Tag: six

July 10th – This one has puzzled me. An unknown family of swans has appeared in Pleck, Walsall on the canal near the Rollingmill Industrial Estate.

Mum, Dad and six cygnets (a smaller, slightly runty looking one was hiding behind the weed on the right) were sunning themselves and preening at the back of a factory, while a man worked noisily through the door in the workshop behind.

I don’t know this year of any local family with six surviving chicks, and the adults don’t seem to be ringed.

They look in rude health though, and weren’t at all skittish.

Wonder if they’re now resident or just passing through? Where are they from, any ideas people?

January 2nd – I’ll start this with a note about time, and the passing thereof; long time readers will know I started this journal on 1st April 2011after being egged on to do 30daysofbiking by ace cyclist and top Dutchperson Renee Van Baar. 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 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 shop, I have recorded my daily life as a cyclist, in all it’s ups and downs. That’s 6 years, or 2192 successive days (including 2 leap years), and about 55,000 miles.

I love keeping this journal, I love writing it, and finding 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.

I’ve done this to show that it’s possible to be normal, and on a bike. That a podgy, middle aged man who’s not a lycra fiend can ride to work, shops, for fun, to explore, keep healthy, be happy, enthusiastic, jaded, sad or depressed, and continue rolling down the road.

In the six years, I’ve had at least 10 different cameras to use, maybe more, actually. Some I’ve adored, some I hated. The Canon GX 7 Mark II I’m using at the moment is like Jekyl and Hyde. It was really good in the night shots of the last couple of journeys, but tonight’s attempt – a simple shot of Morris – it seemed to fudge a bit.

On the camera, the jury is still out.

I’ll need to ride and use it a bit more to find out…

June 11th – On a post repair test ride, bad news.

The Watermead swan family are now down to five from the original six. The remaining cygnets looked healthy and well though.

Most likely the victim of a hungry fox, it’s normal to lose a cygnet or two to predators in every urban clutch – we’ve been lucky in recent years to be relatively unscathed, but one has to remember the prodigious clutch sizes of these birds and consider that maybe some population control is natural.

When the youngsters start ground roosting separately as opposed to in a protective huddle, they are easy prey to Reynard and hopeful, the loss has been a warning to the remaining five.

Sad, so very sad – but it’s nature, red in tooth and claw.

April 1st – It’s the sixth anniversary of this journal today, and what better way to celebrate that than a canalside drama in photos?

Very lucky to catch this, so excuse the awful focus in the action shots. I just saw a small ginger face behind the geese and assumed it was a fox, not a particularly ambitious, small ginger cat!

I don’t know who this dashing young blade is, but it had big dreams, ad was hunting near the new builds between Catshill Junction and silver Street in Brownhills.

A lovely cat, and no geese were harmed in the making of this post!

September 20th – Spotted in a customer’s cycle shed, two bikes side by side that illustrate something that annoys me.

Shimano, the Japanese industrial giant that revolutionised cycling are not what many people imagine them to be. They are essentially production engineering experts, probably more than they are bicycle technology or fishing equipment manufacturers.

Shimano make loads and loads of great, well thought out products that I love. their work to refine the derailleur gear system in the 80s and 90s, their clipless pedal systems and electronic gear technology have changed cycling for the better immensely. But something more than these innovations has had a massive influence.

Shimano sell innovative kit to bike manufacturers. That means they also sell and produce the tooling to manufacture bikes en masse. Shimano often market products to manufacturers because they’re cheaper or easier to assemble on a production line, but sometimes of little discernible end-user benefit.

Shimano pioneered the external bottom bracket, a frankly piss-poor idea that is hated by lots of cyclists for it’s increased wear and susceptibility to corrosion. Shimano invented it to make assembly of bikes from one side far easier. It shifted to producers in large numbers and is now, sadly, ubiquitous.

Similarly, for years, bicycle disk brakes – which I love as a technology – had their rotors attached to the wheel hubs by six M5 screws, like the bike in the top picture. This ‘6 bolt’ design has been a standard for more than a decade, and works well. You can feel if there’s a securing issue without the loose disc being dangerous, and the rotors are light and easy to replace with standard workshop tools – usually an Allen or Torx driver.

Shimano recognised that a big cost in disc brake adoption to mainstream bikes was assembly of the disc onto the wheel – six screws require either a complex, mutispindle head or an operator repeating the same action 12 times per product. So they invented Centerlock(sic).

The lower picture shows a bike with a Centerlock rotor.

Centerlock uses a splined male dog on the hub, and a special brake disc with a mating female recess. The rotor slides onto the splines, and is held in place by the same type, thread and tooled ring that holds the gear cassette on a rear wheel, thus requiring one tool to fit the cassette and two brake rotors, a huge cost saving in production.

Centerlock rotors are heavier, and you need a special tool to fit or remove them. If the ring comes loose, there’s nothing else to hold it.They limit consumer choice of aftermarket replacements.

There’s a whole industry sprung up around centre lock to 6 bolt adaptors.

This change in technology was introduced purely for the benefit of bike manufactures, arguably to the detriment of consumers and to me, is inferior.

Rant over.

May 14th – Bittersweet. Also in the rain, the Brownhills Watermead swan family, I first took pictures of at the weekend – doing well, but down from seven cygnets to six. One will have been snatched by a predator, or may have been weak and died; but the rest look fine and are already growing. Out with mum and dad who were keeping a watchful eye, they were a lovely family. 

Such joy and sadness in nature.