A Reunion

My wife Christine with Ange and Hilary










L to R we have Mick, Mick, Jane, Geoff, Evelyn, Eff, Jic, Ali, Ange, Simon, Lou




Hi

Maybe in the last post I mentioned a few friends of mine were having a combined 50th birthday party. Well it's all done and dusted now. My friends Geoff, Jic and Simon are now officially 50 now despite "actually" turning 50 earlier in the year. And it was quite a gathering of the clan.

"We met / When we were at school / Never took no shit from no-one / we weren't fools"
(From Cheapskates, the Clash)

Well in about 1977, me, Jic, Mick, Geoff, Joel, George and Simon and Wal were all in year 12 at Melbourne Grammar together. Most of us were much more interested in various combinations of Rock'n'Roll Music, smoking, drinking, girls and surfing than what we were at school for. What were we meant to be at school for? Oh yeah, we were meant to be getting a good education, meeting the right people and becoming gentlemen. Anyway the bonds formed between us at school through music and surfing were strong enough to last many years, evidenced by the fact that 33 years later we are all at the same party together.

Some of the girls at the party I'd known since school as well (Debbie, Ange, Jayne, Jane, Effie, Evelyn, Hilary, Ali, Lou) and some who I'd lived in houses with I hadn't seen for 25 years, give or take a day or two. So there was quite a bit of recounting of marriages, children, boyfriends, divorces, water under the bridges, waters not yet under the bridges, and highly exaggerated stories of surfing and sailing and conquests, and remembering some of our gang who hadn't made it this far (George, Mandy and Sue) and other stuff.

"Back to the days of the 4 and 7 friends and the all night rock'n'roll. / Hey 'Chelle, we were wild then" (Michelle Shocked, Anchorage)

Anyway, many thanks to Geoff, Simon and Jic and their families for hosting the party. Early in the new year I will be catching up with Jic as his family heads to Bell's Beach for a junior surfing competition. Will post more about that later.

Well why not leave you with another almost quote.
"Well I'm goin' back to Newhaven on a journey through the past / and I won't be back till Sunday morning comes"
(Neil Young, Journey Through the past. I think the lyrics actually involve things like Canada and February but they don't fit in with my story)

Christine's comment: Terrific catching up with people after 20 or so years and there was lovely food and atmosphere. I learnt a few techniques on how to shimmy from a lovely young lady. (Ange, you know this means you)

PS I have unceremoniously dumped my photos of the night onto the web folder
http://www.modularbikes.com.au/modular/jicsimonjeff50/

PPS Many thanks to Kevin who put Christine & I up for the weekend.

Fed Square this Saturday

Hi

This Saturday (December 11) I will be at Federation Square selling my bike books and cycling boardgame from 11 - 5. Last chance before Christmas to buy them, after Saturday I hang up my booksellers hat and start doing things appropriate for the season - finishing off the year at work and going surfing! A few of my friends are having a 50th birthday bash at Phillip Island and my family will be down there with bells on.

Anki Toner has listed my cycling boardgame on his cycling boardgames website, see http://www.cyclingboardgames.net/g_cycletour.htm

He likes the chance card "Schoolkids yell get a real bike, move back 1" but what about the shopping tokens "Kamahl's Greatest Hits, $0" or "The Adventures of Barry Mckenzie Movie on VHS Cassette, 50c." C'mon Anki, lift your game.

Ok, might see you Saturday

Best Wishes

Steve Nurse

An Inner Trailer

Hi


For a while now I've been mucking around with bike trailers and recently built one for carrying a large amount of shopping behind a folding bike. Unfortunately this trailer didn't fit on my recumbent and I wanted a trailer for my recumbent so you guessed it, the shopping trailer was due for the chop or rather "annihilation by jigsaw". And rather than building an ordinary trailer, how about one that trails from the front wheel of my bike? (My bike is well-qualified for this type of trailer, being long wheelbase, front wheel drive and having a really big space between the 2 wheels, more about it here:
http://www.modularbikes.com.au/bigatthefront.html)

So I began work. The trailer has a height limit - it will bang into the bike frame if its too high. Keeping this in mind, I mounted the trailer wheels on the back of the trailer box so the bottom of the trailer could be kept low allowing for reasonable depth. The box is made from unbraced plywood and is therefore a bit wonky and I will see about improvements at a later stage. The drawbar is a 28mm garden stake and it's attached diagonally on the base of the trailer.

Initially I thought I could just drill a hole in the drawbar and hang the trailer on a pin mounted on the front fork. I made the bracket on the bike, but when the trailer was hitched up it was too high and I couldn't pedal. Back to the drawing board.

Next step was to cut a small extra piece of garden stake and sandwich part of an old bike tyre between the drawbar and the new piece of wood. Apart from anything else, the extra bit of wood helps push the drawbar away from the wheel so the wheel doesn't bang into the drawbar during turns. The tyre was looped at the top and the loop was secured with a few screws, nuts and washers.

Then it was time for a few blockies to sort out any problems. The low ground clearance led to, you guessed it, scraping of the trailer base on the ground and I did a bit of work to fix that. My son Ewan took the main photo the next day when I was on my way to sell books at a book market. Trailer still way too low and lots of scraping, so en route I stopped and twisted the tyre which the front of the trailer hangs from to bring the drawbar up a bit. And this worked, I arrived, bike, self and cargo and trailer intact at the book market.

While at the bookmarket, I readjusted the loop at the front of the trailer and the whole thing worked very well on the way home.

Well what I have here is certainly exotic - an exotic trailer on an exotic bike. Here are some of the advantages and disadvantages of the design.

* Wheels on the trailer are at the back. When compare to a 2 wheel trailer with wheels in the centre, the trailer hitch bears weight and the drawbar must stand more bending force. The bike is front wheel drive so weight on the front wheel is a good thing - there was no wheel slippage when climbing hills.
* This bike plus trailer is much shorter than the standard trailer arrangement. As well, the trailer following behind is very low and would probably need a flag for it to be seen by drivers peering over car bonnets. With the trailer in the centre, a flag is not needed.
* Having the trailer in the middle restricts the height and length of the trailer. Extra volume can be achieved by having a wide trailer, but this starts to make getting on and off the bike difficult.
* Once in motion, the bike and trailer handled ok. But starting was a bit harder than normal, I had to sit on the bike and start pedalling from a standstill. Normally I can start walking or running, then leap onto the bike side saddle and get going that way.

* The current trailer hitch allows the trailer front to "pendulum" about the hitch on the front. There is little resistance to motion from the trailer wheels at the back, so the whole trailer can move back and forth relative to the bike during acceleration / braking creating a not unpleasant "trailer surge" phenomenon.

* Not for the shy and retiring!

* Here is the video! 

A few new Links

Hi

Over the last few months, Jim Wilson from bikerodnkustom
http://bikerodnkustom4.homestead.com/cover9_03.html has been interviewing me by
email. It was a bit of a stop-start process and we rambled over a range of
topics. So here it is, the interview is sticking out like bits of a dogs
anatomy amidst all the chopper bikes.
http://bikerodnkustom4.homestead.com/nurse_interview.html .

As well as this I have 2 entries in the Melbourne bikefest design competition
http://www.melbournebikefest.com.au/better-by-bike
which will be judged shortly. The Rotovelo from Trisled is one of the other
entries. Another designer (Mark Watson who designed the Tote trailer) has
already been in touch with me.

Regards

Steve Nurse

Game Over

Hi

After about six weeks of after hours work I'm close to finishing the cycling boardgame I started talking about in this post: http://modularbikes.blogspot.com/2010_08_01_archive.html

The game has taken a radical departure from the original (series of races) idea. Hopefully that departure is all for the better. The game is not quite finished but is still very playable. The unfinished bit is that the player pieces are not fully coloured in. (I have almost finished doing 1 and even that took a long time!) But you can do the colouring in. To date I have played the game with my wife, my son and with my friend Tony and his 2 young kids. The game cards are based very loosely on items I have purchased or events that have happened while riding a bike. Hope you enjoy it. Hope you can understand the rules!

http://modularbikes.com.au/game/cycle_tour.pdf

Regards

Steve Nurse

4/10/10

Today I updated the game, all the players are fully colored in now and I did some minor changes to the "shopping cards".

A Big Swell!

Hi

Although I've only written about bicycling - related stuff in this blog in the past, I have another
hobby - surfing - which I've been doing since I was about 15. As a Melbourne resident, going
surfing involves travelling at least 100k and often spending time away from my family: so I
don't do it that often. But occasionally I get motivated enough or sick of things enough to run away and go surfing for a day or two. Very fortunately I have access to a place to stay at Airey's
Inlet which is on the coast west of Melbourne. Even more more fortunately, some of the challenging surf breaks around Airey's are not overpopulated by surfers so as a not - very - competitive or aggressive older surfer, I can still go out surfing and enjoy myself.

Before the advent of the internet, knowing what sort of swell would occur on a given day in the future was a black art. You could make some educated guesses and work out what the wind direction would be from the weather maps but what sort of waves would arrive was unknown. Now, various websites predict the surf size around Australia and the world. The one I use most is www.swellnet.com.au backed up by the venerable bureau of meteorology, www.bom.gov.au.
Type "wave" into the bom website and you are a few clicks away from a map like the one shownsomewhere on this blog page. The red and purple bits of the map are areas of the ocean are areas of big waves and when they get somewhere near your bit of coastline there will be big waves. Simple huh? The fact that predictive maps (a few days in advance of now) are available means keen surfers can go to where the big waves will be, virtually anywhere in the world.

But just big waves ain't enough, to get good waves, other things like local winds need to be right.

So anyway, I'll cut the surf lesson short here. Early last week it looked like a ripper swell was developing so I put in for leave on Friday and headed off on Thursday night to see what surf I could find.

Well it was a big swell and on Friday I only surfed at the very sheltered Lorne Point. I didn't see anyone out at open ocean beaches although one guy had been out at Cathedral Rock. Today (Saturday) I went out at a local Airey's beach. 3 waves only, I was out by myself and respectful of the size of the surf. Hope you enjoy the photos.

Note on surfboard: It was a windsurfer in a previous life. It is a long (8"5" in the old currency), sleek, thick and well worn single fin. Very caveman. I love it. Shaped by Howard Hughes, see
http://www.surfcraft.com.au/ Now retired, Howard has been a friend for years and for ages I have ridden on his boards.

OzHpv Challenge: The Board Game

Hi

Well I won't start on the topic, rather just write a bit of a catch-up and then launch into it.

First of all I've been a bit busy! My wife Christine is recovering from an operation and I've been to and from dentists and endodontists this week dealing with an abcess on the gum. That doesn't mean I haven't done things related to bikes, its just I haven't written about them yet.

For a while I've been helping my workmate Brad Jarvis build a trike (donating materials and advice). He's finished now and posted a bit about it on his web blog at http://emotorcycle.blogspot.com/ . Brad has helped me a lot, dragging this website from a small collection of stuff that I've written to something a bit more focussed and impressive. Thanks again Brad!

Well, back to the board game. I read a few Human Powered Vehicle websites quite regularly, among them
Velovision: http://www.velovision.co.uk/
Bentrideronline: http://www.bentrideronline.com/ and more recently
The Recumbent Journal: http://www.recumbentjournal.com/

Velovision posted a link to this wonderful site about Cycling Board Games.
http://www.cyclingboardgames.net/index.htm . It's not a type of game that's known about let alone used in Australia but this website lists hundreds of them, mainly European I think.

I stumbled across one Australian game on the site: http://www.cyclingboardgames.net/g_national.htm

There is a page about making your own board game, and more trivia than you would care to imagine.

Anyway, this got me to thinking: how about a boardgame based on the Ozhpv Challenge? This set of races has been held over about 10 years at Canberra, Broadford, Werribee and more recently Albury. The website for the Challenge is here http://ozhpv.org.au/events/challenge.html

Anyway I've started a small spreadsheet which sets up a premise for a game based on the challenge. It's here http://modularbikes.com.au/game/Boardgame.xls.

Basically the game would have 6 races and six different vehicles, all familiar to Challenge Entrants
Road Race
Off Road
Shopping Race
Slalom
Hill Climb
Time Trial

Road Bike
Mountain Bike
Lowracer Recumbent
Recumbent Trike
LWB Recumbent
Velomobile

Riders would progress a token across a board based on a roll of the dice. There might be 40 squares to progress through in a race.

There's a table in the spreadsheet with something like the most likely outcomes for the races given riders of equal ability, and the idea of the game is to simulate that likely outcome in each race using a set of "rigged dice" (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dice#Cheat_dice) The "average" roll of dice will lead to the expected result. Each vehicle has its good and bad races and it all averages out even in the end.

Of course nothing like this happens in the real version of the Challenge. The actual result in recent years has been:

* Someone comes along with a mountain bike and wins the Off Road (Tim Marquardt in recent years)

* Jamie Friday wins everything else and is once again crowned OzHpv Champion!

Regards

Steve Nurse

Some Reviews of "The Cycle Zoo"

Hi

This is a gathering of reviews of "The Cycle Zoo". Thanks to Sue Archer & Peter Eland (Velovision), Adrienne (Vichpv Site), Jeff Potter (Out Your Backdoor) , Chris and Steve (3CR)

Out Your Backdoor review
http://outyourbackdoor.com/article.php?id=1504

Pdfs of Velovision review and articles http://www.modularbikes.com.au/modular/reviews/velovision_articles.pdf

A brief mention in the middle of a general discussion on recumbents (search for modular)
http://www.bicycles.net.au/forums/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=18723


Vichpv ad
http://mc2.vicnet.net.au/home/vichpv/web/wanted/wanted.html

3CR radio interview
http://www.yarrabug.org/radio/?tag=steve-nurse-uci-world-track-cup

Regards

Steve Nurse