The Roquefort Files

(This post comes from the typing-up-loose-ends department.)
You may recall that I bought an old Peugeot racing bike in Vancouver with the object of converting it to singlespeed. Well, the path to singlespeed enlightenment does not always run smooth, as I found out to my cost. (I will admit that I did not bear that [...]

The MS bike ride I mentioned before fell on the Sunday in the middle of the diving course. I hauled myself out of bed at an ungodly hour that morning (that’s one aspect of Vanouver’s outdoor fetish I could do without) to an uncharacteristically grey sky and spent a while swithering over whether to go [...]

To recap from last time, I had a pair of dimensionally-challenged handlebars which my brakes would not fit. It was time for radical measures. It was time to spent some money on a set of real bullhorns, given that my penny-pinching DIY approach had been found wanting in more or less all possible ways.
This was [...]

So, as I mentioned before, I now proudly rock an old school steel-framed Peugeot road bike, complete with skinny tyres and comically incapable brakes. And while it is now a sleek single-speed machine suitable for silent running and blissfully maintenance free cycling, ’twas not always thus.
My plan, after buying it, had been simple: ‘chop and [...]

As requested by Davis/d(e), witness the bike in its final post-rebuild state, as photographed during a blissful crack in the otherwise uniform cloud cover over George Square on Monday evening. Click away for a bigger version.

During this rebuild I’ve gone a bit bike-geekish (quelle surprise! I hear you say), and while surfing for cycle componentry [...]

It’s been a long time coming but I’m finally back in the saddle. The journey to work has been completely transformed from rat-race slog to open air ramble and I am almost pathetically grateful. I sleepwalk out of the flat and lug the bike down the stairs, and whether it’s misty, muggy or has that [...]

It has been, to be honest, a pretty mundane couple of weeks. I’ve been been inexorably pulled back to work in the office (rather than at home) by a day more each month, and now I’m back up to four days in, one day out. Coupled with this, I’m not convinced I can ride my [...]

further to the preparations for next month’s globetrotting, fund-eating trips I’ve been pratting around with posting to my Flickr account via email, and so I now present to you the first fruit of this astonishingly nerdy pursuit: the finished form of my over-described bike.

The last big piece to fall into place were the forks – [...]

After a bit of pratting around last week with the Dicta sprocket and my Diamondback’s 3/32″ chain, it looked distinctly like the sprocket was determined to accept only a 1/8″ BMX chain. The replacement sprocket, a 3/32″-friendly ACS Claw (“Da craw! Da craw!”) turned up from UK Bike Store almost as soon as I’d even [...]

This bike building malarkey isn’t half drawn out, I can tell you. It’s finally all bolted together, but while I’d like to excitedly jump up and down and write gushing prose about its many and varied unique features, it’s not really finished.
I eventually got all of the minor niggles ironed out (the correct crown race [...]