My slicks get cut to shreds with broken glass on my commute. Every couple of months I pull all the glass out and fill the holes with Shoe Goo. Biggest hole was about 1cm long, and stretched to about 5mm wide at 80psi. Only the puncture strip stopped the innertube from ballooning out of it… Shoe Goo holds it together nicely and can be spread out on the inside to create a smoothe inner surface.

Wouldn't say no if there's one going… willhyde -at- gmail -dot- com

Cheers.

I reckon before your next lesson, or at the start, explain to the instructor the problems you are having, and ask if you can find a quiet street – or ideally a nice loop of quiet streets with left-turns only – where you can stop, move away, work up to 3rd/4th gear, pull over and come to a stop, then repeat over and over. You need to develop muscle memory for the action of controlling the clutch and gearstick.

Normally as a learner you have no muscle memory and have to learn from scratch, but you have the wrong muscle memory from being a biker, so your instincts to change gear quickly are holding you back. My instructor said to me that as you progress, pretty much every aspect of your driving gets quicker, except changing gear, which just has a fixed speed (not true if you are hooning about like a twonk, when you want to/can change gear pretty quick, but mostly holds true for normal driving).

Alternatively, convince/bribe a mate to get up at daft o'clock on Sunday morning and drive round and round your nearest supermarket car-park, practicing gear changes. This will be cheaper than doing ti during a lesson.

After a while you'll be able to change gear without having to think about it as much, and will be able to concentrate on things like signs and other traffic instead.

Will, all that and no mudguards?

There's a crud-catcher on the down tube and a home-made one on the underside of the pannier rack (being pushed out of shape by the lock). Once I'd got the hi-viz vest, the wheel reflectors and the skinny tyres, I figured I couldn't look any more of a div, so the mud-guards went on!

I also use the crappy plastic clip-in reflectors that came with the spuds on the bike – great for being able to clip in and still have pedal reflectors. Even though they don't weigh much, it's enough to make them automatically rotate to the underside so the cleat is always on top.

Don't forget the wheel reflectors! Yes, they look crap in the daylight, but they rock at night – great for side-on visibility. Also, I reckon these and pedal reflectors really say 'cyclist' to the driver's subconscious. Well, they do to me when I'm driving, anyway.

I picked up some black retro-reflective tape from some US website, damned if I can remember the name now though.

I stuck some on the rims before I got the wheel reflectors, and they do a good job. Plus, because it's black you can't tell it's there normally. I also stuck some on the back and sides of my helmet, in a chess-board pattern. My mrs says it's quite eye-catching when driving behind me at night. And again cos it's black it doesn't look crap at other times (and let's face it, we're (almost) all a bit vain about bike gear!). I also wear a road-worker style orange hi-viz vest with loads of 3M retro-reflective stripes, and the helmet has a flashing 1W LED on for getting attention at side roads and roundabouts, when the other 1W flashing LED isn't necessarily pointing towards an oncoming vehicle.

And… that bottle in the cage is the reservoir for an Air-Zound – 115 decibel air horn. It's saved me from a couple of crashes when drivers have pulled out on me despite all the flashing lights and retro-reflectivity. Makes them think something motorised is a hell of a lot closer than they thought, and they slam the brakes on :)

Saw this at a Thai level crossing recently.

No idea what the Thai text means, but the English bit is, err, succinct but effective…

Saw Aerosmith there a couple of years ago. No probs taking food and drink in, seem to recall bottles had to be plastic and sealed though.

I don’t get the whole ‘tastes better’ thing with charcoal – the smokey flavour comes from the fat from the food dripping onto a hot element, or coals, and burning. So you get pretty much the same flavour from both. Food tastes great on both, and I doubt I’d be able to tell a steak cooked on coals from one cooked on gas, and I’d guess most other people wouldn’t either. If you can, good for you.

Anyway, I guess my views changed once I moved away from the UK. There, we only had BBQs a few times a year, maybe ten at most, and a big part of the fun is lighting the coals, and getting a satisfyingly smug feeling when you get a nice tray of perfect-for-cooking coals half an hour or so later.

But, here in NZ we tend to cook on the bbq most evenings in the summer, and do the odd breakfast and lunch too at weekends. Faffing with coals lost the novelty value it had back in the UK, it’s much easier to just fire up the gas.

Don’t get me wrong, I love lighting fires, I have the little pyromaniac inside me like most not-quite-as-mature-as-they-should-be blokes do :) – gas is just less hassle when you’re BBQing most days.

As for the whole ‘drag your kitchen outside’ comment – yep, absolutely. On a gorgeous Saturday/Sunday morning, would you rather prepare your pre-ride bacon butties out in the garden in the sunshine, or in your kitchen, looking out of the window at the lovely weather outside? You certainly wouldn’t go to the hassle of lighting a charcoal BBQ to cook a couple of rashers, but you can do it with gas as easily as you could with the grill indoors.

So in conclusion, I reckon food tastes great on both, charcoal is more fun for once-in-a-while BBQs, but gas rules if you’re cooking outdoors regularly. Here endeth my 2p worth.

Google the Oakley HQ in Letchworth, Herts. The mrs scratched her e-wire lenses, they replaced them at cost a couple of years back. Give them a ring and see what they say.