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.

I disregard the writing and I play just what I feel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Into the lens

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

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

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

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

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


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


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


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

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


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


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

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


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

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

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

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

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?

Circumstances

You have just two and a half days left if you want to look for any last minute bargains. Borders, the bookshop people, is closing down. It's a crying shame, actually, because never before was the phrase 'all stock must go!' so starkly marketed. And by stark, I mean 80% off remaining titles, and rows and rows of totally empty shelves.

It's a crying shame because Borders was a good stockist of Ordnance Survey maps, and the remaining stock of those isn't being spared, or even being held and re-sold to another. Owing to too much work recently, and extreme laziness when not at work, I didn't visit my local branch until yesterday, and most of the trusty Landranger 1:50,000 maps had already gone. I did however pick up four of the Explorer 1:25,000 maps, two of which were in rather splendid 'Active Map for all extremes' laminated copy. And those ones, marked originally at nearly £15 each, were also 80% off. Some people were buying armfuls of maps, which I thought was a bit greedy, but if you're not fast, you're last, and I was close to being last so I couldn't really complain.

I did however manage to find a few Landranger titles for Mum and Dad, thanks to them giving me a rather impressive list of every edition of every OS map they already had. Of course, were I in their shoes, I think I would've used a database rather than a spreadsheet.

It started snowing on Wednesday morning, just as I was preparing to ride to work. That coincided rather inconveniently with the wiring on my P-38 for my halogen bike lights suddenly not working; I can't ride to work in pouring snow with just a little LED flashing light, can I? Well, I can, if I act like many other everyday cyclists in town, and it was fortunate that I had only just bought a new LED light to replace my Cateye EL200 which had, in its seven years, been dropped, cracked, disassembled, soldered and reassembled, soaked and thrown across my bedroom. The soft plastic used for the bracket had worn down to such an extent that it'd cracked away at one end and allowed the light to bounce up and down on the handlebar, and having to reach forward to switch it back on a dozen times on a ride home recently was the last straw. Cree, Luxeon and Nichia-powered torches are quite popular these days for seeing, but don't have great side visibility. I'll upgrade my halogens when it's appropriate, but for now I bought the little Cateye EL135. It still has three LEDs, but since it runs off two AA batteries rather than four it's a lot lighter and that should help with reliability - and it's meant I can easily attach it to the top of my helmet.

The lighting problem meant that I wouldn't ride my Lightning, and instead I took my Speedmachine: the bike with the thinnest, slickest tyres and the lowest riding position. I couldn't use Annie because I hadn't put the knobbly tyres back on; I couldn't use my V2 because the disc brakes squeal viciously when they get damp, and my Dahon needs its handlebar bag to use my halogen lights ... and I'd stolen the light brackets to put on the V2! Nevertheless, I slipped and slid my way to the main road, where everything had already been salted and gritted, and I managed just fine.

I later discovered through a process of elimination that it was the electrical Y-connector on my P-38 that had broken. And I at least had the foresight to buy several extras of those, in the days when you could actually buy Vistalite spares. Having taken my Dahon out for a couple of rides, including a freezing Sunday morning in town to experiment with the new tram rails, its gear cable has decided to stop working properly, so that needs fixed now as well!

For Friday I took Annie out in the snow, shod with the old tyre combination of a Panaracer Duster Pro and a Specialized something-or-other. Old is the right word, and both are well overdue for replacement, so I'll look for something in the next round of sales. But it made a change to scrunch my way through the snow and not be too worried about traction, and I took a circuitous route home to get away from the roads and into the dark wooded cycle paths. I'm still not sitting comfortably on an upright bike but I can manage for ten or fifteen miles. Part of me is hoping that the snow melts away quickly and the temperature stays above freezing, if only for my poor fingers, but part of me would really like it to snow like crazy. There's barely enough in my garden to build an igloo for Barbie and Action Man.

Arriving UFO

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.

Stationary traveller

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

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

Meanwhile...

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

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

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

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

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

Speedmachine front suspension disassembly

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

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

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

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

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

How does the fork work? How does it adjust?

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

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

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

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

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

What's inside, and taking things apart

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

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



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



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

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

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

Reassembly

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

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

Where did that bit go again?

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

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

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

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