Every little thing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.