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most weather/light touring/commuting road bike
vintage classic
hot road bike
kid carrying, trailer hauling practical bike
child-friendly tandem

I have the first two, and a very tepid road bike (I'm paralyzed by indecision about whether to go for hot neo-retro like @breso's fuscia Pinarello Montello or modern carbon). The last but one is a current project and perhaps the tandem will get taken seriously next year.

Was interested in this discussion of "why?" - I don't like buying/having stuff I'm not going to use (just generally), so a bike has to have a purpose. In this case, I wanted to assemble something like an Italian classic for L'Eroica. I'm sure, as you said, their value has gone through the roof, and it was naive (and also mainstream/unimaginative) to pick a Colnago Super, but that's what I hit on.

I didn't take a good enough photo of it when I built it, thought I might get one in beautiful Tuscan surroundings on the day, but it rained all morning. So you can see it afterwards, encrusted with mud. It had yellow tape, straps, and cables to match the lug cutouts, but that seemed to border on clever-clever-matchy-matchy, so since the tape was ruined and I had to strip it right down to clean everything, I rebuilt with more subdued cables and straps and some totally exuburant Benotto tape that came with my L'Eroica death shoes.

Being now addicted, I'd like to find a purpose for a newer one! Perhaps I really do need a hot neo-retro road bike...

What about (cycle)touring the Cotes du Rhone Villages and popping up Mt Ventoux. Hire bikes of all types are very easy to pick up in Malaucene. Or, Craig and Vicky at veloventoux.com can accommodate you, transfer you to/from airports or trains, sort you out with a bike, feed you, show you other great rides in the area etc, and I think are well worth a visit.

If you want to go to Spain before/after, you can get the train from Avignon. The fast trains are a great way to get around in Spain but you have to have your bike in a very stringently sized bag (box may be too big), if at all (please check carefully, I'm not exactly sure of the rules, we had a sticky moment in Barcelona). No problem with the slow trains, but they are slow… We toured in Extremadura which was great, but I gather that Spaniards think it is a bit of a backwater. In April/early May the weather was dry and hot enough for us to cycle in summer stuff, and to be quite frustrated to find every swimming pool still closed because too early in the year! Because it was our honeymoon, we pushed out the boat and stayed in Paradores. They are usually fairly spectacular historic buildings (castles, monasteries etc) converted into hotels, can be quite expensive, but not necessarily. Each one had a secure place to store bikes, and we were able to leave our bike bags at the first one and pick them up at the end.

I would like very much to go to northern spain, and either Girona or San Sebastian would be good for cycling. San Sebastian at least is meant to be good for amazing food isn't it?

Scotland also excellent for a tour. We took the train from Edinburgh to Fort William, cycled up the west coast - over the corner of Skye, across the Bealach na Ba, through Torridon and Poolewe, then across to Garve, where we took the train back to Edinburgh. It rained heavily every day, sometimes several times! Got to be careful about booking your bike on the train!

sending a PM

still available?

Yes, you're right (also @schleazy). I weighed it ages ago and remembered this important number being neatly just less than 2 kg and just quoted it as the total weight without checking. Now I had a look back where I noted it down and find frame=1999 g (with headset cups), fork=731 g (with crown race). So, either I can confirm that a super frame weighs about 2 kg, or that my frame is about the right weight to be a genuine super (which is also important to me!).

Is that including the fork? I recently weighed mine, which I believe is an early 80s super (with fork), and it weighed just a few grams under 2 kg.

what's happening here then?

I looked into this quite a bit for a seatpost and a stem I was trying to avoid cutting out of steel frames recently.

Aluminium oxide is described as amphoteric which means it may be susceptible to acid or base so vinegar, coke, lemon juice are all possible treatments. Caustic soda will eat your fork as well, as you expect. But all aluminium has a layer of oxide on it, and an aluminium fork in an aluminium frame should not corrode further since there is no galvanic potential between them - this problem of corrosion and sticking is for aluminium components in steel frames.

Your seized stem should therefore be due to friction from a very close fit or maybe dirt and old grease. You could try heating the steerer and hope that because it is on the outside, it heats up and expands more quickly than the stem, freeing it. You could try cooling the end of the stem at the same time (e.g. stick the stem end in water/ice/salt mixture while heating the steerer). If dirt and grease is the problem, a penetrating oil (plusgas?) seems most promising to me, but maybe coke (I'm not convinced that it will work its way in very effectively).

Also, if a friction problem, I read a really nice thing about somebody trying to get a carbon seatpost out of a carbon frame. He reasoned it wasn't corroded, but was stuck by friction, and that pulling on the frame and the post served only to stretch and narrow the seat tube, gripping the post more tightly. He created some sort of system that held the frame and pulled the post and it slid out. Don't have a link for that though, sorry.

Gripping the stem end with the strongest vise grips/biggest wrench and trying to get it to turn is also a good thing to try from time to time!

Last things: I don't really know anything about bicycle culture in Zurich really but a couple of things to look out for are Saturday Style ride (http://styleride.ch/) and the six day nights of Zurich which must be coming up pretty soon (won by Mark Cavendish and Iljo Keisse last year).

On to the important stuff: bike shops! This is an update of the stuff I put on the "LBS options in Zurich" thread a while ago, since I've found a couple more and had a bit more to do with some of them. Hot carbon road bikes abound in Switzerland, but they can be really expensive. As @chiroshi says, buying a bike in euros by going to, or shipping from, Germany is a good deal at the moment, or even just a bike from a euro country from a Swiss shop can seem like a bit better value than you might expect. But the usual sorts of shops selling them are pretty easy to find, these are some more characterful shops in Zurich that I'm aware of.

velo-citta.ch/ I think they mostly recondition old frames with new, basic-ish groupsets (could be good for a decent weekday bike), the guy is really nice, he may sell you some of the old bits from his "collection" if you ask nicely. Otherwise it's mostly a repair shop and doesn't have a big stock of new components.

urbanrider.ch/ it's a fixie/single speed shop, sells some nice colorful bits, more down to earth than my original impression!

caprez-zueri5.ch/index.php/ho­me is a strange hybrid of a bike shop and old-skool electrical shop - there are some old disk wheels for purchase in the window if that's your thing, and also some vintage hoovers

raddna.ch/ is a very serious looking swiss-designer-style bike shop, but the guys are nice and helpful and speak English, and they sell mainly Genesis bikes (the steel models so far). This would be my first port of call for a nice bike, unless I wanted carbon.

All of the above are a few minutes from each other, near the station in central Zurich, so worth a quick look around.

veloschmiede.com/ is out of the town centre, lovely vintage roadster in the window when I went past, and the website looks promising, think they're mostly into pimping pretty much any old bike they get.

http://www.zweiradgeber.ch/ haven't been here, but it looks a bit different to regular bike shops and was recommended by velo-citta for resprays.

http://www.velo-zuerich.ch/ weird and wonderful shop in the suburbs of Zurich, it occupies the first two floors of an office building, the downstairs is now almost completely taken over by E-bikes, and the interesting ones are upstairs (but it's not like a shop where you can just go upstairs, you've got to somehow indicate that you're interested in the old bikes). The webpage is not right up to date, but the Coppis are still there.

ricardo.ch is the swiss equivalent of ebay and looks like a decent source of projects or weekday bikes. The compactness of Switzerland means you probably can pick it up pretty easily. Sellers don't put much info for some reason.

So, apologies in advance if this gets over-long, I may be the only north-Switzerland LFGSSer and don't get much chance to talk about life in northern Switzerland for LFGSSers so have (quite) a few thoughts to share! (I live in, and work near, Brugg, 25 minutes north-west of Zurich by train.)

If you want to commute, the trains are excellent and, when you get a discount (halb-tax) or subscription (GA) card, they become good value for money. Winterthur is a nice enough small town. A couple of people who have lived in Zug have said it is unfriendly compared to Zurich or Baden, where they live now - what this might mean I don't know, relations with neighbors etc can be complicated in Switzerland and they may have been unlucky.

I am a bit surprised you would want to commute though. Colleagues live in Zurich and commute outwards every day, so it must be affordable. Zurich, once you get away from Bahnhofstrasse and associated bling, is actually a nice and compact city with great public transport and some funky stuff. Although I know it can be difficult to find a place at the outset, I don't think it is necessary to live right in the centre, because you won't really be that far from it anyway. I would just think that moving there from the outside and trying to find a place, meet friends, and kickstart a life would be easier without the commuting and involving a second location, and that you would find a more active, cosmopolitan, easy to integrate with crowd, and more activities, in Zurich

An important incentive not to live in Zurich though would be if you want to ride/train in the countryside a lot. Even though you could take the train out of Zurich (with almost zero hassle to put your bike on the train!) if you didn't want to ride, if that was a big priority, any small town around Zurich could suit you.

I think you would have to actively seek somewhere unsafe, but for chilled, you might need to be a bit more careful. Are the people in the building younger/older/international/traditional. I'd recommend to find out if there is a shared laundry room (a common feature of swiss apartment buildings and conversational blackhole for expats) and what the rules for sharing it are, then use this as a gauge of how chilled the residents are likely to be!

Switzerland is a great place for riding bikes, there is cyclocross around here, lots of clubs, races, full lycra roadie-ing is not in the least frowned on if that is your thing (it is mine to some extent). The alpine passes are fantastic and after riding some of them this summer I'm really kicking myself for not getting in that direction before, you just have to get a train to Interlaken or similar. Though I don't really get this gravel stuff, the combination of tarmac and forest road available round here seems perfect for it! I have the impression that single-track proper mountain biking is harder to find here, but I'm sure massive downhills are also just a train ride away. There are cycle paths all over the place and drivers mostly well behaved. Walks (obviously) and architecture (Le Corbusier is on one of the bank notes) are also promising interests. The beer on the other hand is nothing to write home about, but they certainly drink it!

If you want to say whereabouts you'll be working and what you'll be doing, I might be able to come up with some more specific suggestions of places to live, or maybe even a contact. In my direction, Baden is probably equal to Winterthur as a place to live and very popular. Brugg, I believe, has been voted the most boring town in Switzerland, but being a bit further out (and a bit more boring!) it is quite a bit cheaper.

Will fill you in with as much info as possible later...

Hi, any suggestions about this one?

Obviously it says Cougar on it! I've asked Dolan about it but got no reply.

The decals don't look like any Cougar anywhere on the web (or any of the usually available ones), and I know the name has been used by a few companies. Usually they have single color Cougar on the tubes in a distinctive and different font to this, and a spitting cat on the head badge. The stripes on the head badge are red/white/blue and give the impression it could be French, on the other hand the tubing is Reynolds which suggests a British bike.

The bike itself is very small, is said to have belonged to a serious woman racer, and likely had a mix of Campagnolo (brakes) and Shimano 600.

Thanks in advance.

I quite like Wire...

My bike now has a 3-4mm Tuscan "patina" all over!

No mechanicals, no walking, 209 km completed in daylight - all my ambitions achieved!

Actually the weather in the afternoon was pretty nice and I was glad to get full value out of my old jersey (which is my best bit of vintage kit - it's really vibrant purple with yellow writing and bits), though by that time it had stretched almost to my knees...

Also, incredible quantity of souvenirs. Has anybody drunk the wine yet?

Did you upload a file as well? I did mine this week - I did get a test but couldn't get a proper certificate since they don't have them here. In the end I uploaded a scan of the ECGs with a very illegible scrawl and a stamp from a dr on it, not at all a proper certificate, then set the date 1 year after the one on the scan. First it was red/not approved, then the next day or day after, changed to green/approved with no further intervention.

Almost certainly, yes. In my defense the glasses are actually brown and the remarkable jersey-specs (xray or not) coordination was a coincidence I hadn't noticed till now.

I see, thanks. I was staying in Axalp, about 20 km away so between about 5.30 and 6.30 I was making my way gently to the start (Axalp is well above the valley floor and the descent is pretty engaging in the dark!) - it was a nice day for an early start.

@Oliver Schick: Indeed... I imagine real x-ray spectacles to be pretty chunky, might be problematic for rule 37.

What time did you get to Airolo out of interest? I was always planning to do the gold (which was quite enough for this year as it turned out), but I was hoping to reach the cutoff in time so I could casually say something like "yeah I could have done the platinum one but I just fancied those cobbles instead". Anyway, your moving average speed was about 20 km/h and so was mine but I didn't get to Airolo until 11.30. Were you pushing on much more in the early sections and then slowed down in the heat? Also, did you start near the front? I was pretty much at the back and perhaps would have made it on the dot of 11.15 if I had really started at 6.45.

Alpenbrevet gold for me as well. I guess we didn't see each other, though I was actually wearing my LLFGS jersey. Got a bit overcooked on the Sustenpass in the heat of the afternoon. Great route, but especially fantastic between the top of the Grimselpass, where the crowd thinned out a lot, and Airolo. Also, gold, easy? How many km of cobbled climbing on the platinum?

The tracker webpage says they have problems getting data from those checkpoints:

Il y a actuellement des problèmes de connexions avec Carhaix, Tinteniac et Fougères.
Nous ne recevons donc pas les heures de passages de ces contrôles.
Veuillez nous en excuser.

Steve Abraham (1 year time trialist!) T166 BREST 18/08 13:17 618 km 41:15 @ 14.9 km/h

Seems so! Track him on http://suivi.paris-brest-paris.org/ with number T166

I don't know yet, I'm hoping not to walk very much at all. @tilover - after building the bike and getting every other thing (including some shoes!), I'm just hoping to avoid buying a pair of leather shoes that I'll hardly ever wear - all the ones I've seen on the internet are pretty expensive and handmade (Quoc Pham, Reynolds, Vittoria etc, all really nice looking shoes of course), and I've not seen anything cheaper and less niche in local shops. But @danstuff I'm experimenting with a cunning plan involving replacing the death cleats with a recycled section of trainer sole - not perfectly comfortable or secure and deeply un-stylish but seems like it might work.