London Town Bike Attempt #3: Meet Liesl

With Lucy the Brompton too heavy for trains and too valuable to lock up and Swoopy 'fessing up to a collision history, the job as London Town Bike was vacant again.

Meet Liesl. You may already "know" her if you've looked at the My Bicycle Stable page at the top of the righthand side bar. On the other hand, you don't know her at all.

And neither do I. I've never ridden her before.

Swoopy Is Dead. Long Live Swoopy.

I am sad to announce that Swoopy -- after just a week of life -- is no more.

Swoopy outside St Pancras station

Through a week of commuting, I struggled to figure out why and how Swoopy kept throwing her rear wheel askew, hard into the lefthand chainstay. Nothing we tried made the wheel axle stay in place in the drop out.

Swoopy's wheel strops were sudden and seemingly unprovoked. One minute, we were gliding along, the next we would come to an abrupt wheel-locked halt, with the rear wheel hard fast against the chainstay. Time after time, I loosened off the wheel nuts, re-centred the wheel and re-tightened -- only for it to happen again. Tantalizingly, not immediately -- usually the next day.

We experimented with the position of the axle in the drop-outs. We changed which cog in the cassette the chain ran on and slid the axle hard against the back of the dropouts. No difference... except to add fender rub to the equation.

Then Thursday morning, standing in the shadow of Birkbeck College on Malet Street -- in the rain -- I re-centered the rear wheel yet again and then noticed that the axle was positioned very slightly differently in each rear drop-out. Hmmmm. Had one rear triangle been bent? In other words, had Swoopy been in a crash somewhere in her dark mysterious past?

I got home that evening and told Adam what I'd spotted and my suppositions. He was doubtful -- there had to be another "more likely" i.e. "possible to fix" explanation.

However, Friday came and went with the same problems so I rode her to St Pancras and instead of locking her up for the weekend, rolled her onto the train to Luton, where I bundled her into a taxi and brought her home.

After a thorough investigation, Adam came into the house and announced "you're right; she's bent".

We tossed around a few ideas to change the build in ways that might compensate for the discrepancies in the two rear triangles, but the most obvious is the one that we won't have an opportunity to do in the foreseeable future: build her up a set of singlespeed wheels. And even then, there might still be problems.

So.......... that's the end of Swoopy's brief but glorious life as a London town bike. All a bit sad but at least I'm glad the problem has been diagnosed, as life was a bit bumpy and I just couldn't trust her and that made me sad too.

*******************
Post-script added 10 May:

Adam just read this post and said (with some surprise and even indignation): "Swoopy's not DEAD! She's just gone back into hibernation after being woken briefly from a deep slumber."

A nice way to look at it. She'll wake again one day.

Nostalgia: A Day Trip to the Seaside

Yesterday, we and five other members of The Fridays cycled from south London to Brighton to eat fish and chips on the beach. But we had company -- unusual company.

Swoopy Comes In To Land

I've had an old Puch loop-frame mixte frame banging around in the garage several years. I bought it on Ebay. I didn't have any firm plan of how I might build it up into a complete bike. I suspect I bought it on the rebound... feeling some regret that I had resisted the temptation to "liberate" just such a frame (shown above, with more photos here) on my morning commute over the course of one summer.

I then made a serious attempt to pick up this immaculate and original Motobecane mixte on ebay, but gave it up when bidding reached £200.

Then a Puch frame appeared on Ebay, listed by an older chap down on the south coast who commutes into London by Brompton every day. He slung the frame over his shoulder one morning and brought it into town to hand over to me after work in Waterloo station.  Included were the original stem, headset, bottom bracket, brakes (without full cables) and seat post. 

Sore Hands

Ever since I started riding bicycles with drop bars, I've had a very particular issue with my hands. I turned to drop bars in the first place because straight bars -- even with Ergon grips -- made my wrists hurt. I thought it made sense to place my hands in front of me at a natural, neutral angle and drop bars seemed to offer the best opportunity to do that. I fit my brake levers so that they "toe in", which helps even further.

All well and good. Except that every pair of gloves and mitts (fingerless gloves) that I've tried have seams placed right across the part of the hand in contact with the bars, especially in my favoured position over the hoods.

On short rides, this is not a problem. On longer rides, however, those seams begin to press and chafe and then hurt in such a way that sometimes I cycle for miles at a time with my attention reduced down to a small focal point fixated on the pain in my hands.

And then when the gloves come off, I find this --

Lucy Meets Yossi (A Nisnas Partnership)

You may recall my last update on Lucy the Brompton ending with mention of "one further modification to be made -- a purely cosmetic one!" 

Well, now I can reveal what it is:  

wooden fenders with steel inlays, beautifully crafted by hand by the

lovely chaps at Nisnas Industries in Israel [click HERE for details!]

REPORT: Bespoked The UK Handmade Bike Show 2014 (London)

This year's Bespoked UK Handmade Bicycle Show was held for the first time in London. (Previous years it was in Bristol in a venue no longer available and in any case now far outgrown.) I hadn't been before but of course with my interest in custom bicycles and local craftsmanship (as opposed to mass production), I seized the chance to go this year.

I hooked up a partnership with one of the exhibitors, Nisnas Industries in Wadi Nisnas, Haifa, Israel, for a very special exhibition - more about that in the next post!

THE VENUE

** NOW SOLD** My beloved Surly Pacer road bike

UPDATE 13th August 2014:  

The Pacer has finally found a new home and a good one too.

I hope Camilla of Hackney enjoys many happy miles with Robin, as I did. 

Bespoked Teaser: The UK Handmade Bike Show

Here's a peak at the Bespoked Show, happening this weekend at the Lee Valley Velopark (velodrome) in Stratford, east London.

You ARE going, aren't you??

Full blog posts are in the pipeline but for now, just click on the caption in the photo to go to the first of two Facebook albums, where the photos are all captioned for your perusal:

Lucy the Brompton modelling wooden mudguards by Nisnas Industries - Bespoked

Edited to add:  Photos from Sunday are here.

Book Launch Party

"You've Got Mail":
Kathleen Kelly, independent book shop owner, attends a
book launch and nearly gets her knife into Joe Fox, wealthy owner of big
impersonal corporate chain Fox Books, which is threatening to
put her out of business. The tension and mutual hostility is fired
by witty repartee and cutting insults.
Is this what a book launch party is like??

Have you ever been to a book launch party? Until last night, I hadn't. I didn't know what to expect. The only ones I've ever "seen" have been scenes on screen, like the one above. Invariably they are suffused with snobbishness and back-stabbing amongst the literary "intelligentsia". And caviar.

Things are different though when the book being launched is not about Julius and Ethel Rosenberg but one about helping more women overcome barriers to and enjoy the benefits of cycling. 

Last night, I attended the official launch of The Girls' Cycling Handbook by Caz Nicklin. I was honoured to be asked by Caz back in February to review this book in advance of the launch - my write up is here. 

So here we were at Look Mum No Hands! in trendy Hackney (not Manhattan's 'old money' Upper West Side) celebrating the launch of Caz's book. The atmosphere was far from tense, stuffy or competitive. The small group chatting when we arrived was friendly and welcoming. I quickly fell into conversation with Alex Davis, LMNH's brand new (two weeks) social media manager and discovered mutual interests in culture, commuting and bags.

From there, conversations flowed and morphed one into another, punctuated by laughter and occasional hugs and a few photographs.