BrownhillsBob

#365daysofbiking I dream of wires

January 4th – A stop on the way home on the North Street Bridge, the crossing point between Walsall’s Butts area and Birchills. The view from the railway bridge to the new college and town has always been great at night.

But sadly, no more.

The welcome electrification of the Chase Line railway below has had an unfortunate side effect of ruining the shot, with the overhead gantry stealing the foreground. But I don’t mind – I’d rather have the more reliable commuter service.

The college anyway was dull and in darkness, clearly not open yet from the Christmas break, and Austin House with it’s peculiar white halo was stark in the darkness.

Ah well, change is what happens while you’re not looking… There are other aspects on this view, I guess…

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#365daysofbiking Stirring

January 4th – In Kings Hill Park again at lunchtime heading for B&Q, I stopped to note that ostensibly, it was very much winter, and the park looked as darkly green and growthless as it always does at this time every year.

But wait up.

Stop and look, and honey fungus is growing in the grass – and bedgraggled daisies are still very much in bloom. But better than these side effects of a so far warm winter, the spring flowers are coming now: They have stirred in the death and are sending green shoots upwards.

Soon, there will be flowers.

My heart sang.

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#365daysofbiking – Misty grey

January 3rd – On my way home, I crossed Kings Hill Park. I expected this cold, harsh evening to have much clearer air, but it was in fact quite misty and the view of the twin sisters of Wednesbury I’d hoped for – clear and well defined – was actually a murky grey image in shades of grey and very pale yellow electric light.

But it was rather beautiful in a very dark, Turner-is way.

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#365daysofbiking Gearing up

January 3rd – One of my bikes uses a Shimano Di2 hub gear – an Alfine 705. This is the original Di2 11 speed hub and has its own pros and cons, but on the whole it’s reliable and workmanlike, and apart from a somewhat fiddly oil change when the shifting gets lumpy, requires little in the way of mechanical attention during it’s lifetime.

Generally, the life I’ve found is about 15-25,000 miles. This hub has been through a lot, and more than 3 wheel builds, but I’m happy with the wheel it’s in now, which was why it was so annoying when it suffered a serious failure on Christmas Day. I lost about half the gears which just spun out when selected – 3,4,5, 9 and 11 I think. An oil change and filling with cleaning oil hadn’t helped at all. The hub was knackered.

There’s not much I don’t know about this system; I’ve been using it in different iterations for over a decade and I’ve got to know the tricks and fiddles and advanced maintenance procedures – both by reading manufacturer documentation and by trial and error. The internal mechanism of the hub is easy to remove and change for another – you remove the wheel, take off the changer mechanism, sprocket and disk brake. You then remove the non drive side cone and locknut, then unscrew the plastic retainer and oil seal on the drive side – I have the right tool for this but a strap wrench will do it fine too, but the key bit is it’s a left hand thread. Once it’s off, the whole gubbins will come out, the oil can be cleaned out and a new mechanism can be put back, or the old one repaired and refitted.

There was a snag. The 705 is no longer available, but there is a new version, the 7051. I didn’t want to rebuild the wheel. I scoured fleabay and the web for a 705. No dice. I found a brand new 7051 in Germany for about £250, which is a great price. I poured over Shimano drawings of the two hubs. I decided to risk ordering the 7051 and trying to swap the innards. If they didn’t fit I could always reassemble it and build a new wheel.

In time the hub arrived, and the good news is it fitted exactly the same. On the rare chance that anyone ever reads this wondering if it’s possible to swap the two, yes it is. I swapped the guts, but also the non drive side bearing and oil seal too – be careful popping that out as they’re easy to damage and if no longer flat, oil will leak from the cone.

The 7051 hub has an upgraded clutch, smother shifting and performs better changing under loading. I have to say, fitting it back was a dream, and it runs well. Once the factory stiffness had gone, changes are much smoother and there’s far less clatter when doing so.

The old hub mechanism I plan to dismantle to see what’s gone. Looks like I’ll be spending some time in the garage with the tools…

This post has been created on the off change anyone ever wonders the same thing: I would say this also applies to the non-Di2 cable variants too.

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#365daysofbiking Getting better every day

January 2nd – Back on the 21st December my heart was lifted, as it always its, by the thought that we’d had the shortest day of the year, and that now the sunset would get later and later and the night and darkness would retreat for another year.

Well, not two weeks later, and the sunset is already 10 minutes later than it was on that day.

Ten minutes may not seem much, but it’s significant. Although the timetable to which the day lengthens is fixed, the rapidity of the change is always impressive to me and the retreat of night, being loosely sinusoidal, accelerates as we escape winter.

That six hundred seconds of gleaned light mean that on a clear day, it’s not really dark until well after 4:30pm. Soon light will leak into my evening commutes, and all will be well again.

I so hate the darkness.

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#365daysofbiking Time is

January 2nd – I’ll start this with a note about this journal. Older readers will know I started this journal on 1st April 2011after being encouraged to do 30daysofbiking by ace cyclist and top Dutchperson Renee Van Baar. From the moment I agreed, the die was cast.

Sadly, I was very ill with food poisoning the following New Year, so never rode a bike on 31st December 2011, and 1st January 2012. But I steeled my resolve, and I carried on, and I never missed a day since. Every day from 2nd January 2012 I have got on a bike and ridden somewhere.

From 100 mile plus rides in one day, to trundles to the shops, I have recorded my daily life as a cyclist, in all its ups and downs. That’s 7 years, or 2557 successive days (including 2 leap years), and about 63,000 miles.

I adore keeping this journal – both writing it, and creating the photos.I welcome feedback. If you have something to say – that I should stop, continue or do something differently, please get in touch by commenting or mailing me – BrownhillsBob at Googlemail dot com.

Today was my first day back at work and on my way back, I headed up the canal to Newtown. I had forgotten to charge my camera, and it was flat, so these are actually photos from an iPhone, which just shows how much phone camera technology has advanced.

When I started this journal in 2011, my phone would not have been remotely capable of images of this quality.

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##365daysofbiking Cold return

January 1st – The ride was continued through beautiful soft half light up to Brocton Field, down into Sherbrook Valley, then over the hill and down Pepper Slide to Abrahams Valley, returning down the A51 to Rugeley then home over Longdon, Stoneywell and Hammerwich.

The Chase was as beautifully cinematic as ever, and filled with hardy souls in new anoraks enjoying the outdoors, many with stoical expressions.

A good sunset, then the beauty of Rugeley from the main road was a real restorative. It was so cold, but I didn’t care: It was just great to be in my beloved Staffordshire outdoors again.

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#365daysofbiking Romancing the stone

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January 1st – So me and a companion went looking for something, for another local historian. And we found it!

Old pal and top history writer Kate ‘Cardigan’ Gomez had written a post, published a couple of days before, about a mysterious ‘wishing stone’ up at Pye Green, on Cannock Chase (click here for that).

Since I was finally out of house arrest, we saddled up and went to look.

I won’t detail where it is exactly so it can still be fun to find, but if you know the area the pictures speak for themselves.

The journey was made even better by the remarkable sunburst seen over Huntington.

Cheers to Kate for the inspiration for a great ride! It’s good to be back in the saddle properly…

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#365daysofbiking Hunkered down

December 31st – I’m so not a fan of New Year’s Eve. The forced jollity, camaraderie and excuse for overindulgence just depresses me, so I tend to sit it out at home, until the madness passes.

Today, I slipped out after dark for a windy, cold spin to Chasewater, which was peaceful but resounding to the call of thousands of unseen, roosting gulls.

The M6 Toll was beautiful in it’s eerie emptiness too.

Happy new year everyone, here’s to a better 2019 and I wish you all the best – and thanks for following along.

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#365daysofbiking Looking after the steed

December 31st – In Lichfield briefly, I noticed this little piece of pride and joy, locked outside the new library and later, near the Garrick.

That’s clearly a very much loved Christmas present and it’s good to see the parents getting the wee cyclist into the security habit.

This little blue, green and yellow steed could be the beginning of a lifelong love affair, like my first ‘real’ bike was. Cracking stuff, and a joy to the heart.

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