Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Bicycle wheels
On the way home this afternoon we were privileged to see a bicycle using one of the cycle racks provided on Southwest Trains for the very first time. Posh bicycle it was too, nearly new and called Specialised - which was the name of the shop I got my Trek from. Fancy looking thing with very hard core looking caliper brakes. But then I started looking, and I became convinced that the front wheel was slightly bigger than the back wheel. This seemed a bit silly, but on further inspection it turned out that the front wheel had been spoked in an entirely different way to the back wheel. The spokes certainly looked rather different. Different patterns among and between them. So on the front wheel, the spokes ran in from the rim, directly toward the centre, onto the hub, with the whole spoke on a centre line. But on the back wheel, the spokes ran onto the hub, on a tangent, with the central endpoint a couple of centimetres or so off the centre line. I thought that this was maybe to enable the back wheel to better take the shock of two hundred pounds of person bounding up and down on it over the various humps and bumps of the metropolis. It would also account for the back wheel looking slightly smaller than the front wheel. Maybe by a centimetre or so. Must ask my all-knowing bicycle person whether I am anywhere near the truth.
Coincidentally, I had had a bicycle dream last night. I was in a part of the seaside which I visit from time to time in my dreams. The seaside being, presumably, a composite drawn from various real seasides. This particular part was a paved road, rather like the red brick drive ways you get in Epsom suburbia, running alongside a fairly high cliff. No fence. I knew that there was no way that I was going to get me and the bike down to the seashore, going along this road, anyway soon. But I persisted. After a while, I came across two middle aged ladies coming the other way, an aura of teacher, social worker or Guardian reader about them, and despite the fact that I already knew the answer, asked them whether the road led down to the beach.
Cut to a bicycle brake problem. Brakes had given out and the answer was to thread some new cable through some complicated series of perforated prongs on the bicycle frame. Two, in particular, about six inches apart, beneath the saddle, one on each side. Couldn't get it right at all. Ladies started making all kinds of helpful noises. Including 'what great bikes these Leverington people make'. I said, no, this bike was a Trek. Trek road bike with mud guards, lights and all that sort of thing. Yes they said, Leverington. Then they got into trying to sort the brakes out for me. But all to no effect. How could I proceed to nowhere on a bicycle with no brakes. Wake up.
# posted by Jim @ 1:34 PM 
