit of a tailwind. And that was that really, not a bad day at all.

A brief few days off the bike and back home I went on another Laid Back ride with Stuart and prospective recumbenteer Mark. Having been thundered and rained on on the way out, we only went as far as Balerno for lunch. Uncharacteristically, I had spicy chicken and pasta for lunch - which was dead good actually - then we headed back in via my old stomping ground of Heriot-Watt university and its environs. I got home and with about two minutes to spare, the heavens opened again. Nevertheless it was a nice warm-up at 22 miles for me. I'm planning to do the Pedal For Scotland ride next month, given that I'm not in shape for this year's Dun Run. It's only 50-odd miles rather than 115, so shouldn't be very difficult.

Testing...testing...

2006-07-05T15:22:00.000Z

This is simply a holding post, until I work out how this works.