Search results for:

I'm loving the elephant's foot idea. Or maybe you could stick a big white old-school trainer on the end of the forks?

In the last two weeks I've seen three different young guys riding round in a permanent wheelie position, only dropping their front wheel when they have to stop. I reckon by Christmas they'll be riding round with no front wheels on, given the natural human tendency to take any new trend as far as it will go (cf arse-hanging-out-of-trousers look).
Any other notable developments in street-level cycling fashion?

This is just fucking nuts:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLQcknhApjM

By about five minutes in it sounds like Frank Zappa in his mid-seventies prime.

So the greater flexibility of the older steel bike was sufficient to make a measurable difference in speed? Gosh - if the difference is as big as that, you'd almost think that you might be able to feel the difference between an older steel bike and a newer bike of another material - while you're riding it! Like, the steel bike might feel a bit more forgiving over bumps and stuff? But that's impossible, right?

Quote:Originally Posted by Mister Baxter

A prison officer for a witness is fucking gold dust.

Why ?

Because in our legal system, the testimony of someone who works within that system is taken very seriously indeed. If you've got a witness who is a prison officer, a magistrate, a police officer etc then their testimony in court will carry a lot more weight than the testimony of, say, a Big Issue seller.

A prison officer for a witness is fucking gold dust. If it comes to court you'll walk it.
He was in the wrong twice - once to make the turn without indicating across your path, once by hitting you. You did no damage to his vehicle, swore in a context which I think most impartial observers would agree was a reasonable one to swear in, and in no way initiated the violence in the situation.
For me, it would just come down to whether I could face the investment of time and emotional energy to get through the process.

Ok - here's a way forwards. It would make a genuine contribution to the development of many countries if they had a thriving local industry paid in stable western currency. Email scams are a carbon-neutral, high-skill industry that incentivises literacy and IT training. However, at the moment, the product that they are producing is frankly not export-standard. And it's not very ethical, focussing as it does on extracting large amounts of money from people who can't afford it.
What Africa needs is better scams - scams that target the greedy, the unethical and the middle-class over here, yet sting each of them for a relatively small amount of money.
Here's my first contribution to ScamAid:

Dear Sir,
PLease allow me to introduce myself. My name is Dr Alfredo Semi-Freddo. I am a Zimbabwean citizen, struggling to make a living under the crushing and oddly inept black-on-black tyranny that afflicts my country.
Not many people know that Mr Robert Mugabwe was a keen cyclist in his youth. Like many cyclists, as he has aged and put on weight he has spent less and less time on the bike and more and more on eBay buying highly desirable vintage bicycles.
My brother in-law is the Keeper of Mr Mugabwe's bicycle shed. The collection stored therein now amounts to over 1270 whole bikes and an uncountable amount of frames and components. This collection includes countless vintage steel bikes with lovely curly lugs and unmarked Italian classic track bikes, ripe for converting into repulsive baby-pink fixies.
A shipping container or so of this stuff would never go amiss. I am looking for a business partner who will front me £500 to hire a truck and get this shit on a ship to Europe. I will slap your address on it, you eBay the lot and we'll split the profits. Deal?
Yours etc,
Dr thingy whateverisaid

Well, yes, but also we shouldn't forget that the Nigerian Letter is a classic con in that it plays on the greed of the mark. People go for these scams because they want free money, often from a source that is represented as being illegal. It's not just a question of vulnerability - to go for a lot of these scams you would have to be happy to collude in a criminal enterprise.

I have some sympathy for African internet fraudsters. When people who have very little, living in a fucked-over country like Nigeria, manage to use their wits to reach out across the ocean and pull in a bit of Western wealth, I can't help but feel a twinge of admiration. Yes, it's wrong and all and the victims tend to be vulnerable people, but compared to the real crimes that go on every day - for example, the murderous destruction that Shell have been getting away with in Nigeria - blagging some cash by email seems fairly far down the scale to me.
I only wish they'd sort out their prose a bit. I had a really good one back in Gulf War II, purporting to be sent by a US Marine from his laptop while sat in a recently captured palace with huge bales of dollars in the cellar and no way to get them out. It had real urgency and excitement in it - I actually wrote back to say that although I would not be contributing any actual money, I did want to express my appreciation of their writing abilities. But since then, nothing's come through that's offered any real literary merit or advancement of the medium.

The box contains one of the early models of mobile phone.

then your calculation needs to offset the fact car drivers are net contributors to the economy who produce wealth - not like your normal bike riding leech.
just saying

I'm not sure that how you get to work has any bearing on how much you contribute to the economy when you get there, does it? Apologies if I'm missing some layer of irony here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tt_-OPwQIE

Potential!

Might have done? Not sure tho...
As for using bamboo fabric - I think it'll be a while before it's anywhere near as strong as carbon. I have a bamboo fabric T shirt and I couldn't tell the difference between it and a cotton one. Might cut it up and use it on my next frame!
Carbon is super strong and light and looks pretty neat too

Not sure if it will ever be as strong as carbon but it might be possible to make it as strong as glass fabric. Bamboo is often said to be stronger than steel, weight for weight; I'm not sure how that's been measured but it's definitely a material with potential for more development.

I had a go at fencing once and it was quite scarey - there were all these faintly wimpy middle management types there, shaking hands with their soft and slightly damp handshakes. I got paired off with one of them; we put our masks on and stood about twenty feet apart; there was a buzzer or whatever and my opponent just lunged across and (mock) impaled me in about one hundredth of a second, over and over again. It was unbelievable how quick he was. I didn't go back, though. I couldn't really see where the fun was in the whole set-up.

That's a very cool utility bike, Smallfurry! I'm ordering a pair of the Tektro 520's. Looking forward to proper stopping power on wet roads this winter...

Maybe I'll just pick up a pair of those levers, set it up and see how it goes... I'm riding a lot with a trailer with about 5 1/2 stone of girls in it at the moment and there's a lot of hills to go down; with the girls on the back it somehow seems more important to be able to actually, definitely stop when I want to...

Thanks Mattster - have you used them with V-brakes? If so, what model of brake?

Does anyone know of any brake levers of the type used with drop handlebars that pull enough cable to use with V-brakes? I've got a pair of the orginal XT V-brakes (with the parallelogram action) and I'd love to put them on my road bike, which is a Thorn, currently using anonymous canti's.

How are trailers like this attached to the bike? Something like this? Do they work ok with quick releases?

I have a child-carrying trailer that attaches to my bike with a linkage like that. I'm using it with a quick release and it's ok, but not ideal - it can work loose and shift around a bit. I'm going to get a solid axle at some point and try it like that - I just need to get a little spanner to carry around in my tool kit in case I get a puncture...

I used to shape surfboards and used epoxy and polyester resin alot, I have recently been experimenting with a natural resin made from nut oil but can't quite get it right. Hemp fibre is not too bad to use either but you need loads of it for it to be half as strong as glass or carbon

The bikes look great. I reckon there's a future in manufactured bamboo-fibre mat and fabric for epoxy lay-ups. They make bamboo socks and stuff now so someone in China must be almost geared up to make it now.

It's Hungarian, not British, but I never miss a chance to big up this extraordinary violinist - and his rhythm section in this film are almost even more extraordinary than him.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4W7N-jEl93o

When I was about 14, I went out for a paddle in this old canoe. It had steel handles on the bow and stern to pick it up and carry it by, and the bow one was broken - half of it was missing, leaving a kind of hook. I was mucking about in the boat, standing up and trying to balance, and I slipped and found myself straddling the foredeck, facing backwards. I slid down the canoe and fell backwards into the water. Unfortunately the handle pieced both my trunks and my scrotum, and I was stuck hanging upside down off the front of the boat with my head under water, suspended by a rusty hook through my scrotum. Not the best moment in my life. I managed to escape, though, got it stitched up and all fine in a surprisingly short time. Not done much canoeing since, though.

I'm farting today. I don't think there are any long-term benefits, but better out than in all the same.

Are you talking about British folk music, or European, or...? There's a whole world of stuff out there. I can educate the fuck out of you regarding your Eastern European musics, and your Jewish musical traditions, if that's what you're after. For these islands, there are probably better people but I'll have a pop.

It looked heavy to me too. The metal (steel?) lugs look fairly massive. Possibly they've used a heavier section for the bamboo tubes than they need to, so as to avoid having one fall to pieces on them.
It's not bikes, but if you're interested in bamboo as an engineering material, Simon Velez's work is just incredible:
http://www.organiclightsculptures.com/NNP/files/bamboo_chair_01.jpg
http://www.asd-realtime.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/ajay.jpg
http://img88.imageshack.us/i/20118ml8.jpg/