Miles Smith - a record attempt starts

One of Miles Smith's bikes - note the infamous large "Pizza" chainring.

Helen Lew-Ton delivers "The Speach", generally wishing Miles well.  Note exceedingly manky Abbotsford Cycles sign in the background.

Front of Abbotsford Cycles

"Follow Me"

Miles and Helen

A couple of mates were accompanying Miles for the first part of the trip.

Cargo Bike Chat, scene outside the Hive shopping centre in Richmond.

Hi

This morning I responded to an Audax email and pootled down to Abbotsford.  In part, the invite read

"Next Saturday, April 11, local Audax rider Miles Smith will start his attempt to break Tommy Godwin's 1939 record of 75,065 miles [120,805 km] in a year (365 days).

While you're still sleeping, Miles will set off to on the first 200 km leg of his year-long endeavour. He will then take a short break before commencing his second ride of the day.

Join us in a celebration of this truly audacious challenge and to wish Miles all the best for the coming 365 days."

Miles' trip will consist of laps between Portsea and Richmond, with Audax volunteers supporting.  There are 2 others on the hunt for the record as well, as per this link to an Age article.

The rules for this particular long cycle challenge allow recumbents and drafting but not fairings or other aerodynamic aids.  And 2 of the 3 now attempting the record are using recumbents, Kurt Searvogel riding a Barchetta bike as part of his riding regime and Steve Abraham because of an injury (broken foot which needed surgery and a plate put in it as per this link) 

So - some very committed cyclists there!  Go Miles and thanks to Audax for providing the support this morning.

Regards

Steve Nurse

A few repairs.

Ladies Bitsa Town Bike

Cable ties and corflute used to repair ilean trike (inside)

Cable ties repairing slightly manky tailbox (outside)

Replaced back axle from recumbent bike.  Note that the right hand bearing seat is completely knackered.

Hi

I spent a bit of time over the last week fixing a few things on bikes and trikes, and the in the first few days of Easter, swapped around bike parts on a couple of 24" bikes, destroyed the frame of another 24" bike for parts, moved some stuff around to make better bike storage, and made a storage space for bike wheels.  Here are a few photos.

The 24" bike shown in the photo now has a front fork and a new home by the beach, I have been pootling around on it a bit, its good fun and rides no hands very easily!

 The trike tailbox repair was at Uni.  Approaching the uni, my toolbox (lunchbox used as toolbox) fell out of the back of the tailbox which is not a good sign. Closer inspection showed a rip down one side of the base of the tailbox.  This was fixed with an extra bit of corflute and some cable ties, all courtesy of the workshop "upshop" (or upcycling shop) for $1.00.  Thats it, blown the budget for a week or 2!

The reason I was riding the wooden trike instead of the wooden bike (which is a bit faster) as the back axle on the bike was knackered.  Last Saturday I rode the trike to the Ceres Bikeshed with a nut from the worn out axle and got a bike wheel with a matching axle, then fixed the bike at home during the day.  Hey Presto, a happy bicycle.

All for now, Regards

Steve nurse

Wooden Bike to Walwa MkII

On the road from..

Hume Dam to Walwa

Walwa rest break, Day 1

Cups and saucers and stuff in the Walwa Tea Rooms

More Cups and stuff on an old sewing machine

Lots of Sunshine!

Granya Hotel, where we had lunch on the 2nd day.  There was a bit of a breeze and we had a chat to a 4-Generation family for a while and patted some of the owner's dogs and listened to Enya on the loudspeakers.  I will never live this down but Enya almost sounded OK. Yes, there goes my street cred.

Walwa Store, 2nd day.  There were 100's of motorbikes around, many heading to the Ulysses motorcycle club AGM in Wodonga.

Lookout on the upper Murray.

Lots of bugs on this tree in Granya

Hi

Just back from 2 days riding East from Albury with Graham Signiori.  At the start of the year I said I wanted to document a few Audax Permanent rides, and this ride was going over the territory of 2 of the rides before submitting.  We went from Albury to Corryong via Walwa and Briggs Gap Road on the Saturday and returned via Towong and Walwa on Sunday.  Graham is quite a bit faster than me and therefor gets to stop at more scenic points and chat to people.  At Corryong, he was about 25 minutes ahead after about 30 km, and near Bungil he checked out a memorial which was all about Murray Grey Cattle (apparently).

Anyway, I was just fit enough for the ride, I've been riding 15k each way to work 4 days a week for a couple of months now, and that makes up about 150k a week riding for a while.  One piece of cycling wisdom is "ride in a week what you will do on the day of a big ride" and this sort of fitted in for 163 and 150k days of riding.  

There were hundreds of touring motorcyclists on the road, some heading for the Ulysses (over 40's) motorcycling club AGM in Wodonga.  At the Corryong motel we stayed with a mob of Harley Davidson owners from Canberra, all ready to have a chat about bikes, wooden or motorised.

Regards

Steve Nurse

Ride Without Gps

A Page from one of the.....

Gall and Inglis cycle touring books I have collected which

show contours for almost any road route you might choose in England.

These are the covers of 1898 Southeast and 1923 England Editions

My own highly illustrative and achievementful section of ridewithgps.com . (Actually, I don't bother with this bit)

One of the useful bits of ridewithgps.com.  Within the next few weeks I will be riding and leading a ride over this route.

And this is how to work out how far it is to work and back, without the benefit of a speedo.

Hi

In some areas of my life I am a luddite (non believer in technology) and in others I am not.  As examples, I don't own a smartphone, do fitbits,  facebook, linkedin, snapchat, sms, gps or itunes and a host of other techno stuff.  My current bikes don't have speedos (budgie smuggler or digital computer type) .  

While these high tech things might have their virtues, I can probably live without them, and if I used them, they would probably waste my time.  It is really a question of whether a  thing (say a fitbit) is my servant, providing useful information compared to the time invested, or your master, being more of a pain in the backside than what its worth.

  On the other hand, I am perfectly prepared to forge ahead in the brave new world of 3d cad and printers and the new and interesting Human Powered Vehicles they can create. And blogs and stuff.

To each his own I guess.  Recently I started preparing an Audax permanent ride from Albury to Corryong and return, and some of the correspondence with Audax HQ went thusly "You need to map the rides preferably using  a mapping program, ride with GPS is preferred" and that was rather daunting to a luddite like me.  But I jumped in and after a few tries, ended up with quite a good result, with nice contours showing the ride elevation and slopes for the proposed ride going up and down all over the place. Hopefully the stuff I've done will be enough to produce an Audax ride guide. 

The contour information is in no way new!  The small sized, fine papered, bible-resembling Gall and Inglis Contour books provided the same information for England from about 1898 on, and I've copied a few pages here in this post.

After a few weeks of riding to my new work / study at Monash Caulfield, curiosity and the lack of a speedo got the better of me and I set to work to find how far I rode every day.  After a few mouse clicks I was there, about 15 flattish k's to work.  No speedo or fit bit necessary.

Plan to do a recce ride near Corryong next weekend and and I'm leading an ozhpv ride weekend based on the proposed Audax route the weekend after that (coming up very quickly, gosh!)  I will post photos.

Regards

Steve Nurse

Blogroll

Hi

Over a little while I have been noting a few other Blogs of interest, hope you enjoy these sites as much as I do.

Bentupcyclingjournal is frequently updated and provides information about trikes and trike riding, but I particularly enjoyed this post.  When Rohan Dennis recently broke the UCI Hour cycling world record, it made the press big time but little or no information about the restrictions on bikes is given in most articles. And us recumbent rider types get upset. Bentupcyclingjournal puts the whole argument quite concisely, Thank You. PS The hour world record is held by a highly unlikely speedbike, the rider Francesco Russo is on his back, head forwards and looking up into a mirror to see the road ahead and steer and balance.  But he's one of us guys.

Type Velomobile, Cake, Germany into your search engine and you end up at the wonderful, gentle website of Auntie Helen. Like it a lot.

And lastly, a few months ago, Aiden McHaffie lives in the UK and bought one of my cycling books late last year.  He is building a recumbent trike and here is his blog.  Not so prolific of late but at one stage, he blogged every day for a year.

Regards

Steve Nurse

iLean mk2 - on the road

Out at our local park in the morning, on the 2nd test run of the pocket rocket ilean.

 

At this time of day the park is populated by dogs, dog walkers and people on strange human powered vehicles taking self-timer photos on digital cameras.

Hi

Posting a few photos of my new, smaller lighter version of an ilean trike.  It works but is a bit slow and can't carry anything, and I will work on fixing that over the next few days, swapping out wheels and tyres, widening the back axle and adding a tailbox.

Regards

Steve Nurse

iLean mk2 - pocket rocket

Starting the build of the new ilean with some fairly snazzy bits.  The aluminium frame shown here was built for one of my Big at the Front Bikes, and the start of that bike build is detailed here. With a bike using an identical frame, I completed the Murray 1200  (1200km) 4 day Audax ride.

The wood and steel parts at the back hold a bottom bracket shell mounted to the frame.  Here I have varnished the wood (laminated and glued 6mm plywood) and brazed the raw steel bottom bracket to its mounting plate.  The mounting plate has been machined so it is square to the bottom bracket and is in good alignment when mounted on the timber.

All mounted in the frame.  An old bike tube was cut up and with this on either side of the wood, it is a snug fit in the alloy frame.  The adapter is screwed into the frame using the centre 3 holes, and the holes at the end are for knocking the timber adapter out of the frame.

 

Slightly more routine work, brazing v-brake bosses to each side of the fork. The front derailleur is already mounted on the fork, a while ago I wrote a procedure for this process.

 Hi

A few weeks ago, I started to build a new ilean trike, and as I write, it is rideable and on the road. 

Do you ever see those cooking shows where the chef (very annoyingly) skips over vast hours spent baking and covering things with cling wrap and leaving it in the fridge by brandishing an almost finished product and saying "Here is one I prepared earlier".  In an ilean trike building sense, I am the same as that annoying chef, I have stuff I prepared earlier, and just use it on my current builds. More will follow shortly!

Regards

Steve Nurse

Monostay Bike, What Next?

Lasercut Steel flat, to be folded into a monostay.

Schematic of steel Monostay on bike

Loopwheel from ......

England, an in-wheel suspension system.  The bike wheel you get when too much bling on your bike is really not enough.

Loopwheel schematic

Original, short-lived monostay bike.

Hi

For a while, I have been building bikes and have been in the position of being able to build what sort of bikes I like within reason.  If something fails on a bike I build, there are few consequenses beyond a loss of dignity.  Its not an aeroplane or a space rocket, you just pick yourself up and move on back to the drawing board.  This is what happened recently with my monostay bike. 

The last one didn't work for long, and I've set about making new alternatives monostay long wheelbase recumbents.  Not content with one approach, I am going forward with 2 separate approaches!

1.  Loopwheel Lwb.   A fascinating 20" bikewheel called a loopwheel has been championed by Velovision.  After lots of negotiation including a few phonecalls to England I purchased a loopwheel for a monostay, which is usually used on recumbent trikes.  Initially I wanted to make a rigid bolt-on swingarm for an existing frame to hold the loopwheel but now thing that making an entirely new frame entirely of plywood is the go.  (Note that a suspension bikewheel can also use the pantour hub)

Last week I started a design master's degree at Monash University with my principle subject the development of the ilean trike.  It's too early for me to make brand new ilean trikes for my masters degree yet, but I can certainly do a bike as an informative limbering up exercise!  I intend to use a few new-to-me construction techniques on the bike, which should be fun and informative.  I like the "one sheet boat" concept, why not have a one sheet bike? 

2. Steel monostay.  The last monostay bike had a wooden piece and lasercut steel bosses supporting the back wheel, but on that construction the wood wasn't strong enough.  So a fully lasercut piece might do the job, and I've designed one and had it made.  Not sure when I will have a chance to put this version of the bike together!

Regards

Steve Nurse