UCI craziness and all that

Back in the dim mists of time, the UCI was responsible for making the rules under which we all race, and by and large, it did an OK job - alright, there were shortcomings in it's control of doping, and some of it's rules looked a bit bizarre, but at least it wasn't, as Leonnard Zinn is now pointing out, placing a tax on bike builders.

Innovation suffered, some might say, with the ban on the riding positions of Obree and Boardman, and the mad rules about frame shape which paid little regard to rider morphology showed that the rules were being written by beaurocrats not people that actually knew anything much about bicycles (and yes, I am aware that Pat McQuaid used to be a rider - check David Walsh's excellent book on Sean Kelly - "Kelly" for further info about Mr McQuaid and his doings ahead of the '76 Olympics) ...

So now we have a new situation - the UCI announced some while ago that it was getting into the business of "approving" this, that and the other - most in the industry barely noticed, but some of us did and wondered what they might be up to - and in January this year, we found out.

Here is the text of the rules:
http://www.uci.ch/templates/UCI/UCI2/layout.asp?MenuId=MTYwNzQ&LangId=1

Here's what I wrote on LinkedIn at the time:

As usual, the UCI have come up with a set of regulations designed to make life commercially more difficult, provide an income stream for the UCI, and stifle small producers' ability to innovate. You have to hand it to them, doing all of that in one document is impressive.

All that a set of regulations like this really do is to drive the manufacture of frames and forks further and further towards mass production and "innovation" that is generally a matter of marketing leading engineering, rather than the engineering supplying a solution to an acknowledged problem.

It makes it all the more difficult for small framebuilders based local to their markets whose USP against the big mass production framebuilders is the fact that they can tune their production to their local market or to the specific needs or requirements of athletes, to sell their wares. The flip side of the UCI coin, where they talk about enhanced value of a product carrying UCI type-approval is that products NOT carrying that type-approval are devalued.

There is already a problem in many markets with different "manufacturers" (many of whom in reality are simply assemblers) effectively trying to pull the wool over consumers' eyes by taking an off-the shelf product, rebranding it, and selling it in some way as new and innovative ... this type of regulation will only serve to exacerbate that problem.

There are endless practical problems that arise with these regulations, too - has anyone seen that interesting point about the type-approval decal being applied at the painting stage & if a frame is re-painted by anyone other than the manufacturer, the frame looses it's type-approval? Well that stuffs (if the regulations are taken "to the letter") several frame makers I know of in the UK and Europe who send their frames out to a third party for painting, and who offer a refinishing service.

How do small producers and prototypers feel about these regulations now that they have seen them "in the flesh"? We've known that they were on the cards for some time, but these rules as we now see them in final form seem to me to have been thought out with an eye too much towards mass manufacturers ...

Then, off the back of that, I had some further thoughts:

This type of regulation really annoys me because it's heavy handed, un-neccesary and smacks of commercial cynicism on a grand scale.

There is another piece of spin here that is really irritating, too - in attempting to justify this regulation, the UCI state that it is a way for a competitor to "know" before arriving at the start line that his or her machine conforms to the rules. Well, call me an old traditionalist, but it also says elsewhere in the regulations that it is the responsibility of the competitor to ensure that her / his machine conforms to the rules laid down for the event (s)he is entering ... so what if competitor trusts the decal, but the decal has been "illegally" applied (and you know it's going to happen ...)? The competitor still looses out, so the prudent competitor is going to check anyway, or their federation are ... so what's the point?

On the same basis, as the rider is responsible for anything that may be in his or her bloodstream, perhaps the UCI might like to take a more robust attitude on that score - perhaps we need UCI approved foods, or hotels, or chefs, or farms, or, or, or ....

I think that those who have commented on the application of "approval" to other components are close to the mark - the 3:1 dimension ratio rule already applies to bars, stems, seatposts ... it wouldn't surprise me if it was all just a matter of time.

The thing of it is, a lot of the debates that we have had, and I sincerely hope that we continue to have in cycle design & manufacture, have been opened up and driven by technical innovations from individuals and small niche companies that thought outside the box somewhat ... The Mosers, Obrees and Boardmans, Kestrels and Hottas who initiated debates about bicycle design would have been stifled by this regulation ... unless they were able to persuade a bigger manufacturer to back them to take a concept to the UCI.

Of course it is arguable that it was the Mosers, Obrees and Boardmans of this world who so put the UCI's nose out of joint that they started off down this route, but maybe that's special pleading from one who was excited by Moser's approach and whose nationalist pride was bolstered by Obree and Boardman :-)

Well, now I have let off steam, I'll mail this link to Carlton Reid and maybe to Leonnard Zinn, too :-)

It's all too damn' rigid ...

I've decided I'm going to start a campaign to get us back to the days when we had some choice in the matter of "rigidity"!

What has sparked this off? Well, I am doing a Mondiale bike build for a very small, petite young lady. We can get around the problems caused by her low body mass by using a small-diameter tubed frame to some extent, but it's at the frame and forks level that the problems start ...

Virtually all the forks available in carbon use a 1 1/8" diameter steerer - there is only one half-way decent fork made in 1", the Columbus Minimal, and that only seems to exist because of the current interest in "retro" and pseudo-retro, so once these go out of production, we'll be stuffed - we'll have to go 1 1/8", or perhaps by then the powers-that-be will have decreed that we all need integrated headsets (why?) and 1 1/4 or 1 1/22 lower head races ... in the name of rigidity.

Actually this has nothing whatever to do with what we need in bicycles, and everything to do with marketing and the need to keep re-inventing the wheel to keep all of those factories in China churning out tat.

On a small frame like the one that we are building, for a light rider, 1" is fine ... she's no Thor Hushovd, she'll not be putting huge torsional loads on the frame, so building something with even a 1 1/8" head is just uneccesary, it is heavier, it uses more material and it's out of proportion to the rest of the frame ...

Then, bars and stem - can I find a decent short reach, shallow bar with a 26mm ferrule? Can I hell. Apparently we need 31.8mm ferrules now - heavier, but giving greater rigidity - lousy idea if you view a bike as a suspension system with the rider as the damping. Again, rigid front ends designed for top-end competitive use are of no flaming relevance at all to the majority of riders.

Seatpost - well, thank goodness there are still some 27.2 posts about and hopefully that may continue as Cervelo, one of the more enlightened designers around with sway in the industry have realised that oversize in this department is probably not such a good idea.

Then we get to the real headache area - bottom brackets. BB30, BBright (a misnomer if ever there was one) and all the rest - great for OEs and bike builders who want to flop bikes together in no time flat, lousy for the end user. No standardisation yet, no concencus - all so that we can have stiffer frames and crank bb interface (which most users neither notice nor need), higher rates of wear and tear, and actually we get less choice, not more, as making the tooling for complex systems (in manufacturing terms) like these means that we loose things like 165mm cranks, 177.5 & 180mm cranks, triple chainsets - this has nothing to do with what bicycle riders might actually want, everything to do with what we are told that we want (and we believe it ...)!

I know I am in danger of becoming a cross between a grumpy old man and a luddite, but we have to start asking fundamental questions about what is needed, not about what we think we can write a clever marketing spiel for - before our choices are limited to bikes designed for 6 foot male racing cyclists or nothing ... OK for me (though I don't actually like the feel of the bike I have with oversize bars and stem), not so good if you are a small, light rider looking for comfort ...

Old meets new ...

In keeping with my new year resolution to write a blog entry daily (ahem!) and as it's a mere week since I last typed something, I thought I'd share a couple of pretty pics of what we are up to in the pimpmytoolbox workshop at present ...

We are currently working on two builds for one gentleman, a lovely Daccordi steel reno, in Oria RANF, Campag / Cinelli throughout. That's the gunsmoke fade jobbie - as the original paint, circa 1985.

For the same gentleman, we are also building up a custom Mondiale frame for the Cycle to cannes event (www.cycle2cannes.org), this frame is completely custom, down to the choice of individual tubes ... It'll be fitted up with Campag Veloce / Centaur mix, compact chainset, pimped Ergos, custom cassette (it's amazing what you can do when you are prepared to adapt things a bit). Need less to say, that's the white beastie with our trademark white and gold finish.

There will be pics (presently) of the bikes further along the production process ...

Hope Technology

It's rare, these days, to come across companies that really make what they say they make ... generally, they either offshore their manufacture to a plant that they don't own, but who "make exclusively for Company X" or who "produce specially to Company X specification" or they assemble parts made in several other factories, or, at worst, they just slap their name on some piece of generic product.

Hope, on the other hand, make everything that bears their name, in Barnoldswick, in the UK...

So, contrary to popular belief, if you have the right product, made the right way, given proper back-up by guys that really know the product inside out ('cos they make it ...), marketed correctly, you can manufacture in the UK and survive ... well, more than survive - flourish even.

I've been having conversations with Alan Wetherill of Hope for years at shows, along the lines of "I'd love to be able to offer training on Hope product, can you train me?" to which the answer has always been an enthusiastic "yes!", and then I've failed dismally to get it together to go to Hope for training (we only train on kit when we've been trained by the makers or their service agent - anyone can read a manual, right?) ...

Well, at long last I got it together, and in late January, I was very, very happy to wend my way up to Barnoldswick to Hope Technologies new HQ.

The building is fantastic, the entry hall very imposing, very plush, very minimalist ... the OCD merchant in me was liking it already! Alan gave me a guided tour of the impeccably clean and brilliantly lit production area, with it's ranks of state of the art CNC machines, and I was blown away.

I have to say, for a bloke with unashamed tool fetish, these puppies are incredible - five and six-head CNC machines running 24/7 just to keep up with demand for everything that Hope make, working from either rough forgings, aluminium extrusions or just plain billet in most cases - I felt quite weak at the knees!

The whole design & manufacture process was there to see, from SolidWorks used in the CAD phase, then to tooling, the raw materials in at one end of the building, the multiple machining stages between, anodising and finishing to the assembly, stock and despatch areas, backed up with a to-die-for workshop for servicing and warranty.

Interestingly, stock, compared to units sold, was very small - the operation is so slick, so well ordered that despite tens of thousands of hub sales per year for instance, I doubt there were more than 50 or 60 pairs on the shelf - so there is a real sense that each item is made specifically for an order, almost.

Wow, so all this, just so I can have a pair of Pro3 hubs 28 / 32 in red!

Now, I've been to a lot of factories and seen a lot of kit over the years, but I can't thank Alan enough for throwing open the doors on Hope Technology - it is a truly impressive place, making a fantastic product IN THE UK ... are you reading this David Cameron? We need companies and operations like this here, not half a world away!

Next, I was conducted to the service Department where I was brilliantly looked after by Nick Owen, who showedme the ins and outs of a full stripdown of all the current product, the things to note & be aware of, and the common mistakes people make. This kind of info is what you don't get from just reading the manual and then basing a lesson plan on it & it's what differentiates what we do at Velotech Cycling when we are training ...

So next steps are to pull some brakes apart piece by piece, compare back to the notes I made on the day, and write up the lesson plan and send it to Hope to be signed off - then off we go!

I'll keep you posted here, or keep an eye on the Velotech website at www.velotech-cycling.ltd.uk

In the interim, there is a ton of technical information available at Hope's website!

You've Never Had it so Good?

When I started in the trade in the early 1980's, one of the most popular bikes on the market was the Peugeot Premiere 10, a ten-speed steel-framed sports bike.

The bike had (in it's standard format as we received it in the UK, anyway), CLB or Weinmann side-pull brakes, steel 700c rims, alloy hubs, Huret gears with plastic non-indexed downtube levers and a steel seatpost.

As I recall, the retail price in the mid 80s of this beast was about £110, at a time when a shop bike mechanic was earning about £65.00 a week take-home - so it was around 2 weeks' pay.

These numbers might not be bang on, but I don't think they're too far off.

If we fast-forward to today, most mechanics in the UK probably earn around £325 a week take-home. For, say, £700.00 in this day and age, not only is the choice vastly wider, but the bicycle iteslf will be so night-and day different as to defy comparison. A bike like the Premier (albeit with probably a rather less accomplished frame) might sell for about the same cash price as it's predecessor ... about 2 or 3 days' pay.

So what am I saying here - well, the retail price of bicycles is at an all-time low against earnings, and the bikes that are available to us are technically hugely advanced against their antecedents, that much is obvious.

It's at this point however, that a small, suspicious voice whispers in my ear ... "there's no such thing as a free lunch" or "it may be a gift horse, but it might be worth looking it in the mouth" ...

Virtually every part of that old Peugeot bike was made in Europe. We can say with a fair degree of certitude that almost no part of it's modern equivalent will be made in Europe. Does that matter? Well, fundamentally, I think it does, yes.

I'll grant you that I am sitting here, typing this, on a computer made in China, but in Europe, we've barely had a micro-electronics industry to give away, whereas we have most certainly had a manufacturing base encompassing a huge range of bicycle parts, amongst other things - and as we have chosen to move more and more of that industry to whichever parts of the globe have offered us the opportunity to manufacture and ship at ever lower cash prices, so we have damaged our own society, our own future prospects, and, to boot, we have created a system which encourages a greater and greater ravishing of the environment. Just because that environmental damage is in Taiwan, or China, Morocco or Korea ... to me, it doesn't make it any more acceptable.

I know this is an old saw, but to my mind, it doesn't make it any less true.

Well, whinging about it is all very well, but what to do - we are, after all, where we are.

What it seems to me we need to do, is to promote the recycling of these imports here, we need to re-learn maintenance and repair skills which the apparent cheapness of replacement products have encouraged us to forget, and we need to ask more searching questions about how and where products are made.

We need to encourage industry closer to home, and allow that industry to generate the income that permits the R and D that has allowed distant economies to overtake our own so quickly and thoroughly - and if we can't reverse it, we need to do all that we can to stem the flow of capital from West to East.

Am I an idealist? Certainly. Am I niave? I don't think so - as the use of bicycles increases at all levels of UK society for everything from utility to leisure, commuting to racing, the opportunity exists to open up access to the bicycle by promoting not just the sale of recycled bicycles (allowing those who might never otherwise have been able to afford a bicycle, or those who would be for other reasons disinclined to spend so much on a bicycle, to buy one) but the other elements that promote cycle use - maitenance classes, pressing for better driver behavious, better riding skills and an improved social image of cyclists as a community.

It's only in this way that we'll get to a situation where my Godchildren, for example, should they wish to, will have the opportunity to work actually making something, rather than just working to buy and dispose of an seemingly endless succession of disposable products ...

You know, deep down, that the way we live at the moment, with the drive to constantly consume, is wrong. The revolution has to start. The question is, are we brave enough to face up to what we need to do, and to do it?

I couldn't resist this ...

I claim no credit for the below ... it comes from a website at www.mini-lathe.com and I use it here with absolutely no permission at all from the incredibly knowledgeable owner of that site, Frank J. Hoose, Jr ... I am hoping that by adding his link in here, he won't sue me, kill my as-yet-unconceived children or burn my house down ...

So ... why is it here?

Well, it saved me trying to write something even half as amusing about a tendency I have noted in myself over the years, and as I am scanning the 'net just now for a new lathe & milling machine (or preferably a second hand one, European made, as all the new ones I can afford are from China), I am clearly not fully cured - in fact I suppose having a blog called "pimp my toolbox" probably makes that pretty clear in any case ;-)

It also made me laugh a lot. Yes, I know, I have an odd sense of humour.
So here it is ... enjoy!

Tool Envy Syndrome (TES)

Tool Envy Syndrome (TES) is a serious condition that afflicts, in varying degrees, nearly all men who are interested in mechanical things. It is very important to recognize and deal with this condition before it becomes serious; left untreated it can lead to a far more serious condition: Inflammation of the Credit Card (ICC). TES is known to strike under the following circumstances:

* Browsing the latest tool catalogs or sale flyers
* Visiting stores such as Grizzly or Harbor Freight (Warning: while much less so than in earlier years, the tool department at Sears can still trigger small attacks)
* Visiting the shop of a friend who has more and/or better tools than you have
* Surfing the web site of someone with a well-equipped shop
* Seeing a well-equipped shop in magazines such as Home Shop Machinist

Tool Envy Syndrome tends to strike young men particularly hard, due its close relationship to a similar condition: Gear Acquisition Syndrome (GAS). Over time, in most men, both of these conditions tend to lessen in severity. In fact, it can be shown that gradual accumulation of tools and gear over a period of years can control both conditions while minimizing the risk of Inflammation of the the Credit Card (this is known as the Mature Phase). It has also been widely observed that getting married and having children can moderate the risk; primarily, it is believed, due to counseling from a loving wife and the sobering effect of having lots more bills to pay.

Tool Envy Syndrome cannot be controlled by any known drugs (although its effects can be exaggerated by the use of alcohol). Therefore, treatment is currently limited primarily to counseling methods. The first step is admitting that you have a problem. Here are some additonal pointers:

* Avoid situations that are likely to cause an attack
* When visiting tool stores, leave your credit card at home (Warning: in severely afflicted individuals this can trigger emotional breakdown, fits of crying and other irrational behavior)
* Meditate on the fine collection of tools that you already have; recognize that time will make it better
* Find a quiet place. Visualize your ideal shop. Repeat to yourself "It is coming"

I hope you have found this information to be helpful. As a TES/GAS sufferer myself (now in the Mature Phase) I felt compelled to pass it on to you.

Oh! My Giddy Aunt ... it's September

Well, I suppose September has to come around, the way it does most years ... but it is months since I last sat down to edit this 'ere blog.

Well. there is a reason for that. Several reasons. A whole truckload of reasons in fact ...

London Paris in June is one. A succession of courses run & "Weldtechies" accredited is another. More wheelbuilding than you can shake the proverbial stick at is yet another ... plus all the routine stuff with Campagnolo, general business admin, ongoing stuff with EDI, who will be our awarding body soon, getting a web presence up, ongoing work on the manual, and assortment of retro restoration jobs, the Royal British Legion's Pedal2Paris ride (don't these people know that a "pedalier" in French is a derogatory term for a male homosexual? Maybe that's why the logo is pink ...).

Well, enough of the excuses already - keep em peeled cos I'll be back, presently, to update you on all of the above and some NEW STUFF! Shocking, I know :-)