Bike Shoes

Bike Shoes, New Shoe is centre

Hi

After more than a year of riding to Uni most days, I've worked out what to do about bike shoes!

At the start, I thought I could ride to Uni in bike shoes like the white one shown above, then change into normal shoes for the day but it didn't work on a couple of counts.  The shoes have a plastic sole which slips on asphalt whenever its wet.  This is no good, and I slipped over a couple of times when wearing them, once right in front of a car in traffic.  So I don't wear these any more.   And changing into normal shoes for the day was no good, sometimes I would forget to change back into the bike shoes at the end of the day, and walk down 2 flights of stairs, then start riding the bike home before realising which shoes I had on, and by then I couldn't be bothered going back.

So bike shoes all day seemed like the answer, and I found some quite good ones from Anaconda .  These are advertised at $100 but on sale they are only $50.00.  I've been wearing the first ones I bought for a while now, but they were starting to look a bit tacky, tatty and even down at heal.  I like to look relatively respectable, so didn't want to keep wearing them all the time, and wandered out to Anaconda and managed to get new ones on sale.  So I started wearing the new ones and threw the old ones out.

But then I changed my mind and partly because I forgot to put the rubbish out one week, managed to retrieve the old shoes in an only slightly smelly state.  I use these shoes for doing gardening, working in the shed etc. now, and as a bonus they still clip in.  See you next year, Mr. Anaconda.

Regards

Steve Nurse

New Steerer Part 4

Steerer under Construction

All done!  ........

But it's a very wet night in Melbourne and I haven't tried it out yet.

Current trike outside my barber's in Richmond. This is the same one shown in this post but with the front wheel swapped to 26" from the previous 20".

Hi

The steerer on my aluminium trike is nearing completion and all the brakes and the gear changer have been connected up.  I've changed the handlebars around a bit as a trial - this arrangement might be easier for a beginner.  I'm not sure how it'll go as I am fairly rusted on to the arrangement I've had on the handlebars previously.

Regards

Steve Nurse

Update May 22

Not raining this morning so I did a quick blockie on the trike.  Had a bit of a false start, I had neglected to put the chain back on!  Anyway, that small obstacle overcome I was able to ride about a k or 2 using the new steerer system.  It works ok, and as usual, I have noticed things that can be improved.  The new handlebar position is surprisingly quite relaxing.  Regards.  SN

New Steerer Part 3

Parts I designed are top right, the other parts will complete the assembly

Part assembled

Lower Part Assembled

Wheel swap was part of the whole job.  The fork with the green top started off as a salvaged part from a 24" bike, the other fork is a new part from Abbotsford Cycles.

Hi

On Thursday a courier arrived with some parts from Hasco Foundry for me.  They were steerer base components, and I'd rung up Hasco a few days previously so was expecting them.   When the courier arrived, my wife and I were talking to a neighbour, then just at the same time a taxi pulled up to take us to a medical appointment.  I signed for the parts, then got in the taxi with them, but in a rush to open them left managed to leave my keys in the taxi.

Fortunately the keys issue was solved by the next day, a call to Silver Top put me on to our driver, who delivered the keys back to us the next day. 

Back to the parts now!  Today (Saturday) I had a chance to work with the parts.  They needed a small amount of smoothing before they could be used and I've jumped in to start installing it on a trike.  This involved a big front fork-swapping job first, and my wooden trike (shown here with 20") now has a 26" front wheel, and seems to be going like sh*& off a stick.  The 20" fork assembly from that trike is going onto the Aluminium trike, and the aluminium trike is getting the new steerer.  All this should be ready in a few days and I will report back then.

Regards

Steve Nurse

Barry Jones at Great Escape Books

The Wonderful Mr. Barry Jones with Nicole from Great Escape Books.

Hi

My wife Christine and I are on the mailing list for Great Escape Books in  Aireys Inlet and the bookshop generally punches above its weight when it comes to getting celebrity authors in for signing and talking about their books.  I've been to presentations by Graham (The Rosie Project) Simsion, Magda (Reckoning) Szubanski and now Barry (The Shock of Recognition) Jones.

Magda's presentation was particularly packed with hundreds of people at the pub for her talk and signing. 

Barry's presentation was about his new book "The Shock of Recognition".  Barry has a string of qualifications, honors and members of societies as long as your arm, any one of which would be enough for most people and his latest book is a comment on the books and music that influenced him.  This goes back to Aristotle and Barry recommends not only to read books such as the Iliad and War and Peace, but which translations are worth reading.  And so it goes on, with Shakespere, Dickens, Opera and so on and so forth.  Just about everything he said was over my head but it was great to see him talk.  Being parked conveniently close to the wine bar helped!  Anyway, I bought one of Barry's books, got his signature on it and a few days ago passed it on to my Dad.

Despite attending one of Melbourne's leading private schools (Melbourne Grammar), I managed to forget everything I'd ever had of a classical education by the time I'd left to do engineering. But my interests in punk rock and surfing continued!

Regards

Steve (An Illustrated Guide to the Cycle Zoo) Nurse

Oppy 2016

Graham and bits of Steve Nurse, heading into Cressy

Mick and Graham

With a group of seasoned Audax riders in our sights.  We passed this mob soon after.  Seeing other Audax riders out on the road was one of the highlights.

Team Laid back at the end, St. Mary's cricket club Geelong.  Mick, Graham, Steve

Ride Producer Simon Watt (left) with Dave Ellis and Simon's 1980's Dutch clunker.

Hi

This post is written a week after the 2016 Oppy and my legs have almost recovered.  

I used the Oppy as a riding weekend away.  I wanted to go into Uni on Friday morning but had the afternoon off, so headed off all packed for the weekend on the trike on Friday morning.  It was wet and by the time I got to Uni, I was wet too!  One nasty feature of this wetness was having soapy water with shampoo in it run into my eyes, not very nice I discovered.  After Uni in the morning I caught the train in to the city and then on to South Geelong.  There are new suburbs and station sprouting all over the vast plain to the West of Melbourne, and many of the roads that service the area are already choking at peak hour.

In the afternoon I visited my friend Damian, then pootled down to the caravan park cabin where I’d spend the next two nights.  Soon my ride partners Mick and Graham turned up.  Mick had grown up in Geelong and he drove us up to his Mum Joan’s house in Belmont for an enjoyable fish’n’chip carbohydrate loaded dinner.  This bought back memories,  (as did several other places on our ride) a Uni friend and I had rented a house in Belmont 35 years ago and worked at the now-closing Alcoa aluminium refinery.  Mick took us back to the cabin after dinner for a quiet night and a good sleep.

Up next morning early for an 8 o’clock start.  We headed long a riverside bike track with hundreds of runners on it for the first few k, then popped out onto a highway heading toward Rokewood.  There was only one decent hill on the way and we had reasonable winds so made good progress.  “Par” for this sort of riding on recumbents seems to be speeds of 28kph on good road with an  overall average of 20kph.  This gives you 6 hours sleep at night if you plan to do the 360k, 24 hour Oppy.

On the stretch between Rokewood and Camperdown, we slipped well behind par and battled headwinds for 80k, reaching Camperdown for a break at about 4pm.  My strength was flagging a bit by this stage but Mick and Graham and were riding pretty strong.  The going was a bit better from  Camperdown on, and there was great scenery riding into Colac.  Mick’s GPS got slightly confused by new roads at one stage, but in general Mick used it with great aplomb to navigate us safely through the course.  Thanks Mick! 

It was dark as we shipped out of Colac towards Beeac.  In Beeac we stopped and chatted and joked with a large party of Audax riders and their support crew.  How the other half live, they had snacks and cups of tea and coffee all made for them.   We plodded on and rested just out of Winchelsea, finally reaching Belmont at 2:20 in the morning.  This is not horrendous for an Oppy, the last one I went on we finished at 4 am.

The Oppy rules say you have to do 25k in the last 2 hours, so it was up early again the next day to polish things off.  We took a short ride down the Bellarine and the route took us on a pleasant detour through the Botanical Gardens to commune with bemused-by-recumbents early morning joggers, walkers and dog leaders.  I was in mild panic over whether we’d make the final checkpoint in time (24 hours riding for nothing, aaaaaarrrrrrrrrrggggghhhhhh) but the botanic gardens were in fact not far from the finish and we got there “comfortably”, 2 or 3 minutes spare.

The finish was at the crowded St. Mary’s cricket club rooms where a breakfast for champions of baked beans, toast, eggs, muesli and juice was available.  Awards of various types were handed out and we caught up with our rider organiser Simon Watt who put the appropriate elephant stamps on our brevet cards. 

After packing up the cabin, Graham gave me a lift back to Melbourne.  Sitting in the warm car gave me a chance to doze off.  I was dropped about 10k from home and slowly rode back along the bike paths.  A bit more sleeping when I got home.

Thanks to Mick and Simon for the organisation and Graham and Mick for the assistance while riding.  The new jalopy made it, the old body made it, strange but true.  For now I am (a bit) over Audax but we’ll see.  I may still take on some more long rides.

Regards

Steve Nurse

Oppy Trial Run

Mick and Graham in Frankston

Last Minute Tweaking, helmet light, Busch and Muller dynamo and a Tupperware container bolted to the frame.  The bolt holding the container was there anyway, part of the mechanism holding the aluminium frame halves together. 

Hi

I organised a ride a week out from the Oppy and team Laid-Back met for the first time.  Me, Graham and Mick met at St Kilda and rode the 35 or so km to Frankston.  Mick is a very experienced Audax rider having finished PBP and the Sydney to Melbourne 1200.

This was good as a first hit out, with a much bigger ride coming up.

Regards

Steve Nurse

Robbie at Hawthorn Biketrack

Robbie @ Hawthorn bike track....

the trike always attracts attention.

Hi

After about a year of supervising my master's degree trike design work, my friend Robbie Napper came down to the Hawthorn bike track to actually try one out.  He got the hang of it fairly quickly on the grass, and after some fairly gung-ho riders had vacated the track proper did a few successful laps.

This was nominally a "supervision meeting", but who was supervising whom?  Anyway, I will let Robbie know about this post and maybe he can write some guest blogger material.

It was actually very lucky that these photos made it to the blogoshere or cyberspace or wherever we are.  I took the photos on Monday afternoon and accidentally left the camera at the bike track.  I missed it the next day and by Friday morning when I returned to Uni hadn't found it, so swung by the bike track, and lo, there was the camera under the tree where I'd left it 3 days earlier.  It had been rained and shined on but still worked fine.

Regards

Steve Nurse

Oppy Prelude

Trike as ridden in Great Ocean Road 200.

Bike Light Hacked.  There is a small bit of drilled plastic below the screw which reinforced the case....

so a screw could be added to attch it to the back of the trike.

Hi

There are some big rides coming up on the Audax calendar - The 1200k Great Southern Randonnee comes at the end of the but for this yaer at least I will confine myself to a couple of shorter (but not short) rides.  An email from Simon Watt led to me joining an "Oppy" recumbent team which aims to travel  360k in 24 hours in a loop out of Geelong.  I'll be riding with Mick Creati and Graham Signiorini.

This sort of distance can't be covered without a well-fettled vehicle and training.  A week ago the trike didn't have lights, a lid for the boot, wide ranging gears or any padding on the seat and it now has  all of those things including an extra 202 km travelled courtesy of Peter Donnan's Audax midweek great ocean road ride.

Before I'd even started fettling, the trike had achieved "The holy grail of recumbent cycling", that is, going to the grog shop and returning with a slab of beer and some wine in the back.

I didn't have my camera with me on the 200k ride so a description will have to do, and in this case the ride is not the main event, so lets just get on with it.  We set out of Anglesea about 8am into drizzling rain which persisted all day - it was all absolutely welcome as the countryside looked dry as a dead dingo's donger with some cattle craning necks over fences in the paddocks to reach the grass on the roadside verges.

The first bit of the ride was all hills and everyone else on the ride was ahead of me pretty soon but I managed to catch up with one rider for a short while.  The chain got clogged up in the chainring a few times and this is something I'll need to fix for future rides.  Other than that everything went fine.  I was a bit slow over the hills to Lorne (84k) and it was headwind into Apollo Bay from there, but with rolling surf on the left there was plenty to see.

A quick stop, refuel and change into dry clothes at Apollo Bay and then it was back along the coast to Anglesea.  This included going through the recently fire-ravaged town of Wye River, seeing the new growth starting to appear.  There were roadblocks for roadworks but that didn't worry me much, you just wait a bit and get to wave to the workers who are very friendly.  I was back at Anglesea in plenty of time for the Audax 200k time limit and chatted with Peter at the end of the ride over a cup of tea.  He's in an Oppy team too, so I'll see him in a week or two.

That's it for now.  More fettling is due.  For the Oppy I'll need lights that are reasonably bright and will last for six or seven hours so that is one of the next things to fix.

All for now!

Regards

Steve Nurse

During Construction.  An existing plywood seat was extended with a curved ply base and a side-frame to support the coreflute.

Once finished, this made for a very stable, beer and wine-carrying tailbox.