Thank you for sucking:

you may remember that I decided to auction off my very rocking and very underused Epiphone Thunderbird.

What an all-round farce that turned out to be.

Firstly, PayPal extracts an uncomfortably large fee for accepting credit card payments. Secondly, eBay requires a similarly bloated fee for any sort of reasonable item listing. Lastly, Parcelforce managed to A) turn up three hours before the booked collection time; B) fail to come back for the actual collection time and C) crack one of the pickup covers through inept handling once they did finally arrive.

I'm now left having to buy an entire pickup unit (I should have guessed the covers don't come separately - it's been that kind of experience) at a cost of around £45 to placate the understandably irate buyer.

All this because some idiot chucked a bass labelled "Fragile" into his van with inattentive gusto. Seriously, Parcelforce suck. They failed to collect on time and just plain broke the fairly robust item they had to transport. Claim form, here I come.

Oh yeah: Thank You For Smoking is excellent, as is mountain biking. That is all.

More money, fewer gears part 3: the build continues.

This bike building malarkey isn't half drawn out, I can tell you. It's finally all bolted together, but while I'd like to excitedly jump up and down and write gushing prose about its many and varied unique features, it's not really finished.

I eventually got all of the minor niggles ironed out (the correct crown race on the forks, the slightly-too-short rear brake cable properly set up, and rim tape in place on the wheels) and came to the last part: the chain.

Since the frame only has vertical drop-outs and the rear wheel can't be adjusted forward or back, I was always going to have to be pretty lucky for the chain to fit perfectly. In the event, after another trip up to Edinburgh Bicycle Co-op to buy a half-link it was still just over a quarter link too long, so I bought and fitted a DMR Simple Tension Seeker and tightened everything up.

In the interests of a anyone who might try a similar sort of build, here are a few of bits of information that became apparent rather too late for me:

• The Truvativ Isoflow Single Speed Chainset likes 3/32" chains.
  
• The DMR Simple Tension Seeker likes 3/32" chains.
  
• The SRAM PC-1 is a 1/8" chain.
  

...all resulting in an unpleasant grinding noise on a brief test ride up and down the street*

The final hurdle, then, is to find out whether a Dicta freewheel can be persuaded to swing both ways, and if not, it's back to eBay to find a 3/32" compatible sprocket and then to the pub to cry into my pint.

* This thread at the On-One forums describes almost exactly the same problem I have, down to the rattling of the chain of the chainguard. Admittedly, they approach the whole thing with a cheerful can-do attitude that eludes me completely.

And in other news,

there is very little other news. Jeff and Devon hosted a pleasant little dinner party on Wednesday night and on Friday Finlay and I finally met up again for a bit of non birth-, death- or marriage-related chat. The chat turned quickly into a light-on-food, heavy-on-beer and ultimately messy evening that I'm in no hurry to regurgitate (even the word makes me reflexively gag a bit) here.

On Sunday Ash and I had a very refined little wander around the west end of Princes Street and St. Cuthbert's kirkyard (unconsciously inspired, maybe, by Lisa?)and then later on met up with my parents for a Father's Day meal in the Outsider. La famille was on excellent form, and everyone got on famously.

And that is the sum total of everything interesting I did last week. Rock and roll.

P.S. I'm running the Water of Leith 10K again this year, and rather than half-heartedly try (and mostly forget) to chase people up for sponsorship, you can donate some money, if you want, via the justgiving.com website and avoid some of the tax that'd normally be levied. That is all!
P.P.S. Some people have been asking how Extreme Phil is doing. Fortunately he's fine - his back's painful but nothing is broken or permanently damaged. He won't be back on a bike for a while, though...!

More money, fewer gears part 2: the build.

So, most of the parts have arrived and I've started to build the bike.

I started with the front end of the bike - forks, headset, stem, bars and brakes. The first thing to do was to fit the forks and stem, and I hit the first hurdle straight away. Fitting the bearing cups in which the bearings are seated requires a headset press (costing somewhere over £100) to do properly; ill-fitted bearing cups will apparently cause the steering action to stick and the bearings to wear out prematurely. A trip to Leith Walk Cycles sorted this out.

I test fit the forks, frame and stem together and again another problem cropped up: the fork's steerer tube is, according to one's perspective, either A) helpfully elongated to compensate for the short, rigid forks or B) just too damn long. With the stem in place, about an inch of steerer tube still projected above it. A couple of headset spacers from Chain Reaction Cycles have arrived today, so this'll be sorted out this evening. As with all of the other slightly dubious bits of this build, a few test rides will soon make it obvious whether or not I should just have the steerer cut down to size.

The brakes were next, and apart from the chain, are probably the most complicated bits that I'll have to do myself. The actual installation was straightforward enough: screw on the calipers and levers, cut the outer tubes to size and thread the cables through everything. Of course, the hard bit will be correctly aligning them and ensuring that both blocks engage the wheel rim at the same time when the lever is pulled, but that'll have to wait until the rear wheel is built (again by Leith Walk Cycles, who are coming out on top in terms of maintenance costs pretty much every time at the moment) and I've got tyres and tubes fitted.

In a sense, it's a pity that there's so little to do: at least a few of the jobs involved in putting a bike together (headset bearing cups, wheel building, installing a bottom bracket) are either so involved or require such specialised tools that there's nothing for it but to have the local bike shop (LBS) do it. This then introduces irritating bottlenecks - I can't buy a bottom bracket until I get the completed rear wheel back to make sure that the chain will fit with the minimum amount of deflection, and neither can I fine tune the brakes; I then can't fit the chain or pedals until the bottom bracket is done. And all this is taking forever and a day because every cyclist around is having their bike serviced for the summer and the shops are all inundated with repair jobs.

It's a hard life, I can tell you. At least my credit card can breathe easy for five minutes.

eBay gum:

I've become a fully-fledged internet auctioneer. Anyone need an Epiphone Thunderbird?

Phil's spill:

continuing in the biking vein, I went mountain biking on Saturday. I loaded up the bike and headed down to Glentress, just outside of Peebles, to meet up with a load of workmates. Bikes were hired, boasts were made (incredibly, Shaun could in fact ride a bike backwards), helmets were grudgingly donned and we headed off into the trees.

The first stretch was up a gently inclined, gravelly access road maybe a mile long. The sun was blazing down and I was sweating fairly freely by the time I reached the start of the trails proper with Scott, Donald and Shaun. We waited until the others caught up, then suited up in our variously borrowed and long-unused knee and shin pads to try out the skills loop, a short section intended to help newbies find their feet.

It all looked very unassuming, and I negotiated the various balance beams and elevated tracks without too much fuss.

Phil, on the other hand, did not. Coming off the ramp from the last beam, a platform maybe twenty feet long and a couple high, made up of half logs, I heard a distinct thunk sound, followed by a sustained - and I mean completely unwavering for at least a minute - wail of pain. I was so taken aback by the volume and agony evident I thought that someone must have had a minor tumble and was hamming it up for comedic effect, but I couldn't have been more wrong. Phil was prone beside the beam, gasping in pain. His front wheel had come off the side of the beam, sending him over the handlebars. He'd come down pretty much on the top of his head, and his neck had taken the full weight of his body as he did so.

We milled about in shock for a minute, and then tried to sort things out: a few of the guys kept an eye on Phil, tying to make him comfortable and making sure that he didn't move too much; Bobby rode after an ambulance we'd seen on the way up and when he missed it, we called the Hub to send for another one. Dave and I led it to the foot of the path up to the skills loop. By now about an hour had passed after the accident, a bike ranger had arrived and we'd all calmed down a bit. The rangers and the ambulance men were fairly optimistic: although Phil was in pain when he tried to move he could at least still move all of his limbs and once we got him onto the ambulance's stretcher for spinal injuries, he was much more comfortable.

Unwilling to stretcher him down to the ambulance and then negotiate the bumpy tracks back to the main road, the ambulance guys made a series of radio and phone calls and finally obtained the services of a Royal Navy Rescue helicopter, which arrived about forty-five minutes later:

Those are your tax pounds at work choppering "Extreme" Phil off to the Royal Infirmiary, getting him a mention on the news in the process.

On the up side, the rest of the day's biking was brilliant.

More money, fewer gears.

I've embarked on a foolish quest to build a single speed commuting bike; i.e, a bike with only a single gear and no complicated derailleur mechanisms. Mostly I like the simplicity of the concept, but partly I want to get a bit more exercise out of my cycle to work and back without making things artificially difficult by using offroad tyres or, I dunno, carrying lead weights.

Here follows an in-depth and massively tedious list of parts, prices and tenuous rationales for buying them. I'll update this (you lucky people) as I get new bits and put it all together.

• Frame: Dirty Jo F-Creme. £100 plus £5 shipping. These are made by the same factory in Taiwan that makes Giant frames, so with any luck I'm getting a decent frame for a sensible price*. I looked around for a frame with track ends that would have made a more natural starting point for a single speed bike, but obvious choices like the On-One Inbred and Identiti 666X start at around £250.
  
• Forks: secondhand, rigid MTB forks from a helpful chap at Edinburgh Cycle Co-op costing a very reasonable £10. They're heavy-ish (i.e., they feel almost as heavy as the frame) but they certainly won't break any time soon. I think this is probably the first candidate for an upgrade come Christmas time...
  
• Bars: FSA FR-330 freeride bars, borrowed from Bobby. These look to be pretty reasonable - they have a 40mm rise which may be a little much for the sort of urban bike I'm building, but we'll see how they work in combination with the rest of the frame components.
  
• Stem: FSA FR-230 freeride stem, again borrowed from Bobby. This particular stem is only 60mm long, and this may have to be temporary until I can lay my hands on a longer one. Again, a few test rides will make this evident.
  
• Rear wheel: DMR Revolver single speed hub (£36 including shipping) and Mavic XM317 rim (£20 or so). I plan to have the rear wheel built by either Alpine Bikes or Edinburgh Cycle Co-op - Alpine quoted £15 to build a wheel. The choice of the hub was restricted to either DMR or On-One really, mostly through price and availability. I'd have liked a hub with a cassette as opposed to a threaded freewheel mount, but I'll survive. The choice of the rim is mostly to match up with the...
  
• Front wheel: Shimano Deore LX/Mavic XM317 combo built by Edinburgh Cycle Co-op. This looks to be the cheapest branded wheel combo I could find. I don't really want to buy branded stuff for the whole bike if I can avoid it, but the whole point of the bike is to be a lightweight commuting bike, so spending a bit extra on the largest, heaviest components is the best use of my cash.
  
• Brakes: Shimano Deore V-brake kit, at £30. These were chosen mostly to get a complete brake kit at a reasonable price - levers, calipers and cables are all included.
  
• Headset: M:Part Aheadset Sport for £7.95. Not much to say about this, other than it was the cheapest compatible headset Edinburgh Cycle Co-op had. And it's black, so it rocks that bit harder.
  
• Crank/chainset: the snappily named SunTour CW-SCSP42-PBG costing a reasonable £15. Again, not much to say other than it's cheap, black and has a 42 tooth chainring. This'll give me a gear ratio of about 2.65:1 with a 16-tooth sprocket. Speaking of which...
  
• Sprocket: Dicta 16 tooth freewheel for £8 including shipping, from eBay**.
  
• Chain: SRAM PC1 at £9, but if memory serves I actually paid less than this. Another workaday part - a single-speed specific 1/8" chain. I've seen some (possibly bogus) internet musings that indicate that 3/32" MTB chains are a better bet for single-speed bikes than BMX-style 1/8" chains because that's where all the R&D dollars go, but we'll see how it holds up.
  
• Pedals: DMR V8s for £22. Seems a lot to spend on pedals, but they look bombproof*** and may well graduate to my mountain bike. Also, given that I initially thought it was £22 per pedal, £22 for both is a bargain :)
  
• Tyres: Schwalbe Silento IIs. These are the road/trekking tyres I fitted to my Diamondback for use in town, and which I replaced with the original off-road tyres for my first mountain biking trip on it. They're not as slick (in terms of tread and also general grooviness) as I'd like, but they'll do fine for the first little while.
  
• Seat and post: I'm going to use the seat and post from my current bike - the post looks to fit exactly into the seat tube, and the saddle has plenty of adjustment available. I'm using a non-quick release clamp which may turn out to be a hassle if I end up doing as much mountain biking over the summer as I'd like to, but it's another free component donated by Bobby so I can't really complain.
  

This leaves the bottom bracket and inner tubes. If this all totals less than £300, I'll have come out with a moderately spiffy single-speed bike for perhaps £200 less than a ready built one. If.

* Since I started writing this entry the frame has arrived - it's incredibly light and pretty well finished. The geometry is notably different from my venerable, secondhand Diamondback Apex, so it'll be interesting to see how the finished bike feels in comparison.
** This arrived from eBay the other day and I'm not impressed. It's shoddily cast, with a fair amount of flashing and generally unimpressive quality. Next candidate for an upgrade, I think - maybe something like this instead.
*** The DMR rear hub has also arrived, and looks to be pretty much indestructible. My mountain biking fanatic boss is très gushy about DMR stuff, and so I'm quite happy dropping some more cash on DMR pedals.

Tags: singlespeed

A long time ago...

Neil showed me some of the photos of Ali's stag last week, and while the jolly japery was much in evidence, it became apparent to me that my hair was getting a trifle ridiculous. So much so that while sporting the requisite fake moustache and Hawaiian shirt I made a startlingly credible drug baron. It was time for a haircut, so on Friday lunchtime I wandered into the Demon Barber on Broughton Street, as is my wont.

The guy that came over to cut my hair was new, and looked to be a little older and richer than the rest of the staff. His hair was cut a bit like mine, if a little shorter, so I asked him to just trim mine a bit and made a point of mentioning how his hairstyle would be a reasonable guide.

"'k then," he said, and off he went.

He wasn't much of a talker in standard barber/taxi-driver/old-man-at-the-bar terms, but it transpired that he was the owner of boom barbers (the lower case name should have set my wanky spider sense tingling) and had recently bought this branch of the Demon Barber.

"Good stuff," I thought. "Hopefully he'll know what he's doing."

How wrong I was, reader. How wrong I was.

Whereas previous haircut disasters have confined themselves to the arena of the mullet, whether sincerely intended as a fashion statement by a misguided hairdresser or as a consequence of general incompetence on their part, this was an almost preternaturally bad haircut. Take the general concept of the mullet - business at the front and party at the back - and add Oasis at the sides and spiky footballers' tuft on top and you are perhaps beginning to glimpse the enormity of what he had perpetuated on my head. Havoc was wreaked with my hair, and he had the temerity to disguise it with some glutinous "product". I paid my money, not yet able to understand the utter horror of my situation, and headed back to work whereupon I stuck my head under the tap, looked in the mirror and suppressed a scream of abject horror.

I can't show you a photo of it - frankly, you'd have to threaten me with being forcibly made to watch The Core over and over again before I'd even consider doing so - but fortunately I'll never have the opportunity to do so because I went straight out to get it fixed. I briefly considered going straight back to the Demon Barber to demand that the fuckwit who cost me twelve pounds sterling and eight months of hair growth make right his mistake, but it struck me that letting an crap and angry barber have a second go at my hair would not be the best course of action.

I went straight to York Barbers (a humble, down to earth establishment with the good grace to not even have a website, let alone a useless Flash-ridden abortion of one), vented my spleen at my coiffeur nemesis and begged the guy to sort me out. Twenty minutes later I looked A) five years younger and B) five times better. And felt about five times better into the bargain.

I did do other stuff last week, like go to see X-Men 3 (another excellent blockbuster - what's going on?) and visit Holy Island with Ash (a diverting little trip on which we managed to unintentionally avoid the main reasons to go there), but dear God! That haircut will live on in infamy.