She then stated as a matter of fact that the postman must be able to get back because he would have to deliver the letters.

Kids rock 🙂

+1 in the “tell the truth” camp. You’ll get the odd embarrassment like with the elderly gent in the shop, but they’ll get it. You might even get asked if you’re going to die soon, because from the perspective of a 3-4 year old, parents are impossibly ancient 😉

No issues with a Siesta here, used for last four years, second child now passing through it. Just watch for the slightly wonky balance until you get used to it. Front seats are great for slightly older ones, though. Have a Weeride Kangaroo on another bike, which is kind of crude-looking but hugely popular with the passengers 🙂

The props on this look pretty big:

http://www.sail-world.com/UK/Australian-Three-Peaks-Race-2011-starts-off-at-a-cracking-pace/82737

Must be a couple of feet across judging by the seats. That boat displaces about what yours does, although two long thin hills might be less draggy than one fat one (don’t know what yacht you’re using).

The main point of that link was to suggest a twisted chain rather than a twisted belt — parts look easier to come by, and it’s tried and tested.

I’m sceptical about the props too — right choice for a kayak or a hydrofoil (light, low drag hull) is probably not the right choice for a 7 tonne yacht (heavy, draggy). I suspect that those props just won’t generate enough thrust.

http://www.recumbents.com/wisil/hpb/compact_drive.htm

Raleigh or Zoom ‘North Roads’

ta 🙂

rootes1: What bars are those? I have a need for some similar 🙂

Why not get the one that’s in between the two?

used this months pay packet to do so.

You might want to rephrase this in such a way as to not imply that tickets cost a month’s wages 🙂

Late reply:

Where did you get this stat? Are you sure it refers to an American billion,not a British billion?

Office of National Statistics. All Government stats have used the long scale billion since 1974.

I’m about (as in, sometime in the next few weeks, probably not this afternoon) to adapt a Thule towbar rack — extra beam with an axle/QR at each end that the tandem dropouts will sit in. Wheels out the tandem’s no wider than the back of the van. Roofrack’s out, it’s a high-top camper 😉

the eneitre population doe snot cycle so that is a poor waty of working it out.

It illustrates that fatal cycling accidents are extremely rare events, though.

In 2002, the rate of passenger (and that’s all passengers, adults and kids) deaths per BILLION passenger kilometres for bicycles was 29.5. Whichever way you look at it, that’s a vanishingly small number. If you rode 10 miles a day every day for your entire life, dying (of natural causes, naturally) at 80, you’d rack up less than half a million km. Or 1/2000 of a billion. The expected number of deaths per 500,000km is 0.01. Which looks like decent odds to me 🙂

(And yes, for cars it was 2.8 per billion, but when the numbers are this small the comparison seems almost irrelevant.)

Or put it another way. In 2002, 130 cyclists where killed in Britain (22 children, 108 adults). That’s out of a population of about 60 million. Proportion of people in Britain killed while cycling in 2002 = 0.0002%.

As an interesting aside, the number of people who became millionaires thanks to the National Lottery in 2003 was 133 😉

No.. but I’ve hardly ever seen a trailer in the UK. Lots in Germany but mostly on cyclepaths.

To clarify: I’ve never heard of, or found reference to, any fatal child trailer accident anywhere in the UK, Europe or anywhere in the rest of the world.

That like saying Space Shuttles are safer because less children travel on them. You have to compare on the basis of some common denominator, distance, hours etc.

_Fewer_ children, dammit!

My point is that distance isn’t an appropriate denominator in this instance if you’re trying to compare the risk, because no-one does thousands of miles with a child in a trailer. Hours would be more useful, I think, not sure anyone’s done the numbers on that though. I guess you could come up with an estimate based on the per-mile numbers and some assumptions for average speed.

I’m prepared to be corrected, but I’ve never heard of, or found reference to, a fatal cycle trailer accident. Anyone know of any?

That is true, but it does illustrate how much more likely a child on a bike is to die vs a child in a car.

It illustrates no such thing. Deaths per mile travelled gives readily comparable numbers, but if we’re discussing probability it’s wholly misleading given the huge difference in miles travelled by the two forms of transport — in the real world, in a given year more children are killed in cars than on bikes. More are killed walking along than either.

Brilliant idea

I wouldn’t claim the “road sense” thing as any sort of an idea, it just occurred to me that they were learning something from it. Happy side effect 🙂

Beamers: Do it, they’re ace 🙂

What age did you get the little uns on there?

We’ve only had it a few months. Stoker’s five, front passenger was not quite two but he’d been using that seat for a little while already. And a Hamax seat or trailer before that. We took him out once in his car seat in the trailer at what must have been about four months but it all seemed a bit joggly. He stayed asleep the whole time so it presumably wasn’t uncomfortable, but we weren’t wildly keen and it was a faff to secure the seat.

The tandem’s actually proving rather brilliant for getting them (well, her mainly) used to riding on roads – positioning, looking, signalling and all that. Generally we get three arms going out before a turn 🙂 Also she took to the gears on her new bike immediately, having got the idea from riding the tandem.

Mike_D – what the hell are you wearing helmets for, do you not know the stats, H&S gone mad.

🙂

If you want to be given a wide berth, trundle around on this:

[/url]
Long vehicle Mk II[/url] by MikeDavis[/url], on Flickr

Adding the trailer makes cars sufficiently reluctant to pass that a queue sometimes forms.

As for the rest of it, everyone chooses what they’re happy with. I think some people are excessively paranoid and some are ludicrously laissez-faire, and I doubt my definitions correspond with everyone else’s. A blanket “not on any roads ever” choice seems weird to me, as frankly does having “car” as the default transport option. But again, that’s me 🙂

I’d be tempted to consider double laps – if you do singles you’re tempted to give it full beans, then you knacker yourself out and don’t have enough time to recover. If you do doubles you have to be a bit more moderate plus you get enough time between stints to get food down/fettle bike/change into fresh shorts/relax/heckle. Maybe do a single “sighting” lap each first to get an idea of pace, it may take longer than you think…

To echo what others have said:

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OSM_Map_On_Garmin

I would agree with that in general, but almost in opposite terms, replace left with right and conservative with labour.

2010 share of vote:

Conservative 36.48%
Labour 28.99%
Lib Dem 23.03%

You may, as they say, do the math 😉

And there’s a difference between meeting the minimum standards for cycling helmets and exceeding them, the giro may well offer several times more protection

Unlikely. There’s no incentive for any manufacturer to exceed the standards by more than a little bit. Meeting them while filling the thing full of massive holes is the trick – any manufacturer who finds themselves exceeding the minimum standard by a substantial amount will make the vents bigger or the helmet lighter, because that’s what people notice.

Only really cheap bikes are made by robots. Everything any of us ride is welded by real people who happen to live abroad.

We trundle about on this — just add trailer for third child:

[/url]

(Daughter (stoking) is 5, son (half asleep) is 2)

[Edit: plus a solo for the other parent, obviously 😉 ]

13 bikes on this page. Depends on whether you want to count a Rockhopper, Rockhopper Comp and Rockhopper Pro as one bike or three.

I tend to count them as three, because they are 🙂 13 ranges, each of varying numbers of bikes.

A quick search shows 13 bikes in the Specialized range, with only 3 of those available as a 29er.

Quick search FAIL. Spec’ UK lists 52 mountain bikes, of which 4 are 29ers. There are lots more in the US, but the UK doesn’t bring them in, which may tell you something about the demand for them. Or may not.

Front cover is Isle of Skye, can be more specific but not right now 🙂

A few snuck out with a handful of blank pages, replacements with everything in can be sorted out.

Professor Inkling off of Octonauts:

look at the outline of his forearms

Forearms in focus. Background not in focus. Mystery not present 🙂

More retro Heckler:

1998 frame. And no, I don’t know what the Maxle lever’s doing down there.

doesn’t every phone deal come with unlimited wifi?

In your house yes. Out and about on BT Openzone hotspots, no.

Bonus I found out is i can heat the van up with the hob

They usually have a big sticker on saying “Do not use to heat the vehicle” 🙂 If you want heat, get a Propex or Eberspacher or something.

PS Now it’s got a cooker in it, get your V5 changed to say “Motorcaravan” and hit the specialist motorhome insurers – very likely to be cheaper than having it insured as PLG 🙂

2012 tariff reduction will be for new entrants. In theory you’ll stay on whatever you get when you start. They probably said that in Spain too 🙂

Free panel schemes = rubbish. Benefit to you is saving a couple of hundred quid a year, and there’s easier ways to do that than giving someone else the use of your roof for a quarter of a century 🙂

Robust 120mm hardtail
Race hardtail
FS
SS
Retro whimsy
Cruiser thing in bits
Shops/pub/kiddie seat/trailer-tower
Road
Cross
Track

Nice round number 🙂

If you’re currently using 180 IS with a +20 adaptor, you can switch adaptors and stay at 180. If you’ve got 160 with the caliper bolted directly to the fork, you’ll have to go to 180 to accommodate the post-to-IS adaptor.

usually reducing the travel doesn’t reduce the axel-crown length

Are you on crack? 🙂

Isn’t it being cached by ISPs? If anyone on, say, BT Broadband looks at it, it’ll be cached on BT’s servers – if anyone else on BT visits that URL, they’ll see the BT cache. So not really anything to do with Flickr.

I never realised that my gas supply only got as far as the meter and then turned into something completely non-flammable and unable to leak anywhere before reaching the boiler and cooker inside the house. Every day’s a school day.