Cycling UK Forum

simonhill wrote: ↑19 Mar 2024, 12:33am You could look away, ride off path, fall in canal and when he hopefully helps you out you explain that you fell in because his lights dazzled you.

Of course! Why didn't I think of that? In future, that's what I'll do every time the situation arises.

"P&O Ferries has paid some crew less than half UK minimum wage
Company is using legal loophole UK government promised to close two years ago, Guardian analysis suggests"

I went for a nice ride along the towpath today, sunny afternoon, lovely quiet space, everything just starting to burst into leaf. The only (small) fly in the ointment was the occasional cyclist coming towards me with a dazzling flashing front light. There’s always one or two. I mean. Part of the reason for going to such places is to get away for a bit from that twenty-first-century sensory overload; so would I be out of order, or over the top, or unreasonable if I stopped them, pointed out the incongruity, and politely suggested that they turn it off?

I’ve ridden it a few times. Dieppe to Forge-les-Eaux is a very pleasant converted railway line; after that, as I recall, it’s quiet French back roads and then suburban Paris.

“a lot of the info was about doing it on a Brompton and the UK section.” – that’s true at the start of those search results, but have a look at e.g. page 15.

The things you learn on this forum! I thought meiosis was a purely biological process, but apparently it’s also a synonym for litotes. And of course everyone knows what that is.

Not sure if I’m still up for long-distance solo touring. I can still manage back-to-back forty mile days (at least, I could last year!) but it’s that sense of “out on my own, thousand miles from home, don’t know where I’ll be sleeping tonight…” that I’ve loved ever since my teens, which at seventy-six starts to feel a bit too edgy. So I’ve got a five- or six-day London-to-Leeds ride set up for next month, I’ll see how it goes. And an autumn plan for France-to-Italy, with herself along to keep an eye on me.

From the OP -

Scu11y wrote: ↑16 Feb 2024, 8:40am... would I be able to get it back to the UK without being hit with all the import tax and vat.
Obviously I don't want to break any laws ...

What's dodgy about seeking, or offering, advice on that basis?

853 wrote: ↑14 Feb 2024, 1:08pm

Pebble wrote: ↑14 Feb 2024, 12:50pm would a premium oil really help, I guess it probably could when the chains were new (first 500 mile) must experiment on next batch, but that will be well over a year away

The best way would be to use a premium oil on one half of the chain, and something cheap on the other half. You'd have to find some way of identifying which half of the chain received which oil, but it would be an informative experiment if you could do it

I’d imagine that with each turn of the pedals, a small proportion of the oil on the chain would be deposited on the teeth of the various cogs, to then be picked up by another part of the chain, reducing the value of the experiment. You could perhaps control for this by adding different coloured dyes to the two oils, and checking with a microscope. Or maybe using a radioactive marker?
However there may be better ways of spending your time.

briansnail wrote: ↑11 Feb 2024, 2:12pm No drugs is the WRONG answer.

At the risk of being sent to stand in the pedants’ (or pedant’s?) corner, a comma would have helped make the meaning clear. At first reading, I genuinely took that to mean that ‘some drugs’ would be the RIGHT answer.

Yes, I think you're right. Oh my effin Gee though, shouldn't we have something better to do with our time?

GideonReade wrote: ↑5 Feb 2024, 10:15am a peevee (if that's the, or indeed, a, word?).

Definitely not. That -ee ending (which I suspect derives from the French past participle) denotes the recipient of the action (e.g. a payee is the person who gets paid, not the one who does the paying). So a peevee would perhaps be the person the peever is peeved at.

On tour last year, I realised I was carrying three bottles of different oils - chain lube, olive oil for picnic salads, and King-o-Shaves for shaving. Time on my hands in the tent at night, I started wondering if I could save weight by finding a single oil that would do all three jobs tolerably well. Any suggestions?

I converted my partner’s bike from 3x9 to 1x10 (she couldn’t get on with the front shifter). I didn’t change the chainset, but just removed the inner and outer chainrings. It works nicely, except that the chain comes off the chainring occasionally (I think ‘unshipping’ is the term, though I can’t see what it’s go to do with ships) - not very often, but too often, and I haven’t been able to reproduce the problem to see why.
I thought of using the little ‘dogfang’ device that fits to the downtube to prevent this, but being sized to reach an inner ring, it’s not big enough to reach. So I’m thinking to cobble together a similar homemade thing. Or I could fit a front mech, locked into its middle-ring position somehow. Or…
Any other suggestions?

twodogs wrote: ↑22 Jan 2024, 6:02am I worry for younger generations, they're going to have all sorts to contend with.

I bet your parents said the same. Their parents too.

As I recollect, for long stretches of the Rhine, and the upper Danube, I only knew I was following a river because the map told me so. Caught sight of it occasionally.