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.

Before and after

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

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

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

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

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

Every little thing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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