Back angle

What is your purpose of cycling? Is it for sight seeing, exercise, commuting, touring or racing?  All bikes can do all of the above to some degree but bikes designed for one purpose is not generally not suited for another. The reason is the back angle of the rider is different on each of these specialised bikes.

Just imagine if you are new to a city and cycling along a river path to take in the scenery, would you want to be hunched low on your bike and sit up in a relaxed position? I would rather be sitting up and look around freely with no tension in my neck whatsoever.

The trade off with a bolt upright position is that is difficult to pedal fast.

Leaning the upper body forward allows an anchor point to counteract the forces produced by your legs pushing down onto the pedals. The more you lean forward the stronger the forces that can be generated by your pedaling. This explains why racing cyclists’s sprinting position puts them in flat back. which also puts them in an aerodynamics position.

With an electric bike you can do both – be upright and go fast.  The electric bike really shines when going uphill or into the wind because it produces a lot of torque at lower speed.  Not to say it lacks power at higher speed but because in Australia the motor is designed ease off at 25km/h, it takes significantly more effort to pedal the bike without electric assistance past this speed, unless going downhill or with a tailwind.  Most roadbike’s cruising speed is between 30 to 35km/h on the flats so I wouldn’t get an electric bike unless your commute is very hilly or have low cruising speed.

Peril of low bottom bracket height

I fell off my bike today riding into an urban parking lot. There was a little crest going from the road into the parking lot and I got unseated as I was completing the turn.  My strong feeling was that the crash was caused by pedal strike on the ground.  Having the pedal down on the turn coupled with a dip and then a crest on the road meant the bike stopped suddenly.  I didn’t go over the handle bars because the speed wasn’t high enough, but the bike became so unbalanced that I fell off to the side of the bike.  Luckily, other than a few scrapes on my knees and palms, I was otherwise ok.

I felt the bike I was riding contributed to the crash. It was a bike with 20 inch wheels, similar to a mini velo. Smaller wheels meant the bottom bracket sits lower than a normal 700c wheel bike.  The crank length is 165mm which helps reduce the incident of pedal strike.  But the height from the ground to the bottom of the pedal is only a dismal 9cm.  Compared to about 11cm on my hybrid and road bike.  2 cm can make a big difference on whether pedal strike occurs due to the angle of the lean and undulation of the ground.  On my 700c wheel bike I haven’t actively think about pedal strike and can pedal through corners.  But on the 20 inch wheel bike, I had to be more careful.  Switching bikes from day to day was not a good idea since I became complacent about pedal strike, ultimately causing my crash.

On reflection, I question whether the crash was inevitable.  Was it a design flaw in the bike, or that the bike was meant to be ridden in a certain way and the condition exceeded its design tolerance.  I think it’s 30% the former and 70% the latter.  A bike simply cannot be designed for all road conditions.  Even cars scrape their bottoms on some inclines, so the condition of the road is a contribution as well.  It is up to the rider to interpret the conditions and control the bike accordingly.  I did not do that in that instance.

Going forward, I will minimise the use of the 20 inch wheeler or be extra vigilant when I’m on it.  From a safety point of view, not a good idea to be changing bike riding style every day, just as it’s not good to switch between auto and manual cars daily.

How to fix a squeaky Brooks Flyer

I bought a Brooks Flyer saddle a month ago, having convinced myself that it was the best saddle for ‘extended’ riding.  I ride to work everyday, each way lasting 45 minutes.  I found with the original saddle that comes on the Trek 7.4 FX hybrid bike, it was comfortable enough in the first 30 minutes, but started to feel uncomfortable after that.  Having read comments and reviews online, the consensus is that Brooks provides the comfort on long rides because the leather moulds to your bone structure.  

My commuter bike

I’ve been riding my new bike for about two months now.  I bought the Trek 7.4 FX 2014 version and it’s been a brilliant ride.  I’ve prepared a review of the features of the bike that you can read from the link below.

Continue reading →

Pros and cons of WordPress.com

Over the last two days I have been experimenting different features of WordPress.com and come up with a list of pros and cons from the perspective from someone new to blogging.

Pros

• Free to use
• Free website hosting
• Lots of free themes
• Website names and path automatically created

Cons

• Customisation of free themes quite limited, paid upgrade required to gain more flexibility
• Adjusting column widths require knowledge of CSS coding
• Premium themes look nicer than free themes (understandably)

Conclusion

I thought about giving a squarespace a try as it seems more flexible to tailor the appearance given it’s paid service.  My main gripe with WordPress.com is something as simple as changing column widths require coding.  It should just be a matter of adjusting a slider bar.  Learning to code CSS seems to defeat the purpose of WordPress.com being a platform where you can concentrate on the content and appearance rather than the technicals!

I eventually found a theme that gives me a wider width I was looking for so I am going to give WordPress.com another go by adding more content and see how the menu interacts.

Tires: How Wide is too Wide?

Wider tires just as fast, but safer and more comfortable!

Off The Beaten Path

How wide a tire is too wide for optimum performance? Our research shows that wider tires don’t give up anything on smooth roads, and gain a significant advantage on rough roads. This has been shown for tires up to 31 mm wide.

It’s now a well-established fact that wider tires roll faster than narrow ones. Professional racers now use 25 mm tires, which are 20% wider than the tires that most racers used just 20 years ago. Will this trend continue? Can we expect racers to be on 30 mm tires in the future? No matter what the pros do – they are influenced by many factors that have little to do with science – the real question is: Up to what point are wider tires faster?

It is obvious that the tires in the photo above will not roll very fast. Clearly, at some point, the performance benefits of…

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Trek 7.4 FX 2014

I bought the Trek 7.4 FX 2014 version in October 2014.  As it turned out, after July is a good time to buy a new bike as the manufacturers are starting to roll out next year’s models, so you can most likely get the current year’s bikes at a discount. After looking at a number of bikes, there were a couple of reasons I settled on the 7.4 FX: