i really need to pay more attention. across several e-mail discussions regarding the possible review of a bicycle, i stupidly failed to notice that those discussions actually concerned a frame rather than a complete bicycle. the veracity of this self-inflicted idiocy transpired during the past week when an appropriately monogrammed box arrived at washingmachinepost croft. deliveries to the island can frequently be more complex than they are on the mainland, often resulting in any package having to survive several haulage depots before finding itself onboard a truck heading for the ferry queue at kennacraig. nonetheless, this particular card enclosure landed safely despite its perambulations.
though the joy of receiving bicycle bits, bobs and books for review has never diminished over the years, the size of the package under discussion seemed a tad on the small side to contain an entire bicycle. slicing through the tape revealed precisely why that was. having said that, this particular steel frame looks particularly impressive; when completed, this is the sort of bicycle that will turn heads in the sunday morning peloton and engender a smug insouciance across the visage of its rider.
however, the salient phrase in the paragraph above is when completed, for though the essence of the subsequent review will lean heavily towards that of the frame itself, in order so to do, it is rather obvious that componentry will require to be attached to allow appropriate forward pedalling motion. and that, boys and girls is where the dreaded procrastination enters the fray, leading to endless discussions with myself over quite what will decorate this delightful frame.
graciously, the supplier of said bicycle frame has offered to supply a cockpit kit consisting of bars, stem, seatpost and saddle, to which i am happy to add wheels from my not immodest collection in order to make it mobile. that leaves pretty much only the gearing to take care of and 'tis that which provides the bulk of a need for this discussion. despite my eminent status within the cycling media, keeping a quality groupset within the confines of the bikeshed for just such an occasion, is a box that has long remained unticked, so i now find myself in a quandary over just what should grace such finely honed steel.
though the manufacturer is apparently renowned for favouring the big s (and i don't mean sram), i have a distinct preference for the componentry emanating from vicenza. to paraphrase a former acquaintance who failed to grasp the meaning of political correctness, it's my blog and i'll do what i (bad word) like; campagnolo it is. but which one to choose?
i will spare you any transcript of my personal ruminations and the subsequent communications between self and vicenza's uk representatives, but i feel confident that at some point in the near future, this delectable bicycle frame will experience the luxury of an appropriately specced italian groupset. however, though all that i have described above would appear to be the very quandary that any member of the cognoscenti would revel in, unless you're one of those admirably decisive chaps or chapesses, i can rather see the attraction of purchasing a complete bicycle.
though i'll admit i have been less than transparent during this particular monologue, refraining from mentioning the origination of said frame, assuming all goes according to my non-existent plan, all will indeed be revealed within the next few weeks. because there's really nothing better than beginning the week with a soupcon of mystery.
don't you agree?
monday 28 august 2017
..........................................................................................................................................................................................................you may recall my paean to sven coppin's portent that his pathfinder light bicycle, a gravel bike by any other name, was the future. or to be a tad less dogmatic a future. the guise in which the bicycle arrived at washingmachinepost croft featured, amongst other desirable componentry, a sram cx1 setup, with a wide-range rival rear mech married to a white industries single ring chainset. in order that my huffing and puffing on the ascents are kept to an acceptable minimum, the eleven-speed cassette sports a comprehensive array of dinner plate sized sprockets. if push came to shove, i could probably ride up the side of my house.
however, taking sven's contention to its logical conclusion led me to posit that for the great majority of the velocipedinally inclined, owning a single frame such as the sven pathfinder and augmenting its versatility with a further two sets of wheels would convincingly diminish the number of bicycles in the bikeshed and ultimately eradicate velominati's rule#12; that the correct number of bicycles to own is n+1, where n is the number of bicycles you already own.
in order to test the veracity of coppin's claims and my resultant sycophancy, i had intended replacing the hope hubbed wheels with their 38mm tyres, with a set from larbert's wheelsmith, featuring rubber some ten millimetres narrower, but with a similarly minimal tread pattern.
though on last sunday's bike ride i rode the pathfinder with the supplied rubber, making a fine job (so i thought) of keeping up with the minimal peloton, i cannot deny that on occasion i had need of using a smidgeon more effort than this ageing physique was willing to suffer. the idea for this weekend, therefore, was to speed along islay's highways and byways on 28mm tyres, smugly not being dropped by my peers.
as you may have noted above, the pathfinder offers the luxury of a wide-range cassette actuated by a sram rival rear derailleur and though i feel my demands on narrower rubber would scarcely trouble those dinner-plate sprockets, just to keep everything in order, i planned on swapping the cassette from sven's wheels over to the wheelsmiths. which is where, you will be unsurprised to read, the problems began.
having checked that the pathfinder sports 160mm disc rotors front and rear and that the thru-axles were compatible, i swapped the incumbent 140mm rotor before removing the cassette for the swapover process. the first sign that all was not going to be well was the oddly splined nature of the inner face of the smallest sprocket. though the standard shimano pattern lockring remover fits perfectly well, unscrewing what i thought was the outer sprocket, turned out to be my unscrewing the entire cassette, revealing a sram xd compatible freehub attached to the hope rear hub.
though many of you will have seen this coming from a few paragraphs further north, in my uneducated innocence, i admittedly hadn't. ultimately, this meant that i had no cassette to pop onto the shimano/sram pattern cassette hub that featured on derek mclay's wheelsmiths. it is possible that the wheelsmith rear hub has a compatible xd freehub available, but foreseeing little in the way of greater need of such a device, i have opted to simply order a regular eleven-speed cassette, which will hopefully arrive before next sunday's ride.
and if you were in the vicinity of the croft on saturday morning around 9:30am, i apologise for the bad word i might have said out loud.
sunday 27 august 2017
.............................................................................................................................................................................................................so begins the slogan atop the cyclescheme website, but then continues "Our cycle to work scheme is not". comforting words, probably more pertinently directed towards the employer rather than the employee. for the now long-running scheme is designed to allow employees to purchase up to £1,000 worth of bicycle and accessories through their employer. so doing allows the former to pay the latter a monthly salary sacrifice and effectively hire their purchases over the course of a year.
once those twelve months are completed, you have the option to purchase the bike, with potential savings of between 25% to 39%. assuming you're happy with a bicycle of that value (and as quality bicycles increase in price, that might be a mitigating factor), it seems this could still be an ideal means of acquiring a more ecological form of transport than using the car and arguably cheaper than bus or train.
according to the cyclescheme website, when the payment period ends, the cycle can be purchased from your employer for a small additional fee; apparently a maximum of £70 if you chose the full £1,000 package. after a period of four years, your purchases become the employee's at no extra cost. using the basic cyclescheme calculator, on the national average salary of £26,000, if i spent the full £1,000 on bicycle and accessories, after one year i could have saved an admittedly rather paltry £70.
if, however, i opted to take ownership after four years, on the same initial outlay, i'd have saved a more impressive £250. despite one of the conditions to qualify for the tax exemption being that employees use the bicycle and accessories predominantly for journeys to work, at least two individuals of my acquaint who now own cyclescheme bikes, seemed rarely to ride their bikes at all, never mind to and from work.
at the end of the one year hire period, ownership of the bicycle reverts to cyclescheme. it's at that point the employee can opt to pay a one-off payment to transfer ownership to themselves, or make a one-off refundable deposit, continuing to use the cycle until it's four years old, when it becomes the employee's no matter what. quite what cyclescheme do with all the bikes that perhaps nobody subsequently wants, i really have no idea.
however, it transpires that those of us already in possession of the bike(s) of our dreams can also make use of the cyclescheme to outfit ourselves in grander style. or, assuming the initial hire period has come to a close, the eager employee can enter into another agreement and use the vouchers supplied by their employer to purchase rapha clothing.
imperial works has apparently been operating in conjunction with cyclescheme for a while. the company said "Rapha is keen on getting more people riding their bikes and now they can enjoy great savings on Rapha clothing through Cyclescheme (at least 25% but up to 40%). The scheme can also be used once a year, not just once in total."
naturally enough, this doesn't necessarily mean the acquisition of sportwool and lycra shorts. rapha offer a comprehensive city riding range, one that ought to fulfil the conditions of having the not so average employee riding to and from work with sartorial elegance for a few pennies less than the others in the traffic light queue.
i've asked around to enquire whether other cycling apparel purveyors do likewise, but at the time of writing, i still await enlightenment.
saturday 26 august 2017
..........................................................................................................................................................................................................on my first trip to portland, oregon in 2009, the folks at chris king were kind enough to lend a prototype of their all-steel cielo road bike as my mode of transport while in their fair city for a week. quite contrary to my experience of hotels in the uk, in order to keep the bicycle safe and secure for the duration of my visit, i nonchalantly wheeled the cielo into the elevator and kept it in the hotel bedroom. even when the bicycle was dripping wet, this seemed to elicit no disfavourable response from the girl at reception.
yet another notable difference between america and britain.
as part of my tour of the king manufacturing plant on north west nela street, i was shown the area where the cielo frames were tig welded and outfitted using stainless steel dropouts and seatstay caps, prior to being sent south for painting. on a second visit some three years later, the painting process had been moved in-house for both economic and pragmatic reasons and the range had been augmented with disc versions featuring carbon forks, subsequently shown in the uk at the annual bespoke handbuilt exhibition when it briefly moved from bristol to the olympic velodrome.
after that first instance, i had been fortunate to receive an all-steel cielo sent from portland, encased in a custom-made carton that project chief, jay sycip, had designed, inspired by the simplicity of apple computer's ipod packaging. despite an almost total absence of internal padding, the bicycle survived the vicissitudes of atlantic air travel and lengthy perambulations around much of scotland before arriving safely and unmarked on islay. that bicycle currently sits in thwashingmachinepost bike shed, replete with a pair of wooden rimmed wheels built by jude gerace of portland's sugar wheelworks.
i was therefore rather sad to learn earlier this week, that chris king had decided to indefinitely end production of all cielo models and concentrate on their core products: headsets, bottom brackets and hubs.
ironically, this was only a few days after the newly promoted rouleur executive editor, ian cleverly, had tweeted to ask if anyone knew of a uk repairer who could remove a dent from the top tube of his own cielo. the fact that said bicycle could perceivably have entered the realm of the collectable, subsequently made that request all the more pertinent. but did the end of frame production by one of portland's higher profile originals signal a deflation of the pacific northwest's framebuilding bubble?
ira ryan and tony pereira, two of the town's more prominent framebuilding individuals, combined forces a few years ago to form breadwinner cycles, invoking an economy of scale that enabled them to better supply the demand for their talents. hoping that the bubble wasn't about to burst, but having need of asking the question anyway, i contacted ira to ask if breadwinner was seeing what i had perhaps incorrectly assumed was a diminishing state of affairs.
"Breadwinner is doing well and we are growing slow and steady. It takes a lot of time and energy to keep pushing, but in the end it will be a good business."
the combination of ira and tony had always seemed one that was ultimately likely to happen, even in the days when they used to cycle between each others' workshops with a front rack festooned with frame components. however, in the face of ever improving production frames, a combination of skills was likely a very astute move.
"I do miss being a one man custom show in the garage, but that's how romanticism works right?"
however, maybe it's a naive assumption that simply because chris king is based in portland, any apparent downturn in the cycling cognoscenti's appetite for handbuilt frames could be solely affecting that particular city. i daresay that richard sachs needs no introduction to readers of the post, but now happily ensconced back in his original domicile of connecticut on america's east coast, i asked richard pretty much the same question as i'd asked his west coast counterpart. it's worth bearing in mind that a waiting list of several years has been oft attributed to the demand for a richard sachs frame.
"Business is fine; almost better than ever. I think the Cielo project had/has little to do with what the rank and file independent frame maker does."
according to richard, cielo frames didn't quite have the personality of a 'handmade' frame, but were a tad too different to be considered as 'production' units. "It's never safe in the middle."
the ending of cielo production is most likely an economic, if disappointing decision, but apparently not one that can be seen as an indicator of the state of portland's or america's handbuilt bicycle scene. i for one am sad to see cielo disappear from the market, but encouraged that others are still thriving.
richard sachs | breadwinner cycles
friday 25 august 2017
..........................................................................................................................................................................................................i had the dubious distinction yesterday morning of carrying the queen's baton for a moment or two on its lengthy journey to australia's gold coast in time for the 2018 commonwealth games. our local newspaper had invited nominations from the community as to who should have the honour of participating in the sole scottish island visit of this rather strangely shaped dod of wood and rather surprisingly, several folks nominated yours truly.
keen to prove to the commonwealth games representatives that their choice of hebridean destination was an astute one, a susbstantial proportion of the island's population had turned out in bowmore square, including pupils from all four primary schools, highland dancers, islay pipe band and more cameras and smartphones than could be seen at a digital gadget conference.
oddly and disappointingly, though the assembled nominees appear all to have been chosen through one aspect of their purported athleticism of one kind or another, when it came to myself and a girl from the leisure centre, there was only an xl and xxxl t-shirt remaining. guess who got the latter?
i mentioned all those cameras and smartphones for a reason (or two); facebook and twitter. it was a matter of mere minutes before embarrassing photos of a ponytailed yours truly clad in an enormous queen's baton t-shirt wandering aimlessly around bowmore square had appeared on both. mrs washingmachinepost seemed delightfully pleased that photos of her husband had been liked an apparently impressive number of times.
i, on the other hand, and probably quite ungratefully, couldn't have cared less.
for though i have the occasional moment on twitter, facebook is total anathema to me, as, indeed, is the facebook for cyclists; strava. more often than is likely to find favour with the masses, i have disparaged this velocipedinal social media, though i doubt i'm giving away secrets if i tell you that most of my stick poking is done with tongue firmly planted in cheek. at least so i thought until their latest missive arrived in my inbox.
strava's latest campaign (their word, not mine) is (and i quote) "...a direct call for athletes to be themselves, celebrate the inclusivity of sport, their hard work and reject the curation and negativity found on other social networks." analysis of this somewhat obscure statement implies that strava members, for all their k.o.m.s and sectors, are the paragons of social media virtue, less inclined to denigrate their virtual sparring partners than those allied with the little blue bird or the ubiquitous 'f'.
this well-meaning encouragement is further compounded by the contention that the platform shows "...the honest, supportive community that separates Strava from other social networks, and that sport has a powerful ability to unite different kinds of people in a time when little else can." my never-on-holiday cynicism has me wondering whether the stravalites in the boardroom are firmly entrenched in the late nineteen-sixties. it all seems perilously close to flower-power on a bicycle.
lest you consider that my inner victor meldrew has been given free reign, i offer the following quote from strava's vice-president of marketing, gareth nettleton. "There are two key insights that drove (this initiative), both inspired by what's wrong with the world lately. Firstly, we live in a terribly divisive time, and sport connects people across lines you might not expect. It is a positive, unifying force, and we want to shine a light on its power to bring people together."
one of my more pertinent observations across the many years that i have been proud to refer to myself as a cyclist, is that the majority tend to exhibit all the positive traits of individualism. in truth, that is almost a prerequisite, given that any tendency towards a sheep mentality would likely forbid the wearing of brightly coloured polyester or sportwool, along with close-fitting lycra shorts and clippity shoes rather early on a sunday morning. it has rarely, or ever, bothered members of the velo club, including myself, to climb the hill at foreland, roll back down and climb it again, repeating the exercise several times.
i'm sure many a bird-watcher has considered us slightly lacking in the grey matter department, but in the true spirit of apathy, i doubt many of us could care less. yet strava seems intent on unnecessarily reinforcing a glaringly obvious tautology by mentioning "Strava is a real, raw, very unfiltered (?) social network. We believe that people all over the world are exhausted by the pressure to always present a perfect, curated self on other social networks. So we wanted to make it very clear that Strava is a place to put it all out there and be yourself. Unity and acceptance - that's what this campaign is about."
i've searched the press release in vain for any mention of the simple joys of going for a bike ride, well away from the iniquities of social media.
ah, well.
thursday 24 august 2017
..........................................................................................................................................................................................................i may have read it in a coffee magazine (yes, such publications do exist) or it may have been included as a paragraph in one of the cycling media's more sociable features, but one way or another i gained the impression that a cycling café could scarcely live up to its portended existence unless a track-pump were made available for those in sore need of such facility.
yes, indeed and with legitimate conviction, we can argue over a cappuccino and carrot cake as to the merits or demerits of the range of designer coffees on offer. but other than a few obligatory cycling prints hanging from the wall and the compulsory framed and signed jersey, what else would make the difference between a café and a cycling café?
granted, there are examples such as sunderland's fausto coffee, the names of which leave potential customers in no doubt as to the café's heritage (always assuming the average northerner has the faintest idea who fausto was in the first place), but it would be highly iniquitous to denote the branch of costa coffee at the corner of sauchiehall street and cambridge street as a cycling café simply becasue i'd once read a few pages of procycling magazine while indulging in ritual froth supping.
needless to say, on having made myself aware of this compulsory requirement, i immediately (or a few days later), carried my spare track pump directly to debbie's where it currently resides to this day. i'd be fibbing if i were to inform you that it has become the lifeblood of the velo club, or even the saving of numerous hapless itinerant cycling visitors, but i do know that debbie's son removed the chuck in order to inflate his football.
islay, in keeping with many of the hebridean isles, has a long-standing reputation for assisting not only its own, but annual visitors with all manner of odd requests for help. rebuilding a sturmey archer rear wheel after the weight of an accordion caused it to collapse; providing directions to bowmore distillery while standing at the gates of bowmore distillery; i'm sure you know the sort of thing to which i refer. augmenting an avowed cycling café with a track pump truly seemed no different amongst the melée. after all, the filling station round the corner features an airline on its outer wall for the principal use of the motoring public.
to my receollection, no-one on the island has every felt it necessary to complain about the siting of such a facility.
which made it seem all the more unnecessary to read of brick lane's isambard cycles being threatened with a £100 fine for leaving a track pump outside the shop window for free use by those who may have need. it is, by now, a well-known and well-recounted story, but one placed in stark contrast by the legions of petrol stations who place considerably larger free-air facilities at their own premises. i'm well aware that these rarely, if ever, impede the unfettered progress of the pedestrian public, but it strikes me that even a top of the range silca track pump would be unlikely to be viewed as a health and safety hurdle by anyone other than tower hamlets council.
as a show of solidarity and to bring the point home that cyclists will continue to look after their own in the face of authoritarian adversity, perhaps it would be a neat idea if every bike shop in the uk were to also place a track pump at the service of the cycling public? i have little doubt that every decent bike shop in the world would be eager and willing to lend a pump to a cyclist in distress on their doorstep (and also that there may be certain neighbourhoods where leaving an unattended, though securely locked, track pump might not be the most judicious of choices), but it would be nice to pat ourselves on the back now and again.
wednesday 23 august 2017
..........................................................................................................................................................................................................despite the old adage that america and britain are two countries divided by a common language, it takes little in the way of cursory observation to note that such is scarcely the sole separator. for starters, the usa rides its bicycles on the wrong side of the road, they spell colour and several other words incorrectly and they have a president who seems a tad less popular now than he was prior to the vote. however, depending on your political persuasion, the same could likely be said about britain's prime minister. and i recall a phrase in the 1970s regarding the comparable music scene on both sides of the pond 'britain's where it's from, but america's where it's at' if that makes any sense in these days of music streaming services.
it would be something of a pointless exercise to continue listing differences between two substantially differing outposts of the same civilisation, but a possible corollary to my last remark concerning pop and rock music, would imply that what happens in the usa today will likely infiltrate british society tomorrow. rather obviously that's also an endlessly debatable point, if only because the differences are there for all to see. if only to underline one salient example, there's not a lot of baseball being played on this side of the atlantic.
but fitness is undoubtedly a concern for both brits and americans, with frequently similar means of achieving the honed physique, ranging from early morning jogging, to riding a bicycle, to nipping to the nearest leisure centre for a swim before or after work. on my sole visit to new york well over a decade ago, it was possible to observe legions of appropriately clad individuals sweatingly performing on running, rowing and cycling machines through the windows of numerous first floor gyms.
however, recently taking place in madison, wisconsin were the crossfit games, a competition to select the world's fittest man and woman. the term world's is often used in the manner of the baseball world's, despite participating teams originating solely from the 52 states. in this case, competitors did, in fact, originate from all across the planet, including the united kingdom.
competitions such as this are, in essence, nothing new; there have been similar contests all across the modern world, varying solely in the manner in which the winners are selected. this year's crossfit games apparently included, for the first time, a cyclocross competition, with participants riding hardtail mountain bikes around a barriered grass course. granted, any use of cleated shoes was eschewed entirely in favour of flat pedals and the riders could have been mistaken for the average jogger, had the bicycles not given the game away.
perhaps unsurprisingly, the course over which this form of cyclocross racing took place could scarcely be described as technical, but it did feature one or two obstacles forcing the riders to dismount and trudge forth with cycles in hand (so to speak). to paraphrase mr spock "it's cyclocross jim, but not as we know it."
those of us who believe we constitute the cyclocross cognoscenti would scarcely provide such whimsy with house room. whither those sven nys baseball caps and mouthfuls of frites and mayo in the face of such cycling trivia? but that would surely be to miss the point entirely; mistaking the pointing finger for the moon. there is many an individual who opted to adopt the bicycle as a means of getting to and from work and who now has a triumvirate of carbon fibre in the bikeshed and rides 100km every sunday morning.
perhaps we could take a leaf out of the north american handbook of sociable cyclocross and incorporate a similar style of event at regular 'cross meetings? or a separate entity altogether, entry open to anyone with a rideable bicycle. there's no real need to ally this to proper cyclocross; identifying it as an alternative to the ubiquitous jane fonda workout dvd, might just do the trick, a trick that involves an excellent means of getting fit by way of riding a bicycle.
just saying.
tuesday 22 august 2017
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