Cycling UK Forum

An old french cycling guide recommends tying a branch behind the bike to keep the speed down on downhills. If a forester asks where you got it from, you should say that you brought it with you from Paris. Anyway... The Sturmey Archer dynamo is a bit inefficient according to lab tests. This will be e...

The only way I could see it as a viable option is if you modded the rear derailleur cage so the overall range is somewhere around 65 teeth, then would you get a simple sistem with all the gears usable Perhaps you could have a sprung return idler that helps to take up the slack in addition to the re...

Hi MickF I know what you're getting at, but I don't think the position of the dropouts matters much. What matters is the position of the contact patch. In both of the cases you describe, the contact patch will move to the right when you steer left. With the forks reversed it will move further right ...

Some boffins have produced a mathematical model of bike stability called jbike6. It runs in Matlab and can be downloaded for free. Two important outputs which it gives are the weave speed and the capsize speed. The weave speed is the speed at which the oscillations become smaller and smaller when th...

Problem solved! Nazca replied very quickly. I poured boiling water over the tube which the bolts are screwed into, to soften the loctite. After that I was able to grip the tube with pliers to stop it spinning, and unscrew the other bolt. Nevertheless, I do think it is an odd design.

I'm trying to remove the underseat rack from my Gaucho (don't need it on at the moment), but am running into difficulties! I have got one of the main front bolts out (the right one), but the other one is still screwed into the nut which is inside the frame. This nut is spinning around when I try to ...

A quick google tells me that Araldite has a shear strength of about 2500 psi. At a very rough guess, the surface area of the splines might be 2 sq. inches. A strength of 5000 pounds seems like plenty? The rotor would be utterly destroyed before you could apply a lateral force that high I think. I co...

The lockring gets in the way. Yes, this is the problem. I got the adapter partly so that I could take the disc off using only a torx key. This could be useful when taking the bike on a plane. I wouldn't want to rely on a disc of mine solely held on to the hub by epoxy. Well, the splines should be t...

Would it be OK to glue the adapter onto the hub with epoxy? Then it would be possible to dispense with the lockring. This would allow the disc to be removed using only a torx key, without needing the special lockring spanner.

I think it is worth considering the environment* in which this happened. I'd like to consider two aspects. Firstly, as I understand it, this is a junction in central London which is busy with pedestrians and motor vehicles, yet no green man is provided. This is pretty useless IMO! I think it is like...

The Rinko idea seems quite nice, although I'm not sure about regularly taking the headset apart. I feel like a headset, especially a threaded one, is the kind of thing you want to get set right, and then leave alone as much as possible? I thought this video might be of interest to some (it's a foldi...

Well, I can see that there are some potential issues with surveys. However, if we reject all surveys out of hand, what are we left with? How do we find out what the main barriers to more cycling are? Intuition? Anecdote? Poking a finger in the air? Surely the thing to do is to look at each study in ...

Certainly the car has replaced a bicycle as the main mode of travel to work, shop or pleasure ground. This is due to many reasons - many. Those reasons may include "lack of cycling infrastructure" but that will be a teen-weeny reason compared to ... There may indeed be many different reas...

Quite - so exactly what I said. No, not exactly! There is an important distinction between ...assuming unsegregated roads correspond to whichever performs worse. and what Schepers et al (2011) actually did. If you have another look at my post then this will hopefully become clear. To be clear, I'm ...

Cars in London (and other urban spots) cause high levels of pollution, as well as squashing and maiming many pedestrians, cylists and, of course, the car drivers themselves. A superhighway does very little if it just makes you feel a bit safer - especially if (like the pedestrians) you are still su...