Search results for:

I was training up round Constitution/Highgate Hills couple of months ago and had a chat with a courier who was riding an orange low pro brakeless fix that he seemed to want to sell. Nice looking bike but watching him try to stop the thing coming down hill was a lesson in the impracticality of the design off piste... He managed okay, but it looked damned hard on his knees and his head was sticking out in front of him like a gargoyle on a gothic church.

sorry, haven't had a chance to take pics yet. top tube is 57cm/22.5". will try to get some pics in the morning when the light is better, if i get remember to get up early enough...

degreaser, plastic bottle, cloth. chain goes in the bottle, cloth used on the ring and sprocket. then regrease.

though to be honest i only bother when the chain is noisy.

I paid £70 for it (also inc. headset). Will post some pics this evening when I get home... But in the meantime, here's one on FGG that's pretty much identical.

http://www.fixedgeargallery.com/allison.htm

I might have a 60cm steel Fuji frame (road, not track) if my mate hasn't pinched it. It's fine for a conversion, I was going to use it myself but when I tried it out I realised I need a 58cm, so I went back to my too-small frame.

What's your mate looking for?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qO8xBlkumYM

I knocked a woman over at an irritating right turn off Oxford St which is taxis/buses/cycles only - I was slowly wending my way through the peds who always cross there when the light's green for the right turn (there's no bus route through there and taxis rarely make the turn), thought I was clear and started mashing, when all of a sudden one woman steps off the kerb right in front of me without looking. Went down like a bowling pin and hit her head. She looked very upset and I managed to persuade her to get her head checked out at the Soho walkin clinic, but fortunately one of her colleagues was waling past and took her there, because she really didn't want me around (though she volunteered the fact that it was her fault).

Then some have-a-go heros decided to tell me I couldn't turn right there and get shirty...

I had a damaged lhs crank after I hit the kerb avoiding a taxi. I made a shim out of bits of tin can.

When, a week later, I went to put on my new crankset, the bits of tin can were shredded up with the grease I'd put on the spindle into a tin can paste.

I wouldn't rely too much on an inner tube in your drive train to be honest.

aidan oi nervous nancy!!

hah!

was asking for it i guess...

jv ^well yeah obviously if you're changing lanes and stuff! but i see loads of nervous nancies checking back every 10 seconds on a straight stretch - why?!?

i check over my shoulder quite frequently, mainly so that I know where everything is around me in case I need to move suddenly in response to an unexpected obstacle. There's not usually enough time to check over my shoulder and signal when a ped steps off the curve, so if I happen to know in advance that there's not a taxi or a courier on my back wheel I can swerve round them in full confidence.

i'm not what you'd call a 'nervous nancy', as i ride pretty aggressively. i just like being aware of my surroundings. i do the same on foot or in a car.

rakan If you don't like riding on the drop part of drops and never use it but you use the curve bit for climbing it makes sense.

Bullhorns look shit though.

mebbe. on that red one perhaps you could use the curves for climbing but I don't see anyone riding the hoods at that angle, esp. with no tape on.

andypancake It's for tricks... your legs won't get caught when leaning forward on a skid. They are way ahead of us in japan!

Ahah - that makes sense.

I was walking back to the office from a meeting today and watched as a woman and her kids were crossing the road. No ped lights on this stretch: you just cross when the lights are red on the street you're crossing. Anyway, a car turning left slows down to let her and the kids cross. Straight away, the driver behind leans on the horn because she can't continue on immediately.

Point is, it's not really that cars hate bikes. It's that roads make people stupid. Everyone thinks it's a fundamental human right to travel as fast as possible, and woe betide anything that gets in the way. To make it easier to justify that to themselves, they dehumanise everyone else out there on the road.

Look at the fuss about speed cameras - an entire political platform built on people's perceived right to travel faster than urban planners think is safe on a given stretch of road. And that's before you start talking about vehicle excise duty, which people think pays for the roads and hence gives them priority use thereof, when actually road maintenance comes out of council taxes or from the highways authority - which I, as a Londoner, pay for as much as any car driver in this damned city. Or peds calling cyclists Nazis, or cyclists attacking cars. Sorry. But it's like there's a whole chunk of our brains that we turn off to justify the way we act when we're on the roads that means that we do things that are difficult if not impossible to rationalise. Emotionally they feel justified, but as soon as you start pulling at the thread, they unravel.

why? is it just fashionable? i can't work it out - it's like taking away all the advantages of drops without adding any of the advantages of bullhorns.

about 60 or so commuting, plus whatever I do at the weekend. if i'm training I try to do another 40-60 on top of that, though I am way out of the habit at the moment and can't even drag my sorry arse down the gym.

I have a cheapish cycling outfit consisting of some 3/4 shorts and some cheap mountaineering base layers I bought on sale and carry a change of clothes in my bag. If it gets cold I put long socks on. If it gets colder I have a proper cycling jersey and if it rains I have an old skater jacket I bought about 10 years ago that is waterproof enough and not too sweaty. And a sponge and a bar of soap to freshen up in the disabled toilets when I get to work.

Sitting round in an office with a big smelly sweat patch on your back is not nice, so I never really got into cycling to work in my day clothes. I wish we had showers in the office though, would be even easier!.

to be honest i find normal lycra boxers don't bunch up particularly and are fine riding up to about 20 miles (on a brooks, tho), but like jeans on a bike, they shred up round the crotch. Shredded jeans plus shredded boxers = indecent exposure. So I started wearing lycra padded cycling undershort things which are great though a bit expensive and those dirt cheap hennies 3/4 jean things, which cost less than the damned undershorts.

i started on 48/19, then went down to 48/17. 48/18 is probably exactly right for london I reckon - 19 was too spinny at the kind of speed I like to go to keep up with traffic, but while I have no problems handling 17 generally, I do wonder if all the standing starts are going to take a toll on my knees eventually.

winston eat plenty of carbs in the morning and lunch, none at all for dinner and no fats either....have a big dinner of veggies (not potatoes) and protein...as early as you possibly can...worked for me.

^^^^
what he said. unless you're going on an all day ride, in which case eat carbs the night before.

if you're snacking during the day eat crunchy food with virtually no energy content (rice cakes, celery, carrots, cucumber) - crunchy stuff makes you feel like you're eating even if you're not actually taking in much in the way of carbs.

If you need a boost, eat fruit - the sugars are absorbed slower. Refined sugars hit you quickly and give you a brief boost, but then they leave you feeling slumped and listless when they wear off. They may be helpful if you're racing but even for training I reckon bananas are a better bet than powerbars. I have a soft spot for dried dates and apricots, personally.

TheBrick(Tommy) [quote]trampsparadise ... her fix is much cooler than mine...

roxy is just much cooler than you in general.:)

joe_b

build her a bike but don't push it on her and maybe build a normal bike first, if she is not cofident and happy on a bike she prob does not care if it is fixed or not. My girfriends bike is a five speed, but I am currently on the look out for a SA 3 speed hub to lace in to the rear wheel, the ultimate hub, some varation of ratios but bullit proof and low maintainace. Just don't push anything on anyone it won't work.

At least she is only crying over a bike, easy.[/quote]

^^^^
what he said

part of it is the sharing thing, part of it is her wanting to feel valued. if you tell her to get her own bike she'll just do her own thing, if you build a bike for her it'll make it feel a lot more special and a lot more like you want her to share in the whole thing. at least, that's how the women i know tend to take it...

it's the size of the disc bits on either side of the hub. high flange means a larger diameter, low flange means a smaller diameter.

http://www.sheldonbrown.com/gloss_e-f.html#flange

high flange

low flange

jonaent (Jon) [quote]

Money is a big issue to such a new shop so paying a photographer is not top of their list - they have a digital camera so do it themselves..... I suppose what you see is what you get, it's the sort of ethos they like there. No pretenses, plus, they have a lot of second hand stuff that sells very quickly and that's another reason not to get in a pro photographer. Time will tell, perhaps if the site brings them good business we'll up-grade to much better picstures. PhotoBen has already offered.
[/quote]

Putting some sizes on the photos of the more expensive frames might not be a bad touch.

brooks are really comfy, but they do creak a bit which can be irritating at times

Stef [quote]hippy Proximity? Buying power? There's already a CS and Evans at one end of Brick Lane (Spitalfields) so Specialized wont sell through another that they deem too close. Otherwise they all undercut each other and no one wins.
Like a Maccas chain wont set up another unless they deem there's a market for it. Otherwise it'd be a waste of advertising, setup, etc. if all the business went elesewhere anyway and the new store failed.
It may have been a used frame they sold - it doesn't make much sense if it came from Specialized themselves.

is that why there are two cycle sugery in the spitafields area?
and they both sell spacialized[/quote]

I suspect the older of the two will be closed down when its lease expires.

/