Great Ocean Road Audax Ride on 15/3/2010

This ride takes place along the scenic and popular-with-cyclists Great Ocean Road. The (Bicycle Victoria run) Great Vic Bike ride is extremely popular when it runs along the G.O.R. . In recent times there has been a 1-day, commercial ride on the Great Ocean Road, see

http://www.supersprint.com.au/events/2xu-great-ocean--otway-classic-ride-2010.aspx

The Audax Ride I went on is non-commercial and is limited in numbers due to the laws requiring traffic control measures for larger groups. Despite being non-commercial it was extremely well organised and my thanks go out to Peter Donnan and his crew for a job well done. They never failed to look relaxed and provided excellent food at the lunch and morning and afternoon tea stops.

As for the ride itself: well the gods turned on beautiful weather. The week previous (a holiday long weekend) had seen Melbourne hailed upon with "hail the size of lemons" damaging stations and stadiums. The rain slowly cleared and the State Emergency Service slowly mopped up the hail havoc and the insurance companies slowly got busy ironing out the damage from hailed-upon-cars.

So, nice weather. The ride is 150k, Anglesea to Apollo Bay and back. The route hugs the coast and watches the waves roll in for the whole of its distance which suits me as a rider who has no speedo, no GPS or other gizmos on his bike. My recumbent bike (looks a bit like this one http://www.modularbikes.com.au/challenge07/wport/winter/blurry2.JPG)

is heavy and slow uphill but very fast downhill . By Audax standards I'm not very fit, so compared to some other riders I'm the hare, going quite fast occasionally and then slowing right down while the tortoises catch up. And overtake. Mostly.

Anyway, despite riding at wildly inconsitant speeds, for me, doing the Great Ocean Road on a recumbent is heaps of fun. And a few other recumbent riders were along for the rides as well. There was a 200k option offered instead of the 150k and Peter W. , Simon W. Rob L., Rick H. all rode one of the distances on recumbent bikes. This makes quite a high proportion of recumbents on the ride and there was respect for us and everyone else on the ride. Thanks again Audax.

http://www.audax.org.au/public/

Painting The Bike

A fair amount of the weekend of Feb 27 and 28 was spent painting my bike. I rode out to Bunnings in Hawthorn (4wheel drive / toorak tractor city!) and bought a can of Hammertex Grey Spray paint. This paint goes onto just about anything and does a reasonable job of looking good even if you are an amateur painter like me.

On the way home from Bunnings I stopped at a church fete in Richmond and somewhat ambitiously (in terms of transporting the things home)bought several shirts, some grapefruit marmelade, a few books and a signed, framed music poster print from the jazz group Galapagos Duck.

After unloading all that stuff I stripped down the bike. On the Saturday Night (um, we are talking about real excitement here) I painted the forks.
On the Sunday I stripped down the rest of the bike and used an old bike fork to hang it over the lane behind our place. A block of wood with a bolt stuck up through it was used to jig the seat frame and the forks.

Well I was happily painting away, Hammertex Grey when the can ran out, somewhat prematurely and possibly due to a lack of shaking on my part. I mean, the can needs shaking, otherwise not all of the goop that's in it comes out of it in the proscribed manner, ie as nice paint. So what to do? Not panic! I resorted to using some canary yellow paint which was hanging around in the shed. So now we have main frame: canary yellow, forks and bit of seat frame: Hammertax Grey, other bit of seat frame: Canry Yellow. Some photos of the finished results at a later date.


Till next time!

Regards

Steve Nurse

Racing on The New Bike

On March the 20th my wife and I were up at Ballarat for the weekend and I participated on my new bike which includes a body sock. The cover is nicknamed "Carmen Miranda" because of its extremely loud, bright colours. John Reynoldson organised our team.

The night before the ride was very windy and I attempted a couple of laps in the bike with the fairing on. Not much fun, the wind kept blowing part of the corflute fairing into the path of my foot and I spent some time modifying it with the limited tools I had available. After a while I abandoned the body sock and went for a ride on the "nude bicycle". A couple of people who had seen me on the bike with the fairing said "there goes another one" when they saw the uncovered bike - the appearance changes quite radically.

Well I needn't have bothered fret'n about the wind. Sunday Feb 21 dawned cool and still with a blue sky. Hallelujah! The ride went very well for the 'bentriders crew. Most of us reported few standard cycles passing us on the 6k flat circuit.

Lloyd Hassell put together a video, the results are here. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzNPJgiqU_E

Graham Signiorini is a great bike rider and a master wooden boat builder. He made the bent plywood seat for my bike. The photo show him on his Rans Xtreme for team Bentriders. Note the custom wooden tailbox.