Combing my hair….

Have got my Brompton up and running and am now officially in training for the World Championships. I am riding for the Barnsley Hospice A Team. It has not been explained to me whether the ‘A’ stands for Ancient or Ace. If you feel so inclined you can find more about the team and sponsor us here

One of the things I so like about riding a bike is that it is a personal experience but at the same time inherently sociable in a way that driving a car never could be. Arriving at Sheffield Station yesterday morning I was asked by another cyclist what I thought about the Brompton. Tim, a fellow member of Cycle Sheffield, told me he was thinking about getting a folding bike and had narrowed it down to a Brompton or a Bike Friday Tikit and what did I think?

Now given I have two and a half years of riding Tikits and over 2000 miles in the legs and one afternoon (25 miles) and yesterday (8 miles) on the Brompton there is no way I could make an even handed comparison, but I have already spotted a number of differences, advantages and disadvantages.

Focusing on the positives:

The Brompton

Folds smaller and the head tube feels more secure than the hyperfold Tikit
Is potentially lighter than the lightest Tikit
Is less expensive than the Tikit (in the UK at least)

The Tikit

Folds faster (but there is not a lot in it) and doesn’t move the saddle height or alignment when it folds
Rides better – in part this is down to the fact it is available 3 sizes and the fact that you can adjust handlebar height and stem length to get an optimal position
Uses more standard components, so is more readily upgradable – the Tikit’s choice of 8 speed Alfine hub and 8 speed derailleur are markedly better than the Brompton 6 speed set up

Are these differences significant? On balance I favour the Tikit and if buying new today would probably go for the impulse fold (which uses a twiddly knob to secure the headtube) rather than the hyperfold. However if space was at a premium I could see a strong argument for the Brompton and if I lived somewhere flat(ish) I could understand the attractions of the Brompton 2 speed model. In the end however, if you are using a folding bike as a means of commuting, I believe it is reliability which trumps all other measures. And there, I cannot make direct comparisons at this stage.

Gold Hill in Shaftesbury, Dorset is famous for being the location of this Hovis advert from the 1970′s. It is the first ride listed in the excellent 50 Quirky Bike Rides by Rob Ainsley. Rob suggests cycling down Gold Hill as in the advert, I wouldn’t recommend it. Far less risky to try cycling up. If you do try, I suggest:

1. Attack the hill on the tarmac section, so you have enough speed to keep going on the cobbles – this is where I think I went wrong

2. Aim to put more than 23 mm of rubber on the road – this also did not help

Anyway, chapeau to Tim who made it despite a wrong turn near the top.

Of the 50 rides in Rob Ainsley’s book I have done only two others: cycling across the Humber Bridge (boing boing) and through the Ashbourne tunnel on the Tissington Trail (echo echo). But I will be trying some of the others. A book well worth getting.

Local trails ala cx from Andy Wardman on Vimeo.

Have been on holiday in Dorset and while you are waiting for the awesome video (ahem) of Gold Hill, here is something that will no doubt give Barry ideas for next season’s CTC runs.

(Thanks to Greg for alerting me to this video)

Thanks to Ian for flagging this

The Planet Bike front mudguard that comes as standard on the Tikit is fixed to the bike in only one place, on the fork crown. The short forks combined with small wheels send shocks to the fork crown and the mudguard has a tendency to vibrate. In my experience this has led to two mudguards dropping off while riding along. Without a front mudguard spray hits the bottom bracket area (and the lower half of the rider). So I took the bike Chris at Tony Butterworths and asked him to do his best. And his best turns out to be pretty damn fantastic. Using a standard SKS mudguard, the fixing point on the right hand side is the only fixing which is standard. At the crown he fixed the new mudguard to the remaining tab of the Planet Bike mount. This has the advantage of ensuring that the mudguard can be fitted and removed without risking the need to reset the headset.

On the left hand side he shaped the stay so it clears the disk mechanism.

Nice! I’m pretty confident this set up should last.

In the latest piece of car culture populism, junior transport minister Mike Penning has ended financial support for councils wanting to install fixed speed cameras. He is quoted as saying ‘The public must be confident speed cameras are there for road safety – not as a cash cow’

So let me get this straight. We apparently have a ginormous deficit. We need to pay more taxes or spend less. Taxes are often levied on social ‘bads’ like tabacco and alcohol. Speeding is incontrovertibly a social bad. What is wrong with cameras all over the place fining speeding motorists to raise a bit of much needed revenue? Don’t want to pay the tax, don’t speed. Simples (to quote a phrase).

So our nice new Government have acted quickly to stamp out the nastiness of garden grabbing, where those evil developers build new houses for people to live in. Oh those developers are so evil! They are like drug pushers but instead of drugs, it is homes they are trying to sell. You know – homes, the ones that keep people warm and dry.

Why does this matter to cyclists? Fact is people have to live somewhere and less ‘garden grabbing’ means more homes on the edges of towns and cities. And if people live somewhere, they might just work somewhere else. If that somewhere else is a long way away they will quite possibly drive. If it is near, they might walk or ride a bike. It is a simple equation, Traffic equals numbers of people times how far they are going. Longer distances means more traffic. And this from the Government that said it was going to be the greenest ever.

So fewer homes in Hallam and more in Stocksbridge, and more traffic. Thanks Nick.

Photo of North American traffic by smith on flickr

Kickstarter is a fascinating project – a new way to fund creative projects. I am really grateful to Andrew Curling for drawing it to my attention. And one of the projects they are supporting is called Bicycle Portraits – everyday South Africans and their bicycles. They already have some great photographs and I am a right sucker for cycling books and photography books, so it is not a difficult sell to get me to pledge support – which is in part a pre-order for the book. Check it out.

Summer’s here and added to the joys of wind around bare knees and squashed greenfly on the teeth is the sight of wildlife on the way to work. This morning I got a great close up view of a Little Owl on a post just outside Thurgoland. It stared right back at me as went past. (photo by me’nthedogs’ on flickr – thanks for the Creative Commons license)

It is not often that my day job in arts education and my interest in bikes overlaps, but on Friday it happened twice. Firstly, I was still musing on whether to buy a Brompton for the World Championships on eBay. The thing is  – I really do not need the Brompton as an ongoing addition to my modern lifestyle -  just need to get used to riding it, compete and then get off. The trouble was that while eBay seemed like the obvious answer I was worried about provenance. Familiar to art historians, provenance is basically, ‘is this what it claims to be?’ If I suddenly put what I claimed was a Picasso up for sale, it would be greeted with great skepticism. It would be down to me to prove that there was a history of the canvas going back to when Pablo gave it to his dealer. On eBay you tend to see lots of things that doubt the provenance of bikes up for sale – one obvious clue is when the bike is photographed in a public place rather than in the house or the back garden. Another is when there doesn’t seem to be any understanding on the part of the seller of the specialised nature of the bike. You can always ask questions, and honest sellers shouldn’t be upset. But if the answer to the obvious question ‘Do you have proof of purchase?’ comes back with a tale worthy of Tolkein, probably best to stay clear.

Helen Pidd has some useful advice on spotting stolen bikes for sale in her new book Bicycle: Love Your Bike: The Complete Guide To Everyday Cycling which I also received on Friday. And what should be on the title page? An illustration of a Brompton by Olivier Kugler who I hope my colleague Jane will be interviewing for our new Illustration course very soon. A small strange world.

As I say Helen’s book is useful, a great present for someone new to cycling. It is clearly from the cyclechic rather than lycrachic perspective, but none the worse for that. Just one thing – 16 inch wheels do not mean you have to pedal faster (p26) – it’s a gear thing Helen.

BTW the way one thing eBay is very good for is vintage bike parts, so if you want some 1990 Campag Chorus brake callipers you know where to go – and I still have the receipt!