Author Topic: RIDES 2018 — add yours here  (Read 65291 times)

jags

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Re: RIDES 2018 — add yours here
« Reply #105 on: May 03, 2018, 10:28:33 am »
You have an orchard 8) 8)

PH

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Re: RIDES 2018 — add yours here
« Reply #106 on: May 03, 2018, 10:51:48 am »
Lovely photos and report John, must be good to get out but I can feel the chill through my monitor.

jags

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Re: RIDES 2018 — add yours here
« Reply #107 on: May 03, 2018, 05:20:25 pm »
Sorry John meant to say great photos  just that Andre stopped me in me tracks when he said his Orchard. ::)

Anto.

Andre Jute

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Re: RIDES 2018 — add yours here
« Reply #108 on: May 03, 2018, 07:21:59 pm »
It was let go to seed probably a century ago. I got some apples out of it one year, but that tree went when the rather large red lantern tree near it became dangerous and had to be chopped off. My foxes and hedgehogs live there now. The illustration shows the paterfamilias of the foxes sneaking around the stable to see if my wife's cats are lunch.

I found Foxy's family at dusk crossing the road in front of the graveyard on the very edge of the town two widely-spaced roads over, and herded them with my bike through a huge sports field and through a culvert under a busy main road and into the 30m deep gully that backs onto the orchard, and over the years made them welcome by not chasing them off, so that now their descendants are relatively tame, though wary of the pair of German Sheepdogs next door. In my old age, rather than having a Yorkshire terrier, I'll negotiate with Foxy to adopt one of his pups; foxes, if they bond with one young enough, make wonderful pets.  If I hadn't been on my bike when I discovered this breeding family, they would easily have outrun or outsmarted me, and I would not now have the choice in a few years between a Yorkshire terrier and a little fox.
« Last Edit: May 04, 2018, 10:37:34 am by Andre Jute »

jags

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Re: RIDES 2018 — add yours here
« Reply #109 on: May 03, 2018, 07:55:15 pm »
Class, I only came across a fox one time on my river walk,he spotted me long before I spotted him followed my every move beautiful animal.

geocycle

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Re: RIDES 2018 — add yours here
« Reply #110 on: May 04, 2018, 10:30:24 am »
Sorry John meant to say great photos  just that Andre stopped me in me tracks when he said his Orchard. ::)

Anto.

Doesn't everyone have an orchard?  We have one, although ours is a community one, bought and looked after by a dedicated bunch of volunteers.  The blossom is looking amazing.
 

jags

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Re: RIDES 2018 — add yours here
« Reply #111 on: May 04, 2018, 01:13:47 pm »
i have a postage stamp front and back. ;D
i need to do a job on my gray miserable block wall its all we can see from our kitchen window, depress a rabbit that's the truth.

anto.

JimK

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Re: RIDES 2018 — add yours here
« Reply #112 on: May 13, 2018, 03:04:00 am »
A fun campout last night - rather wet, but it worked out. The Provo Bike Collective sponsored the ride:

https://www.provo.org/community/events-in-provo/bike-to-work-day

just ten miles and 600 feet of elevation gain, to Nunn's park, right on the Provo River.



But I don't live terribly close to Provo! It was about ten miles from our house to the train station, then a two hour ride on the train, to get to Provo:



One highlight of the evening was a fellow who told us the story of L. L. Nunn, after whom the park was named:

https://web.archive.org/web/20050922140443/http://swcenter.fortlewis.edu/inventory/Nunn.htm

The park is the site of one of the first industrial scale AC electric generators, that powered mine operations on the other side of Utah Lake - maybe 30 miles away. 44 KVolt transmission line, the highest voltage of its time.

Lots of nice bikes along for the ride... one other Rohloff with a nifty shifting system - some German set-up, a variant external box and then the STI shift levers got re-purposed, one side shifts up and the other side shifts down.

Danneaux

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Re: RIDES 2018 — add yours here
« Reply #113 on: May 13, 2018, 05:02:27 am »
So glad you got the nice ride and campout, Jim.
Quote
Lots of nice bikes along for the ride... one other Rohloff with a nifty shifting system - some German set-up, a variant external box and then the STI shift levers got re-purposed, one side shifts up and the other side shifts down.
<nods> Yes, that would be the Gebla Rohbox shifter: http://www.rohbox.com/

All the best,

Dan.

Andre Jute

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Re: RIDES 2018 — add yours here
« Reply #114 on: May 13, 2018, 08:16:38 am »
Well spotted, Jim & Dan. That Gebla Rohbox looks like a solution to drop bars with a Rohloff. Any solution that requires a cyclist to take his hand off the grip to change gear seems to me contrary to the ethos of the Rohloff. Consider, the experienced derailleur rider changes gear well before the lower gear is required, but the Rohloff rider changes gear in the moment it dawns on him that he's pedaling harder, or will in a moment have to pedal harder than he wishes to.

Personally, I change gear only when my heart rate approaches my cardiologist's chosen limit (or falls away from it, for gearchanges in the other direction), which I trust because he's also a cyclist; also, my heart rate is how I've always controlled my output on the bike, even when I rode on derailleurs, so I was at ease with the method long before it became necessary.

It wouldn't surprise me to discover that some, perhaps many, erstwhile derailleur riders have been seduced by the forgiving nature of the Rohloff into the same slack style as those of us who were, so to speak, born to hub gears. I'm not just cracking a joke: when I switched from Shimano manually operated hub gears to Shimano fully automatic hub gears (otherwise exactly the same Nexus box in very similar bikes), over a ride I took probably 200 times a year, my average speed improved so much that in the same time span I added another, shorter, loop; that's all the result of substituting an optimum (automatic via sensors) gear changing regime for a lackadaisical (manual) gear changing regime; actually, even when, after I noticed the improvement, I was trying to make the best gear changes on the old manual bike, as expected the Cyber-Nexus autobox still beat me, if not by so much. Gazelle fitted that autobox to a top model for a few years, and owners of that series of bikes consistently reported finding their commute less stressful, in an environment, Dutch commuting, which does not encourage speeding. (I found the same thing in cars in a study I did for a client: from about two liters upwards, an autobox will give most drivers greater economy than manual shifting, and that was before all these electronically-controlled boxes came in; today it is very likely a slam-dunk in favour of the autobox, never mind the artificial government mileage numbers.)

If I were a fan of drop bars, I'd be looking into this Rohbox. It seems superior to the  similarly pricey French solution with split bars in which the rotary control would often anyway require releasing the grip to change gear.

JimK

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Re: RIDES 2018 — add yours here
« Reply #115 on: May 16, 2018, 09:23:36 pm »
Nice, we all got portrait photos in the morning: https://www.instagram.com/p/Bi2Q4HblYgx/

John Saxby

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Re: RIDES 2018 — add yours here
« Reply #116 on: May 16, 2018, 10:46:56 pm »
Great stuff, Jim -- so green there!

lewis noble

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Re: RIDES 2018 — add yours here
« Reply #117 on: May 21, 2018, 11:46:51 am »
Photo . . .
 

lewis noble

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Re: RIDES 2018 — add yours here
« Reply #118 on: May 21, 2018, 11:51:12 am »
Loch Eil + Audax on Saturday 19th May. Good ride, will write in more detail when next on computer.

Lewis
 

PH

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Re: RIDES 2018 — add yours here
« Reply #119 on: May 21, 2018, 12:17:17 pm »
Nice photo Lewis, look forward to your report.