MacGyver’s Shoes

As subtly hinted at by this morning’s tweet, I have been road testing a budget option of winter-proofing my SPD shoes.

Shown half-way through the delicate procedure, you may notice one of the bomb-proof Shimano shoes has been subtly modified to block off the toe ventilation.  The end result should hopefully be toasty piggies, whatever the weather.

Does this work?

No.  No it doesn’t.  Snug feet are achieved, even in the stiff breeze and sleet we had this morning.  However, the gaffer cap is already separating off from the toe, so unless you’re happy to recreate this every night, it might be time to pony up for some overshoes.

Anyway, I’ve decided that unless I am physically unable to open the front door due to snow fall tomorrow, the recumbent is getting an outing.  Upright bikes in a headwind are such hard work.  This means that I’ll be leading with a good half inch of rubber sole, and warm feet are a happy bonus.

The Need For Speed

Finally got around to writing the post that really describes the point of this blog.  Regret you’re unlikely to find a philosophical epiphany, but there’s some faintly amusing alliteration.

I have a 30 mile (each way) commute, which is a bit of a pain. Currently 20 miles is done by train, which costs 30 quid a week. Travel time is about 3 hours a day. Disregarding the sanity of doing this just to sit behind a desk all day, the aim of the game is to decrease the time spent commuting without having to remortgage the flat and without becoming a broken cripple of an individual come the evening and weekend.

The recumbent was the first step down this road, giving a slight speed boost and a huge advantage in comfort. The other key benefit of such a bike is that the fettling of recumbents in search of going faster is a well documented and wide open avenue of discovery, glory and fibre glass. If the idea of some quality shed time appeals, there’s hardly a better subject.

So, some ground rules and objectives. 

1. Commute time will be measured door to door and I’ll use an average taken across the week to measure progress.
2. I’ll be completely open about costs incurred in the pursuit of speed. Given my other half occasionally audits these pages, this places full carbon disc wheels firmly out of the question. 
3. To link 1 and 2, I’ll ‘pay’ myself £10 an hour. Therefore consistently saving 5 minutes a day would be worth it for a cost of £4.16 a week (£10 x 5/60 [fraction of hour] x 5 [days in week])
4. All day lycra and Spar sandwiches are both pretty grim. The bike must remain able to carry a change of clothes and my lunch.
5. Getting squashed forfeits the game: the bike must remain road legal.  Lights and brakes folks, lights and brakes.

So. How to approach this wee project? And where, for that matter, is the promised alliteration?

I reckon there are three groups of things that can be done to decrease commuting time, which I’ve given suitably cheesy titles:

Drop the Drag: Everything to do with reducing the forces slowing the bike down.  Aerodynamics, surface drag, weight - get it here.
Push the Power: More power reaching the rear wheel means more speed.  Ish.  Think things like training, nutrition, reducing drivetrain friction.
Maintain the Motion: Cruising at 30mph is no good if the route is peppered with red traffic lights, or if every corner slows the bike to a crawl.

Right.  Game on…

P.S.  For the sceptics, note that driving would save 45 minutes a day, plus the £30 of train fares a week.  Using the scoring in point 3, the total time and money saved comes to just over £3k a year (assuming I work 45 weeks a year).  The best car route is 33 miles one way, so we’re looking at a total of 14,850 miles in the same year.  Based on the AA’s latest cost of running tables (using 37.15p/mile) that’s likely to cost £5516, not including buying the car in the first place or the fact that insurance is generally hilarious for 25 year old males.  Superior transport indeed…

H*lmets

Thought I’d treat you to an exceptionally dull summary of a post I made on YACF, pondering whether helmets offer any real benefit on a low recumbent.

As an initial disclaimer, this is not intended to sway you opinion one way of the other.  Helmet wearing on bicycles is one of (if not the) most contentious issues that comes up on every forum vaguely related to cycling.  Personally I’m not fussed.  The lack of any proper evidence as to whether there’s any benefit either way bothers me and as such for convenience if nothing else, I tend not to wear one.  As a brief summary of the prevailing opinions, wearing a helmet appears to make it:

• more likely that you’ll hit your head in the first place
• more likely that you’ll suffer some kind of torsional injury to your upper spine
• less likely that in a very specific yet non-negligible scenario you’ll end up with a severe head injury
• less likely to have abuse hurled at you by drivers and the general public
• possibly less likely to risk contributory negligence being used against you if you are involved in an accident.

Please insert your own [citation needed] throughout.

Anyway, for low recumbents only, I believe the following arguments also apply.

In favour of the helmet there’s all the usual stuff about some protection in low speed falls, arguably less abuse from drivers, avoiding the chance of contributory negligence or similar, somewhere to mount lights/mirrors/cameras, etc

Against gets more interesting.  The main way me and my beloved will part company is me binning it with no outside assistance, in which case I’ll be neatly placed on my side.  Huge gravel rash yes, but a helmet would only serve to increase the chances of my head actually being hit (greater volume) and as I skid along the risk of bits of the helmet catching and placing a twisting load on my neck.  In addition the speed this is likely to happen at is well above that which cycle helmets have any proven benefit (generally held to be walking speed)

The other ways are going to involve some other object, probably a car.  Assuming head on, my weight is below the impact point (chainset), so the chances of me flying over the top are negligible.  No helmet benefit.  From the sides or behind is a complete lottery, but again I can’t see any huge advantage I’d receive.

Effectively the low ride position seems to add a huge lump of safety in an accident, and the helmet nothing further.

As a result, I’m currently wearing the fetching cap, and have left the helmet behind.  So far, all brain cells are accounted for…

Slicks

Brand new set of lightweight slick tyres are waiting for me at the post office, bought to replace the bomb-proof but bomb-heavy Schwalbe marathons on at the moment. Because speed is always the sensible choice…

Sadly the sink must be unblocked before I’m allowed to collect them.

Lying down on the job - the Nazca Fuego

So, a recumbent bike.  Wassat then?

As artfully depicted above, lounging by the side of Gare Loch, the Nazca Fuego is a strange looking thing.  As pictured, she includes:

• Steel frame, with aluminium boom (silver bit at the front)
• 20” front and 26” rear wheels
• Bizarre tiller steering thing, attached to a somewhat narrow set of handlebars
• A wing mirror
• Pannier racks (under seat) and another rack at the back
• 27 gears, ranging from fairly spinny to quite high
• Staggeringly comfortable seat
• More chain than you can shake a stick at

The seat can be adjusted in angle, from the lowest position it’s in here to one that gets you approaching eye level with most car drivers.  This is all cunningly achieved by a pair of quick release skewers that slot through the triangular silver piece under the seat, and works really well.  Note that should you remove the pannier rack make sure you space out the skewers with suitable washers, otherwise you run the risk of the seat hilariously raising under heavy braking.

The seat also has a single shock absorber linking to the read wheel forks, which takes some of the pain away from potholes and cattle grids.  

I’ll add more detail than any sane person would ever want to read in due course, but for those who can’t wait to try one out I can’t recommend David at Laid Back Bikes highly enough.