ride_whenever

:$ Okay so i did over-react a little. Better still would be a no car day, personally i'd like to bad cars almost entirely and make everyone cycle everywhere or use public transport!!!! That'd be great. As a sport I think trials riders as well as all cyclists seem to recycle quite a lot, constantly selling our kit onto each other etc. On the carbon fibre is evil for the environment theme, one frame company, Storck reclaim 99.78% of the carbon used in their frames as well as some of the resin!!! It is also recycled by specialist companies like www.milledcarbon.com

take it you're a fan of raw rotting human flesh then Zombie!

I'd just like to say that i also cycle to work in the holidays and to lectures etc when at uni, the effect on emissions that i have by that travel (about 200miles a week in the holidays) is clearly enough to allow me my adonised qr skewers! Also on the Nuclear power front, it is indeed very safe and almost certainly the way forward. The problem at the moment with alternative energies is that we currently use an enormous amount of energy. Therefore we need a large easily accessible source of power. Fossil fuels are good for this because they are reasonably easily obtained (at least the first 10% or so) and give up large amounts of energy. Nothing else even comes close to the energy factor of oil except nuclear (both sorts). From what i have heard from physicists working at JET they just need to make the reactors much larger to get fusion to work, and ideally make it in a remote location, but the hydrogen isotopes needed are reasonably rare and difficult to separate. Conventional nuclear power is the only fuel that has any chance of currently providing the energy we need. If our energy needs are not met we will not be able to produce any plastics or pharmaceuticals. If that occurs then we will have massive deaths worldwide and the decomposing corpses will compound this and cause some proper climate change and we'll most probably wipe ourselves out.

I personally never ride with gloves but using them for other things i'd suggest a silk liner so the gloves move relative to the liner rather than your skin, but i'm not sure on how much grip you'd get. Anyone tried it?

As soon as the skin starts to lift and rub, but before you have blisters you should tape your hands loosely with Zinc Oxide tape, from the chemist, this is really smooth and stops them blistering so your callouses develop as fast as possible. Once you have them the only way to do it is to pop them with the smallest pin you can find, sterilised in a flame and then cooled in ice, and then open them enough to super glue the skin down and tape as above, however try to leave your hands as untaped as much as possible so they can breathe or they end up smelling minging! Once you have callouses then you're cooking on gas because you should be able to ride as much as you want and not get blisters, but if you do tape them as above so that you don;t loose the thickened skin. You may want to try a firmer grip, it sounds counter-intuitive but it'll rub your skin less because you'll slide round rather than having your skin move. Also try fatter or thiner grips, if they don't suit your hand size then they will rub more and feel less comfy and give you less control.

Try phoning up hope, from all accounts they have utterly brilliant tech support, i wouldn't know from personal experience but i soon will when my new brakes and hubs arrive! The number is: 01282 851200 but I'm not sure whether that's tech support, but if you don't want to phone then you could e-mail them: info@hopetechnology.com Hope that helps, sorry i could resist that :$

I get most annoyed when I plan to go out in the evening for a ride but realise that I'm far too knackered and or stiff from being in the gym the night before and end up going to bed, it makes me really cranky. The way I see it, things brake, just got to live with it, or carry a spare bike parts with you all the time Which is kind of heavy!! A bigger problem with water, that i can see, as you're using a closed system, that it's volume varies hugely with both pressure and temperature, and that must cause problems with different temperatures, even before you add freezing into the mix!