Round the Bay in a Day 2011

At the end of the ride, Photo by Jeremy Lawrence

Last year I was booked in to do this ride but had mouth surgery a few days before so withdrew.  Not to be stopped, I registered again this year.  Quite hard work but the bike went well, and I managed to get around the 210k in about 10 hours, that is, about 5am at Alexandra gardens and back there at about 3pm.  That included about 2 hours of ferry ride, lunch and other sundry stops.  Highlights were chatting with a bloke for several kilometres through Geelong, and moving easily with a large group of riders toward Sorrento. Here is the short video I took.

Pre Round the Bay

Paul Prentice and his Roulandt Recumbent

Knitted Bike Cover

Trisleds new load Carrying Trike.....

Which is front wheel drive. 

Today is the Saturday before the annual Round the Bay in a day ride and I know of at least 1 other recumbent rider going on the ride, John Reynoldson who is riding anti-clockwise, I am riding clockwise.  Needless to say we will see other recumbents along the way. 

There is a bike fair around the start / finish of the ride which runs for 3 days and today I pootled in to have a look around and gather up all the free and cheap stuff available.

Here are my awards.
* Best and only free T-shirt is from bikeroar.com
* Best and only load trike: Trisled front wheel drive as per photos.
* Best decorated and least aerodynamic bike: knitted cover bike.

Also good to catch up with Paul Prentice, he lives quite near to me, he was cruising around near the bike show on a 1980's Roulandt and we stopped and had a chat.  He is a keen environmentalist and bike collector and loves to chat about bikes.

All for now, will report on the ride within the next few days.

Ride to Work Day

Scene at Edinborough Gardens on Ride to Work Day

Helmet from Fed Square (before)

Ross Harrup Rode in from East Burwood....

On his shaft drive bicycle

Helmet After

Hi 

Wednesday last week was "Ride to Work Day" in Victoria, and for the first time I took part in a small way.  I took the day off work and sauntered off at the late hour of 8:30 and caught the tail end of the Yarra ride to work day In the Edinburgh gardens.  There were some cyclists and quite a few police (and no crime to speak of) gathered. Managed to get a cup of tea and then I rode off into the sunrise.

My next appointment was at 10 o'clock and I had some time to kill so rode via Federation square and bought one of the inexpensive ($5.00) bike helmets on sale there.  Victoria has compulsory bike helmet laws and a bike hire scheme - cheap helmets are a way to encourage bike hirers to wear helmets.  It doesn't always work and dudes ride round helmetless on the hire bikes with gay abandon.  But it makes for cheap helmets.  See http://www.melbournebikeshare.com.au/Helmet-locations 

The helmets come in small and large sizes and has an adjustment knob at the back which tightens a band around the top of the head.  It can be adjusted quite quickly but the headband tends to make the helmet a bit sweaty - there's not enough ventilation there.

Next stop was the RMIT bike market where I set up a small stall selling  bike books and boardgames and representing ozhpv.  I saw bike acquaintences Ross Harrup, Ken Smith and Kim Tolhurst during the day.  Ken is a vichpv ride regular, Ross has been building and riding unusual bikes since forever and Kim is the Australian agent for Cruzbike.  A pleasant day was had.

During the day I did some surgery on the bike helmet, attaching lights and reflective material and having a go at the ventilation issue.

The big bike ride "Round the Bay in a Day" is Coming up Sunday, we will see how I go and I'll report back after Sunday and recovery.

 

October Vichpv Ride

John Kuljis sports a handlebar moustache
courtesy of his Fraser rowbike.....

which he rode to the Vichpv / Ozhpv
  come'n'try ride October 2011.

The label on the rowbike opens up a
whole new line of insults,
"Hey, Mr Trampoline man etc."

After mucking around with bike on Saturday, I went for a ride on Sunday.  It's easy to ride along bayside beach road and end up at the start of the vichpv / ozhpv come'n'try ride in St Kilda. Bike is going well.  Here is a short video I made.   I can overtake quite a few standard road racing bikes on this stretch of road, especially on the downhills. All for now except to say Happy 21st Birthday, Cameron Shallard!

Making a new bike part 14

The back wheel disc - finally

Hi
We are close to the moment of truth now when I will be riding this bike on a long ride, the Melbourne "Round the Bay in a Day", and I am fiddling around with bits and pieces on the bike.  Firstly and most importantly, I bought a complete new front wheel from Bikes de Ver just down the road in Fairfield.  The original wheel was a bit buckled which meant the V-brakes had to be set quite wide and the brake levers were bottoming out.  Not a good situation.  Anyway, I spent an hour or so at the bike shop and in between other customers coming in, my front wheel cluster was removed and swapped onto a new wheel, a new Schwalbe Marathon tyre was fitted and the new wheel was put on the bike.  The gentlemen in the bike shop are very experienced bike riders and mechanics and were checking out my bike, telling me how they would have done things different, what brazing flux I should have used, and which bits of metal should have been cro-moly instead of mild steel but generally admiring the beast.  I left the old wheel with them for straightening and we had a bit of a chat.  They have a guy who paints bikes so when there is a break of a few weeks when I'm not using the bike, I'll take it up there for painting.

Rotating the handlebar extension to adjust the grip.

     

Still life of nasturshiums with recumbent bicycle.

On getting the bike home I muck around with the handlebars a bit, swapping the side that the extensions are on.  All for now.  Blogging as the mighty Cats (Geelong football club) demolish the Magpies in the grand final football.  Not really a football believer but half the conversations people have in Melbourne this week are about football, you are left out in the cold if you know nothing about it. Really all for now. Bye
Steve Nurse

Spotted in Dandenong

Unidentified Flying Object in Dandenong Part 1

Unidentified Flying Object In Dandenong Part 2

My work takes me between 2 workplaces in the outer Melbourne Suburbs of Rowville and Dandenong, and sometimes I borrow a company car for the drive between the sites.  On Wednesday I happened to have my camera with me and managed to take 1 bad and 1 reasonable photo of this Aero - Dude on a bike.  Must admit I didn't know whether to blog about this one, the first photo is so terrible with the cyclist obscured  by a slightly boring company car.

Now I have worked out that people take photos for a couple of reasons: 1. Pictures record events or objects or people at a particular point in time for posterity and 2. Pictures are taken to look beautiful and to demonstrate the skill of the photographer, or sell a product,  and they're manipulated to a greater or lesser extent to look even more beautiful.  When photographers take photos that both record events and look beautiful they are blessed.  But in my case, I don't have a reputation as a photographer and nothing to protect so I will just publish a crap photo of an interesting subject if I want to. 

If you are looking for much better cycling photos, have a look at the photos on this page of ecovelo and all the photos you get to from all the links, like this one. I will try to take good photos.  But if I don't I will just publish and be dammed.  Because I can.

So back to my photos after all this diversion.  The gentleman in the photo could have chosen the duck-down-and-decrease-frontal-area or ride-a-recumbent methods of reducing wind resistance but has gone his own way with an aerodynamic body extension.  And good on him - we need more varieties of bikes and riders! 

Building a new bike part 13

Previous Set of Handlebars

Hi

As discussed in the previous blog entry, work on the bike is not quite done.  Although everything now works fine, I am tweeking and modifying and improving some things.  Handlebars are on the list and I'm motivated to do them this weekend.

So why change the handlebars?   Well there are 4 things I thought of:
* Make the bars lighter
* Make the bars more aerodymamic by running brake and control cables down the tubes.
* Have the bars split to simplify carrying the bike inside a car or on a car roof.
* Remove the need for cable ties on the handlebars.  See here for the way the bike was before.  

The next few photos show the result.  The materials I needed were 1" x 1.2mm wall cro moly tube, 7/8" thin wall steel tent pole, 7/8" steel tube and lock mechanism from kid's scooter handlebars. The way these handlebars are set up, the split in the bars is essential if the bars are to be removed from the bike at all as the zinc plated tentpoles would normally make the bars captive.  The build process could be automated by having the cro-moly tube laser cut.  Here are the photos, any questions please ask!

Regards

Steve Nurse

Videotastic!

A recent, inexpensive but slightly dodgy vhs purchase from the Savers op shop.

Before I launch into the Videotastic! blog post I just want to say that the bike I've written about in the last few posts is on the road and doing well. We are down to the fine adjustment and I plan to build a new set of handlebars and paint the bike, so blog posts are not quite over yet.

Now, just because a technology is old and unfashionable doesn't mean it won't work.  Most VHS videos you buy from op shops and garage sales cost from 50c to $2.00 and there is often a wide choice of videos available.  Normally you've paid so little for them that its fine to just give them back to the op shop when you're done with them.  Most videos of Australian movies I will keep.

So now we come to my latest purchase.  The diabetes foundation's Op Shop chain is called "Savers" and they sell videos very cheaply.  A recent find was videos of the 2003 ABC TV series "Love in the Air" which chronicles the history of Australian pop music featuring the likes of Kylie Minogue, John Paul Young, Molly Meldrum and Crowded House with an occasional glimpses of Hunters & Collectors, Deborah Conway and other slightly more hard-assed rock'n'rollers.  Sherbert does Howzat! Norman Gunston does Howzat! Much to like.  Noticable by their absence were AC/DC, Paul Kelly and INXS.

So anyway I get the videos home and open the cases.  Two of the three videos were still in their plastic wrapper but one was the wrong video altogether as per the photos.  Shock and horror! Caveat Emptor!  This reminds me of the old Meatloaf song "Paid $1.47 for three videos but one of them was the wrong bloody video and I was pissed off.  A lot".  Wait, maybe that wasn't the Meatloaf song I was thinking about.  Maybe that wasn't even a song.  Wait, I've got it now.  "Two out of three ain't bad"

Next post will probably be about bikes and not did-not-quite-live-up-to-expectations-but-was-nevertheless-quite-pleased purchases of videos.  Thank God I hear you say.

Best wishes

Steve Nurse