Month: December 2013

Return of the Turbot*

On By AlexIn Bikes, Mountain Bike Riding, Other stuff10 Comments
Crouching Badger, Hidden Terror

The fact this photo exists at all is no small miracle. Firstly because it’s taken by my good friend Martin who cannot count, amongst his many talents, any photographic ability whatsoever. This is his first recorded image where both wheels have been in the same shot. And the riders head is a lucky bonus. Secondly that setting sun had been well hidden behind a curtain of rain driven sideways by gale force winds for most of the day.

A small window of riding opportunity opened up between getting wet and going dark, so we jumped right through it. The rain may have stopped but the wind was still brisk enough to have us seek shelter under the muscley shoulders of the Malvern Hills. The first descent through the storm blown treeline was an exercise in amused terror. Terror because of the rain-slicked service offering grip levels between variable and none, amusement because Martin as designated ‘grip tester’ was lamenting his decision to stick with a balding rear tyre.

Stick isn’t the right word really. Because it wasn’t sticky at all – more sashaying in a parabolic arc in an attempt to inform the desperate rider that all was not well out back. Except for the bloke a bit further out back displacing his own traction issues by simple dint of laughing at Martin’s predicament. Ten minutes earlier, I really hadn’t been keen to ride at all. Too cold, a bit hungover, concerned the mech bodge was merely repressed exploding metal, and a bored of the slop and the grime.

Ten minutes after that, with views opening up over the Black Mountains on one side and the Cotswolds on the other, there was nothing which could have bettered it. Riding back on some of my favourite trails and reacquainting myself with the joys of the sorted hardtail, the climbs passed quickly enough and the descents were desperately funny tip-toeing between every corner feeling for grip and ready to catch the inevitable slide. It was the opposite of fast, clean fun and all the better for it. The essence of why we ride mountain bikes can be distilled from the feeling of riding crazily slippy dirt on engineering masterpieces with your friends.

Which isn’t something so easily attained when natural trails are replaced by those made especially for us. For a while, I’ve been a bit snooty and dismissive of trail centres – some of which is because there is so much brilliant riding to be had not graded and signposted. But it’s a bit more than that.

As the sun fell behind the mountains to the west, my dislike of trail centres found something more rationale than ‘well it’s not proper mountain biking is it?‘. That’s a lazy curmudgeon view of MTB ghetto’s which offer weather independent fun and year round ridability. The first trail centres – before the Forresty Commission got wind of their financial prospects – felt like the best natural singletrack but cleverly engineered against erosion and decay. The final descent on the Wall, Sidewinder and Dead Sheep Gully at Afan, the original beast at Coed Y Brenin, Heartbreak Ridge at Kirroughtree and many more were absolutely worth the drive and price of entry.

The new stuff tho – all rollers, massive berms and so industrially created leave me cold. They seem carved unsympathetically out of the hillside and don’t feel natural at all. Maybe trail centres have moved on and I’m stuck in the past, maybe I just don’t ride them fast enough, maybe this new stuff is what the majority of trail centre riders want. Whatever, it isn’t for me, and sitting on my bike atop the Worcester Beacon ready to chase the sun home, a second conclusion was belatedly reached.

Virtually ever minute I spend on a bike is a good one. But the absolute best ones have always been in the middle of bloody nowhere, not quite sure what might be coming next, no idea when we’re getting home and only a vague one of which way it might be. More of that please – 2014 shall be the year of ‘Adventuring by Bicycle’.

Probably need a new bike for that I would have thought?

* not the mythical missing Star Wars episode, more a bike handling approach when slithering through tyre deep mud.

There’s a word that rhymes with farce

On By AlexIn Bikes, Mountain Bike Riding, Photography8 Comments
That’s a custom option… not.

And that is, of course, arse. Up there is the result of the ‘sacrificial‘ mech hanger letting go on yesterdays’ ride. This lump of engineering genius is carefully designed to shear under extreme load, thereby saving the more expensive things it bridges between. Those things being the rear mech and the frame, so a sensible solution to the real world problem of rotational torque being transferred in potentially damaging directions. Splendid idea. Well done.

The OED tells us that sacrificial can best be defined as ‘an act of giving up something valued for the sake of something else regarded as more important or worthy‘. In this case a£500 frame and a£60 mech. Definitely more worthy and important than a fivers worth of pressed aluminium. However brilliant the idea, functionally the mech hanger has some shortfalls, namely 1) the mech was twisted beyond use and 2) it attempted to eat the frame during the snapping process.

I discovered this only today after removing around a metric tonne of Forest Mud from the bike. At the time, my mighty-thighs(tm) were attempting to generate sufficient momentum to propel rider and bike through yet another sticky mess on the trail*. There was the briefest noise of tortured metal giving up followed by a lose of drive and a feeling of flappage out back.

I can only assume the volume of mud and grit in the mech had created some kind of sideways load best thought of as catastrophic. The sheared hanger split took the easiest path the freedom which was sadly through the back of the dropout. However, my initial concern was the exact whereabouts of the spare. That was closely followed by the realisation that I have never purchased a spare in the first place.

Helpful suggestions from my riding buddies included creating a bastard single speed of the remaining working parts. This feels similar to suggesting a man with a sprained ankle could best manage the pain by hacking his entire leg off. Before I was able to articulate my hatred of all things one geared, Haydn magnificently brought forth his own perfectly fitting spare. Sometimes it’s good to ride the same bike as your mates. Especially if they’ve got some concept of what useful spares might actually be worth carrying.

A quick swap and we were on our way with most of the gears sort of engaging in a non indexing manner. After a fabulous downhill run to Coffee and Cake, an emergency fettle, involving the lost art of mech bending, restored shifting harmony. That lost art by the way involves chanting the mantra ‘please, please don’t break the mech‘ while shutting your eyes and leaning heavily on the innocent component. All good, another 30k of mud and fun before a quick beer nearly benighted us.

Until this morning. Much grumpiness. Mech is beyond help and has been thrown into the overflowing ‘drawer of expensive broken metal things that might one day magically fix themselves‘, frame has been photographed, prodded and poked and is waiting for Cy from Cotic to come back off hols to give his professional opinion. Less professional opinions suggest ‘it’ll be fine‘, ‘hit it with a hammer‘ and ‘hand it over to a man with a welding torch’. All of these these things may come to pass, but for the moment I’ve bolted on a new mech and left well alone.

In the last ten days since my miraculous recovery from plague**, I’ve rediscovered a few things. My Cross Bike is fab, there is much singletrack to find and link up within the radius of this confused bicycle, I really don’t like trail centres much and riding in the slop can be good fun. If only as an appetiser to Spring.

Tomorrow will probably be the last ride of the year. Just short of 4000 kilometres on the mountain bike. Just short of 150km on the road bike 😉 That feels about right.

* not THAT kind of sticky mess. I always find the best way to get through that is to store it on my shoe.

** Self diagnosed. Pretty sure I was close to death on occasion. Not a widely shared opinion in the Leigh household.

Rise of the machines

On By AlexIn Other stuff, PhotographyLeave a comment
We may be going to the moon

In the halcyon days where being a proper northerner was as much as an attitude as a calling, we drank tea. There were no variants. Fruit was never involved. At no point would one enquire of a fellow Yorkshireman if his warmed beverage of choice should contain hints of jasmine*. We believe Earl Gray was the posh (k)nob in the manor house, and tea was only considered ready when the stirring spoon no longer moved and those from over the border were passing out on a tannin overdose.

Yes we had tea and it had a name. Tetley. Some arty types waxed lyrical over other brands available in that London and such like. But for a kid in the 70s, it was a Tetley teabag per person and about 9 for the pot. Unless Grandma hobbled into the kitchen where we’d dig out the stale tea leaves. There’s much to say about a simple life where the choice of drinks was basically Tea, Water, Beer or – if it was summer and you’d been good – watered down orange squash.

The concept of coffee was not one welcomed in the Leigh household. But by degrees, I abandoned my tea drinking birthright first at polytechnic necking gallons of instant supermarket filth during caffeine fuelled attempts on assignment deadline day. Then many months in the US brought forth the joy of the ever-full filter jug and the first hit of ‘proper’ coffee served up by a man calling himself a barista allegedly skilled in the dark italian arts of coffee perfection. Obviously being American they felt the urge to offer it a) without any actual caffeine and b) topped with chocolate, nuts and squirrel poo**

So bang up to date having abandoned my northern tea drinking credentials through dint of an unbreakable caffeine addiction, I invested in one of those Italian machines somehow magically turning beans into body-jolting java. It came with a level of niche much mined on those specialist internet forums where the apparently sane argue violently about the exact grinding to milk co-efficient. First time in there, I wasn’t quite sure what I’d stumbled into. There wasn’t a second time.

It’s like bikes, radio control gliders and all sorts of other stuff where I’m a big fan of the product but I couldn’t going a flying fuck about the process to create it. This didn’t stop me being sucked in (the language of proper coffee is amusing, grinding, foaming, pressing, etc. I even find myself sniggering when reading the word pumping) into pointless purchases of paraphernalia guaranteed to improve my ‘coffee drinking experience’. My accessory count ran to both manual and electric grinders (fnar), air-sealed tins, heritage tampers and all manner of cleaning attachments. The horror of ‘back flushing’ became part of my world. All of this expense, research and effort resulted in the creation of mediocre but now even more overpriced coffee.

And the faff. Fire up the machine, wait for the tiny boiler to heat a similarly tiny amount of water or explode – whichever came first. Find coffee beans, grind coffee beans, extract from grinder and tip a shaky handed approximation of your morning medicine into the waiting thingy. This is the kind of technical vocabulary that’s served me well on those coffee obsessed forums. Tamp the coffee down with just sufficient force to ensure the pressurised flow runs through the whole malarky at at rate somewhere between dirty water and gritty raw coffee. Fuck about a bit longer, press a button, achieve disappointment. Spend hours cleaning up.

Enough. Really. Obsessed as I am over getting a proper hit first thing in the morning, it’s time to find a solution that’s better than me faking it, taking half the time and sod the expense. An expense I was happy to discover could be simply mitigated by pretending it was a company purchase, which put me in the slot a proper machine where beans when in one end and awesome coffee turned up at the other. With absolutely no user interaction. Goodbye tedium, hello nirvana.

I even read the manual although faded out when faced with about five pages detailing the operation of the cappuccino steamer much struck through with ‘danger of burning’. I assumed any use of the ‘milky wand’ would leave me holding said attachment with a blackened claw or the house would be burning down. So instead we turned the monster on whereupon much scary noise was emitted from various lightly armoured parts, liquid was ejected, lights flashed and then a blissful quiet was augmented with a single green button waiting to be pushed.

I pushed it. More noise from the internal constipated plumbing and then rich, gorgeous coffee expelled into the waiting cup. I tried it again with EXACTLY the same result. This never was the case with my ham fisted efforts at a repeatable process. I kept pressing the button and great coffee kept appearing in my mug. And the whole messy buggering cleaning routine is now encased in the machine needing emptying about once a week. Which incidentally is about the period of time I didn’t sleep after my initial experiment of drinking about a 100 cups of eyeball popping coffee.

And yet in the same way our Mielewashing machine attempted to annexe the fridge, there’s a nagging doubt this machine is far too complex and clever for the mundane act of serving me up much needed wake up juice. ThereforeI wouldn’t be surprised to see it hover unsteadily above the worktop before blasting through the roof and accelerating into a lunar orbit.

Until then, it’s my most favourite new thing. And it sits on top of the beer fridge. Feng Shui for those of Northern Persuasion.

* Unless you were prepared to deal with a response where a rather firmer enquiry would demand to know if your face needed to contain a knuckle sandwich.

** I may have made this bit up. But I was deeply suspicious of a coffee bean floating unwanted in the top of my drink