Thirty second reviews: bike kit
May.29, 2006, filed under Miscellany
I was riding into town yesterday to pick up the Sunday papers, as our village shop has closed.
By the way: hi to the C+ man I met in Sainsbury’s car park. Didn’t catch your user name, but I was dead jealous of you riding across Canada like that.
I got to thinking about the fact that I haven’t done a kit review in absolutely ages. And I don’t have time to do the full waxing lyrical thing now.
So, in true good list/bad list stylee, here are my goods and bads from the past 18 months or so, in no particular order:
Goods:
- Il Pompino. What a bike
- Timbuk2 El Ocho. I know I bought it 4 years ago but it’s still in my top three.
- 2006 Camelback MULE. Major improvement.
- On-One clothing. Cheap, robust, sexy. Nice.
- Selle Italia Lady Gel Flow. Still close to a benevolent cloud after a couple of hundred miles.
- Torq energy bars. Yummy, not too dry, taste great with tea or coffee.
- Carradice Trax. It’s a good bit of kit – just wish it would fit a bit more neatly on the Pompino with the full mudguards.
- Continental GP4000 in 700x25c. Very impressive. Grippy when they need to be, still skid when I want them to, hard wearing. All I could want in a tyre.
- Lumicycle Li-Ion battery. That rocks.
- Oakley Mag M Frames. Sexy, indestructible, cooler than a polar bear on ice and no longer available so there’ll be no copycat kit queens stealing my ideas (right, Munky?)
- EAI alloy sprockets from Will at Hub Jub. A thing of beauty is a joy forever.
Bads:
- Cat Eye Opticubes. What went wrong, guys? Other than the little watertight 3 LED ones, this is a great idea executed in the worst possible fashion.
- Conti Ultra Gatorksins. Unless you weigh 3 times as much as I do or you enjoy sliding over manhole covers like a seal over oiled rubber.
- Panaracer Paselas. Stay back! Keep them away from me! The product of Satan’s bowels after a particularly nasty chicken vindaloo.
- On One bottom brackets. They break and they give you a dodgy chainline. Seriously, Brant, love you to pieces and the bike is my best friend ever, but that chainline solution is just jive, man.
- Lusso cycle clothing. Maybe I’m not Italian and do come from good Viking stock, but that doesn’t mean I have the waist to hips ratio of Mrs Santa Claus.
- Tyre Flies. I mean, really. Why have second best when you can get the much cooler Tyre Flares?
- Time ATAC Carbon XS. Not because they’re bad, but because they’re no better than standard ATACs and yet cost twice as much. And do more damage if they catch you on the shin.
Typically, there are a couple of things I’ve left out of my good list (e.g. the Specialized Fortress gloves) and I’m struggling to make up the numbers in my bad list because I usually put a lot of thought into my kit purchases and try not to buy on a whim. I tend to remember the things I expected to be good and found to be bad more than things that I just picked up and that turned out to be rubbish. In my mind, the latter is my fault for not speccing them out properly first.
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Singularity
~something that is singular as (a) a separate unit, or (b) unusual or distinctive manner or behavior; PECULIARITY;
~the quality or state of being singular;
~a point at which the derivative of a given function of a complex variable does not exist but every neighborhood of which contains points for which the derivative exists;
~a point or region of infinite mass density at which space and time are infinitely distorted by gravitational forces and which is held to be the final state of matter falling into a black hole. Sight
