Riding in the city

Waiting for the train at Fenchurch Street

I am really enjoying testing the Battersea prototype. Apart from the warm feeling I get riding a bike I designed from tube sizes down to the exact location of each cable guide, I just really love riding this bike. But I guess you'd expect me to say that.

This past weekend was a bit of pottering but also a long ride on Saturday out to Box Hill. For the role of road bike, I stuck on a set of 25c road tyres and pumped them up to their maximum. The bike certainly felt much more alive than running with the 32c rubber, but this had more to do with the reduction in rotational mass rather than rolling resistance. The narrower rubber takes marginally less effort to get up to speed; once rolling though, it is a more agitated and I was hard pressed to notice any difference in rolling resistance. If anything, the larger volume tyres made riding feel easier as all the roads felt billiard-table smooth.

Tyre comparisons aside, the long run out to Box Hill (and the climb itself) was very instructional, and what I learned will definitely feed into the revised design. I was also heartened by the attention that the bike got at the cafe, it seems to be generally well received.

This week has also been about testing in the environment that a Battersea would be expected to spend a lot of its working life, on the commute. The disc brakes once again proved their worth. As would be the case, I was faced with two SMIDSY incidents (pulling out from side roads) within the first mile, and in both cases the ability to drop anchors was crucial. While you certainly can get by perfectly adequately with rim brakes (and many do), I found that the order-of-magnitude-better stopping power discs provide gave me a lot of confidence.

Of course, this testing lark isn't all fun. Puncture on Wednesday saw me pumping up my tyre with my mini pump (on a cold railway platform when already running late). Not sure how much longer I will be able to resist CO2 canisters!