On the back of your forty-second screamdown

So, it's only been ages since I last wrote anything in here. While the tumbleweed absent-mindedly blows across the road, and I shuffle around somewhat sheepishly in the knowledge that, incredibly, this blog is actually linked to from somewhere else (edinburghcyclechic, as it turns out, which is suitably ironic for my general predisposition to wear lycra, and occasionally even look good in it), you can listen to the muted and rather pleasant rhythm of cogs ticking round. That isn't the sound of a well-oiled dérailleur transmission, nor even a rusty squeaking one, but of my brain on the realisation that four and a half months have gone by with the first thought that nothing of note has happened.

Has it?

After Tim Brummer at Lightning sent through the replacement and much stronger boom for my P-38, back in May last year, I set off into the countryside here in pursuit of hills and railways and architecture, took a spin down to York to look at Moultons and windmills and railways and architecture, commuting as usual the rest of the time, and all the while generally enjoying the heck out of the bike. After all, it had been several months in which the bike had lain in the garage in a not-quite-rideable state. The first real outing of the new boom had of course been the day of the twelve steepest streets, but it had also cemented itself in my memory as the day that the Brake of Horrendous Squeal came into the world. For some reason the entire world supply of Kool Stop brake pads had vanished a week before, and I'd reluctantly slid in a new set of those peculiar Ashima pads, discovered they were too thick, adjusted my once meticulously set brake positions four times to try to compensate, discovered to my joy a long lost pair of Kools in a bag and slid them in, adjusted the brake position again ... and gone climbin'. And for the next 1000 miles or thereabouts the front of the bike braked just as well as it ever had before, but in the process would be sounding like an air horn.

Slowing down from 20 or 30mph, behind a car, while one's bike produces a noise like a double-barrelled Air Zound mixed with fingernails-on-blackboard, is one of the most embarassing situations I've ever known, even worse than organising a meeting for twenty people and forgetting to invite the chairperson. Worse still, it wasn't even a new situation, as I recalled my experiences of Victoria's old cable-powered Tektro discs trying to do their best in a thunderstorm. They were certainly most trying, which is why I replaced them with Hope hydraulics which turned out to be only slightly more powerful and almost as noisy. But with a P-38 you can have any brakes you like as long as they're rim brakes, so you throw money at it and buy an Avid Ultimate. Given the frankly astonishing increase in price for those twin machined aluminium arms—currently at a discounted 85 of Her Majesty's British Pounds, or £115 at full price, when the Big S's XTR is clocked at £100, and Avid's otherwise excellent Single Digit 7 comes in at an altogether less eyewatering £22—I was inclined to grin and bear it. There was method in the madness at the time I built the bike, because the Ultimate transforms to a mirror image of itself which made for tidy cable routing, and in 2007 we were still enjoying ludicrously good value on expensive components.

In a similar manner to John Ackroyd's Thrust 2, which Richard Noble and Ron Ayres later discovered was stable only under savage acceleration, my P-38 would only be quiet under savage deceleration, and while that might useful for avoiding fading discs or drums, if it had any, I was rather too aware that it wasn't so good for holding traction with skinny little bicycle tyres, even if they've worn down their herringbone pattern micro-tread to pure slicks. The rest of the time, dabbing a brake here and there for traffic lights and traffic jams, an occasional errant pedestrian, or a frequent pothole, the bike squealed unrelentingly. I even found myself digging a heel into the brake arms—sometimes the left, sometimes the right—in a hopeful attempt to quell the vibration, with both brake and rider fretting merrily to themselves.

At least twice I set-to on the bike to resolve the problem once and for all, with a little piece of folded-over breakfast cereal box for presetting the requisite toe-in of the brake pads, and despairingly it made no difference whatsoever. Last week it became all too much and I took Victoria out on the roads instead, while back home I investigated a suspicious amount of play in one side of the brake; the Ultimate runs on two pairs of 15mm sealed ballraces, not that you really needed to know that, so one ought to expect perfection. After prising off a rubber seal and finding all the grease replaced with plenty of rust, it took a heatgun, a hammer and a thin screwdriver to remove the bad ballrace which promptly committed suicide, spilling its insides onto the workbench. And, of course, the things are of a hugely proprietary type that one doesn't find stocked by places like SimplyBearings or Model & Small, being assymetric and of a size far too small for which anyone remotely technical might have any use. But heroically Avid provided a part number—genuine spare parts!—and a few days later again my local bike shop had the goods. Before this I'd actually devised a workaround using industy standard items and some skateboard bits that I would've still had to modify, and then I worked out that it was easier if just as expensive to buy the genuine things in the first place.

Buoyed by my newfound confidence in solving mechanical mysteries, I made a rudimentary Ultimate bearing press and provided a home to two brand new sealed ballraces. I was so confident in fact that my testing regime was to ride 20 metres up the road and back again, and if it didn't squeal I was in business. It didn't squeal.

And so the very next day I set out on my commute. About 30 seconds down the road, where the hill begins, I applied the brake firmly for the first time and my bike was blissfully silent! Actually, it wasn't. At this point I had to get to work, an activity involving plenty of traffic and plenty of hills, so I said something that rhymed with muddy bell and decided my back brake would have to work extra specially hard. Most of that day was spent doing worky stuff, while part of my brain was busy thinking about brake pad compounds and logical ways to rule out one component after another.

As I thought idly about the familiar (too familar, for this former student of vibration theory) relationship of natural frequencies vs. mass, spring stiffness and damping, it occurred to me that my suspicions of why Victoria's discs sometimes sing loudly to themselves, being attached to very lightweight rims and spokes, and akin to a sounding board, might translate to the little bike. After all, I already knew that both wheels were rapidly approaching rim replacement. If the rim sidewall was sufficiently worn down, perhaps that was the crucial factor. It seemed like a good idea to set up the wheel truing stand that weekend and install the new rim I'd bought ages ago while they still made them, and a happy afternoon was spent unpicking spokes and threading them into their new homes, culminating in that meditative zone of spinning a wheel, eyeballing, listening and tweaking things to perfection.

'If this doesn't do the trick,' I said to myself as I returned the wheel to my bike's fork, 'it has to be either toe-in or pad material. It has to be!' With my confidence in solving mechanical mysteries now higher than ever, this time I didn't even bother with a test ride. The next day I set out on my commute, and the first hill was pleasingly silent while the pads gently scoured the untouched brake trake of the rim. I came to the big hill, and accelerated down it. At the bottom, where a bus was setting down its passengers, I decided that slowing down might be a terribly good wheeze. I hauled on the brake, and it squealed for Britain; it was as though the last thousand miles were just the warm up. I may have said several very rude words at that point.

I stopped short of taking my bicycle to the menders, because I used to be one of them and I decided that a stupid little brake couldn't be that hard to sort. Could it? Returning to my bike at the end of the day with my multi tool in hand, I took a bit of plastic about the thickness of a credit card and wedged it behind the brake pad, and reset the toe-in on each side once and for all. It could hardly make things worse. Amazingly it didn't, and even more amazingly the brake suddenly started to behave, just like it did in the olden days. I accelerated, braked, accelerated, braked again, and ... silence. I rode the long way home with the long gradual descent, and it behaved. A few more days and it's still behaving. Hurrah!

I was going to tell you a tale of Carradice, saddlebags and Bromptons, but my back brake has started squealing.

It's not how fast you can go

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.

An ill wind comes arising

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.

Arriving UFO

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One little victory

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

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.