You are currently browsing the category archive for the 'Bikes' category.
Many thanks to those who answered the questions in the last post: I’ll be working on the Xtracycle (and post how I do) as soon as I can, but that annoying thing called work is encroaching on reality again. It’s a bummer, but there you are. I’m also enjoying getting out on the bike(s) as we’re having a beautiful November right now, and I’ve a couple of other bike-related projects that I’ll tell you about when I have time to write about them.
And my birthday prresent was delivered yesterday…
Mwahahaa…
The Xtracycle is a great bike, but this is the Achilles’ heel. The Free Radical kit doesn’t have an attachment for cantilever brakes, so I had to use a V-brake. As I’m not about to throw away my very good shifter/brake levers to I had to try and fit this little beastie in to make the V-Brake on the back side fit with the cantilever-compatible levers up front. It’s called a Travel Agent, and in theory it reduces the force produced by the levers so that the Xtracycle stops smartly but gently when I pull the lever, instead of locking the back wheel and throwing me over the handlebars. The problem is that it’s a pain to adjust, and usually results in the rear brake being as effective as a bowl of jelly. Usually I end up using the adjuster at the front to get any bite out of the thing at all. So I’m wondering about alternatives. If anyone has any pearls of wisdom in response to these questions, please feel free to comment:
- The point is to reduce the force on the brake blocks/wheel when using cantilever levers. Is there another, less awkward way of doing this, like another piece of kit to fit on the cable?
- Is there a way to fit cantilevers on an Xtracycle?
- There is an adjustable travel agent. Could this mitigate the problem?
- Am I missing the point? Do V-Brakes simply feel soggy compared to Cantilevers?
- And the potentially dumb question: I know it goes against all published wisdom, but what difference would it make if I just used the v-brakes directly from the brake lever, (Especially as it’s on the back of a long heavy bike, not the front) Would it just lock the back wheel?
This is an unusually short post for me, but the German Special Bike Exhibition Blog has just added an entry on the new Terracycle CargoMonster. Even with the Bakfiets I still love the Xtracycle for its flexibility and speed, not least its ability to climb hills faster than an elderly tortoise, so I use it all the time. If I could afford a Terracycle, and get it through some of our narrow local bike lanes I’d be very tempted.
On balance it’s probably best that I can’t: even a German Garage can only take so many bikes…
Yesterdays post seems pretty maudlin reading by the light of today, so let’s look at something more positive, and furthermore actually on topic for this blog. I’ll Introduce you to the Omafiets.
The first thing you notice about Oma is that she’s Heavy. None of that namby-pamby lightweight carbon or chromoloy: this one is steel: great lumps of the stuff. If it didn’t have wheels you could mistake her for scaffolding. In view of this, the manufacturer fitted a stand rather like those associated with Indian bikes, a big triangle that is horizontal much of the time and lifts the back wheel clean off the ground when pushed vertical, It also locks in position. These stands are found on most single-speed bikes in Japan, which seem to be most bikes. The ubiquity of these inbuilt stands may be why I’ve yet to find a bike rack as I’d recognise one in Europe: most are just a parking space with a bike symbol. The bike is locked with a wheel lock of the sort that the Dutch use all the time, but out of interest, do the Dutch ones clamp the key into the lock when it’s unlocked?
If we get a bike for Beautiful Wife to take home, it will probably be a three-speed one at least, partly so she has at least some options when climbing up the hills of Ostfildern, but also because than I can be sure that the frame is wide enough to take a Nexus hub gear for if and when we want to upgrade. I know they are usually a standard size, but Japanese bikes seem to have few ’standard’ parts (Ironically, I don’t see a lot with Shimano components) and It’d be a real bummer to find the chain stays are the wrong width after I get a new wheel.
The back rack is next to useless as I don’t have any bungee chords and it doesn’t have a sprung clamp, but the front basket is very handy for shopping, although it’s not exactly Xtracycle capacity as I found yesterday when I had th squeeze the groceries in, and when full it does funky things to the steering and I’ve nearly landed in a ditch once when the handlebars seemed to move of their own accord because of the weight. I also find the contents of the basket tend to go airborne when we hit a bump: you hit a lot of bumps on Japanese side roads.
However, the frame is what sold me on the idea of getting a bike here: It’s curved like a Dutch Omafiets, instead of being straight like a mountain bike. For some reason it looks slightly more feminine (when my wife’s riding it anyway, my beard tends to take the edge off any femininity). It certainly looks more at home doing the shopping than an MTB conversion would, while being a bit better suited to Beautiful Wife than the larger-wheeled European town bikes.
We’ll be scouting the local bike shop, which is so eccentric it warrants a blog post of its own but which has a big range of used bikes of the sort we want. Then we have to work out how to get it home.
Anyone have any other suggestions for thngs to watch out for?
‘Could you fix my bike?’ is becoming a more common question these days, and the latest request was a rebuild of two old well used bikes, which the owner wanted rebuilding into a decent commuter, preferably as cheaply as possible. This would be a challenge: one of the bikes was okay, if in need of urgent repairs, while the other was an unambiguously awful supermarket special with full suspension, shoddy components and a frame made of scaffolding.
First thing we did was take off any usable components from the suspension bike. This didn’t take long. Almost everything was either worn out or such poor quality it was unusable. The shifters turned out to be pretty good, which was fortunate as the front shifter was broken on the other bike. Andi also took the rear forks to some dark corner while muttering about a wheel jig. We then took everything off the other bike, repacked bearings, and swapped the shifter. It was all looking so easy, but then we found the cable to the front mech was 5mm too short, and this being a grip shift it took a lot of muttering to thread a new cable in.
German law states that a bike must have dynamo lights, so we (ie. Andi) somehow put together a system from the pile of bits that was once the supermarket special, and built a whole new bracket to fit them onto the MTB frame.
A new commuter, for the princely sum of €6.
I present the new header, which’ll be in use for the next couple of months, or until I get a few ’spring’ pictures together. I’m wondering about taking a photo at this location through the seasons.
It all looked rather like a general election in the UK with the winner only getting 36% of the vote, so I think next time I’ll just have two options so we get a clear majority.
Thanks to those who voted and commented. I’ll be posting as soon as I’m rested from working all weekend, and driving…
Sunset on the way home. A cropped version of this may become the 'Winter Banner'
I had an appointment with a client about three kilometres away by cycle ways in the next village. My record so far for this run is eight minutes and you could never drive to the same place that quickly, because cars have to drive further and through four sets of traffic lights. The weather report said it would be dry and cloudy, so naturally it snowed all morning. I allowed a lot of extra time, thinking I’d have to walk through deep snow a lot of the way, and set off for the Scary Hill of Doom.
Lines in the snow
The Scary Hill Of Doom (SHoD) will one day get a blog entry of its own. There are valleys on three sides of the village, and the main road has is an 11% gradient for a bit less than a kilometre long. I’m not going to say how fast I went. At the bottom of the hill, where the road winds up the other side, I took the Feldweg along the valley. This is the way to a set of riding stables, so I knew the steady procession of SUV’s would clear the snow off the road, and so it was: as long as I kept in the tyre lanes I was snow free. The valley was monochrome: black tyre tracks and trees, white snow, and the loudest noise was the river running alongside, swollen from the thaw that morning. Anyone driving between the villages would right now be going stop-start through a jumble of shops, industrial buildings, and fitness centres, but I had a whole valley to myself.
Cleared cycle path
In the next village a shared use cycle path had been ploughed and gritted. In Ostfildern. I followed it feeling rather guilty for my earlier mutterings on this blog. Let the record show: a cycle path in Ostfildern that has been cleared of snow.
My client lives on the other side of the village, on top of the valley. Of course. I needed all my concentration to get back up the hill so there are no pictures of that. I finished the appointment a bit early, which I thought was a bonus as it meant I could get back sooner, but then I got sandbagged by the sheer beauty of it all and kept stopping to take more pictures.
Xtra and snow. Another possible banner image
Having climbed out of the valley once I don’t really like doing it again, so I avoid the SHoD by riding back along a slightly longer but less strenuous route. The first part of the journey is through a planned town, and lo and behold, the cycleways were cleared again, (and, like Assen, clearing cycleways was given priority over side roads) I could have raced through with very little trouble, but the sun came out and it was just too beautiful to race through, so more photos.
Leaving town. Xtra seems happy on the snow
Back on the Feldwege, and onto packed snow. I thought this would be a get-off-and-push moment, but the Xtra just dug in and kept going. Except that the views kept seducing me. More pictures. By now the sun had come out, and this being Germany I was sharing the road with half of the population of Ostfildern, a lot of dogs and small children with sledges. I barely had a place to stop for a pee before a nordic walker came around the corner.
The Xtra seems to like packed snow when loaded: I thought it’d be a bit skittery with the weeks bread supply in the back, but it just powered on along the ridge road home. By now I was severely late, but if I’d rushed home then I’d have missed the suset at the top of this post, which added an extra layer to an already beautiful view of the village.
Come to think of it, I’d have missed that in a car as well…
[Thanks to David Hembrow for the title idea...]
Not this one...
Temperatures are running between -7 and -10°c. I realise that for some people that’s practically barbecue weather, but for south Germany it’s considered a bit nippy. I’m almost the only cyclist to be seen in Ostfildern (but not elsewhere, more on that later) and even the local bike shop is only open half the time. Brr…
So I was much cheered by these pictures by Nico, whose blog is about cycling and local cycle culture in his corner of North Germany. The first is this elegant green and yellow ladies city bike which if it was in the second-hand adverts in our bike shop, could tempt me as a steed for my wife, except that she’ doesn’t like the yellow on the mudguards, and it’d never manage the local hills anyway.
- …This one.
That bike, however, fades into the background compared this rolling piece of art. I really admire the style of someone who paints a bike like this, and the hours of work that went into making it so unique. It wouldn’t look out of place on a plinth. It probably has the added advantage of rendering the bike virtually unstealable, as it would be recognised by anyone locally. I’m not about to take a brush to the Xtracycle though.
On top of all this good cheer, Google dropped me a line to say that Urban Simplicity and The Hungry Cyclist linked to my tiny corner of blogdom, so thank you both. I’ll get a reciprocal sidebar link up when I have time…
Family transport step 1.
The boys favourite Christmas present was this pair of swept handlebars with cork grips on the end which I mounted on the Xtracycle. It’s a good job as it was probably the biggest present they got (the box was over a metre high). As eagle eyed readers will have already noticed, this was on the Xtracycle before Christmas day, but I’ve always been a bit bad at dates and anyway I had to put it in when I had workshop time. It’s getting lots of comment, not least from three lads who paused their football game to shout “Geil” (“Cool!”) as we passed, which made Eldest Son very happy.
The bar was from Ebay, cut down by 60mm each side (because otherwise the boys would have been spreadeagled like a driver of an extreme Harley) I fitted it using a standard 120mm mountain bike aheadset stem: thanks to David Hembrow for advising that this could work without a tandem-styled Stoker Bar. All the boys think this is the most awesome idea to hit transportation since… well, anything really, and every time I put a coat on a have a small shadow starts asking if I’m going somewhere by Xtracycle and if I’m open to passengers. Its a bit slower with a small person on the back, but who cares? it’s Daddy Time.
I also changed the front handlebar grips for a cork pair, just because the bike looked nice with matching grips. What’s happening to me? I think I’ve been reading Copenhagenize too long…
Cycling Video
January 4, 2009 in Bikes, Cycling, Stuff you can't do with a car, Sustainability, Transport, Trenchant comments about cars, Video | 4 comments
One of my favourite cycling videos which I recently rediscovered thanks to this link from David Hembrow. Apparently the text at the end says: ‘If we like cycling so much, why sit in traffic jams to go to work?’ I particularly like the fact the car is a BMW.
I’ll post about the (happy) ending to the broken Xtracycle story next week.