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Saturday 24 March 2012

UK Handmade Bicycle Show, 2012

People queuing at 9.25am this morning - a stunning spring day
Bespoked Bristol 2012 - The UK Handmade Bicycle Show (24 March 2012)

One of the vendors had a T-Shirt. It said: "There's more to life than bicycles, you know? (but not much)." A nice, inadvertently accurate take on this show, now in it's second year and twice as large. I was almost transcendental happy, especially after one of Look Mum No Hands' flat-whites. Lovely atmosphere, lovely people and intelligently organised so that for the modest £7.50 entrance fee, you walked away with a programme booklet that included a write-up on all exhibitors but also a directory that was wider than the show, thus throwing a loop around a nascent cottage industry in the UK. Superb. It was an immersive, bike-fest like no other, with a grass-roots texture - maniacal obsessives trying to do something truly original in the field of bike tech or design, whether retro or space age. This much colour is not easily found at the massive Eurobike held in Germany each summer.

Chris Sleath of Dynamo Works, Edinburgh, is reviving the non-digital art of hand printing with wooden blocks. I subsequently bought the print shown here - it summarises my philosophy entirely...

Quoc Pham - yes that's the name of the London-based, London-raised Vietnamese founder of this superb fledgling brand of very functional yet stunningly beautiful cycling shoes. Someone had to do it; Quoc Pham is surely succeeding by not exceeding it's brief. As Quoc said to me: "It's simple: shoes are my love." Great to see a city shoe with a completely recessed SPD cleat cutaway, so you can still walk on it all day in an office without causing clickety clacks; but I love all of 'em.


The Brooks Criterium Jacket
This coat caught my eye. It's a Timothy Everest-designed, Brooks branded, Foxes (of London) produced mega-garment costing £850 a pop. In retrospect, I didn't like the belt and the too-pocketed front, which apes Orvis and the 'Zambesi twill' approach to African safari. Where's the pith helmet Jeeves?
But I am told that within a month there will be an even lighter, summer version costing less. It will be called The Blackwell. The price-thing is not trivial when you consider the sorts of wheelsets you can get for £850. (NB - the chest straps shown here are from a bag, they're not part of the jacket)
www.atomic22.com (infiniti 3D security)
Possibly the most important exhibitor of the whole show, infiniti3D security is headed by Patrick Wells and Ayantika Mitre. They've done what the boys at Royce engineering said wasn't possible: design a 3-D key for a 3-D security bolt. More than that, they've thought through the whole geography of the bike so that every significant part from saddle to skewers has been secured. So they are evolving a three-key, three size solution to cover a whole bike. In theory, you'll only need one small D-Lock. The hardest thing will be to get manufacturers to fit from scratch, but it has to be the way ahead.
Cherubim Piuma frameset with steel fork

Highly desirable
London, Soho-based Tokyo Fixed gear founder Max Lewis told me that the fixed-gear market has sagged in the face of mass, cheap imports from China. Grant Young of Condor said the same. What was special and counter-cultural became mainstream and then tacky, just like snapping a finger. However, the 'boom' will, I predict, have long legs because riding fixed is so pure. It's an authentic, magical way to ride a bike so everyone should have a fixie in their armoury. I don't mind if it stops being a 'boom'.
The other consequence is a raft of new and wonderful discoveries, mostly with a roadie emphasis - such as Cherubim of Japan, which produces less than 100 frames a year and every one bespoke. Tokyo Fixed are importing them to the UK, and the Piuma got a rave review in Cycling Plus magazine. I subsequently rode the same bike and can vouch for that - it achieves an extraordinary degree of the impossible qualities of being very stiff and very compliant. This would be an amazing winter/cobbles bike. The Uli is even better, and with a carbon fork starts to look competitive for racing. Yes, the steel concedes a bit to carbon fibre on the weight front (1.3kgs for the frame set, ex-fork), but Max told me that customers have so far been completely wowed by the bike, making it their #1 ride including racing.....
Enigma Etape in white - yes, you can paint titanium

Dario Pegoretti's stand was the most avant-garde

Il Soigneur: the coffee thing just keeps coming up
Enigma of Sussex, southern England, had a superb stand and have now evolved alot of models to the point where you can have practically anything you like. For instance, the ever-green Etape (shown) can be painted, if you are weary of bare ti grey. Would they make the Rohloff-hub bike they've just evolved in a titanium frame? Yes - but it would be a custom build and take a few weeks. These guys are real engineers and theior prices remain real world, the Etape frameset weighing in at £1,300.

Original take on Roy Liechtenstein print made me laugh

Lovely venue, but will it be too small for next year?

Tom Donhue

Donhue Road Bike






















Tom Donhue won best exhibitor last year and is already building frames for Rapha, with a six-month waiting list out of his Norwich base. His stand was so richly immaculate and original that you immediately wanted to stop and examine - bespoke shifters here, stunning paint jobs there, and several completely different kinds of bike to show that almost anything you dream up is possible. Above all he has revived the art of bi-lam, or bi-laminating, where you braze in a secondary tube and then cut it away, a sort of in-situ alternative to a hand-cut lug. The swallow logo is based on the symbolism of coming home after a long flight - and a typeface remembered from the Hino trucks Tom saw when cycling across Mongolia on a massive biking odyssey he took three years ago.

Tuesday 20 March 2012

REVIEW: Garmin Edge 500


REVIEW: Garmin Edge 500 Blue, with HR and Cadence sensors, Wiggle £219.99
This all started with me being unable to get speed and heart rate data from the back wheel of my bike to my Polar CS 200 - and because I'd just hired Tom Newman, my coach. It was important that (a) I acquire the right data when training on my turbo (when the front wheel doesn't turn), and (b) that he could easily look at it by using my log-in to Garmin Connect (what better way for a coach to keep an eye on his charge, without it being obtrusive?). So out came the Visa card. As one club mate blogged: "It's just money isn't it?"
I take it as an interesting point of departure that Tom told me all his friends use Garmin, whether this model or the longer established Edge 800 with full sat nav capacity. Does this mean Polar is losing? Certainly their GPS devices are horribly clunky the last time I looked, and their software less intuitive. The social networking/sharing rides/beating virtual rival aspect has suddenly erupted to the point when its as much a consideration as the actual hardware.
I was attracted to the Edge 500 Blue because my team kit is blue (!); and because it's 56grams instead of the 100g+ Edge 800, and because I don't typically envisage that many situations where I would really use the mapping/sat nav. It's also half the price of the Edge 800 but still alot of money, the cited price here including a discount from Wiggle. Finally, it has a lithium-ion battery, mains re-chargeable, with a claimed life of 18 hours. This is very attractive unless you do multi-day events such as 24 hour TTs or Paris-Brest-Paris. My old Polar burned through the coin batteries fairly quickly, and they cost money.
Please take note, if you buy the Edge 800, it's even more eye-wateringly expensive than it appears, because you have to get the right mapping bundle otherwise you might have well have not bothered. The 'universal embedded mapping' that comes with it is totally, utterly useless for riding purposes. I know because I had a loan unit from Garmin for a magazine review and it was hopeless. Why the Garmin press folks didn't load up some great maps is one of the mysteries I never solved. The Edge 800 package with maps is going to tip the scales at £400, which is far too much in my book.
But for the purposes of this review I wasn't totally thrilled at every detail of the Edge 500. The Garmin HR strap is heavier and clunkier than the thinner, more-fabric-and-less-plastic Polar one. Then, to my dismay, I found that the cadence sensor was too thick to pass the swirly stays on my Ridley X-Night. OK, it's a cross bike. But it doubles as a winter trainer and I do want the cadence function. There is no need for the pedal sensor to be this thick.

The same applies to the spoke magnet/speed censor. It does work over a flat aero spoke, but less from design than good luck, amazing given the racy credentials Garmin claim. In the 'Quick Start' hand book, the picture shows said magnet clamped to a traditional, round profile spoke. What decade is Garmin living in with respect to this? Maybe the 1980s. How about providing more than one magnet to suit customers who have spent this sort of money? The magnet provided is functional, but it doesn't grab your heart or your eye.
My final gripe concerns the initial set-up of the software. A DVD comes with the unit, but your best bet is opening Garmin Connect (a web site) and then hitting 'upload' while the computer is connected by the USB cable provided. None of this is adequately explained, and I was led off on a wild goose chase with Windows saying it couldn't read a FIT file, and then a third party vendor trying to get me to download their solution for this unwanted problem. And etc. I went onto a forum and the first remark I read was: "I don't know why it's doing X; is it really meant to be this complicated?" My sentiments exactly, although now I have downloaded a few files I am impressed by the software itself.
Other than these gripes, the actual unit seems to have performed flawlessly so far, and unlike the Polar it is not (so far) prone to any false readings or hiccups out in the field. The Polar's biggest weakness was defaulting to a HR Max reading of 220 at the first sign of speed work and intervals, when the pulse was changing rapidly. The Garmin does not do this. My wife Stephanie has the wrist-mounted Polar FT80, one of Polar's top models, and despite a recent £30 repair and a new HR strap, it is still prone to these fake readings, a shocking state of affairs for such an expensive item.
A final comparison comment: the Polar over reads calorie burn by a whole 30-40% compared to the Garmin. They can't both be right and that's a huge discrepancy. Garmin claim to have done sophisticated modelling of calorie burn taking into account the other relevant data, weight/height/gender/age, which might be true. Polar might instead have wanted us to feel great about ourselves and our exercise, and taken the generous route from a one-size fits all universal calculation linked to heart rate. But I honestly don't know.
My initial, overall feeling is that I've made a good choice, indeed an excellent choice, but I will only know for sure over a much longer period of training and racing, so the plan is to use it hard for a year and report back once it's had some knocks and scratches.

Richard Lofthouse

Richard Lofthouse