September 24th – Heading for Chasewater from Brownhills along the canal, my recovery ride was slow and plodding, but if it had not been, I might not have looked right down the Spot Path on Clayhanger Common and seen the old dog fox annoyed at my disturbing his duck hunting activities.
One ear flat in irritation and an expression of utter contempt, that fox never changes and we’re old familiars.
Rare to be able to catch a photo – despite his age he’s nimble and still quick on his feet.
September 23rd – At Calton, high in the Weaver Hills, I was surprised to find a tree with a huge crop of ripe plums, so ripe that they were falling off the tree and rotting on the ground, food only for birds and a huge army of wasps.
A taste of one of the purple fruit told me why they were untouched – so tart my face nearly turned inside out.
This was no deterrent to the wasps, however, who were too busy to bother the inquisitive human with the camera.
September 23rd – A chance day off and escape into the Staffordshire Moorlands. I rode the reverse of a ride I did in spring, leaving at dawn and riding up through Rugeley and Uttoxeter, then over to Marston Montgomery, Snelston and Ellastone, over the Weaver Hills and Waterhouses, up Morridge to Flash, then back through Danebridge and Rushton Spencer to Congleton, where I picked up a train back to Lichfield.
Passing Morning Star, the steam roller from Klondike Mill at Uttoxetter was a rare treat.
It was a long ride, over a century, and the climbing was hard and prolonged. There was a good but chilly following wind, but when the sun shone it was warm and lovely.
What a joy to catch summer’s last breath in such beautiful scenery.
September 22nd – Also coming out better than expected was Morris, the Brownhills Miner. I often have people grumbling I don’t feature him here often enough, but it’s hard to know what to do with him; Morris has been photographed so often and so well by others, my photos would jut be noise.
I’m very fond of Morris – as a technical achievement, he’s stunning and a wonderful demonstration of Finite Element boundary analysis as a method of solving complex shape resolution. But he’s also that rarity – a civic artwork with soul.
Morris has done very little for Brownhiills. He hasn’t ‘put is on the map’ – we never left it; he hasn’t created jobs or sparked a regeneration.
But what Morris has done is made lots of people smile, and wonder about the history he represents.
Which is worth an awful lot in my book.
ISeptember 22nd – It was a pleasant but slightly chilly evening as I slipped out for a test circuit of Brownhills after a little bike maintenance. I’d forgotten my camera when I went to work, and was still without it, so I gave the phone lens a polish and had a go.
Cameras on phones haven’t half come on in the past few years.
September 21st – I’d had to nip to Birmingham late, and came back to Shenstone. There had been heavy weather about, but I’d managed to evade it al day.
When it caught me in the lanes on the way home, it wasn’t messing about. I was like a drowned rat.
Still, like summer rain tends to be, once I was wet through, it was quite enjoyable and not cold. And it hasn’t rained much of late, after all.
Lets hope it’s just a blip.
September 20th – It was so beautiful on the way home that I decided to take a spin around Stonnall and Shenstone, just to catch the golden hour.
Although Autumn’s feet are well under the table now, there’s still plenty of green with freshly planted crops in the fields and leaves not yet turning.
But oh, it gets dark so early now…
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.
September 18th – I have no idea about this, as I’m no meteorologist and I know even less about cloud formations, but I can’t recall ever seeing stripy cloud like this before.
It persisted for some time around 5pm over east Staffordshire, and was quite beautiful – when most pronounced, it had a very shard ‘edge’ to it which was fascinating in itself.
Can anyone tell me what this is all about, please? How rare is it? Does it have a name?
September 17th – The sunset was gorgeous at Chasewater, the calm before the chaos. A lone lady practised her wake boarding to a small audience, birders checked out the gull roost, and those lucky enough to catch this spectacle – very few, sadly – basked in the light and beauty of the dying day.
Sometimes all you need for peace and beauty are a couple of cyclists, a couple of cameras and a beautiful evening.
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