Cycling UK Forum

Many thanks to all you brilliant 'whizz-kids' for your very kind and prompt replies! All is now made quite clear on the QR springs front, and re derailleurs, I'll now gratefully follow up your tips, plus suggested links to Sheldon Brown, Shimano, etc., so am just off to the garage to suspend the fir...

A. Starting young as a fixed wheel cyclist, building and maintaining my own lightweight bikes, I became a competent basic mechanic, never needing to worry about derailleurs or quick-release wheels. However, upon marriage, my husband insisted on converting my bikes to derailleurs and QR wheels; he th...

Thank you all very much for your helpful info and suggestions. Yes, it is the cream LP rack, where you take the front wheels out, and is excellent, apart from this infuriating fixing-obsolescence! Will continue the search, but if I can't solve the problem, and there's someone else out there who'd be...

I have an excellent 4-bike roof rack type carrier with fixings made for cars with roof-rim gutters. The fixings are removable, but now having had to change to a newer car, I've tried everywhere I can think of to buy replacement mountings, for modern cars without gutters. I'm told by retailers "...

Many thanks to all of you for your observations and recommendations.
I now have a better idea of what to look for/ask about.

Having inherited dreadful family Glaucoma genes, I've now had trabeculectomy operations on both eyes, which hopefully should prevent me from losing my sight, as others in the family did. However, this has now changed my sight greatly and everything is now a complete blur, plus bad double-vision, so ...

Since having my beautiful, but completely ctippling, (for me), Hetchins frame built, without the basic knowledge to specify what I really needed, I've learned a lot more about it, through pain! One fairly common principle is that women generally have a longer leg to body ratio, whereas men tend to h...

In 1979 I blew all my savings on having a superb road frame built for me by Alf Hetchins in Southend. Being a complete ignoramus re frame building, and having up to then only ever had second-hand road-bikes, which I'd been able to try before buying privately, I made the fatal mistake of merely quoti...

Having had many nasty mudguard stay injuries in the past, with scars to prove it, I tried building up a few blobs of Copydex on the ends and it worked!

Hi NUKe; don't believe everything you hear/don't hear/read re medical science, Matey! We're all in the grip of the mighty food and drugs industries, and they don't want us to know about the deleterious effects of the stuff they push at us, or have us use pure simple stuff of our own accord. (I do kn...

Just remembered something else about commercial squashes & drinks, Sports or otherwise: -they mostly also contain the not-very-good-for-you preservative SULPHUR DIOXIDE, which the manufacturers use to prolong shelf-life; but this stuff can cause severe reactions in many people, such as digestive...

Still at risk of being thought a Crank: -'squash' is usually filled with a lot of unnecessary additives, which the manufacturers put in to heavily sweeten and flavour the stuff, to cheapen it and disguise the fact that there isn't really very much of anything good in it! When you're not used to drin...

There are now masses of 'Sports Drinks' on the market and many of them are loaded with junk, for commercial reasons! At risk of being called a Crank, I advise you to check the ingredients on the labels before spending a load of money on this stuff. You can buy many of the key ingredients in basic fo...

AAAAAAAAAAAARGH!!!! -So it gets worse1 I still can't evade all the perilous technical hiccups! Thanks, all of you, for your further points. Will now try to check re potential clearances, etc (Anyone got a decent Penny-Farthing for sale? -I know THEY didn't have all this trouble!)

Further thanks to all of you, for ongoing v.useful input. Thanks to you Chris, for your extremely informative info re gear ratios, from which I now gather that I shouldn't worry about the falling-over-sideways aspect of low gearing, as I was brought up on fixed, which I used for years, and which see...