Category: Bikes

Tens of thousands of words and the odd blurred picture of fast moving vegetation rehashing one of two tenuous threads. Spliced together using random punctuation and alcohol.

Morning blues

On By AlexIn Bikes, Pretentious nonsense, Road Riding5 Comments

Step carefully into the darkness. Grope for a frosty door guarding the entrance to the hard transport option. Shiver and fumble, with cold fingers, for riding gear. Add an extra layer and wheel out into the pre-dawn light. Clip in and fire shotgun audio – bang, bang – into the still of an icy world.

Crank carefully on white roads. Imagine a painful future through squirming tyres. Feel the freezing sizzle of 23c of slick on nature’s glass. Then, carefully risk upping the power needed to heat freezing extremities. Watch a crescent of fiery orange imperceptibly ascend over the low hills. Marvel as the layers of primary colours – reds and blues – push back the night.

Frozen water from autumnal storms forms winter crop circles. Long shadows are cast from bovinely stupid but contextually perfect cattle. Stop, dismount, abandon the bike to spiders busily icing Mandelbrot patterns. Marvel at this planetary show of fire and ice, until freezing hands and leaving trains drive you on.

Snick a couple of gears. Pity those unknowing stuck behind airbags and fiddling with heater controls. Sweep into the station and catch a little slide on untreated tarmac. Ignore the warmth of a stuffy waiting room. Grin at a hundred identical city coats and useless patent gloves.

Feel the morning blues. And reds – freezing fingers and hot blood mirror the colours of the sky. Stand on the platform now, savour the feelings of being warm and worthy. Remember why you ride a bike. Smile.

And as if by magic…

On By PhotoIn Bikes, Photography3 Comments
Voodoo Wanga, originally uploaded by Alex Leigh.

… the bike frame appeared. Well not actually appeared as Teleporting is still a young science. But an almost unheralded advantage of silly one geared bikes is how quick they are to build. I accept this doesn’t make up for their many disadvantages, but work with me here.

90 minutes from bare metal to beer medal. This included Helicopter tape that didn’t stick and a three bike brake bodge after some otherwise lovely 2nd hand stoppers were missing in action. Or possibly Acton from where they were sent.

Even a brief ride – in the pitch black that is wintry mid afternoon – revealed a frisky persona mated to a Tigger like springiness. Whereas the Love/Hate felt solid and all a bit GRRRRR, the Voodoo is all skippy and fleet of wheel. It’s light too 🙂 Still after the love/hate, fitting casters to the barn and pushing that would probably qualify for such a description.

Obviously, my level of riding skill transcends geometry, frame material and component choice. But now I can be rubbish in a fetching shade of red.

Downsides? Apart from missing 26 gears? The disc hose flays around the top tube as an angry python, for which a superglue solution awaits. And worryingly, the full complement of brackets, flanges and associated paraphernalia for full gear transformation are all present.

Which means conversion to a proper bicycle is possible come trails above the water table. Let’s not go there eh? Not while I’m still clinging onto this sacrificial testicle.

Wang! A…

On By PhotoIn Bikes, Mountain Bike Riding, Photography3 Comments
Wang! A, originally uploaded by Alex Leigh.

.. noise heard as the slapping of the prudence ruler connects with the face of the monetary blind. The complexity of a chain of correlated transactions involving frames owned but not bought, a road train of wheels and sufficient brakes to stop the world, cannot be easily explained.

All I am prepared to say – until the lawyer from the Enron trial comes on shift – is that this financially neutral covenant dovetails perfectly with a bicycle purchasing policy that is far too clever for mere mortals to understand.

Including me. Although my head is still spinning from removing the three ride new* singlespeed freewheel from its threaded prison. Great design in that it affixes itself ever more firmly to the wheel every time your turn the pedal. Making it an absolutely bugger to remove – honestly it’d be quicker to wait the few millennia for the surrounding components to rust away.

I’ve never seen the vice flex before, as I hauled on the wheel in the manner of a hairpin facing bus driver before the advent of power steering. And when the workbench began to twitch, so did I with the world rapidly slipping from focus.

First rule of committed physical tasks – remember to breathe. Second rule, consider the effect of potential energy as – with a satisfying ‘paaatang‘ – the sprocket is freed with a final violent wrench. I found myself turning perfect circles in an increasing ripple of perambulation.

My ‘Dancing with the Wheels’ foxtrot came to a painful end as the radius of my spin intersected with a spikey workstand. Didn’t stop me performing a little encore running around the barn – freewheel held aloft – chanting “got you, you little bastard, who’s the daddy now?”

I am now faced with a choice. Stalk Ernie the Postie on Friday and rush the build knowing I’ll probably need to remove/sell/rehome about half the components or wait and do the job properly. Oh yeah, fridge some beers and set the grinder to stun, we’re going in.

In almost related news, we’re having a frank and open discussion around sizes of things. Carol wants me to have a smaller one that’s easier for her to manoeuvre, while I’m keen on something both longer, wider and with a bit more grunt.

Once I accept that Camper Vans for driving around New Zealand are not scaled up mountain bikes, I’m sure we’ll come round to her way of thinking.

* It’s important to distinguish between “old and worn out” and “new and knackered” because the former adheres to some quality standards whereas the latter satisfies the modern law of cheap, shit, useless; pick 3.

Hold the front page

On By AlexIn Bikes6 Comments

See that post down there? It out of date by exactly one bike. This absolutely is not my fault although any help you can offer to counter the argument “When we booked to go to NZ, you promised not to buy any more bikes” would be appreciated. Right now I’m going with “I forgot” but it’s a bit thin.

I am clearly a proper cod in need of battering. But – in my defense – I was about pay the fella who generously lent me Verty Heft some months ago. But, in a never to be repeated planetary alignment, the tractor beam that is Sideways Cycles pulled in my feebly resisting wallet with an offer that no sane man could refuse.

No sane man who doesn’t value his testicles anyway.

So when the option is between saving a few quid, making good on a deal with a mate and working a bit harder on the hills, against spunking/wasting/profligately hosing investing a small sum on a super light and frisky frame, predictably I capitulated.

I’m sure it’ll be fine though. I’ve asked Tim to package in the shape of an interesting Christmas present for Carol, bribed posty to sneak it round the back and popped round the local sports shop for a cricket box.

It’s going to be fine. Isn’t it? 😉

Measurement

On By PhotoIn Bikes, Mountain Bike Riding, Photography, Pretentious nonsenseLeave a comment
Moto Parker, originally uploaded by Alex Leigh.

The earth may have turned seven times but not much has changed. Another idiotic charge into waterworld, another joust with tractionless roots, hub deep mud and all-body immersing puddles. Still stupid, still fantastic but it got me thinking about how we slice time.

Before global warming, we had 1976. No rain for approximately ever, creepy spires steepling skywards through a glassy Ladybower reservoir, baked earth, parched vegetation and – if you are 9 years old – just bloody fantastic. That summer never seemed to end; oh you sort of knew that at some far future point, a return to school awaited. But you didn’t care because every day was a voyage of discovery, finding stuff, making stuff, learning stuff, bonding friendships. And it felt like it would go on for ever.

That’s not how life works now. I measure stress levels by the weight of the bottle recycling and general job busyness by the increasingly frenzied scrawl, which is beginning to resemble an inky spider performing an operatic death scene.

It’s a far cry from living for the moment, greeting each day as an adventure that has yet to start, and dreaming of how tomorrow might be even better. Age may allegedly bring many things but long term memory is not one of them. Years coalesce into non sequential events, time compresses everything that is important into flickery thumbnails.

Here’s an example – what happened to the summer pf 2007? Except that we never had one. Good Metrological answer but it is not the one I was looking for. I accept the climate of this low lying windswept island is basically different temperatures of rain but that’s not the point.

So what is? Maybe nothing more than an realisation that there is nothing penultimate about this life. And this must be the hazy rationale to why saying Yes is suddenly very important. Yes to riding in all weathers, yes to reading with your kids, yes to finding time to have a beer with your mates, yes to stuff that is contextually stupid but life affirmingly brilliant.

And No too. 10 days without beer made the nights slow like summers of old but lordy how keen was I do say Yes to everything else. Although I accept I may have misinterpreted the amorous signals of next doors dog. I’m coming to a reluctant conclusion that alcohol – lovely as it is – is not a substitute for real life. A bit like computers, blogs and pointless internet surfing really.

It’s funny really – many people try and alter their personal history so they are venerated when they die. That bothers me not at all; all I want is to do everything today and then the same tomorrow and the day after that. I’m absolutely fine with mediocrity but it has to be mediocrity with style.

Look I’m over 40. This gives me rights to naval gaze occasionally 😉

Yes, Yes I know…

On By AlexIn Pretentious nonsense, Site StuffLeave a comment

… I promised to swear my through an accident which bothered me less for what happened to me, but way, way more on the way it was met by a total lack of humanity from those who put the ignore into ignorance. But I’m waiting to see if it may still have a slightly happy ending. Which’ll please my mum who – because all mothers support their kids even when they have forgotten why – reads the blog and finds the swearing a bit offensive.

It would please me too as the incident messed with my version of reality, to an extent that I wonder if I’ll ever properly understand it. And you can judge if this is merely pretentious overreaction when I finally get round to writing it up.

As for the many other articles airily promised, but never delivered, over the last two years, the 22 dusty items in my drafts folder should give you some idea of the chances they have of every electronically coming to life. Snowball and Hell come to mind. I like to think of it as harsh editorial standards but really I just can’t be arsed to finish them.

And there’s something else. In January, the Hedgehog will be limping into a frankly unbelievable third year. In that time there have been tears, occasional laughter and a string of rubbish photographs. And while my ability to carry on writing it is almost as infinite as your patience for reading it, there are things afoot. Or possibly apaw.

But I’m fairly certain – for a given value of certain – that we may have to pickle the old fella for a while. And it’s odd that I care because long ago, I convinced myself stuffing the ‘hog was written for the enjoyment of trying to be clever, rather than any reflected ego in all of you reading it.

Might have been kidding myself then. Anyway – even by my loquacious standards – I have rambled enough tonight. Fear not, I’ll provide a plethora of links to funny people who will amuse you for far longer than I can. And while you’re doing that, I’ll burrow on with the secret project to see if it can ever crawl out of the burrow.

And no, it’s not a collection of mixed metaphors. But thanks for asking.

EDIT: The reason this post was pulled a couple of times – for those utilising the magic of the RSS feed – was because I was concerned it was self referential BS. In face, I’m still pretty sure it is, but if we’re mixing those metaphors on the great decks of pretension, it seemed important to draw an electronic line in the sand. Or something. Right, glad that’s cleared it up 😉

Somedays I hate my Inbox

On By PhotoIn Bikes, Mountain Bike Riding, Photography2 Comments
Queen Charlotte Ride, originally uploaded by Alex Leigh.

As head slopper-outer of the dark and fetid corners of other peoples’ inbox’s, I feel I am suffering enough. But what – you may well ask – is my reward for this tireless mopping up such a litany of disasters? A thankful pat on the shoulder, perhaps? A kind word to still my weary angst?

Not a bit of it, that picture is what. Time differences with our antipodean cousins ensure that this image is projected up front and personal in my to do list. It was captured and digitally flung across the electronic oceans by my friend Doug. The fact he was just off the ferry on the South Island and heading into 100k of New Zealand’s best singletrack didn’t exactly make me feel better.

On the upside, in ten weeks we’ll be enjoying a similar view with – oh please let it be so – similar summer weather. On the downside, the world outside our door appears to have exploded. My commute is now jauntinally nautical with storm force gusts and horizontal rain.

I no longer corner, I tack. Tomorrow I may have a go at jibbing although I’m not absolutely sure what is involved in that procedure. Sounds vaguely sexual “Yes indeedy, I gave the wife a damn good jibbing last night“.

Right I’m off to baton down the hatches and splice the mainbrace. But in a contemporary twist, I shall be using powertools.

Hope Clings Me Spurnal*

On By PhotoIn Bikes, Mountain Bike Riding, Photography2 Comments
Love Hate. Sums it up really, originally uploaded by Alex Leigh.

You may think – and the weight of evidence would be with you – that this blog is nothing more than a barren wasteland of desperate words, with occasional punctuation helicoptered in. And yet in a circumstances as mitigating as “it was dark, I was drunk, how was I supposed to know it was your sister?”, I offer up the post title as testament to the unheralded research and grinding attention to detail each article undergoes.

What are the chances of a rhyming quadlet** segueing from Alexander Pope*** to a braking system design to erode momentum regardless of lever position? Not bloody likely and that’s pretty much my purchasing attitude to any further products from that fabrication shed nestling in the Derbyshire hillside.

For those of you not afflicted with the incurable disease of mountain biking, Hope Technology produce all manner of interesting components including brakes with a default position of always on. No amount of shimming, swearing, beating with a mallet or – in desperation – prodding with a baked Spurnal (Capital Letters Fully Deserved) will release the needy pads from the spineless discs.

And while squeezing the brake lever does force the Vichy caliper to collaborate with the overrun pistons to bring a final ‘halt‘ to proceedings. This loftily assumes you are still in motion at this point, rather than resting quietly in a bush awaiting the arrival of an oxygen tent. El Verty Monstromo was pitched into the muddy bath of Chiltern trails after a week of rain. From which it emerged a couple of hours later fairly plastered – a state its’ rider was now thinking of as much needed therapy.

The retarded rotation made the climbs a little harder, the descents less freewheel friendly and the occasional flat bit rather overwhelming. The mud didn’t help much. Or the cold. Or my frankly whiny attitude brought on by the mardy realisation that everything brake fixing was not about my person. Still with the gurning, swearing and grunting, there wasn’t much room for it.

It was still great though. Frosty in the first half, wearyingly thawing in the second, my pal Dave and I romped over some favourite trails knowing that twelve hours of drinking lay ahead. A 40th birthday bash which passed from drunken into legend – around 8pm – when the band struck up with “You’ve lost that loving feeling“. Too damn right, plus any feelings of maturity, responsibility and balance.

I don’t remember much but that may not be enough to protect me from the advances in digital photography. I might as well give myself a kick in the Spurnals and wait for the worst.

* Spurnal (Spur-nl). Noun, Verb – eld -ing or led.
1. A little known vegetable found only in Yorkshire. EX: He was found dead hanging by the spurnels.
2. A now defunct Irish sport derived from the petting small furry animal and gailic football.
3. A disc, specifically a steel braking surface for a mountain bike
4. A lie.

** I’m on a ROLL here.

*** This one is true I promise.

Divide and Conquer

On By AlexIn Bikes, Mountain Bike Riding9 Comments

Citizens of Singlespeed world(tm) don’t really have much truck with reasoned debate. From the lofty high ground of the morally authentic, they are right and you are wrong. So not content with sneering at your geared weakness, they lampoon the physical frailty of those not residing in the land of the smug.

And because most residents of this world have OCD*, a certain mental rigidity defines the magic ratio of their official transport icon. Simply divide the tooth count on the front ring by two and you have your rear sprocket size. But even in the fundermentalist religion of 2:1, some worship at the altar of 32:16, some 34:17 and a few rebellious fanatics preach the righteousness of 36:18.

Thankfully I am merely wintering in Singlespeedworld on a three month Visa. So I can break the lore, and after four eye popping, knee crunching, arm wrenching rides on 2:1, it became obvious that I needed too. While searching for a new sprocket, a random forum post proclaimed that 34:18 was the “Gear Of Champions“. I almost missed this shard of heathen light, darkened as it was by the unicogged jihad insisting all that was required was to “toughen the fuck up”

Sod them, fit that lovely big sprocket. And then ride a route to which the night brings a host of interconnected “evening bridleways” into play. This was a copy of a loop ridden earlier in the week, so granting a reasonably scientific back to back test of different ratios. First time out, the hills hurt just too much and, on occasion, I was forced to engage the 32inch pushing gear. Last night – after a day of miserable drizzle – it was a little sloppier, the roots a lot slippier but the climbs significantly easier.

Rather than approaching each long pull back up the hill with weary wretchedness, I have begun to quietly enjoy the challenge. Better still this extended jaunt into the vale of silliness reminded me that Mountain Biking is a four season sport, and that long, cold evenings are perfect for night riding on cheeky trails.

But when the days finally lengthen and the trails return to hardpack, everything with gears will waken from winter hibernation. Anyway I fully expected to be deported back to GearWorld(tm) once a proper singlespeeder reports me for riding on the – slightly wussy – Gear Of Champions

*One Cog Disorder

The power of three

On By PhotoIn Bikes, Other stuff, Photography2 Comments

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2100/2038181862_300740004b.jpg?v=0

In terms of three great rides, three crushing disappointments and a third time lucky. And what relation does the image have to this gruesome threesome? Absolutely nothing other than I like it in a vanity publishing kind of manner. Taken by Simon on the Seb Rogers photo course. Even with his skills, my short legs, long arms, big arsed riding position puts one in mind of a balding orang-u-tang surprised by a bicycle.

It’s something I’ve been working on. Anyway enough of that and more of this. An appointment with a night of liver damage hurled me back smack bang, dead centre of the commuting rat race. Despite being twenty minutes late, the delayed train failed to collect its’ missing carriages, so depositing me betwixt a door sized suitcase and a women of similar volume. All of us pressed into the luggage racks because the upstream passengers had blockaded the normal seating areas and wore the determined expressions of those prepared to violently repel borders.

Time passed slowly as weapons grade body odour combined in a toxic mash-up slowly – but painfully – crisping my nasal nerve endings. The bump’n’grind of irritated people armed with sharp executive luggage forced me into displacement activity that referenced a certain ironic tautology. You see, I’ve been thinking, when people get really, really fat traditional measurements of weight lack a certain wow factor. 150 kilograms sounds like it might be a fair heft and yet a naval tweak could substitute a ship measuring Draft. “Yes she’s displacing about four fathoms unladen. Add the weight of lunch and you’ve got some tonnage there“. No one could read that without knowing for sure they were dealing with a proper fat bastard.

Squeezing out onto the platform before I could verbalise my contribution to the field of weights and measures, a small maintenance task stood between a non bikey me and the grimy den of the tunnel rat. This replacement of the frame based lock lost during “The Trafalgar Incident” should have taken two minutes. The reason that some twenty minutes I was left swearing at fifteen quid of broken tat is simply explained. The manufacturer slyly retains the name and description of a product while cheapening the manufacturing process by a factor of about 3. The lock casing had already broken on a first release before a second attempt snapped off the plastic key. The “one size fits all” frame mount combined a cheap plastic shell with a rough machined rotating spindle. I think you can probably guess what happened next.

A slight modification of the useless mounting system saw more and more fixing cable trapped inside the housing. Just at the point it may have gripped the frame tube, the whole thing exploded, showering innocent commuters with plastic shrapnel. By this time, the bike was at the epicentre of a multi-tool wielding lunatic, swearing at the greed of product managers and dispatching the ruined remains of this plastic shit to four corners of the platform. I was lucky not to be shot by the trigger happy police on patrol.

Because no day can pass without an extra special disappointment, a stapled note demanded re-registration of the bike because “the bike racks are overcrowded because of the number of abandoned cycles“. This is the kind of twisted logic which explains “the train is overcrowded this morning because we have too many passengers for the carriages”. As if in some deranged schism of reality , THIS IS OUR FAULT. The racks ARE overcrowded because – and I know this is hard for Chiltern Railways to understand – because there are NOT ENOUGH OF THEM. Really, that’s it. Invest the officious record collecting effort into a few more stands. How can anyone be that impossibly dim?

So after a cattle based travel experience, an unsuccessful wrestle with the cheapest shit ever made by man and, prolonged exposure to an organisation that would much rather passengers bought a ticket but didn’t bother turning up, I was grumpily dispatched to the fetid underworld of the tube.

The experience was – possibly – even worse than the last time being squeezed and randomly assaulted formed part of my travel plans. In fact, so disgusting and dirty was it down there, my return trip was taken by shoe. Four miles, three parks, one hour – nowhere near as good as a bike but several million percent better than the pit of doom.

And although significant beer did form a major part of an increasingly blurry evening, I triumphantly avoided the de-rigour masturbationary train wreck that is the East London strip club. It has not always been thus. It seems, in a week of threes, I’ve learned that commuting without bikes is bad, large corporations care only for profit not customers and, paying a tenner for some bored modelling failure to wave her tits in your face is really not for me.

Stuff then, that I actually already know. Age does not bring wisdom, it merely reinforces your preconceptions.