Cable Ties...

Welcome one and .. this is where the word all is suppose to appear, although I think it'll just stay at one and one :)

After having had all the possible hassles that I could have yesterday with HSBC to try and figure out who was charging a solid £170 to my debit account in "pending authorisations", I finally logged onto internet banking last night after Grieks spoilt me by sticking me for some serious caffeine at the StarBucks in Jubilee Place ( shopping mall that's part of Canary Wharf tube station)..

And to my surprise it seemed to have all been sorted out by the end of day, cause I had my money back again.. kewl.

So come Saturday morning, and because I'm going to be using the bike ( see previous post) to get to work now in these glorious summer month (of which today though was not as kewl), I needed to accessorize :) Yes, I have a mean shopping streak in me at times, all within planned budget ideas though.. ok, so here and there I splashed out a little..but what is life if you can't enjoy that which you worked for so hard once in a while...kind of part of the Zodan Ethos (there is very little else in it so I suspect I can't really call it an Ethos, oh who cares :).

So down to Decathlon, store found by friend of ours who's over here as well [Fanus], in Canada Water. This is very similar to Sportsman's Warehouse in South Africa (just across of Tygervalley), huge stores (they have two over in Canada Water, next to each other. The one being for all other gear and one specific to cycling).

And here the items are : We'll take it from the top left.
1. Cycling computer. I'm a geek, how can I not have a comp of some form on my bike, I mean come on ppl.. I need stats, how far, how long, average speed, max speed. This is however marked with a red sqaure and the reason for that is because it was one of the splash outs. This thing has 16 functions, can track two different bikes (if you share the comp with someone in the family and the likes).. very kewl.. and comparatively cheap to what the general prices of these babies used to be in SA.

2. Middle top we have the magnet tool-free extra connection set that I thought might be handy to have with the comp, little did I know that the comp came with it's own tool-free kit, but we'll get into that a little later in the post...

3. Heavy duty chain lock for keeping bike mine, and not having anyone else take the baby I've paid so much for.

4.Middle left : Helmet. Very light, very kewl, and fairly pricy, yet again can't recall what the prices used to be in SA.

5. Middle middle : Mask :) Yup, have always wanted to be ol'Darthy. This has a filter to take out all the car emissions that I'll be driving behind on my way to work and home. When I get my planned sunglasses (some of you know which it will be ) I'll take a photo of me with the mask, helmet and specs on :) Professional assassin in the making I tell you.

6. Middle right : General toolkit, they were on special. This includes a pump, fold-tool with all the general things required for the little changes here and there ( like the calibration of the disc brake pads). Also has handy things for repairs on the road.

7. Middle bottom : Reflective vest to wear on the way in and out of work, safety thing that I thought needed because of the huge amount of cars on the road and people not looking out for the large amount of cyclists on the road in London of late.

So yup, the red block stuff were that I splashed out on.

So got home today after only being out for a little while to go buy aforementioned [t]. And ofcourse the first thing out of the packaging was the cycling comp.. geek here, anything in the comp area always gets the glint in the eyes going :)

This thing was fairly interesting, although only after getting the manual out and reading how to set the language on it to English (Turkish is not a language I have any concept of). Figuring out what all the buttons did and such was a fairly short process of elimination. Press 1 , uhmm.. think it does this, no.. does that.. right.. remember that.. press 2, didn't know it even had that function :) You get the idea.

After that it was down to the bike to pump the wheels, install the comp and maybe get some test driving in. Figured out the pump, nope it is not your standard just press over the valve and suffer trying to get more air into it before you loose it all coming out when you disconnect the pump from the valve. This one ( I eventually figured out, no manual.. darn Brits) has a locking mechanism. So the correct procedure : Put over valve, solidly over valve as well, and then turn the middle section which locks and opens the inner valve systems ( not going to ask ), and then fairly easily pump up the bars [no pune there]. So did that.. and then the comp installation.

Now having seen other ppl's riggs for this little thing I thought, this is going to be a breeze... and so mistaken I was. Because I have the monster of all front suspension forks on the bicycle the frame and the spokes of the wheel that is located inside it ( and I think it's in part also to do with the disc brake though) is fairly far from each other.. and after almost installing everything I get to the manual bit that sense that the pickup sensor and the little metal click on the spoke should not be further than 5 mm from each other.

Exhibit A : How Zodan eventually ( and this was after an hour of doing a lot of other things, inclulding trying to make the cable with the sensor reach the back wheel, seeing that the extra kit I bought actually has a tracker that works not on the wheels but on the cadenca ( the part that the pedals of a bicycle connect to.. that arm thing) of the bicycle.. thinking I should install that.. then realising that I "free-wheel" a lot when I cycle and then going against that notion, so back to front fork installation and loads of thinking).

Yup, those small little things you see wrapped around the SIGMA sensor, next to the (looks like, but don't know if it is carbon) rim, and the blue piece of the front fork are ... wait for it... cable ties... and from there the title of the post as well.

The little thing on the spoke of the wheel ofcourse is the little metal jack that the sensor tries to pick up.

It turns out that the fork has these little holes in it where I could tie the sensor in place to get it close enough to the spokes of the wheel. (This the holes are for a standard V-type brake assembly, which luckily I don't have which allows me to use it for the sensor rigging.) Those cable ties are fairly securely in place as well ( although had to be trimmed for obvious reasons).

So hopefully later tomorrow I'll get to put the bike on the road for a little test drive, and be able to record how far it really is ( at the moment I have data using Google Earth, although that has proved in previous experience to be fairly accurate on a bit bigger scale we'll see how accurate it is on the smaller ( 1 - 10 km ) scale in due course.

Tomorrow is Grand Prix day, and we're having good ol' friend Fanus over to come and enjoy it here with me ( Grieks likes sharing GP, but in the way of falling asleep on the couch with me while it's happening over somewhere in a different country :).

Night all.. bed time for me.
Z