From Bike Trailer Blog: Kenneth’s BOB Trailer/LHT Combo

via Bike Trailer Blog

I love pictures like this - although I can never imagine loading my LHT up to this degree, there's something satisfying about seeing a tourer loaded up for some real adventure.

Posted via email from monkeyphoto's posterous

STUFFE

The Surly Troll.

Yes, I know it's been a while.

NEW SURLY
If you don't want to be spoilered before Interbike, look away now.

Surly have outlined the new things in their range in a blog post here. I guess the trailer is the big addition - with a hitch that attaches at the rear dropout, by the looks of things, and capable of carrying 300lbs. Blimey.

Also of interest is the Troll, for all the world this looks like the sort of classic steel frame rigid MTB that makes a great beater/commuter/trailer hauler &c &c, with modern touches like disc compatibility. Like the Cotic Roadrat, in a lot of ways.

REDBIKES
Is gradually coming back from his injury;

3 weeks ago I was starting to wonder if I would ever get back on the bike.
2 weeks ago I was cursing the fact that I couldn't ride over 5 miles.
Last week 10miles / hills seemed impossible.

Hopefully his recovery will continue in this speedy fashion!

THE PREDATOR
I really think that using masking tape as handlebar tape is taking thrift too far. Although, given the amount used, wouldn't regular tape be cheaper than buying twenty rolls of masking tape?

ARE MODERN BIKES FASTER?
...or what part has bike technology played in the increase in race speeds? Cozy Beehive looks at one examination by Bicycle Quarterly, and attempts to untangle the different factors involved.

BAILEYWORKS
Their "flag" messenger bags really look cool - hopefully these will move beyond the prototype stage soon. (Story at Urbanvelo.com).

ANOTHER DIY TRAILER
I like the idea of this one - its designer aims to make a "global" DIY trailer, i.e. one constructed from materials that are easy to source anywhere in the world, and simple to put together.

RETHINKING THE PENCIL
As someone with a drawer full of slightly too short pencil stubs, Lines and Colors' article on the Continuous Pencil concept holds great appeal.

LOVELY STUFF FROM VELO ORANGE (AGAIN)
Their fillet brazed Rando frame prototype can be viewed here.

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ENGINEERING CORNER
Cozy Beehive has an interesting piece on the forces experienced during a sprint crash.

Is that a lot of force? Depends whom you talk to and which industry they belong to. But for the Boy Racer, it would really seem he were getting slapped hard on his back by a Sumo wrestler applying 10 times the former's body weight in force, roughly about 6 Kilo newton or 1300 pounds.

You can read the article here.

THE DAUPHINE
Cosmo wonders in this piece whether it's time to re-examine the one week "tour tune up" races. I was a bit busy to follow the Dauphiné properly, but rather wish I'd made the time now.

REMINDER CORNER
Karl On Sea's Ironman is looming. He's doing this particular piece of lunacy (an Ironman is 2.4 mile swim, 112 mile bike ride and 26.2 mile run) in aid of a fantastic cause, Macmillan Cancer Support, and you can sponsor him here.

SHARE THE JOY
A nice piece at the end of Cycling Inquisition's latest article, about remembering to tell the nice stories about your commute, as well as the horror stories too.

TRAILER CORNER

Burley have a guest post over at the bike trailer blog, with a bit of company history, and some information on their "Travoy" trailer. The idea of the Travoy is that it mounts to a seatpost hitch, and can be removed & wheeled with you when you get to your destination (a bit like a cool shopping trolley, if you can imagine such a thing). As they say;

Since you can take the new Burley inside with you, there’s no need to worry about locking up what’s in your pannier bag or leaving anything outside. And if you don’t want to stand the trailer up in your office or a restaurant, it folds down to briefcase-size to fit under your desk or in your cramped downtown apartment.

It's another neat solution in a growing number of neat solutions to carrying large things on a bike. How large? Well, there's a list in the post itself, but my favourite is pictured above...

STUFFE

BIKES, BEER, TRAILERS

Have Keg, Will Pedal from marty benson on Vimeo.

Biketrailerblog has this nice story about a group of friends transporting a beer keg from their local craft brewery. The trailer used is a Wandertec Bongo, and the film made about the trip, and the brewery is above.

WORLDS COLLIDE DEPT
Karl on Sea has a series of nice modifications (calling them hacks does them a disservice) featured on bikehacks.com today, in this article.

The modifications were all carried out on his wife's Raleigh shopper, and vary from the sort of modification I've seen up to now...

RICHARD MOORE
Podium Café has a great interview with the author of "In Search of Robert Millar" here. It also mentions Moore's next project, which sounds like a must read;

PdC: So your next book is about the 1986 Tour? When is that coming out?

RM: It’s going to come out next June for the 25th anniversary for the 1986 Tour. Couple things, some of the people who read the book about Millar said they’d love to read a book about Hinault, another fascinating character. But rather than just write a book about Hinault I thought could I structure this book around an event.

MUSIC/PHILOSOPHY/QUOTES
From the System comes this wonderful site, "Music Philosophy" which is;

"a weekly graphic/typographic interpretation of philosophical song quotes. All the posters look great as an iPhone desktop wallpaper, so feel free to download them. Hope you enjoy."

STUFFE

BICYCLE DELIVERY - MATTRESS
Where else but Portland? You get a discount if you arrive by bike, and can have the mattress delivered by bicycle too. That's a hell of a trailer. (From Utility Cycling).

Also from Utility Cycling is this primer on running errands by bike.

JOSEPH ADOLPHE
Lines and Colors has a piece on this artist. At first sight, the portraiture looks fairly conventional, until you see the underlying patterns and textures. I love his pen and ink illustration in particular.

SHUTT SUMMER RANGE
There have been sneak peeks floating about of this range, but it was officially launched yesterday.

I've banged on about the benefits of sportwool previously - the jerseys are well priced, the material is sourced in the UK, and the jerseys are made here too. The red "ringer" club jersey is very smart in particular.

AIOTM! (aitom!)
It's back. Richard Herring's "As It Occurs to Me", a weekly comedy show/podcast returns for a second season this week. You can find the podcast here. (Bear in mind that it's usually *VERY* sweary & occasionally pushes the boundaries of taste - if you can handle that, its very funny though).

The show is based around what's happened to the cast over the previous week, and goes out unedited - last season was fantastic, with Richard's evident panic at writing a show's worth of new material every week becoming hilariously more evident as the season wore on. It's also probably the only outlet for Emma Kennedy's many stories about pooing in buckets (see season 1). If you're in London, you can see the show being recorded (as well as some extra material before the recording, if I remember right) at the Leicester Square Theatre, the link for tickets is here.

FUN?
Mikael at Copenhagenize set the cat among the pigeons with some of his periodic po-facedness recently. Fun? Ride your bicycle because it is EFFICIENT. Karl on Sea responds in this piece.

MOTIVATION
Doesn't everyone need a little Pascal now and then? (From cyclocosm).

MONKEY TRAIL
Nothing to do with me, but knobbly tyred types might enjoy this write up of the new trail at Cannock, from Redbikes.

STUFFE

GAZELLE
From the Bike Commuters Blog comes this nice video of Gazelle bicycles being made in 1925. I want one of their truing jigs, they look great...

SIN TITULO
Artist Cameron Stewart has been publishing "Sin Titulo", since June 2007. There are now 97 episodes of this complex plotted webcomic on line now. The art is a lovely duotone style, do have a look.

BREAKING THE FOURTH WALL
Who else could it be but Nedroid.com?

LATE BECAUSE YOU TOOK THE BIKE?
Maybe, but not for the reason you think;

"In truth the real reason I was late was that I couldn’t decide which bike to ride. But another small part was that I saw a friend out on the street and stopped to say hello. A real hello, replete with handshakes and well wishes. Which is something you really can’t do in an automobile."

It's from a nice editorial on Urban Velo. I really think this is one of the unstated benefits of travelling by bike, the fact that you're connected with your surroundings far more than you can be in a car.

BIKE TRAILER ROUNDUP
A new feature on the Bike Trailer Blog, this monthly article is a round up of bike trailer news from the preceding month. Well worth a read if you're interested in going beyond the capabilities of a standard bike with a rack, or just share my opinion that cargo bikes and trailers are cool.

INFOGRAPHIC
Flowing Data brings this visualisation of Facebook privacy settings. The graphic charts how much of your personal data is available (and to whom) if you use the default privacy settings.

STUFFE

BADGER II
From BikeHugger, this Piet Mondrian saddle. So, you grab your Look bicycle, mount this on it, buy the "La Vie Claire" kit from Prendas, and your rolling Hinault/De Stijl tribute is complete.

SPEZI 2010
Velovision has this quick rundown of the recent SPEZI show, with LOADS of pictures.

Spezi is a show for Recumbents, Quads, Tandems, Trikes, Folding Bikes - those slightly out of the ordinary things that you don't see all that often in most bicycle media. Worth a look.

ARTS AND CRAFTS
Simon at La Gazzetta Della Bici shares this post on wrapping handlebars. From an original post by Simon's friend James, the method he uses to make custom finishing tape produces a *really* nice effect. (Manufacturer finishing tapes are crap, as James rightly points out, even, and it pains me to say so, Fizik's).

For wrapping the bars, I think it's hard to beat the guide on Park Tool - use the "self tightening" method described in their advanced tips. And do melt the ends of the finishing tape as both Park and James recommend.

TRAILERS

Biketrailerblog.com is always an interesting place to look for utility cycling inspiration.

They cover a DIY project today, this trail maintenance trailer.

"Dean found that walking to different parts of trails that required maintenance and carrying tools took way to much time out of the day, and sometimes when you only have one day a month do to trail work time is of the essence. Dean felt that pre-made retail bike trailers where not cost effective, So he decided to design a bike cargo trailer that he could attach to his mountain bike and that would allow him to carry the tools he needed for effective trail maintenance."

They also link back to an older post, using the BOB trailer for tool carriage (and as a barbecue grill, as it happens).

PORTLAND
I'm not sure it's even worth linking to BSNYC because EVERYBODY reads it, but on the offchance that you might miss his Portland write up...

"Yes, that's another Rivendell (with wooden fenders to boot), which people apparently even use to ride to the store here. I don't think I've ever seen two Rivendells in a single week in New York City, let alone in the space of a day or two, and I've certainly never seen one locked up outside. ... If I ever were to see more than one Rivendell in a day in New York I would just assume some kind of beard convention was in town."

It's vintage stuff.

JOE PARKIN
Urban Velo review Joe's new book, the follow up to "A Dog in a Hat". "Come and Gone" is;

"...not the book of a champion, but rather of the guy who had a few good rides over thousands of races. This is something that most bike racers can relate to. He talks about cycling in America’s competitive cycling heyday, the 90’s. Most of the races that he competed in are long gone."

LEADERSHIP DEBATE
Charlie Brooker reviews last night's;

"According to some polls, Cameron won, or at the very least tied with Clegg. Which is odd, because to my biased eyes, he looked hilariously worried whenever the others were talking. He often wore a face like the Fat Controller trying to wee through a Hula Hoop without splashing the sides, in fact."

STUFFE

ART
Scott C's "Great Showdowns" series is utterly wonderful.

"YOU KNOW, FOR KIDS?"
A nice feature on kid trailers - why not ask the kids what they think? From Bicycle Trailer Blog.

BROMPTON ON TODAY
About 22 minutes in, still on iPlayer here.

"Interviewer - "Your factory is located in Chiswick, one of the most expensive parts of London. Is that wise?"

Will Butler-Adams - "No. Completely barking"

(He does go on to explain why it makes sense).

FANCY DAN TYRES
Panaracer's Pasela is a good, and surprisingly reasonably priced tyre for commuters and tourers - I ran the TG flavour on one of my old bikes and really liked them. Now you can now get a practical tyre in a fancy colour, see here.

THE RULES
Another set of Cycling Rules has popped up, to join rules of the euro-cyclist et al.

Of course, the only rule you really need obey is JUST BLOODY RIDE. All else is secondary.