Is it possible to squeeze the line “My cardiovascular fitness level’s right up there with Lance” into a rap and have it sound good? Amazingly, yes, as MC SpandX shows us in his wonderful hipster-baiting, fixie-dissing performance. Hilarious.
Video page [YouTube via Cyclelicious]
This is an oldie, but most certainly a goody, and if you have never heard of the Topeak PropShock, you’re going to like it. The pump is designed to re-pressurize the shock-absorbers in your bike, and can deliver pressure of up to 300 psi.
So far, so normal. But there is a secret function, too. See the eyelets on either end? If your rear shock fails, those holes let you swap in the PropShock and limp home. The pump won a Eurobike award a few years back, but as the folks at Bike Radar just recently tested it out, we thought it was worth digging up. $55.
Product page [Topeak via Bike Radar]
“I had this dream from childhood of not needing to climb mountains anymore. I wanted to go to school in my own flying machine.”
This was the childhood dream of Wu Zhongyuan, of China’s Henan province. It is also, quite likely, a childhood dream of most you, dear Gadget Lab readers. Unlike you, though, Zhongyuan actually did something about it. He built his own helicopter.
The device, which likely breaks almost every airspace and safety law simultaneously, is made from steel scaffold, has blades cut from Elm and is powered by an old motorcycle engine. Zhongyuan says that the ‘copter, which took three months and around $1600 to build, can soar to 800 meters (2600 feet). We’re not sure if it can even get airborne, though, as currently the machine is grounded by Chinese authorities.
How did he come up with his ramshackle design? The internet, of course. “I didn’t have a design. The only source for me to get relevant knowledge was surfing the internet via my mobile phone,” he said to news site Ananova. We love it. A personal helicopter is a fantastic project, and we wish Zhongyuan luck getting it off the ground. Of course, we’d never go near the thing. Imagine being half a mile up and when the engine cuts out on you. No thanks.
Farmer’s home-made helicopter [Ananova via DVICE]
Chinese farmer builds a working wooden helicopter [Auto Motto]
Getting kids on bikes early is a great way to keep them cycling for life. I got my first big-boy’s bike when I was around five. It had stabilizers (training wheels), solid rubber tires and was a copy of a Raleigh Chopper cruiser. I loved it, I often crashed it, and I painted it a hideous 1970s shade of dark blue. In between than and now I have hardly been without a bicycle.
And the QuadraByke would have let me start even younger. It begins as a four-wheeled transport, suitable for any toddler to take for a spin around the yard. As they grow older and more confident, the kids can remove wheels one at a time, running through a trike and up to a bike. Best of all, they can do it themselves, and without tools, meaning that they not only learn to ride, they learn to tinker, too.
An enclosed chain keeps tiny fingers safe, and the axle design is the key. It allows you to put a wheel on each side of the frame, or inside the forks. Better, its inexpensive (ish). At £110 ($185), it’s not the cheapest kids bike, but then, it is three kids bikes.
Product page [Q-Byke via Bike Radar]
If further proof were ever needed that inventors should leave the naming of their inventions to others, here it is. Swiss designer Andy Muff has come up with some clever new length-adjustable stem and layback-adjustable seatpost designs, and he has given them the snooze-worthy name of “ISA”, or Integrated Size Adjustment.
The seat-post fits any saddle, and clamps onto the rails in the way of any modern tilt-adjustable post. This one, though, has an internal, eccentric section in the middle which can be turned 180º to move the mount an inch backwards (or forwards, depending on where you start).
The stem works similarly, with an insert that can change position, like a big, movable shim, to alter the POSITION of the handlebars by 30mm, or just over an inch.
Neat, patent-pending and not yet for sale, these are of limited use but for the right purpose could be very useful, in a shared bike for instance (although if you’re going to spring for presumably expensive, specialist part, you should probably just buy another, cheap, bike).
Designer invents stem and post with 30mm of adjustment [Bike Radar]
I see a lot of folding bikes in Barcelona. Small-ish apartments, a lack of elevators in many apartment buildings and a generally high risk of theft means plegable bikes are pretty popular. I used to have one, but it was so small that motorists would laugh at me in the street (I’m over 6’2”) so I swapped to a less embarrassing pink girls’ bike. And there seem to be almost as many designs as there are riders.
Dominic Hargreaves, a 24 year old designer, has come up with yet another one, called the Contortionist. And when you see how fast and easily it folds up, you’ll know why. It’s almost impossible to explain, so head to the (non-embeddable) video page to see in in action. And watch your fingers — some of those hinged joints look like they could chop a pinkie off at the knuckle.
You’re back? Good. You’ll have noticed that, apart from folding up to a size smaller than its own wheels (on which it can still be rolled in its collapsed state) there are few other oddities. First, the wheels are each attached by one arm, not two. This helps the folding, but has to be made nice and strong. It also puts the wheels off-axis instead of in the usual straight line.
Next, where’s the chain? There isn’t one. Actually, check the video again and you’ll see that Hargreaves doesn’t even pedal, but a production version will use pipes and hydraulic fluid to transfer power from leg to wheel. Yes, production. Hargreaves is in talks with three car manufacturers to actually make this bike. It shouldn’t be too hard to guess which they are: they’re all German.
The best thing, though, is that the bike looks so damn cool when unfolded. Most folders have charm, but even the beloved Brompton is a bit on the dork/utility side of things. The Contortionist, though, looks like it could be Batman’s bike.
Product page [Eye to Hand via The Grauniad]
The Pulse concept-o-cycle from Teague is a cross between a fixed-gear bike, a cafe-racer motorcycle and a bag of fireflies. The ultra-simple bike design includes glowing tubes, bar-ends and even pedal, which will both keep you safe at night and, due to being built-in, resist the attempts of thieves.
The bike exists nowhere except inside a CAD application, and the pictures generated therefrom, which explains some of the rather odd details (take a look at those toe-straps, for example), but the idea and the styling is sound. The bar-tips contain LED turn-signals, operated by twist-grip switches. Pointless in the day, but dead handy at night. The tail-light is in the seat-post, and the whole frame glows in the dark (although the designer doesn’t bother to tell us how. Maybe it is fireflies).
One neat touch is in the pedals, which are weighted to always stay right-side-up for easy toe entry. We’re not sure how well that would work in practice, but we’d like to give it a try.
Product page [Page Gangster via Core77]
One of the beauties of bike riding is the freedom. You buy one, or find one, and just jump on. There are no taxes, no fuel to buy and almost anything that goes wrong can be fixed by the rider. They’re also cheap enough that anyone can own one.
But should bikes be treated more like cars? Further, is it even possible to do so? Bike riding seems to be getting more and more popular, a result of green concerns, money concerns and the attentions of politicians. London Mayor Boris Johnson plans to spend £111 million on cycling infrastructure in the capital in the coming year. It might not surprise you to learn that Johnson is a keen cyclist.
So as the use of bikes explodes, and bike-sharing schemes in many European cities bloom, are we heading for a changes in the law?
Taxes
One way to pay for bike lanes is to levy a tax. This could be on sales, or something like the vehicle tax on cars. Many drivers like this idea, as they bemoan that they are giving cyclists a free ride. But road tax doesn’t exist, and there are many other taxes which pay for their upkeep, including the vehicle license of cyclists who own cars.
Also, once bike lanes are built, they require little maintenance other than stopping cars from parking in them. It’s also likely that taxation would be impossible to enforce. How would you know who had paid for what? Bikes would need to carry registration plates, and that seems unlikely. A sales tax on new bikes would slow sales and be, in these times of peak oil, political suicide. It looks like we’re safe for now.
Insurance
Car-advocates often propose mandatory third party insurance for cyclists. It is available, and it’s cheap — a testament to the difference in damage-causing capability beween a two wheeled, human powered bike and a two-ton, gas-fuelled monster.
As bikes become more common in cities, it is likely that pedestrians will start to sue cyclists for crashing into them, so insurance could be useful. But again, how would you possibly police mandatory insurance without registering all bikes and making them carry license plates? Add to this that most policies would be void the moment that a rider runs a red light of hops onto a sidewalk and you’re looking at a whole mess. Which brings us to:
Road Laws
Cyclists flout the law. We run stop lights, drive on the pavement (legal here in Barcelona, although wearing an iPod will get you a fine) and head in the wrong direction down one-way streets. All clearly illegal, but all, at times, the safest thing to do. Sure, a bad cyclist will likely do all three at once, at top speed, and give some poor grandmother a heart attack. But for the more careful rider, a slip down a one-way street can avoid a dangerous junction, for example.
It has been argued that red lights and street directions shouldn’t apply to cyclists anyway, as they are not inventions for safety but inventions to lubricate traffic-flow, specifically motor-traffic. As a bike, carefully and sensibly ridden, cannot cause a traffic jam, it follows that they should not have to abide by these traffic schemes. With the exception of driving on the correct side of the road, why should bikes obey car laws?
Roadside Assistant
As easy as bikes are to fix, not everybody want to repair a flat or gets their hands dirty on their way to work. Roadside assistance for cyclist has just been announced for AAA members in Oregon and Southern Idaho. The catch is that you’ll have to have a car to get it, as there is no standalone package for cyclists: It’ll come as part of the Plus, Plus RV and Premier packages. These start at $105 per year.
Neither will the mechanic fix it for you. He will give you a lift, for up to 25 miles, but apparently it is too hard to mend a bicycle. Marie Dodds of the AAA told Oregon Live that “There are a million sizes of tires and tubes. Our people are not prepared to repair bikes.”
This seems like an excuse: apart from removing the bottom bracket of my bike, I can repair everything on it with a multi-tool, a 15mm wrench, a pump and a puncture repair kit (slipped into a pocket made from an old inner-tube section). I can true a wheel, break and remake the chain and swap in a new saddle, all with a kit that fits into a pocket. I’m sure that an AAA van could carry everything needed in a small tool-box, and how much space does a box of different sized tubes take up?
Still, late night rescue in the rain is still a nice service to have. Or you could try the Better World Club, which has offered a bike assistance scheme for some time. It’ll cost $40, and they will even fix a puncture for you.
What do you all think? Should bikes be, legally, treated like cars, or should cars be penalized further to push people onto bikes? There are plenty of opinions, and we haven’t even started on the savings in health costs made by riding instead of driving. Have at it in the comments, and keep it clean.
Photo: mugley/Flickr
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When a zipper shows up in a mid-life crisis, there’s usually a private investigator outside a motel window with a telephoto lens.
But the only thing I was cheating on was my athletic destiny. Or I thought I was.
The zipper in this case was of the floor-to-ceiling variety, enclosing me in the oxygen-starved weirdness of an altitude simulation tent from Colorado Altitude Training. There, in the basement, wedged between the bookcase and my 7-year-old’s wooden railroad empire, I spent four weeks of not-so-restful nights trying to sherpa-charge my cardiovascular system for a road bike race up Colorado’s 14,420-foot Mount Evans.
Altitude-simulation tents are enclosures hooked to the back end of an oxygen generator, so they suck O2 out of your air instead of pumping it in. They don’t duplicate the air pressure difference — you would need a steel tank for that — but an athlete’s cardiovascular systems is still forced to work as if it were at altitude, causing the proportion of oxygen-carrying red blood cells to rise. The tents, which start at $4,000, are thus sold as a quick ticket to the “live high, train low” regimen.
“This is certainly the way to prepare for it!” Colorado Altitude Training CEO Larry Kutt told me. Kutt has no medical training, but he quickly sketched out a program for me. Already acclimated to Boulder, I could ramp up the elevation quickly. He told me to start at 6 or 7 thousand feet and work my way up to 11 or 12 thousand. I would practically fly up Mount Evans. “The entire podium at the Tour de France [in 2008] was people using CAT equipment,” he exclaimed.
The tent CAT loaned me was one of the company’s higher-end models. Setup was simple but controlling the “low-oxygen environment” was trickier. The unit delivers the oxygen-thin air in liters per minute. A hand-held meter gives the percentage of oxygen while a graph keyed to the starting elevation matches that percentage to an approximate altitude. But there is no gauge that measures oxygen level. Keeping it right meant waking up several times a night to check the meter and adjust the flow.
I took some “before” numbers into the tent with me. After a trip, the Boulder performance Lab, I found my wattage at lactate threshold, the point where your body can’t clear lactic acid from the bloodstream, was 248, high enough to qualify me as “elite,” at least among 45-year-olds.
My VO2 Max (the amount of oxygen the body can process) was a respectable 51 liters per minute. If the tent increased the proportion of red blood cells, those numbers, and my performance, should go up.
After 10 nights in tent, I upped my average speed on one 8-mile uphill ride by 1 mph, to 15.4 mph, shaving 1:32 off my best time, but that was perhaps due more to favorable tailwinds than anything else. On another climb, my best pre-tent speed had been 11.9 mph. A week before the race, after two weeks in the tent, I spun a disappointing 11.4 mph.
I went into the last week with growing doubts. I wasn’t sleeping well. With the iffy oxygen-level controls, I would wake in the middle of some nights at the elevation equivalent of 13,000 feet. The next morning I’d wade through pedal strokes in a hangover-like stupor.
Two nights before the race, I decided to sleep tent-free. I wanted as much quality sleep and oxygen-aided recovery as possible. Turns out I needed it.
The Bob Cook Memorial Mount Evans Hillclimb starts at 7,555 feet and follows the highest paved road in North America, past the timberline and into the gasp zone above 14,000 feet. Pilots are required to carry supplemental oxygen a 12,500. And I’d been sleeping at 12,000.
But the morning of the race, disaster struck from the onset: A starting line snafu delayed my start by almost three minutes. I was crushed: All those sleepless, oxygen deprived nights in the tent were seemingly all for naught.
I still rode hard. For the first, comparatively flat, six miles, I tucked down on the drops and hammered, still thinking I might catch a lead group. By the time I got to the cruel hairpin where the real climbing starts, it was clear that would not happen. I kept pumping, leapfrogging from one group to the next, steadily suffering the grade.
My time targets clicked by unmet. By the time I got to Summit Lake at 13,000 feet, I had practically given up. The switchbacks through the otherworldly alpine expanse were numbing. At the finish line, I was despondent. Finishing at 2:46, I had missed my target time by 16 minutes. I attributed 10 of those minutes to the chaos of the first 100 yards of the race, but I had only myself to blame for the other six.
I didn’t start feeling better until a week later when I went back to the Boulder Performance Lab. We were looking for the “after” results and we found them. They just weren’t what we expected. The difference was one watt out of 248. My VO2 max was up, climbing from 51 to 58, but my legs weren’t using that oxygen to any effect. I wasn’t faster. I wasn’t stronger.
But I was surprised.
Rick Crawford wasn’t. A Durango-based coach at Colorado Premium Training, Crawford has worked with ultra-elite athletes like Lance Armstrong, Levi Leipheimer and Mount Evans record holder Tom Danielson. Crawford has “a lot of experience with tents” but says he doesn’t recommend them. “I have never asked an athlete to buy a tent,” Crawford says. “They just end up having them.”
Crawford discounts anything beyond a placebo effect, claiming that the low-oxygen environment hampers recovery and robs the athlete of sleep, a primary component of any training program. “Why am I starving my athlete of oxygen that he needs to recover?” Crawford asks.
And even believers can be cautious.
Karen Rishel, a 44-year-old family practice physician, who races road and mountain bikes on weekends, had a custom tent made. She sleeps in it with her husband in their El Paso home. “All the advertisements say four weeks and it should make a real difference,” she notes. “I think it is cumulative and takes longer.”
Her experience in the first month matched my own. “For the first month that I was in the tent I would wake up in the morning and feel like crap, every day,” Rishel says, though in the end, she says, she got stronger and faster.
“A lot of people end up having an expectation that you are going to get tremendous results right away,” Rishel says. “It’s a long-term journey with cumulative effects.”
That may be true, but I’m not sticking around long enough to find out. I bid farewell to the tent and returned to restful sleep. Turns out neither science nor body hacking nor a generous dose of tech were going to help me achieve a single minded two-wheeled fantasy.
I just couldn’t cheat on my athletic reality.
(Images by Beth’s Gallery/ Picassa, Colorado Altitude Training, and bicyclerace.com)
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