Cycling UK Forum

Another aspect to this complex and subtle topic (ting-a-ling...) is consistency across all the cycles. I've tried wherever poss. to keep everything the same across three Moultons and a Brompton and have largely succeeded. Muscle memory can work away unhindered that way!

I've always taken the view that my right hand might be busy applying suitable force to the front brake and so the bells on my bikes always sit near my left hand.

I spent a sizeable chunk of my working life in hospitals. Several colleagues who worked in A&Es often chipped in to the helmet debate by agreeing that the sort of serious head injuries they dealt with wouldn't have been helped much by the sort of helmet cyclists wore. (They had different opinions with respect to motorcyclists & their heavier and better helmets.)
Some of them were cyclists, some weren't. But like a lot of folk who have to clean up the real-world mess, they pretty much all of them didn't have an axe to grind re the helmet debate. Instead they took a more pragmatic view, saying "wear one if you want, but don't expect it to help much if a 10 ton artic wheel goes over your head!"...

Oh gosh what a sorry tale... sorry to hear your woes. Certainly agree that it's p*******e season Yesterday at the market garden where I work, we all had flats, including the barrow we use to take all the produce over to the yard, to load the delivery truck!
I have sympathy for your predicament - when my back tyre went down, I was able to turn around, walk home and switch to my second bike. It's not that easy if you have little ones along and are several miles from home. Wouldn't it be great if there were reliable e-bike mechanics who travelled out to folks suffering breakdown. There are such mobile mechanics for cars and vans of course.

I will remain eternally puzzled by the sizeable proportion of cyclists who go to the trouble of buying a helmet and then go everywhere with the dang thing swinging off their handlebars...

The key action that's helped enormously with the removal of the Brompton's Marathons is described below - others may already be doing this.
Us fans of Schwalbe's excellent-but-tough-to-fit puncture resistant tyres will already know that the secret to success is to push the tyre bead into the rim well, at the point farthest from where the tyre levers are being used. However, I've found as a rule that the tyre's inherent springiness means the bead pops back out of the well, as soon as one removes hand/hands in order to do something else. Hence the well-known toe-clip strap manoeuvre.
What's working well for me is as follows: Insert tyre lever near valve and pop the bead up over the rim. At this stage, use only one reliable lever, Don't try to use any more than just one, yet. Anchor lever in the usual way. The tyre bead is now under tension. Move to the point on the wheel opposite the valve and press the bead off the rim shoulder and into the rim well. Because of the tension, the tyre bead seems more likely to stay put in the well. Now work around the tyre with the heel of hands, pressing the bead into the rim well and by the time you get back to to the tyre lever, you should have enough give to pop the bead off the rim quite easily.
The application of the single lever - a slim and smooth steel variant I've had for decades - before pressing the tyre bead into the well, is the Game Changer for me. Hope that helps.

STOP PRESS! Bloomin' thing's flat again this morning... grrrr. More practice to fine-tune Marathon + removal technique - boy, amI going to be good at this soon!?
Off to Halfords to see if they got any suitable inner tubes. On the plus side, I can nip onto adjacent Swedish furniture store for a plate of meatballs & chips

Bmblbzzz wrote: ↑24 Jan 2024, 6:33pm I don't think Derri boots are made anymore though. Or are they?

When Derri boots made an appearance, us motorcycle dispatch riders thanked our lucky stars!

Today's is an old chestnut.... why do pedestrians, when alerted by my bell, always turn, dither and then, choose to step into my path??? Leave the bell out of the equation and 9x out of 10, there's no issue - other than the pedestrian being slightly surprised

How odd! No explanation I'm afraid. Glad to hear it's fixed. I too was out this morning on my newly flat-free Brompton
The one advantage of all this inner-tube replacement is that I'm getting quite good at popping Marathon plus tyres on & off.

Nearholmer wrote: ↑14 Jan 2025, 2:02pm PS: I wonder whether Huel would make viable camping rations?

Even assuming one was content to sail through the astonishing implications in the paragraph repeated below, we see that the daily limit is 8.5 grammes... it's beginning to sound more like radiation fallout than food!

853 wrote: ↑14 Jan 2025, 1:22pm Here's the ingredients list from their 'daily greens' product. I counted 88 ingredients, a lot of which were chemicals I'd have to look up to find out what they are. Looks like an expensive UPF to me.

Crikey! One of the current pundits who make a living out of dissuading us from eating processed food says a rule of thumb is to note if there are any ingredients you don't have on your larder at home. The higher the number, the worse it gets, obs. I learnt early on that anything with the word 'flavour' in the blurb is likely to disappoint. My mum tried Penguins on me a few times, 'till I insisted in that thoughtless way children can have that what I wanted was Club biscuits, they being coated with quite generous quantities of milk chocolate.

Brucey wrote: ↑14 Jan 2025, 12:26pm

simonineaston wrote: ↑12 Jan 2025, 1:29pm I had a pipe cutter that was nigh on impossible to operate without badly pinching the tender flesh adjacent to the thumb...

might it be possible to glue/lash a chunk of rubber betwixt the handles, thus preventing this?

I note just now that I still have it! I will follow Brucey's advice, I think...

I read that AI can whizz through huge quantities of images, correctly identifying elements of interest at a rate far higher than any radiologist. Never tires, never has a bad day - sounds good to me!

Yes. Bananas, apples and nuts spring to mind!
I got to say though, I do like muesli - and I went round my friend's house too and he showed me how to make home-made granola which was really nice. Something to do with an egg white which is how come you get those clumps, apparently!