Rich
In my circa 35 years of riding I have only ever taken my bikes to a shop when I needed to ask nicely to borrow a tool that I didn’t have - usually in return for a quantity of beers proportionate to the number of staff who worked there, the value of the tool in question and/or the amount of workstand time I wasted.
The number of bikes I have owned is a number that I don’t want my wife to know. Years in the bicycle industry in various guises interspersed a corporate career, ultimately leading to becoming founder, owner, CEO, spanner monkey and Tea Boy of my own home-based workshop, which is The Best Job in the World; and is where I currently practice a solid amount of Yelling At Bikes.
Stuff I've written:
Reading Time: 6 minutesCan a (relatively) budget electronic dropper post hold its own against the revered SRAM AXS dropper, and how does it compare to a manual dropper?
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Reading Time: 4 minutesSomething like 15-years between drinks on a Nicolai, then two come along at once… sort of.
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Reading Time: 3 minutesIt’s not often I regret selling a bike, but I always regretted selling my old Nicolai – the opportunity to own another couldn’t be ignored…
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Reading Time: 5 minutesI was trawling Facebook Marketplace when a bike I’d lusted over before reappeared. Nostalgia got its teeth into me and my eyes were glazing over…
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Reading Time: 4 minutesYes, you. All of you. New-to-the-sport MAMIL and weathered, battle-hardened wheelmen alike. Do yourself, and all other road users, a favour: Learn to clip-in to your clipless pedals WITHOUT LOOKING. Please, for the good of your own friends and family and for the love of all things cycling, learn. NOW. Cycling is, we are repeatedly told, ‘the new golf’ — I get that. I also get that this means there’s a lot of new cyclists — and I even like that fact. The cringe-worthy offset of this, though, is that many cyclists who now prematurely consider themselves to be ‘good’…
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Reading Time: 5 minutesStandards? You realise this is the bike industry, right?…
Read this yell...Reading Time: 5 minutesFirst things first, don’t go near any glue – get those tyres unpacked and mounted onto a set of rims…
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Reading Time: 2 minutes“35 years on tubulars and I’ve never seen one folded the way you did. Share with us the techniques, please?”
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Reading Time: 7 minutesI thought I’d add my tuppence with this photo sequence of how I wrap mine…
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Reading Time: 5 minutesA little while back, my good lady wife’s bike was in need of a spring clean so I took the opportunity to finally cover something I’ve been meaning to do for ages – cables. But this is not so much a ‘how to setup and tune your brakes and gears’ and more like ‘how to keep your cabling tidy when you do it’… The cable of choice for me at the moment is the Jagwire ‘Racer’ or ‘Hyper’ range – they’re available in loads of colours, and are one of the very few cables that you can get in purple (to keep…
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Reading Time: 5 minutesSaddles are perhaps the most personal item in cycling — what works perfectly for one rider could feel like sitting on pine cones to another. For some, even the visual appeal of a particular saddle could be enough for them to persist with something less comfortable, or to reject what might otherwise be the perfect perch in the case of an uglier duckling. We reviewed three of the SQlab road range previously. It is fair to say that visually they are more intriguing than most saddles, but they are far from ugly — and, when they work as well as…
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Reading Time: 7 minutesFor Campagnolo, 2017 was a big year. They launched a range of products to the market which many speculated whether the company would even attempt so soon in their new ‘H11’ road disc range. But how would it stack up against Shimano and SRAM — both of whom already had years of experience with disc brakes? On the back of the Record EPS groupset review we posted in September 2017, Campagnolo sent us the relevant parts to convert that groupset to an H11 road disc group and hang on a review frame so that we could answer that question for…
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Reading Time: 5 minutesOff-the-peg carbon from the custom carbon specialists. Parlee are a brand I have admired from afar for a while. They came to prominence when a riding buddy ordered a custom Z2 from Bespoke Cycling in London sometime around 2008 — a bike which blew me away when I first saw it as the lacquered raw carbon finish looked incredible. Since then I have watched Parlee grow and seen their progression; from the stock Z4 and the full custom Z1, 2 & 3 models back then, to the impressive range of stock models they produce along with their Z-Zero custom super…
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Reading Time: 6 minutesMelbourne-based Curve sent us their ‘Belgie Spirit’ frame to see what we thought of it… Mention the word ‘Titanium’ in certain circles and you’ll see grown men glaze over, drifting off into romantic, wistful state of Bike Lust. Thankfully it is not a material that is likely to be leaving the bike industry in any hurry, so bikes like the one featured here will hopefully continue to romance us for a long time to come. However, it is also a word which has fallen prey to stereotype. This has led to the unfortunate pre-disposition that titanium bikes ride ‘soft’.…
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Reading Time: 6 minutesTechnology and art have always combined in bicycles. One man’s treasure is another man’s poison; but whether your treasure is a hand-built lugged steel machine draped in 8-speed Campagnolo or SRAM eTap hanging off a bang up-to-date creation, the beauty, and elegance of a bicycle are indisputable. Bastion Cycles are taking this perfect marriage up a notch by — according to their own strapline — ‘Engineering a New Art Form’. They sent one our way for a brief dalliance. We drooled over it as we pulled it out of the box, then clocked up some miles to see what it…
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