Used to have a dynamo headlamp when I was a kid, but now they all seem to be battery powered. I liked the dynamo, except for how it went dark whenever I stopped at junctions. I probably shouldn't have been out that late, anyway.

I like your Emily. Next bike will be a cousin of hers. Very sensible, and therefore ridable.

But what is the purpose of the gears hanging from the key? Is it something to do with the lock? An easy way to identify the key in your pocket? An homage to Steampunk? What's left of your watch?

1) Remove chain from bike, clean thoroughly in a solvent bath, dry, and then submerge in a melted wax/graphite chain lubricant. This works great, but is a bit of a pain. I do it about once a year, and to new chains*.

2) I've got a little chain bath thingamajig which runs the chain through a lubricant/cleaner† bath while on the bike. The bathtub goes under the chain, and a set of gears and brushes clamp over the chain pushing said chain into the bathtub. Add cleaner and/or lubricant to tub, support bike with rear wheel off the ground, and crank slowly.

*No matter how well maintained, chains stretch. If you let this go on too long, the chain starts modifying the gears (especially aluminum alloy chainrings)to fit.

† My favorite cognitive dissonance dual purpose product is something called Lube-N-Glue, which is used to slide foam handgrips onto handlebars, and then make them stick tight. If an oxymoron is a word that disagrees with itself, what is the name for a product with a similar conflict?

Would Lube-N-Glue work to make it easier to apply hard rubber cane tips to the end of wooden canes? They're such a pain to put on, and when they start to wear out, I usually end up having to saw and tear the cane tips off in chunks.

The big drawback of fully enclosed chains is that no-one has yet come up with a case that is actually convenient to open. And it is even worse when you need to replace the tires. And they tend to collect lots of dirt on the outside. The lower amount of chain-maintenance needed is worth it.

The disc-brakes themselves are essentially maintenance free, or that is the way I have always treated them. Cables need some tightening or replacing every now and then, but that is relatively simple.

The ring-lock has been the main lock on all Dutch bikes for ages, and they are still usually the highest rated ones. The lifting to open somewhere else approach of thieves results in the need for cable or chain-locks. Those started flimsy, but in an arms-race are now often stronger than the object you chain the bike to.

There should be dynamo-powered head-lamps that have a small capacitor or battery that continue to shine if you're not moving. There is a reason tail-lights are battery powered nowadays, the wire back to the old dynamo-powered lights was very vulnerable, and the lights prone to burning out.

Hope she won't disappear on you.

He grew up in Toronto and cycled enough in high school to permanently change the shape of his calves (they're still 'high and tight', even after over a decade of largely-couch-potatoing). He came to Chicago for college, and suddenly realized he was in cyclist's high corn -- the steepest street inclines you'll get in the city proper are generally bridges or overpasses. Otherwise, we're very flat. Especially compared to Toronto. :->

I was never able to make the coordination work for bikeriding when I was the prime age (I was great with training wheels, but then once they came off couldn't go more than half a block without falling/putting a foot down). Once John came into my life, his enthusiasm encouraged me to give it another go ... and I'm now older and self-meta-analyzing enough to realize it's a mild phobic feedback loop (Worry. Wobble. Clench handlebars in DEATH GRIP. Wobble more. Iterate until fall over), which will be conquerable with sufficient time, effort and practice ... so sometime in the next few years we need to institute whole-family bikerides.

John gets to carry the kids until I stop keeling over in traffic, of course.

I crave a bakfiets, and will be saving up for one; they just feel safer to me than those pop-up drag-behind mesh-and-polyester two-wheeled trailers.

Plus, since they're MY kids, I much prefer to keep 'em where I can see what they're getting up to. :->

No should about it. That capacitor's a perfectly ordinary feature that is available on most generator lights. Including my exceedingly American bike. Only the cheapest of the cheap generator lights skips it.

And no, the rear light's wire is not all that vulnerable, in the hands of an adult. Nor are the bulbs prone to burning out. The usual procedure is to run the wire along the underside of the frame, with a lot of attachment points, then up along the inside of the fender or the inner side of the back rack, depending on where the light mounts.

You *don't* want a battery powered light. People steal those.

I like the high cross-bar type frame for the same reason as described in #11 - if I have to carry it, that's how I carry it.

It definitely caused some consternation when I bought it ("You want a gentleman's bike?!") but outside of the store if I shocked anybody they were too polite to say anything. My dutch relatives did report to my mother that I had bought a man's bike, in rather dismayed tones, she told me :-) My co-workers in holland said it was such a nice light bike it was a shame to install a heavy lock on it; the bike shop in north america knows they can suggest heavier wheels (cheaper) and tires (got one on the back that's probably as close to puncture-proof as rubber can be) because my bike is already heavy, another couple of ounces isn't a concern.

I'm long since back in Canada but the guys at the bike shop where I take it for its annual tune-up and any other maintenance it needs know me as "the girl with the old dutch bike". I guess from their point of view, a ten-year-old bike is old.

Close to ideal for that, but it can be a bit hard to take off, since it has hardened to a gummy glue. There are actually lots of stuff that are both slippery and sticky, and for your cane tips I'd suggest methylcellulose, because it dissolves in water. Make a slippery, thick solution, apply to end of cane, slide on. To remove, squirt some water between the tip and the cane with a syringe, wait a while and slide tip off.

The standard is getting better here, but I've still been honked at or given the finger for biking on the roads, and most cyclists stick to the not-wide-enough-for-a-bike sidewalks. :(

Have fun with Emily! :)

Re: cycling with Fiona, I remember riding around with my dad that way all the time at her age. He had the back rack that had the wire cages on either side, perfect for little feet. (http://www.rei.com/product/782410) Also it had an upturned bit at the end that I would hold onto (hands behind my back) rather than holding onto him--I think the seat on his was more forward, putting him a bit out of comfortable reach.

Anyway it's one of my fondest memories of my childhood...thanks for the reminder!

For the decades in which my bike hasn't been new, I've always considered one of its features to be the sort of theft resistance (not proofing, but resistance) that comes of always parking it next to better-looking bikes. Perhaps you could cultivate this by having an artistic friend paint it to look beat up and even somewhat damaged, and have a wire that looks like a brake cable dangling loose somewhere where it won't mess you up.

When I commandeered my mother's bike-- it was basically a little kid's bike only bigger-- my dad had to file down part of the kickstand so the pedals didn't rub. It still doesn't work properly.

One bike-theft technique I have seen is that the thieves put their own lock on the bike. It happened to someone in my department and I am *still* disappointed that no one said, "Hey, we're engineers. WE FEAR NO BIKELOCK," and cut the rack apart that night.

...subconscious Syd Barrett mashup?

Never heard that term; it took me a moment to realize that the people I know refer to those as "bungee cords."

I rode my bicycle to high school, 3 miles each direction for four years. My freshman year I'd been in an accident on it and tacoed the front wheel; my dad straightened the frame but it was never quite straight again. (You couldn't ride it handsless and I finally gave it up after college* when a friction problem developed with the back wheel rubbing against the frame at higher speeds.**)

It was— I kid you not‚ a ten-speed Huffy. Bought for $80 in 1990. I once saw a statistic on how long cheap bikes like that were supposed to last and I'd gone more than double that.

Because of that thorough imprinting, I want a ten-speed with racing handlebars that have the cheater brakes on top. I've ridden other bikes and my reflexes don't like other handlebar styles. And unfortunately, I live near a bike and bike-theft mecca, so prices on new and used cycles is absurdly high and a barrier to entry. I. Just. Want. A. Bike. Not a $600 high-performance frame, or even a $300 fixer-upper frame.

Though I do want the ability to crank the handlebars up way higher than any bike-lover would consider. I am not a cycling competitor and I don't bend way over.

*I didn't so much give it up as allow my mother-in-law to donate it to charity while I was out of town. She'd forgotten that I'd told her where the lock key was, so she donated it with the U-bolt still in place.

**You go faster, the wheel shifted against the frame. That was a maddening problem to diagnose since it only happened with the particular pressures of actually riding it.

Abi: snelbinder My (Raleigh, folding) bike has one of those. However, I still carry three bungee cords, for when I'm overloaded with large heavy books or similar.

Abi: I think making reflective sidewalls or similar mandatory is a great idea. I have a couple of reflectors on each wheel. As a car driver as well as a cyclist, I agree with you that making the turning wheels visible is advantageous.

Bell: I use mine a lot in central London, due to the tendency of pedestrians to walk out into the road without looking, so long as they can't hear any (powered) vehicle coming.

Kickstand: My folding bike has one, and now I miss it when I'm on the full-size bike.

Yes, this is why when I once advised someone who was visiting our office for a week to rent a bike, he said, "Well, that, or maybe rollerblades." "No," I replied, "I meant the way you would rent a car back home. Transport, not sport."

jnh @5:
But what is the purpose of the gears hanging from the key? Is it something to do with the lock? An easy way to identify the key in your pocket? An homage to Steampunk? What's left of your watch?

The second reason and the third, plus another. If I lose the key (I have done, twice, with Vera), then it's useful to have something distinctive to ask after. "Has anyone handed in a bike key?" gets you two or three candidates at the local elementary school. "Has anyone found a bike key with gears on the keychain?" is much more specific.

(The gears themselves are from a box of clock parts I got from a friend. I use them to make indentations in the leather for steampunk bookbinding.)

Elliot @11:

I am not planning on carrying Emily anywhere. She's kinda heavy.

You can get bakfietsen with two front wheels, which would solve the balance problem. And when the kids are older and have their own bikes, you can put the picnic gear in there. Or a smallish elephant.

Kip W @21:
For the decades in which my bike hasn't been new, I've always considered one of its features to be the sort of theft resistance (not proofing, but resistance) that comes of always parking it next to better-looking bikes.

The old joke about outrunning a tiger comes to mind here. I'm certainly planning on doing this.

Perhaps you could cultivate this by having an artistic friend paint it to look beat up and even somewhat damaged, and have a wire that looks like a brake cable dangling loose somewhere where it won't mess you up.

Well, there are many bikes in Amsterdam that are either very distinctively painted (to reduce resale value) or actively junked. I may do something like that, but I don't want to completely trash my suburban street cred.

B Durbin @25:
Because of that thorough imprinting, I want a ten-speed with racing handlebars that have the cheater brakes on top.

I did that too, though I found that I was OK with more gears. But a few years here seems to have widened my views. I just have Dutch bikes classed as a somewhat different species in my head; I still don't like mountain or non-Dutch city bikes.

Forgot to mention that the pump's already off and in the bike shed. Since most bike shops will lend out a pump for the asking, I'll probably just go without one. Alternatively, I have a miniature pump that'll fit in a fietstas.

Good notion about the postal code. Do bike shops do that, or should I just get my Dremel out?

Congratulations on your receipt of Emily*.

I notice from the shot of Vera that she has panniers attached - can I ask what type and how you decided? I've started a work commute and I'm considering replacing the current solution (small rucksack).

Do you carry any emergency repair gear, or are bike shops common enough in Amsterdam that you will always expect to be able to hobble to one?

Happy cycling and may she be invisible to the eyes of thieves!

Diatryma@22

"One bike-theft technique I have seen is that the thieves put their own lock on the bike "

*which is, coincidentally, also my new daughter's name.

I tried to get a dutch bike in southern Germany some years ago, but it was impossible. Only 25-kilos, aluminium-frame, over-suspended "City bikes" that took twice as much effort to move as my old three-speed Dutch bike (which got stolen after 15 years of service, sigh).

pericat #1: Modern lamps keep going for a minute or two after the bike stopped. And axle dynamos are not effected by rain and snow, as those running along the wheel are -- but with that equipment, the bicyle's risk for theft is already increased.

J. Mejer #10: There is a reason tail-lights are battery powered nowadays, the wire back to the old dynamo-powered lights was very vulnerable, and the lights prone to burning out.

Burning out is much rarer with LEDs than it was with the old light bulbs. The main practical issue I found with the battery powered lights I used for a short time was that in cold weather (below freezing), the battery life was counted in minutes. I used a heat pack to keep them going. A friend mounted a motorcycle battery on the bike in winter to keep the lights on. And you have to take the battery-powered lights off and carry them with you when you lock the bike.

Occasionally (rarely) fixing the (well-attached) wire is less of a hassle IME.

anja #28: you might consider engraving your postal code somewhere on the frame so if it does get stolen (and is found discarded elsewhere), you at least have a small chance of getting it back.

Or write down the frame number. Don't know how it is in the Netherlands, but in Germany if the police finds a bike that might be stolen, they check the frame number against a list of stolen bikes.

Congratulations on your Emily, who is probably somewhat more high-maintenance than mine!

I notice from the shot of Vera that she has panniers attached - can I ask what type and how you decided? I've started a work commute and I'm considering replacing the current solution (small rucksack).

Vera's onto her second pannier configuration. Both of them are built around what I've carried to the office these past three years: a laptop case with my work computer, my wallet, pens, and assorted gubbins, and my rain gear, pump and secondary lock.

When I started commuting with her, I had a set of silver flop-over-the-rack panniers. I'd put my laptop case inside one of them, while the other things lived fairly permanently in the other. But the plastic stiffeners of those sorts of panniers bend inward over time. Eventually the back corners are playing the spokes of the back wheel like a marimba. It's most annoying.

So I switched to a laptop case with bike mountings, which lasted until the plastic clips that hooked it onto the rack broke (the only damage was my iPod, which caused my husband to buy me an iPhone*). But I still liked the case, so I drilled through the back plate and bolted on some spare Ikea hardware that happened to be lying around. Then I attached some webbing to the hardware, further webbing to the rack, and now can clip the bag on. It's the best solution I've ever dealt with, and I suspect I'll replicate it in future. The bag is wearing out at the corners now, but I figure a new configuration can wait for the new job; I don't know that I'll be bringing a laptop home every night.

On the other side, for the rain gear and suchlike, I've tended to a variety of clip-mounted panniers, one after another. They don't carry much weight unless I've been by the supermarket on the way home. Their main disadvantage is that they stand a little proud of the rack, so I can't have one of them and a kid on at the same time (bruises the little legs).

Do you carry any emergency repair gear, or are bike shops common enough in Amsterdam that you will always expect to be able to hobble to one?

On the first photo I linked to in this comment, you can see a black pouch mounted under the seat. It has an inner tube, three tire levers, and a multitool, which allows me to change a flat on the side of the path, or do quick adjustments on the way home. After the seat bolt broke the second time (my frame's a little small for me, and it comes out in pressure on the back of the saddle), I started carrying spare bolts and moved the bag to the pannier.

However, that degree of repairability was contingent on quick-release hubs and cantilever brakes. I would not expect to be able to change Emily's inner tube by the side of the road.

The main problem with relying on bike shops for repairs is that they're closed from time to time (evening commute hours and Mondays, for instance). I suspect if I have bike trouble I'll have to choose between walking it home and locking it somewhere to come back to at a more convenient season. Fortunately, my new job is also accessible by bus, unlike my current one.

-----
* O Happy Fall!†
† Note the apple connection.

The bakfiets is very heavy and its turning radius is very large, but the death grip wobble is in fact the main problem I had to overcome after purchasing the bike. Something like the Winther Kangaroo might be a good alternative; it's more high-tech and more spacious for two kids (or kid and cargo), but definitely wider, so its practicality depends on your route. You also can't exactly swoop around corners like on a bicycle.

Bits of the bike (seat, wires etc.) taped up goes a long way to making a new bicycle look older and less desirable...

*As are many of my belongings - if stolen, then recovered by the police, it allows the marked objects to be traced back to you.

(The slightly backward stance actually feels right now, as I move from the very forward position on Vera. It reminds me of aikido, in that my chi is properly centered when I'm riding.)

It is in theory possible for me to bike to work, but probably not practical. But I hope to use it for weekend errands as well as for the general pleasure of getting outside.

I've concluded that Dutch bikes are a brilliant design for commuting to work - basically everything about them is designed to protect your good clothing. I'm currently riding in about twice a week, because I have to turn in my car in a couple of weeks (it was a moving benefit from my company) and after that I will be dependent on the bike or bus, so I need to prepare for it. Now if I could just figure out how to ride 6.5 km without working up a sweat...

Think I'll try it again.

Now, just need someplace to bike to.

It's rather a push going uphill, and you have to use your brakes going down. Skilled cyclists will often just bike down, but it's narrow and Vera is fragile*, so I've not tried it.

It's a system that reduces the amount of time humans spend carrying bikes rather than the reverse, which is a mercy in a country where the cycles are so very heavy.

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* OK, I'm fragile, at least in the face of going down a narrow concrete channel with sharp concrete steps to one side.

Thanks!

In terms of repair kit, you listed pretty much what I currently carry (3 tyre levers, multitool, spare inner).

What do you use as a pump? That bag looks quite small and you mentioned Emily's attached pump went straight into the shed. I got myself a CO₂ pump because it was:

a) small, and (frankly)
b) cool-, technical- and gadgety-seeming*

I can't comment on the effectiveness as I've fortunately not yet had a mechnical failure. I am also keeping my fingers very crossed that carrying around small pressurised cannisters of carbon dioxide is not going to lead to any kind of explodiness.

*I will leave deciding which of these was the deciding factor as an exercise for the reader

Thanks!

In terms of repair kit, you listed pretty much what I currently carry (3 tyre levers, multitool, spare inner).

What do you use as a pump? That bag looks quite small and you mentioned Emily's attached pump went straight into the shed. I got myself a CO₂ pump because it was:

a) small, and (frankly)
b) cool-, technical- and gadgety-seeming*

I can't comment on the effectiveness as I've fortunately not yet had a mechnical failure. I am also keeping my fingers very crossed that carrying around small pressurised cannisters of carbon dioxide is not going to lead to any kind of explodiness.

*I will leave working out which of these was the deciding factor as an exercise for the reader

great bike--having a new bike is almost as bubbly sweet as having a new puppy.

i'm having trouble seeing disc-brakes on the front wheel--are you sure it's not a drum brake? (on the rear wheel i can't see anything disc-y or drummy.)

agree about step-through frames--for commuting, they make total sense. as a young man whose squishy bits occasionally collided with the top bar of bike frames, to my infinite regret, i always regretted the gender-typing that forbade me to ride a step-through frame.

(let's put it this way, guys. i'm going to make you balance on two wobbly wheels. meanwhile, i'm going to hold a steel bar, an inch in diameter, between your thighs, a few inches from your cobblies. if you make one wrong move, i'm going to whack you with several hundred pounds of force, right where it hurts. now there's a deal any guy would take, right? the whole thing is, well, nuts, especially when one is young and has ambitions to make use of said organs. at my age, they're only an historical footnote.)

on theft--i always make sure to deface a new bike when i get it. wrap some duct tape around bits of the frame and shred it. that gives it a good used look.

here in the states, there is a new program to encourage biking to the shops:

http://www.bicyclebenefits.org/

bikers get discounts at shops. could be good if it catches on.

I tend to pick devices that don't take refills and can be operated without additional purchases over ones that need canisters and suchlike (it's a deep value thing, and a reason I'm pleased to have a dynamo headlamp as well). So although the CO₂ pump is neat and gadgety and shiny, I'm probably going to stay manual on this one.

kid bitzer @46:
You are correct; they're drum brakes rather than disk ones. I'll amend the entry.

I always thought guys rode bikes with those bars to demonstrate their machisimo. I know, frame rigidity, yadda yadda, but most of the people who buy them aren't doing bunny hops, and don't need that much strength. Still, that much visible risk proves you are a Real Man, a Warrior, and a Skilled Rider.

(I believe that, as a woman, I'm supposed to fall in love at this point. I'll consider it.)

In the immortal words of, um,... [Googles quickly] ...Rita Mae Brown, as it turns out, "if the world were a logical place, men would ride side-saddle."

sounds totally fine with me, q. pheevr, except then it's the wrong location for my crank.

um. i mean to say, then both feet would be on one pedal, and there'd be no foot on the opposite side of the crankshaft.
maybe a new pedal design, with two pedals on one side?

maybe it works better for horses?

Purple. Electra Townie 7D, which looks quite a bit like a Dutch bike. Gear shift is a dial on one handle which I love to death. It sits me quite a bit more upright than the road bikes did, which I really like and has done wonders for my confidence. I added a fender on the rear (rain protection in PDX), and many, many stickers (operating on the same principle as stickering my laptop. Not many people are going to have the combination of ski/Quarter Horse/Grateful Dead stickerage on their bikes, so I can ID it. Plus now I can pick it out from other purple Electra Townie 7Ds--same principle as stickering my champagne gold 2005 Subaru Outback. That was the favorite loss leader car for all the local Subaru dealerships when we bought it, and by plastering it with stickers, I can figure out which Subaru is mine, either in the ski parking lot or the mall parking lot).

Oops no...you were not unclear in #34, I simply failed to read for comprehension.

And in general I very much agree with you on the desirability of practical gagets that continue to do their job without additional input/outlay - I clearly remember a thread in which Jim McDonald vehemently* described books this way.

But the CO₂ cannisters are literally shiny. And cute. And I'm pretty sure I saw someone use one to breathe underwater once.**

*I hope that's not an inappropriate way to put it, and since I wouldn't know how to dig up the thread apologise if I'm misrepresenting him.
**Although presumably that was compressed air, not CO₂, as Her Majesty's agents are many things but not, generally, plants.

By reputation Brilliant, British, and Bat-Shit insane...

I've always had a kickstand, and I can't see how they would deform the frame, unless one has a very light set of tubes and sits on the bike. I suspect the real aversion is that we don't, as a culture, see bikes as practical transport. They are more entertainment and sport, so lighter is better, and kickstands aren't needed, because what's the point. It's not as if one is going to carry anything, or need to do things while the bike is free of a rack, and not mounted.

re "spiders". I don't think she means bungee cords, I think she means elastic nets, with removable hooks. Motorcyclists are very fond of them. I have one, and it's just the ticket for a small load of groceries, or keeping me helmet safe when I'm in a shop (I don't trust helmet hooks. I worry someone will bash it, and I won't know. Without something inside, that's not really a risk of damaging the helmet's function, but I'm a trifle paranoid about the armor for my skull).

I never understood the stigma of frames. I know why the rigid frames are, "better" and by the time I learned to ride a bike (late in life) "women's" frames were almost impossible to find.

Brilliant, British, and Bat-Shit insane

That's consistent with the interview process...batshit insane trying very hard to approximate normal. I got to use an unreasonably large number of cultural references and clever turns of phrase to win over my interlocutors.

(Basically, I managed to convey the impression* that I'm also batshit insane trying to pass for normal. I also managed to convince them that I spent long enough in Big Corporate to teach them how to do a better imitation of clinically sane as the company grows.)

-----
* an entirely accurate impression, too

No, I meant bungee cords; my family always calls them "spiders", even single ones. And the Dutch call them "spinnen", which means "spiders".

I'd like to get a good Dutch fiets. Fortunately, I live in Leiden, so this shouldn't require going too terribly far out of my way. The canonically Dutch properties I'm primarily interested in are (1) sitting upright, rather than hunching aerodynamically, and (2) having a nicely contained hub gear rather than a derailleur. The other major consideration is that I'd like to take this bicycle with me when I move from Leiden (which is very flat) to Halifax (which is not very flat at all). (Dutch bikes are cheaper in the Netherlands than they are in Canada, and the move is being subsidized.) This presumably means that I want more gears than I might on a bike that was destined to remain in the Low Countries, but I don't really know how many. It should also not be too expensive, partly because I don't have a lot of money, and partly because I don't want it to be too tempting to potential thieves. I don't have strong feelings about the weight or gender of the frame, or about whether to get a new bike or a used one.

Any thoughts on what kind of bike I should get, or where would be a good place to buy one, or stuff I haven't thought about but should?

I think it's by extension from the thing where you have multiple bungee cords (usually three, meaning six hooks) joined together at the center. This kind of thing.

(My first impulse would be to call that a "spider king", on analogy with "rat king", but I think that's several degrees off of normal.)

i see they don't do the postal code any more but a unique code. makes sense, it's not unique and when you move the postal code will no longer be valid.

you'll have to bring id along.

I just finished having my bike reconditioned. Basically, we replaced everything but the frame, rack, and handlebars. Wound up with what amounts to a medium-quality new bike for somewhat less than a new low-quality bike would have cost. Plus, PLUS: It's cleverly disguised as a beater.

Jon (my bikesmith) was tickled by the idea of having a stealth bike. They managed to leave a lot of the accumulated schmutz on the frame and rack, and the handle bar is thoroughly worn, so at a glance, it looks like it's in terrible shape. This Is A Good Thing, because it's been my sad experience that the only really effective bike lock is a good coating of dirt and rust. There are a few shiny bits that need to be scuffed up. Jon couldn't quite bring himself to take my suggestion of grubbing them up with his nice bike-greasy hands. Ah well. I'm sure time will supply the appropriate patina.

Oh, Panther is a sweet ride now. My bike-racing friend Brian was suitably impressed with its heft, even including the 10ft cable. (I use that instead of the fancier locks because I can loop it through both wheels and the frame, and have enough left over to strap it to a bike rack. I've seen far too many empty U-Locks abandoned forlornly on public racks to have any faith in them.

I'm particularly tickled with abi's post here, because this gives me the perfect venue for this.

(Serge, you're up.)

My name is Emily and I have no tank.

It's entirely counter-intuitive (especially when one is feeling afraid) that the way to stabilize a wobbling bike is to accelerate. I finally got this firmly installed as reflex when I was riding in Sarasota, FL where their bike "trails" were often tracks of sand. Came in very handy later when I was faced with riding on snow and ice in Boulder.

Torrilin @13: That capacitor's a perfectly ordinary feature that is available on most generator lights.

I'm going to have to look into this. My dynamo dates from ~20 years ago.

Kip W @21: I was told when purchasing my bike (in 1977) that a kickstand deforms the frame, and they said I should take it off, so I did.

IANAEngineer, but IMnotparticularlyHO, "Balderdash." In my observation, kickstands went out of style in the '80s because they weren't "cool." I went along with that for too many years. I added a kickstand in my upgrade, dammit! (Now if I could just figure out how to configure it so it's not quite so tippy.)

dcb @26: Torrilin @ 13: You *don't* want a battery powered light. People steal those. That's why they come in "small" and "tiny" nowadays, so they're easy to take off the bike and carry in your pocket.

The problem, of course, being that you have to remember to take them off and put them in your pocket. Assuming you have a pocket to put them into.

I had a Cats-Eye for a while. Until I forgot to take it in and it got stolen. Feh. Dynamo, all the way.

abi @34: bolted on some spare Ikea hardware that happened to be lying around. Then I attached some webbing to the hardware, further webbing to the rack, and now can clip the bag on.

Oh, now that's a slick idea! I don't use panniers because I carry Too Much Crap, and I want to be able to grab my pack, sling it over my shoulder, and go. So I've been bungying it to the rack. But your solution sounds ever so more elegant! Bet I can figure out how to do it w/o having to drill holes, too. Heh.

Russ @44: I've gotten out of the habit of carrying a tool kit because (1) the Kevlar thorn-resistant tires I've traditionally used are effective enough that I don't (knock-on-wood) have much trouble with flats. Jon, (my previously-mentioned bike guy) sold me on the newer version, which is a New and Improved material (the name of which escapes me). He says he just rolls right through broken glass with his, it's so sturdy. Add'ly, if I get a flat, I just bus myself and my bike home.

Well, we're not British (but it's close), but otherwise that's a pretty good description of our company (I don't pin one end of the Weird-meter, for the first time in my employable life, for instance). I like it...

The comments here seem to suggest that the natural life-cycle of one's bicycle ends when it's stolen, rather than wearing out. That's depressing.

But then, I remember that it was depressing back when our son Chris was in his early teen's, and had about seven bicycles stolen over about a three-year period.

One of those times was when he was taking the bus home and had the bike on the front rack. The bus driver wouldn't allow bike riders to lock their bicycles onto the rack (took too much time, he said). Well, fine, but the driver could at least have sung out when he saw one of the other passengers get off, lift my son's bike off the rack, and ride away on it.

Another time was when Chris got off the bike to get a sip from a public water fountain. Less than ten feet away, and someone jumped on and pedalled away. (Chris ALMOST caught up to him before the thief gathered speed and sped off.)

Recovered bikes twice all from those thefts. Once the thief just dropped the bike to the ground in the middle of an intersection about six miles from our house and walked away; the bike was distinctive enough to identify it from all the other lost/stolen bikes being held at the police storage yard.

The other time was a few days after the theft, when Chris got off the city bus home from grade school, about a mile and a half from our house, and saw his bike at the bottom of a deep hole in a construction project next to the bus stop. A deep hole filled with even deeper mud from recent heavy rains. He got me from home and we managed to get the bike out, at the cost of a heavy coating of mud up to the elbows.

"Uglifying" a bike didn't stop it from getting stolen either. One of his bikes he uglified to the point where calling it a "shitpile" would have been polite. Lasted about two months before getting swiped.

Those experiences left me with little sympathy for bicycle thieves. Deep into the negative numbers, rather. (Add in auto thieves, ever since the time our minivan was stolen a few years ago.) The old practice of hanging horse thieves seems eminently practical, and one wishes it had survived into the modern era's equivalents. (The neighbor down the street has a big old pine tree with a thick branch that would be perfect for slinging a noose over.)

Then someone took a hunting knife to my moped and cut every fuel line they could find, every electrical cable and brake cable, and tried to stab the seat to death: they also threw the air filter down a sewer hole and stole one of the fairings/chain covers. I don't have $400.00 to get that one fixed, either, but boy do people try to buy it off of me!

It was a should as: I think there are but cannot remember how common they are, not a : I wish there were.

Lots of the newer bikes have a battery-powered back light integrated in the back-reflector (that one might be typically Dutch, obligatory red reflector mounted on the back). But I still prefer the type you can click on and off, you'll have to get into the automatism to always remove them though :)

There are, yes. However, bakfietsen are very thin on the ground here in Chicago; I've found precisely one company so far selling them, and theirs are two-wheelers. They're imported from overseas, so the price is inflated by transatlantic shipping costs. There's a group in Portland that welds their own, but, um, again, shipping. And they're not even all that much cheaper. I'm probably going to be out about $3,000 for one, and I'll be limited to the models the people I buy from happen to be willing to sell me. This will have to wait till after I have a job again, in all probability, which is at least 3 years out.

Sigh. At least the place in Chicago sells a 'shorter' bakfiets, total length 6.5ft instead of 8ft, which is 'nimbler' while still having a wonderfully unreasonable amount of cargo space. We'll see if nimbler is what's wanted, by the time I'm actually considering buying one. The Winther Kangaroo does look good (thanks, 'a chris' @36!), but unfortunately they seem to have no US presence at all, and no distributors here.

abi @43 said: On the subject of picking up bikes to go up stairs: here in the Netherlands, most outdoor steps have a small sloped channel next to them, looking rather like a gutter. This allows you to wheel your bike next to you as you climb or descend the stairs.

I meant indoor stairs, from the street to our apartment, upon arriving home in the evening. At least, that's when my husband mostly carried his bike. Sometimes up several flights, with groceries in the other hand -- he's a better man than I, Gunga Din, etc. I'd've just figured out some way to secure the bike on the ground level, but he hupped it up and down every time he used it. Those gutters sound awesome, though. Almost as awesome as this [typography-geek humor, though mispronounced].

abi @27, in response to Kip W @21's suggestion she "havi[e] an artistic friend paint it to look beat up and even somewhat damaged...": Well, there are many bikes in Amsterdam that are either very distinctively painted (to reduce resale value) or actively junked. I may do something like that, but I don't want to completely trash my suburban street cred.

Then Jacque said @67: Jon (my bikesmith) was tickled by the idea of having a stealth bike. They managed to leave a lot of the accumulated schmutz on the frame and rack, and the handle bar is thoroughly worn, so at a glance, it looks like it's in terrible shape. This Is A Good Thing, because it's been my sad experience that the only really effective bike lock is a good coating of dirt and rust. There are a few shiny bits that need to be scuffed up. Jon couldn't quite bring himself to take my suggestion of grubbing them up with his nice bike-greasy hands. Ah well. I'm sure time will supply the appropriate patina.

My mother, in the 80s, owned a very expensive French racing bike. She needed to use it for transport, and leave it locked up in urban Chicago. She tested out a bunch of finishes on some spare metal downspout material we had lying about; this was the winner for being both convincing and perfectly reversible: She disassembled the bike entirely, then put a sturdy clear-coat on most of the metal parts. She spraypainted the frame unevenly a coat of the ugliest flat-finish spraypaint she could find (which was, at that time and in that place, how people refinished cheap bikes). Then she quite artistically applied a layer of rust-colored spraypaint in careful mists and glops on parts of the frame, spokes, etc, chosen for verisimilitude.

When she was done, it honestly looked rusted from more than about 8 inches distance. Then she reassembled it, and used a lock method that looked like crap but was quite strong. Never went anywhere. When she was done with that period, she applied her carefully-tested solvent, and took off all the spraypaint (but not the clearcoat), and had her old pretty bike back.

Jacque @67 said in response to my particular bikewobbles and phobias: It's entirely counter-intuitive (especially when one is feeling afraid) that the way to stabilize a wobbling bike is to accelerate. I finally got this firmly installed as reflex when I was riding in Sarasota, FL where their bike "trails" were often tracks of sand. Came in very handy later when I was faced with riding on snow and ice in Boulder.

I grasp the theory just fine. However, the faster I go, the more the niggling voice over my mental shoulder keeps insisting (in increasingly frantic tones) that I need to WATCH OUT or I'm just about to RUN OVER a whole sidewalk-full of NUNS AND BABIES AND OLD PEOPLE and then they would DIE and it would be MY FAULT! Which makes my whole body go tense, even when I'm fighting it, and tense tight body == keeling over. I just keel over faster into more things if I speed up. In my case, the solution is to quit deathgripping, while going a sufficient speed as to engage the gyroscopic effect.

I had phobic problems with driving cars, too, but at least cars don't wobble. Usually.

I changed out my mountain tyres for road tyres last night (I've been commuting for a three weeks and it looks like it's going to stick, so the bike is officially repurposed). It made a massive difference to the speed/effort this morning, but the real eye-opener was that the change-out took man an hour. Per tyre.

Either I have particularly awkward tyres*, or I'm doing something wrong** - but if a roadside puncture repair is going to take an hour, then there's no point (gadgets notwithstanding). Plan B is phone the wife and get her to bring out large car (and baby) to rescue me. Plan C will be a long walk***, I guess, unless a London taxi can be convinced to carry a bike.

Q.Pheevr@32 & abi@34

Sorry - I forgot to say thank you very much! My Emily is3½ and very sweet - just learning to reach out and grab stuff. It feels a bit like having a puppy that smiles at you.

*Continental travel contacts; actually the reviews do indicate they're a pain to fit. I should have paid attention.
**I'll look for a youtube instructional tonight, which is something I should have done first.
***Worst case scenario, 7 miles.

It's my picky requirements that boost the price. I wanted a bike that I was fairly sure hadn't been stolen, and which had at least some gears.

The default Amsterdam bike is a one-speed. I could get one of them reconstructed from thrown-away cycles for €60 - €80, or a more conventional used one-speed for €100ish. If I'm not so nice about whether or not it's been stolen. I can probably get a one-speed for €50 or thereabouts; a three-speed will be somewhat more expensive even through grey channels.

But you know, I don't want a stolen bike. It's part and parcel with not wanting mine stolen. And I wanted the gears so I could zooooom along on the flats and still be able to climb the steeper bridges with ease.

It reminds me of aikido, in that my chi is properly centered when I'm riding.

*wave* *wave* I'm a sandan in the ASU and train with Dennis Hooker-sensei in Orlando.

What's aikido culture like in the Netherlands?

Bruce Arthurs @ 73: my first adult bicycle was a no-name built by the local shop. That went to the final bike rack in the sky about 15 years later. It did get pinched once, from my parents' garage, but since the chain was still locking the back wheel to the frame, the thief got fed up of carrying it after a few hundred yards* - the police found it up the road and brought it back to us (it was postcoded). I've still got the replacement, a Raleigh 10-speed - I deliberately avoided a Trek or Ridgeback or anything more fancy.

My first folding bike, a Dahon, was stolen from outside the British Library (and the police couldn't be bothered to look at the video the library had of the thief on CCTV, which really annoyed me. The replacement is Raleigh branded for reduced street cred/resale value, painted old-fashioned green instead of shiny modern grey, and has artistically placed tape and other signs of "age", as well as being postcoded and Smartwater marked - and I don't leave it locked up outside anywhere I can't see it, and if I have to leave it in e.g. a cloakroom, I lock it to something immobile.

*Ha! Wimp! I once half-carried (wheeling it on the front wheel, carrying the back wheel) the best part of two-and-a-half miles when my keys ended up going home from the Cam (we were punting; I'd put them in a friend's rucksac for safety) earlier than I did.

Also still not very feasible in the summer, without showers at work.

Most of where I live is flat enough for biking to be pretty easy, but that's an issue some places as well. Pittsburgh, say, or Ithaca, or San Francisco.

A bike was my main transportation until I was 22, when I got licensed to drive (there was no public transport where I grew up, too small at the time). Well, bike and walking; I often preferred to walk in the winter. I never had an inconvenient collision between the cross-bar and my dangly bits; never particularly worried about it, either. However, my frame was the right size for me, which was easy since I'm tall but not too tall. And I'm yet another person who lifts and carries bikes by the cross-bar; it's much the easiest way since it lets you grip at the balance point.

Mine was once stolen on campus. I found it parked at the library. With books in the baskets. I seriously considered the potential revenge pathways, and finally wimped out -- I just took my bike back, and returned the library materials.

**"One bike-theft technique I have seen is that the thieves put their own lock on the bike "

* "I don't understand - how would that help them steal the bike?"

The way I'd learned it when living in the Netherlands, is that the thieves hope an owner unlocks their own primary lock, realizes the bike remains immobile, then forgets to re-lock their own onto the bike before starting to look for help. The thieves are nearby, and when the owner goes looking for help, they swoop down and remove their own lock, and take the now (semi-)freed bike.

It occurs to me to consider that this gambit probably works less well than it used to in the days before one could phone for help on one's own mobile phone.

Crazy(and glad of this thread for the celebration of Dutch bicycles - hers is now Belgian, but also a dearly loved conveyance)Soph

The concept of a bike without a kickstand is weird, though. Even the slightly too-small bike I bought in Zurich had one!

I tend to follow the Tennessee Earnie Ford school: "If ya see me comin', ya better step aside!"

Russ @77: I'll look for a youtube instructional tonight, which is something I should have done first.

"When all else fails, read the instructions." Story of my life. (An hour per does seem excessive, though.) The other advantage of street slicks is that they don't fling mud up your nose when it's raining.

ddb @82: Biking: still not very feasible at -30C, on icy ground.

Pish-tosh. I did it for years before I could afford to take the bus. Before there were any bike-paths, too. (And it was up-hill both ways!)

Most of where I live is flat enough for biking to be pretty easy, but that's an issue some places as well. Pittsburgh, say, or Ithaca, or San Francisco.

Heh. This is where I worked during the early '90s. Squint real hard and you see the little castle on the hill. At 6Kft above sea level. Nice exercise!

Once on a business trip in Germany, I noticed the 3-speed commuter bike in the grocery store could be bought for €150, rather less than it would cost to bring the boy-racer bike over on a plane flight. Hm thinks. There was a nice little 2 or 3 day Odenwald loop tour nearby the office, too: but never managed it, to my lasting sorrow.

My Schwinn Continental commuter is theft-proofed with a horrible paint job and artfully applied smears of dirt. However as part of the new No Net Gain in Stuff policy, it must make way for a MTB bought to ride with the boys on local trails. I'm deeply conflicted about getting rid of it though - it's a perfectly good bike but no-one else will want it, hate to see it landfill bound.

abi @ 59,
"batshit insane trying very hard to approximate normal"
it took me thirty years to start learning how to fake normal.. this is a company I could like ;-)

Mark Wise @80:
What's aikido culture like in the Netherlands?

Well, first off, it's in Dutch, which means I'm only about 50% sure what's being said at any point in time. I've only been doing it a few months, and it's currently caught up in the blast radius of my soon-to-be-former job. I'll come back to it afresh when I start at TomTom.

But for aikido culture in general, you do know we have some serious aikidoka here on Making Light? Of course, they won't start a conversation on the subject, but they will respond if you start talking about it to them...

of course. i should have realized that there would be overlaps between the aikido world and the making light world.

i studied for awhile with mitsugi saotome in his d.c. dojo, decades ago. i was no damned good at it, and had neither the physical nor mental abilities necessary. and now my knees are shot and my attitude is worse, and i haven't swept canvas in ages. but i have always been grateful for the experience.

may have taught me something about taking falls, in any case, even if now they're mostly pratfalls.

(I tried to follow through the theme, but lyrics not Zathras' skill.)

The Dead Equine Flogging Commission is now in session. Logic is suspended until further notice.

I first saw “ring locks” on the ubiquitous Chinese bikes in Bali thirty-five years ago, and still haven't seen on in the States. And I still don't know why.
All Balinese bikes are women's step-through, to accommodate sarongs. A male in a sarong has to learn the proper agility to mount one; it's a much more imminent threat than the accident of sliding forward off the seat onto the top crossbar.
But I like the crossbar for carrying the bike up the back stairs to my apartment, if only for the joke that the stairs exercise my arms to balance the bike's exercising of my legs.

Bicycles still aren't Real Transportation in the United States, alas. During my stay in Silicon Valley, which makes Chicago look hilly, I was able to find an old Raleigh 3-speed, and in less than a week, riding on the sidewalk on Saratoga-Sunnyvale-Saratoga Road, I was going through the pedestrian crosswalk and some idiot watching only the stop light ran into me from 3 feet away. From a standing start, fortunately. My triumphant tale of being persistent enough to extract revenge is too long to fit in this marginal note . . .
And I never did find out why ALL the bikes in Silly Valley are mountain bikes (I got mine in Berkeley) when it's flat as a pool table.

This being the US, of course the bike thieves have a pickup truck or van, and a bike not solidly locked to a well-anchored object will simply be lifted up and placed in the truck.

But the cars tend to give room, the bike paths are clear, and (wonder of wonders) there are a number of left turn lanes which have electromagnetic sensors set to "bike" (which are marked). Those are really nice for someone riding a motorcycle too.

I know there's a significant overlap between the sets of fandom and aikido. I don't know which ML habitues are sitting in that intersection. On the internet, nobody knows you wear funky pleated culottes. And, I mostly lurk. The room, it is too smart for me.

Kid Bitzer @93:

The ability to fall safely is a life-long benefit of aikido training. It's the only training that most people are likely to use. Taking a 3-foot razor blade away from someone? Not so much.

Like Mark Wise at 101, I frequently stay quiet because others here are saying it smarter.

It would be hard for me to answer the question Mark poses to Abi upthread because even with the longish practice time over residence in two countries, I haven't ever trained in my home country, and don't know what the basic experience would be like outside of Ireland and Belgium. (For what its worth, the experiences of those two places were similar enough to help me through the trauma of an international move....)

In the meantime, I've also learned that a lot of my fan-friends seem to have found not just any martial art, but aikido as their choice of art. Wow, I think, whodathot? Is it statistically deviant, though? Or just accountable by some larger world process? I keep thinking aikido is really well known, but of course, I'm getting a biased sample, and my reality gets re-adjusted when I travel outside that cozy circle. (One does get very tired of responding to the same jokes about the martial arts, though the nut-shell description of aikido, "No one's in any trouble unless they actually do attack..." seems to settle most of the worst sort.)

Our kind hosts here probably wouldn't want to make a top post about aikido specifically. (I'm only guessing, of course, based on a feeling that the top posts are for items of special expertise in their respective areas...) But to lure all the fan/aikido/lurkers out to chat specifically, perhaps a post about something more general to the situation - the intersection of many fandoms/hobby activities, and how they share many details on the level of social dynamics? I seem to vaguely recall something like that might have been done already, but not very recently. (Was it knitting, then? **scratches head** Phooey, can't recall just now.)

Crazy(but saner for her commitment to training in aikido)Soph

On the internet, nobody knows you wear funky pleated culottes.

He shoots, he scores... thanks, Mark!!

Crazy(and giggling)Soph

(One does get very tired of responding to the same jokes about the martial arts...

Q How many Aikido experts does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: Just one, but the lightbulb has to attack first.

I think that the aikido-in-fandom thing is self-reinforcing. I picked it up because people here mentioned it.

Hanmudo was extremely helpful, as they taught falling from day one and every class began with dozens of falls, rolls and then punches/kicks. I know from personal experience that the lessons I learned then have never left me, for which I am grateful (specifically, my back and shoulder muscles, along with my knees -- very grateful we are).

If I had enough time in the day, I'd consider aikido, although kung fu has been interesting me for years -- learning yet another language would be additionally tempting.

(Digression: when watching the new Karate Kid -- call it Kung fu Kid -- I heard the Chinese words for "begin" and they sounded an awful lot like the Korean. Jun bi!)

A silly idea I've been playing around with for some time is writing a children's book (maybe a mystery or detective novel kind of thing) wherein one of Our Heros is an Orthodox Jewish rabbi and the other is an Aikido master, and they're both lawyers. The title of the series would be Hakama & Yarmulke: Attorneys at Law.

Do you have cruiser brakes? I love them, mostly because I'm used to it of course -- pedaling backwards feels stronger and more resolute than pressing a little handle.

We always called them coaster brakes. But then, see the thing about spiders above.

Emily doesn't have them, though.

in the midwest in the '50s, the usual term was "coaster brake". don't know if that's common, official, anything.

hmmm...for what it's worth, wikipedia acknowledges "coaster brake", and gives "foot brake", "back-pedal brake" (surely the most accurate description) and "torpedo" as synonyms:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coaster_brake#Coaster_brakes

their description of the mechanics is not comprehensive, however--in addition to the coaster-brakes that function via a drum-action or a split collar, i have also disassembled brakes that had a series of 8 or 10 clutch-disks stacked on the axle, with all the odd-numbered disks rotating with the fixed axle, and all the even-numbered disks rotating with the wheel. free-wheels when no pressure, brakes when the stack is squeezed.

it's a great design for kids, and for flat-lands. however, it cannot dissipate heat fast enough to handle major braking loads from heavy people going down big hills. they burn up.

http://www.johnforester.com/Articles/BicycleEng/safe_brakes_that_burn_up.htm

excerpt:

"The coaster brake was destroyed in one run. It started smoking a short distance down the hill. At 700 feet down the smoke was streaming behind. Several times during the run its effectiveness changed, sometimes more, sometimes less. About 1500 feet down the brake refused to release fully, and it dragged for the remainder of the run. At the bottom I found my heat-measuring instrumentation had been burned off and the chrome plate was a white powder. On examining the inside afterwards I had to pry apart the stack of brake discs because the steel discs had softened and jammed onto the stationary mandrel."

neither rim-brake, by contrast, went above 200F (= roughly 90C).

I would say (from my sense of it) that an aikidoka is one who takes it seriously. Even when I am away from the mat, I work on things. With the various upheavals of the past few years I've had almost no time on the mat, and none of it in a regular way.

I was checking out a dojo I've wanted to train at for most of fifteen years (it's local to me now), and one of the dan there said he wasn't sure I was 4th kyu. I was pretty much ready to move up the last time I hurt myself, but it's been three years since I was in practice. That was flattering.

It's amazing to me (from experience) what keeping up with ukemi and footwork does for movement. Simple things, working on kokyu ho (I work on it when kneading bread, or doing fencing practice forms, opening doors, you name it), standing in hamni, and any number of other minor techniques one can work on anywhere.

Hand brakes don't work all that well on wet tires, in my experience.

I started Aikido with a student club in Scotland (that was somehow weirdly affiliated to the Belgian Aikikai) and continued with the UKA for several years. I never made it past 1st kyu and haven't practiced in a short age - but when I moved to London, Aikido provided me with a group of friends I still have ten years later, practice or not.

I'm biased, but I think Aikido of all the martial arts tends to attract (or rather, keep) thoughtful people.

And...I don't think I've ever posted this many times on an ML thread before (for the same "other people say it smarter" reason as Mark and CrazySoph), but it seems like Abi made this one just for me :D

People regarded front brakes as dangerous, I remember (makes sense, in that if you squeeze them too hard, you flip the bike; I'm pleased to say I never did that). Even with hand brakes, people used them as a secondary or auxiliary brake. (This was back when bicycles were kids' transportation and sometimes adult transportation in a small town; before they became high-tech madness.)

I really should get the old bike back on the road a bit.

And yet you have not been struck by lightning, turned to gold, or otherwise affected by the traditional symptoms of hubris. Must mean it's not so intimidating as all that. Might even be safe to post more often in general; what do you think?

(Remember that I too am an ex-lurker, then poster. It's not actually impossible to settle in and feel at home, you know. We're just people.)

Yes and no. If someone can be induced to attack, then the skilled aikidoka can pretty much end things. A really skilled aikidoka, who want's to induce an attack can do it in such a way as to make it, relatively, trivial to then cope with it.

And there are, "hard" forms of aikido, some of the very basic techniques (like tenchi nage) can do tremendous physical damage to the attacker, if they are done in a more, for want of a better word, "open" fashion (by which I mean, the joints aren't closed up tightly when the leverage is applied).

It was such a mistake which caused me to leave the mat this last time. I didn't (given my other problems) want to risk making things worse for rushing back too soon.

A good dojo makes a point of emphasizing ukemi. If you have good ukemi (which I think is more properly thought of as awareness of one's place/self protection, more than it is the "art of falling" as it seems to be most often described), everything else tends to fall into place, because one is more confident.

I find I am much more confident as uke (the "attacking" half of an exercise) than I am as nage, in solo practice. In more free-form exercises, I am happy with either. I suspect because in things like rondori am too busy to think about just what I am trying to do, and so I can be more liquid. Those are times to just flow with what is happening, and carry through to completion.

And... when I am hitting the mat, my joints are happier.

(and follow that link, esp. if you have ever done aikido)

Yes. It is true. Even abi and Teresa and Patrick and Jim and Avram are just people.

In the same sense that a ruby is just a rock.

kid bitzer (114): It never would have occurred to me that weight of the rider would make a difference with coaster brakes. Do you know how big a hill it would take to burn them out? Probably depends on exactly how heavy the rider is, I suppose. And I daresay the damage would/could be cumulative, too.

If I'm ever in the market for another bike (doubtful, at this point), I'll bear all this in mind.

But I still insist on a step-through frame. :)

Thankyou kindly for the encouragement :)

I can't begin to enumerate the cool stuff I've discovered via Making Light, including introductions to the work of John Scalzi and Charlie Stross, who became two of my favourite authors and bloggers. To list everything great about this place would be a thread in itself* (and I'm not even into knitting).

If I appear reticent, it's not that you're unwelcoming. Rather, the opinions I read here matter to me, and the quality of contributions is often very high. This makes me think rather more before posting here than I might elsewhere. Nevertheless, I promise to speak up when I have something to say :P

Terry Karney@121

The best instructors I've trained with have placed a huge emphasis on ukemi; I've heard it stressed that it's a matter of receiving the technique (and potentially coming back/countering), rather than of learning how to fall.

I was fascinated by an instructor who follows Seishiro Endo Sensei. Endo Sensei seems to perform amazingly soft, sensitive aikido, yet apparently came to that after 20 years of being known as the hardest of the hard. When I saw him teach a seminar a few years ago, he focused a lot on ukemi - it seemed like he thought the feeling he was trying to teach might be grasped more easily from that side of the exchange. Then again, I'm second guessing an 8th Dan aikikai here, so YMMV.

I'm also firmly of the opinion both that there is a single pure thing we can call aikido, and that there are at least as many ways of doing it as there are people**.

*and embarrass various commenters unnecessarily
**I'm specifically staying out of the political side

*declaration of interest - I know the creator, who is an aikidoka with a keen sense of humour.

I could probably train myself out of this again, but I don't bike all that frequently, and I'm loath to add one more obstacle to the little biking I do. Besides, I hate biking up or down steep hills, and am inclined to just walk my bike on those anyway.

I had a bad set of rear brakes on my ten-speed in high school, and no matter what I did, I couldn't get them to function. This isn't really much of a problem. Despite the stories of people pulling an "endo" and flipping the bike, it's not easy (I don't weigh much more than I did in high school, and at 115-125 lbs. and a tendency to forget the rear brakes exist, I've never flipped a bike; even in a "panic stop" which lifted the rear tire).

Since braking moves weight to the front tire, and off the rear tire, the more the rear tire is used to brake, the less braking power it has; and the faster it will come to a full stop, which reduces both braking power, and control (in anything other than a vertically oriented stopping posture).

This is, in fact, the technique for laying a bike down. One get on the front brakes, leans the bike, and then clobbers the rear... when the rear tires stops... the bike falls to the side, with the back end sliding out from under the rider (this has the caveat with motorcycles that if the rear wheel stops, you don't reengage it until the bike is vertical, or it will try to level itself, and fling the rider away. This is known as a "highside" crash, because instead of hitting the ground on the "lowside" of the falling bike, you hit it from the side which was "high". There is more energy in your body at that point, and you are hitting the ground, rather than the usual sliding of a lowside crash. Since this is often accompanied by the motorcycle trying to follow one, well it's bad).

Concomitantly the front brake gets more effective as it is applied, which is why motorcycle riders are strongly preferential to the front brake. I am trying to make sure I recall to engage the rear when stopping so I won't have to think about it in case of a need to stop with all possible speed (this is complicated by my BMW having ABS, which engages when the rear brake pedal is engaged. The rear brakes actually co-ordinate with the front, and ABS has a longer stopping distance [if more controlled] than non-ABS on dry pavement).

Did anyone think we were unjust people?

think of brakes as energy converters--they take the kinetic energy of your forward movement, and convert it into something else (mostly heat, plus a little mechanical work of grinding off rubber and aluminum, or grinding off little particles of asbestos).

because it is converting your movement-energy into heat-energy, the brake is going to get hotter and hotter unless it can offload that heat elsewhere. that's why coaster and drum brakes can have problems, because they are enclosed and don't get a lot of air circulation, and why rims and discs get hot, but then do a good job of handing the heat on to the ambient air.

that's also why rims sometimes *don't* do a good enough job in extreme conditions (e.g. tour de france descents down the alps), and cause the air in the tire to expand enough to burst the tire. bad scenario.

e.g.:

"Tire blow-off occurs most commonly on tandems where substantial energy of descending mountain roads is converted to heat in rims by braking. In contrast a single bicycle is usually able to dissipate enough of its descending energy by wind drag to not suffer from this. Rim heating with rim brakes on continuous steep descents can increase inflation pressure substantially. For this reason some mountain passes in the Alps prohibit descending by bicycle while up hill riding is permitted. For instance, Zirlerberg between Zirl and Seebach (Innsbruck), a major road between Germany and Austria, is one of these. "

http://www.sheldonbrown.com/brandt/blowouts.html

the amount of energy that you release in zooming down a hill is pretty phenomenal. to a rough approximation, it is the same amount of energy that would be required to get you up that hill again, at that speed! imagine trying to fling someone up a big hill at 20mph--that would take a lot of energy! and all of it has to be absorbed/transmitted by your brakes.

now imagine trying to fling a heavier person up that hill: more energy! more heat!

but i have no way to put numbers on this (e.g. "if you weigh x kilos then you may descend no more than y meters at z kph"). too many factors (e.g. wind resistance, condition of brakes, rolling resistance of bike, etc.)

check the link from my #115, though--it's very interesting.

I wonder, is hand/grip strength a limiting factor on the usefulness of hand brakes? It seems as if it ought to be, but maybe the brakes are sensitive enough that it's not a problem. Anyone who's ridden a bike more recently than I have (i.e., within the last ~25 years) care to weigh in on this one?

Because for most purposes, maximum braking power isn't needed for more than a few seconds.

If they ran me down after ringing their bell, would it count as warning, even if I couldn't hear it? How do Dutch bicyclists handle communicating with deaf and hard-of-hearing pedestrians?

(Actually, I am really nervous and not a little irate about the people who ride on sidewalks here and expect people to hear the bike coming. I got clipped the other day, though only a little. It almost makes me want to wear a tshirt that says on the back, "I AM DEAF, I CAN'T HEAR YOUR DAMN BELL, AND YOU SHOULD NOT BE RIDING THAT BICYCLE ON THE SIDEWALK ANYHOW." I have not done so, though. It seems unduly hostile, and I don't care for retaliation. I've been cussed out enough by adult bicyclists riding on the sidewalk.)

If they ran me down after ringing their bell, would it count as warning, even if I couldn't hear it? How do Dutch bicyclists handle communicating with deaf and hard-of-hearing pedestrians?

Flippant commentary aside, you are expected, as a cyclist, to be in control of your vehicle. If the person doesn't move aside when you ding them, ride around them in a safe manner.

Some cyclists may say something rude, because ableism transcends cultures (alas! I'd love to live somewhere where it didn't). But losing control of your vehicle enough to so much as touch a pedestrian? It would be a source of deep shame, a failure of essential Dutchness twice over*.

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* Once for not cycling well enough, once for a failure of samenleving.

The bicyclist on the sidewalk is a second class pedestrian, and must yield to foot traffic. Further, they are required to dismount at all intersections, and walk the bike across the street. Failure to do so makes one eligible for a citation for, "operating a vehicle on the sidewalk."

But it never happens.

I have disc brakes on my bike (excuse: originally spec'd for downhill), and it takes very little pressure to stop the wheel dead.

This has its own problem of course, as locking the wheel raises pressing questions re: the amount of traction the tyres have with the road, and how quickly the bike can lose momentum and still retain its association with the rider.

My recollection is that rim brakes give a more analogue experience.

Terry Karney@137

Wow; presumably rather than make the roads safer, they allow riding on the pavement*. That's...not a good solution. But then I hear California doesn't exactly have a local government budget surplus.

Brakes and i18n: In the UK, the rear break is on the left and the front break on the right. According to my brother (who did seasons there), in France it's vice versa, which caused all kind of humorous situations when he went mountian biking. Which way round are our friends the Dutch?

*American: Sidewalk == English: Pavement, which you probably knew. What I didn't know (and nearly screwed up my California driving test many years ago) is that American: Pavement == English: Road

You'd think I had been stomping puppies or something, instead of telling them that they were merely passing the scared down to a more defenceless class of person than they were.

(I'm married to a former almost-all-seasons bicycle commuter, just for the record. It's not like I hate bicyclists. I just hate being terrified by people whizzing past me and dropping obscenities in my ear because I have the temerity to not be able to hear their bell.)

Anyhow, Emily looks like a lovely bicycle, and I too hope she stays with you and is not enticed elsewhere.

You're a bit fuzzy about the energy needing to be dissipated on a downhill run with a bicycle.

It's the gravitational potential energy: height multiplied by mass multiplied by acceleration due to gravity. Air drag can be significant, so it isn't all down to the brake system.

The faster you're going, the greater the rate the energy has to be dissipated. This requires a higher temperature for the friction components to give a fast enough heat flow. And it's the temperature difference with the surroundings which matters.

All this is the same for any kind of braking, on any vehicle. When you're on the level, it's the kinetic energy that has to be dissipated. If you want to spend enough money, you can use the same sorts of expensive materials as are used in jet engines, so that the brake disks can reach red heat on a Formula 1 car.

The wheel brakes on airliners have to stop a lot of mass, travelling at quite high speed. A Boeing 787 has a maximum landing weight of 193 Mg, and a Landing speed of maybe 200 knots, about 100 metres per second. Which is about 950 gigajoules for the brakes to cope with. (It may be quite a bit less, I'm pessimistic about the speed.) For an airliner, you want the brakes to be undamaged by that. And remember, there are much bigger airliners out there, and you can't build a longer runway.

This is why older military jets used braking parachutes. They didn't have the materials, fifty years ago.

It's also part of the reason why big 'planes have a lot of wheels. It's not just to spread the weight over the runway structure, it's to give enough brake units that the heat can be handled, and the tyres don't skid.

We've come a long way from those two guys who ran a bike shop, and that day on Huffman Prairie.

(Apparently, Sir Patrick Moore has, in his long life, met Orville Wright, Yuri Gagarin, and Neil Armstrong. That's how fast we came on.)

Exceptions are when pedestrians walk in the bike lanes (not uncommon in Amsterdam, where tourists don't read the road enough to realize that's what they're doing) or step in front of a bike while crossing the cycle path (without looking, in other words).

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* in comparison to most places I've cycled in the US and UK
‡ this is made more feasible by the fact that Dutch drivers are neither homicidally inclined toward cyclists nor blind to them
† by which I do not mean a sidewalk, but the sort of path that wends its way through a nature reserve. I do not recall ever needing to share an ordinary urban sidewalk with pedestrians; I belong on the road in that context‡.

Air drag can be significant

...particularly in a country famous for its windmills—and its wind. I've come to a complete stop coasting off the highest bridge in the area into the prevailing wind.

I was weirded out by the brake placements when I bought Vera in Scotland, but they wanted me to sign a release before they'd rewire them. I didn't bother.

Emily also has the back brake on the left and the front on the right, so, the British fashion. I have no idea what Dutch sport bikes do.

It's rare that I'm out doing any kind of errand that involves sidewalk walking and am NOT passed on the rather narrow sidewalk by an adult bicyclist riding at something close to speed. They were a bit more careful when I had the cane as a signal, but now that I'm off the cane a fair amount of the time, it's back to the old playing-chicken-from-behind game, and as I said, somebody clipped me lightly the other day. I don't have the balance yet to react as well as I'd like, either.

Your pardon; I am morose for all sorts of tedious reasons today, and I would much rather be happy for your bicycle.

TFL* have an initiative to get more cyclists on the road (the Mayor of London is a keen cyclist), and are updating roads and junctions with varying degrees of success**.

*Transport For London - they run the tube & buses and make road policy for the capital
**The intention is to get you across to a cycle lane that runs (against the one-way) to the right of pub across the road, thus avoiding a major road junction further up. It doesn't help that it's typical in London for drinkers to crowd outside pubs in the summer, hugely increasing the number of pedestrians you come into confict with here.

Now that is a bloody stupid intersection. Feeding cyclists onto a pavement, so they're perpendicular to the foot traffic on a busy road? That'll build amity between road users.

At the very least they should put up a dismount sign and an end cycle lane so at least the alert cyclists know that they won't be given space. On a crowded morning, I bet you can't even see what's under the pedestrians' feet to realize the cycle lane ends.

(I would take a bit of nerving up to cycle in London—or Manhattan, for that matter, as Patrick does. I gave up on Edinburgh after a taxi tried to chase me down for the crime of existing where he was trying to pull to the kerb.)

(Personally I don't feel too strongly about this: I accidentally miswired my brakes on one bike the last time I changed the cables and could not be bothered to redo it. No problems so far.)

Dave Bell @ 140: Commercial jets cannot brake with the wheel brakes to standstill from touchdown speed. The brakes would melt. The primary mechanism for high speed braking is thrust reversing engines. Of course the planes are so huge that even for the purpose of low speed braking the brake discs need to be substantial.

many hipsters these days are riding "fixies" in which the rear wheel has no mechanism for free-wheeling: if the rear wheel is spinning, then the pedals are spinning, too.

this means that the rider can apply braking force merely by resisting the push of the pedals as they come up on the rear part of their stroke. if you are strong enough, you can lock your feet at 3 and 9 and cause the rear wheel to skid.

as with any braking, the energy is transmitted to heat, this time in the rider's leg, plus the mechanical work of grinding off little bits of your knee's cartilaginous lining.

there's nothing wrong with the system if you are young, stupid, and have plenty of knee-lining left. for the rest of us, it's easier to change rubber pads now and then.

i was told that u.s. hand-brakes run right-rear, left-front because right-handed people have a natural tendency to grip with the right first, or are more likely to do that quickly. sudden application of the rear brake is less likely to result in flips.

if that rationale made sense, then it would make sense to reverse it only in countries that had a strong preponderance of left-handers. something doesn't make sense.

I doubt it will be enforced.

However, the reason it was passed at all is that a month or two ago, a Chicago driver who DELIBERATELY COLLIDED WITH a cyclist he felt annoyed by was CONVICTED of doing it ON PURPOSE ... and was fined $70, apparently the maximum available punishment.

No idea why he wasn't arraigned for Assault With A Deadly Weapon; the cyclist was put in the hospital with at least broken bones.

Apologies for the SPoraDIC CAPitaliZAtion ... we feel rather strongly about this case in our household, and I had to vent it somehow.

Re. T-shirt, you could get one of the yellow high-res. vests sold for horse-riders saying "Please Pass Wide and Slow" - the way the buses and lorries treat me (a law-abiding cyclist) I'd probably wear one myself, if not for the fact that my backpack would cover it.

Hence, drive on the left, front brake's on the right. Drive on the right, front brake's on the left. I've no idea if that's the real reason or not, but it makes sense to me.

Wow. That's some wind. Could you get back up onto the bridge, or were you just stranded in midair?

It's against WI state law to ride on the sidewalk. I view this as a great and glorious good thing... however it's also possible for municipalities to override the state law via an ordinance. Madison has, which means I often have other cyclists blow past me at an unsafe speed while I'm walking my bike. I find this particularly egregious on State St, since the street is closed to car traffic. (not that you can tell...)

The trail network is shared between pedestrians, cyclists, rollerbladers, skateboarders and the like. It is generally not as gloriously wide as a Netherlands style cyclepath. In the Netherlands, a cyclepath is a ROAD, and has SIDEWALKS. Most Madison cyclists seem to treat all pedestrians as if they were hearing impaired or two tho. I walk on the paths about as often as I ride, and I don't often get buzzed.

I'd still rather have a Dutch path tho. The big in town ones would actually be wide enough for Madison's rush hour.

Motorcycles have the front brake on the right, rear under the right foot (the left hand is operating the clutch, and the left foot the gears).

ddb: Sadly, here in an place with large numbers of Hybrids/Electrics (the Tesla is made here), the most common response seems to to tell cyclists to use less of the road, because they can't hear quiet cars. The idea of educating drivers seems to be something most drivers; even those who say they think cyclists have rights, don't comprehend.

i like that rationale, mike, and i think i may have heard that, too. it does go with the idea that your center-line hand is your signaling-hand, and then your rear-brake goes with your non-signaling hand.

it certainly explains the reversals in the uk better than my story does.

Unless it's an old British-made bike, in which case the brakes are on the left and clutch and gears on the right...

I use my bicycle to and from work when weather permits. It's a nice trip, except for the bridge I have to cross to get over to the mainland. Tall, steep, narrow lanes, narrow pavements (sidewalks) and a notorious traffic bottleneck. Any conversation about bikeriding will touch upon the horribleness of that bridge.

Left her locked in central Amsterdam, with both the ring lock and the chain (round a drainpipe). She was near some nicer and less well-locked bikes.

All was well. She's a good commute bike, though I will have to rig a water bottle holder (I have a few ideas for a handmade one that could hold a thermos cup of coffee or tea in the winter).

Good bike. I like her.

Rather, the primary mechanism for braking is brakes. Reverser is a means of reducing the braking effort required, in order to improve the landing minima and extend the life of the brakes, and also to improve braking in the wet (reverse thrust acts against the airframe and doesn't need any friction with the surface).

It is entirely possible for an aircraft to land engine-out (and therefore without any reverse available), indeed, it's a key safety requirement. As is landing with reversers locked-out, for example if only one of them works (you wouldn't want assymetric reverse!)

Yeah, asymmetric reverse would be a Bad Thing, and if you knew about it you'd certainly want to avoid it.

Except that at certain airports, you really need both.

There was a nasty case at Midway♦ several years ago where a pilot unfamiliar with the airport who assumed everything was standard -- and who was landing in ucky wet snow -- landed further out than he should've and then didn't bother engaging the thrust-reversers at the first possible moment, and therefore overshot the end of the runway, crashing through the airport fence and ultimately colliding with a minivan in the middle of an intersection. Everyone in the van but the child in the center-mounted carseat survived (everyone else could exit the van fast enough once the plane was spotted). The van and several other cars were totalled.

This is why pilots need to be intimately familiar with the idiosyncracies of every airport they fly through, even though nowadays most of them are pretty standard ...

♦ MDW is a square mile. Its runways are the hypotenuses. Simple math shows their maximum possible length -- which is shorter than many airports are currently designed as having. Also, immediately at the end of the runway is a fence, a single foot of grass and curb, and then multi-lane city streets with heavy car traffic. Which is why the runways haven't been/can't be lengthened ...

"Yeah, asymmetric reverse would be a Bad Thing"

i don't know why you say that. people pay a lot of money for whirligig rides at the fun fair.

people would surely pay even more for a whirligig powered by several g.e. turbojet power plants. and with free in-flight meals!

When I go to Chicago I prefer to fly into Ohare, but it's cheaper to use Southwest into Midway (no bag fee). Midway's runway layout gives me the heebie jeebies -- I'm not sure being in the cockpit would help.* I know turbulence doesn't bother me as much when I have the stick as it does when I'm stuck in row 23 looking out a dinky dark window...

The only good thing about landing at DCA is if it's a VFR day and you get just the right landing pattern sometimes you get to see all the wonderful buildings -- especially the National Cathedral.

*I took aviation ground school as one of my high school courses. Never had enough money to complete flight school, so I know just enough to be dangerous.

The old Kai Tak airport in Hong Kong had one of the more...amusing...approaches for a major international airport (from Wikipedia):

The landing approach using runway 13 at Kai Tak was spectacular and world-famous. To land on runway 13, an aircraft first took a descent heading northeast. The aircraft would pass over the crowded harbour, and then the very densely populated areas of Western Kowloon. This leg of the approach was guided by an IGS (Instrument Guidance System, a modified ILS) after 1974.

Upon reaching a small hill marked with a checkerboard in red and white, used as a visual reference point on the final approach (in addition to the middle marker on the Instrument Guidance System), the pilot needed to make a 47° visual right turn to line up with the runway and complete the final leg. The aircraft would be just two nautical miles (3.7 km) from touchdown, at a height of less than 1,000 feet (300 m) when the turn was made. Typically the plane would enter the final right turn at a height of about 650 feet (200 m) and exit it at a height of 140 feet (43 m) to line up with the runway. This manoeuver has become widely known in the piloting community as the "Hong Kong Turn" or "Checkerboard Turn".

And stills giving some idea what Kai Tak Runway 13 approaches were like.

I have heard stories (I don't know how true) that occasionally the jets would clip people's laundry off the line as they were heading in to land there.

Joyce, #52: OMG, I love the Electra Townie! As in, I don't have the $500 to buy one, but I've test-ridden one and it was fabulous. They have what's called "crank-forward" design, which means that the pedals are a little ahead of your body instead of being directly under it as you ride -- not like a recumbent, but it feels more like sitting in a chair. And yes, they do need fenders in a wet or dusty climate, but those are readily available.

Re kickstands: say WHAT?! I've never had a bike without one, and wouldn't want one so lacking in the first place. How else do you park it when there's not a rack handy, forghodsake? And for more serious riders, how do you do on-the-road repairs without the ability to stand the bike in a stable configuration? That just doesn't make sense.

Neil, #99: Oh, do tell; I love hearing tales of proper revenge. And the answer to why all the bikes were mountain bikes when there was no mountain is most likely "because that's what was trendy and cool at the time, and either no other style was available or nobody would be seen dead on something Not Cool".

Re coaster brakes -- mileage varies; I loathe them and would never buy a bike without hand-brakes. The ability to adjust the position of the pedals at a traffic light is too valuable to lose. Besides, coaster bikes are single-speed by definition, and therefore only useful in areas which are nearly flat (like the Detroit suburb where I grew up). Our first art-bike tandem was a coaster bike, and getting up the 2 underpasses on the parade route was a major hassle; this year we bought a geared tandem, and it was amazing how much easier those underpasses got!

Also, while I understand the "front brakes are dangerous" comment, every bike I've had with hand-brakes had them on both wheels, one hand controlling the front brake and the other the rear. You get used to adjusting the relative pressure on the grips very easily -- so much so that it came back to me by reflex when I started riding again after 30+ years off the bike.

elise, #139: As a cyclist, I'm with you -- wheeled vehicles belong on the street, not the sidewalk. For one thing, cars coming out of a side street are less likely to hit you because the drivers are looking at the street for cross-traffic! (Also, the sidewalks in Houston -- where they exist at all -- are generally in absolutely terrible repair, with potholes and root-heaves and ledges. The streets are at least marginally better.)

Terry, #157: The idea of educating drivers seems to be something most drivers; even those who say they think cyclists have rights, don't comprehend.
Boy, does that sound familiar from a different context. Rather like the resistance to educating men about what constitutes rape (and why it's wrong) rather than telling women what they should do to "prevent" it. :-(

It made me think of this thread and inspired me to ask - what do the cyclists here do for weather proofing in the winter months?

It seems to me there are a two working approaches to cycling in the rain: You either swaddle yourself from head to toe in Gortex(tm)*,or you accept that you're going to get wet and rely on dry clothes at your destination.** Anything in between is doomed to failure, and damp socks.

What do you think?

* and therefore sweat buckets
** free copy-editing sought - was that the correct use of a colon?

It mostly depends on how far I expect to travel, and how long that will take.

Ian-my-husband cycles in most weather, and so he put out for a jacket he could adjust the warmth of easily. The armpits unzip, and a bit across the back.

(My motorcycle jacket has a similar arrangement; shoulder vents in front, and lower back vents in back)

But, realistically, unless you generally ride at a demure and scenic pace - and in rain, who does? - this is just going to make you more comfortable on the bike. You probably still want clean dry clothes at the other end because, well, sweat happens, as does mud and crap from passing cars.

Motorcycling has a similar issue: if you're dressed to be comfortable outdoors with no gear on, you're probably dressed more-or-less right for in motion WITH gear. But there's a period in warm weather after the gear goes on but before the bike gets up to speed when it's just HOT. And I sweat. If it then rains, or the wind picks up ... so it turns out that I can do up my front vents - and Terry's back vents, actually - while sitting on the back of the bike at highway speeds. With numbish fingers.

I have a well-vented, waterproof jacket, but I've never been able to bring myself to put rain pants on over my regular ones. I carry a change of clothes in the water-resistant pannier bag.

I'm checking out bikes with a more upright position now. I only ride short distances, all in city traffic, so I want to see where I'm going at all times. I've currently got a crappy old mountain bike with a Rube Goldberg handlebar contrivance that gives me a fairly upright position.

I've ruled out Amsterdam bikes due to weight. I don't have a garage, and have to carry my bike up and down the stairs to my basement. I'd worry about theft with a bike left outdoors all night, even locked up.

I tried the Raleigh Roadster briefly and loved it. I tried some Trek cruiser bikes, with the pedals forward of the seat,and hated them. The position, and the high handlebars felt very out of control to me. I'm going to head back to the store with the Raleigh and give it another spin. What's a bit crazy-making for me in shopping is that I know how a bike feels can be changed dramatically by raising or lowering the seat by a few centimeters, or changing the angle of the handlebars. Decisions, decisions!

Rain suits (trousers and jacket) are easily obtainable here, at good prices. But the cheaper ones don't breathe, so it's possible to end up wet and smelly at one's destination, rather than simply wet. A further complication is the fact that I am very much in a skirt-wearing phase of my life right now, but I'm not a big fan of ponchos (you can get them for biking, but they put up some fierce wind resistance. And the Netherlands doesn't have all those windmills just for show, you know...)

Now, although I wear skirts, I tend to wear bike shorts under them all the time. This is because (a) I bike in skirts in a windy country, (b) I never did learn to be ladylike even off a bike, and (c) in the winter they keep my tights from sagging†.

So my solution is to put the skirt and my shoes for the day in my panniers, and wear the rain trousers over my bike shorts. That's generally thin enough that I don't overheat (indeed, I have to bike reasonably hard to keep from chilling.) I have a pair of cheap wellies I use to keep my feet dry. I put my rain jacket on over my work shirt (usually a T-shirt), and draw the hood over a baseball cap (the bill protects my face and moves the hood when I look over my shoulder).

(I have considered seeking out, or making, an overskirt of rainproof material. It would be less trouble than the trousers.)

At the office this morning, I ducked into the ladies' room and changed into the skirt and shoes, then left the rain gear to dry over an absent colleague's chair (dry side inward; I'm not a beast.) I have, in the past, changed into the skirt in the underground bike parking, since with bike shorts on as a base layer it's not even immodest.

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† unspoken (d) it's like a girdle? yeah, maybe.

The trick is judging when the rain is getting strong enough that you're going to need to put the waterproofs on, and doing so before your other clothes are already wet. Then, yeah, dialling the speed down a bit to reduce sweating. Decent "breathable" waterproofs do help.

An alternative I use in moderate temperatures is to wear fast-drying convertable trousers and sports sandals,and zip the legs off when it's raining. Combine with a lightweight, "breathable" waterproof jacket and let your legs cool you down - they dry pretty fast when you arrive, then you can zip the legs back on.

Also, you can get trousers now that are waterproof but look like normal hiking trousers and are designed to be worn all day. Not tried them myself (they came out just after I'd bought lightwight, fairly breathable waterproof overtrousers on sale).

Neil at 99 was breaking those rules (which I explained at 137. Given the actual danger to cyclists on the roads, and the lack of lanes for them in most places, the sidewalks (with such rules as aren't enforced in Calif.) isn't always wrong.

In Calif. the law was made because of the large number (though not so much the case now) of kids who were commuting to school on bikes. I know that I was clipped twice, as a teen, when someone didn't notice me in the street (and also once, a lot worse, when someone didn't think crossing a sidewalk in a car, leaving an alley, required slowing down. I was on that sidewalk to avoid a really dangerous left turn further up the road (no left turn lane, major thoroughfare, more than one left turning cyclist killed there; from behind).

No kickstand, and field repair... most of those can be done (at more easily) if the bike is on the seat and handlebars. I know that I, with a kickstand, do most of my work in that configuration.

As to gear. I used to bicycle all the time, about nine miles to school, and eight to work (before that, in high school it was about 2 1/2 miles to school). This was in Los Angeles, where it may only rain 30 days in the year, but when it does, it pours.

I used to carry spare clothes. If I was waterproof, I was drenched and overheated. That the rain was always cold, and had wind, didn't help. If I wasn't going fast enough to overheat, I would freeze.

On the motorcycle, I had abandoned waterproof gloves. The water runs down the outside of my jacket sleeves, and into the gloves, which it then refuses to leave. Better to carry a couple of pairs of gloves, and swap them out if they get to wet/cold.

As Marna said, having clothing you can vent, or seal, big advantage.

Currently, my plan is a GoreTex jacket and waterproof trainers* and snowboarding trousers** over my biking gear, and clean trousers/shirt at my destination (which I do anyway, wet or dry). I haven't tested this particular combination yet, so I'll see how it goes.

If I get around to buying custom kit, I'll bear in mind the recommendations for a properly vented waterproof jacket (doesn't the rain get in?) and dcb@181's suggestion of gaiters, which I wouldn't have thought of.

David Harmon@176: Thanks! I seem to be a little afeared of colon usage other than of the "new paragraph, list" varitey, as it seems such strong punctuation***. This temperament leads me to litter my prose with semi-colons, and choose pastel shades when decorating. Must be bolder

* which I already had for walking
** which already I had for...ok, you probably get the picture.
*** coincidentally, this morning I was randomly pointed at "The Deluxe Trasitive Vampire". I'm tempted to pick it up for the title alone, but I wonder if anyone has read it and can comment on its usefulness?

She recently wrote me:
[...] But the hub motor-assist is powerful enough to go up a reasonable incline in high gear and NO pedaling. So it should handle my unreasonable grades in a lower gear with some pedaling just fine. These are customizeable within limits (his abilities, my price).

For summer, the top comes off and there's a mini-windshield. A fabric cover snaps into place for parking and it even has a slit and hood to convert to a poncho if you get caught out in the rain in the between seasons. (We have quite a bit of that here...though this year I probably wouldn't have bothered to remove the top until July. The winter shell comes with a manually operated windshield wiper, but with Rain-X, he says he rarely needs to use his, and Portland's weather is mighty similar to Seattle's.

It has LED headlights, tail-lights, and turn signals. I'm going to ask him to do a night video to show the brightness. My current headlights are halogens, but that would no doubt use a lot more battery power.

I might want a bigger electric assist motor and/or a bigger battery because of the hills around here. They definitely beat the hills he is used to traversing. Base price WITHOUT the battery is $3800. If we sell the Camry, no more taxes or insurance, I don't think it'll take that long to recoup the cost.

It was, as may be imagined, quite the comedy moment. I guess I should feel good about providing entertainment for a number of amused onlookers at relatively little cost to myself; as I happeded to be a very short distance from this place, I was able to drop the bike in and tube home with only a modicum of disruption.

I've just picked up the (inexpensively) repaired bike up now, and cycled through a lovely sunny evening. Yay, bike shop & cafe!

In other, hyperlocal, news: 5½ month old Area Baby, Emily**, tried her first banana (mashed) and apple (segmented and sucked, lollipop style) today. Both met with cautious approval.

* To be precise, the right crank (and associated cogs) sheared off from the bottom bracket, leaving half the bolt wedged in place.
** This is, after all, partly her thread.

Charlie Stross has a tendency to put some stage business ending in a colon, and then have a line of dialogue after the colon, and he consistently does not capitalize the start of the dialogue. E.g:

He takes your wrist. His fingers are clammy from his beer glass: "let me explain. [...]"

All of this is correct, except that chains stretch. This is not the case. Bike chains do not elastically deform to any meaningful extent. What they do do is lengthen through abrasion of the plates and pivot pins. Details here. More details here and here. Related: why you probably don't want to commute on the latest-greatest racing drivetrains here.

I agree the mechanism is pretty much unrelated; it's not about anything elastic loosing it's stretch.

If you don't have a concise, clear, familiar term to substitute for "stretch" (and I hope you'd have mentioned it if you did), you're basically tilting at a windmill. People will continue to say "stretch". And most of them will understand the actual mechanism, you know; so at least for those people, no harm will be done.

The anti-spam patrol finds that the linked article is apparently now here.