Most of our friends were agreed on one thing when Alexander arrived – we might previously have lived a car-free lifestyle as rootless ‘dinkies’, but all that was going to change. Sage nods all round.

First, there would be a nursery, followed by playschool (both made worse when we exercised our parental prerogative and chose out-of-town groups), then school, plus a long list of extracurricular activities and a ceaseless round of parties in distant villages. Some of them even began discussing car-share schemes.

The car never happened, and we’re glad of that because not having access to a car doesn’t half concentrate the mind when choosing transport options. Child trailers saw us through those infant years – pulled initially by one or the other of our Bromptons, but later behind the priceless Giant Lafree power-assisted bike, especially as the boy grew, and the volume of ‘stuff’ expanded (parents will understand).

For train-assisted journeys, we used a range of folding/collapsible solutions, graduating from a baby sling to a Burley Solo child trailer, a Brompton-mounted child seat, and most recently, the invaluable ITChair. For the school run – and optional for longer journeys – the mainstay has been Steve Parry’s tandem Brompton.

Older Children

With the boy now six-and-a-bit, and sprouting like a bean up a pole, the on-bike options are becoming more limited. But if someone tells you their child went solo at 31/2 and now pedals him/herself everywhere, they’re either living in the Outer Hebrides, lying, mad or (more likely) using a car for the tricky bits. Alexander often rides his own bike to school and to local parties, but when he’s tired, or the weather’s dubious, or we’re riding a long way, it still makes sense to travel en tandem: For years, we’ve used a rack-mounted child seat on the Ezee Sprint electric bike, but the rack was starting to sag. Clearly, we needed something sturdier.

Years ago, before the invention of the bulbous people-mover, bicycle seats for older children were quite common, but they’re much rarer these days. Any number of manufacturers produce rack or frame-mounted seats, but very few of these are suited to children of five and above.

Folded down, the Junior is unobtrusive, but the harness straps must be secured with care

The bag bracket will carry a pair of small panniers either side of the seat, or a lightly- loaded rucksack when folded down

In Holland and Germany, as we so often point out, it’s another world, and child- carriers abound. One of the very few to have found its way to Britain is the Bobike Junior, a rear-mounted seat designed for children from four to nine years old (or five to ten, depending which brochure you’re reading). If you have a podgy 91/2-year-old, we should qualify that upper age limit, because in the small print, the gross weight limit, including luggage, is 32kg, or five stone in what Francois Mitterrand would call Anglo-Saxon measures. For reasons that will be explained, we wouldn’t recommend exceeding this limit.

Fittingly, in this ‘vision of the future’ issue, the Bobike Junior is a clever multi-purpose device.

When little Hans is elsewhere, the seatback folds flat, which not only does wonders for the drag coefficient, but produces a wide rack suitable for carrying all manner of awkward things home from B&Q. The seatback also incorporates a steel frame that can be folded down behind the seat to create a longer load platform, or some vestigial luggage capacity when the seat is occupied.

…The Junior weighs 4.8kg, even before you’ve mustered the podgy ten-year-old…

Fitting

We fitted the Junior to the long-suffering Ezee Sprint, the various fixtures and fittings coping reasonably well with the slightly unusual geometry of the bike, so it should fit most conventional diamond frames. A few tips here: the frame tubes have to be clean and grease-free (that includes spots of road tar), and the bolt threads should be lightly greased. Tighten the fixing bolts, ride a few miles with the seat under load, and re-tighten everything, because the clamps are fitted with plastic bushes that take up a bit of slack as they were ‘run-in’.

Highlighted in black, the support structure is clearly well in front of the child’s weight

Usefully, Junior shares a quick-release system with its smaller cousin the Maxi. This means that children of various sizes can be accommodated on different bikes as and when required. The seat is secured by engaging the nose in a connector bolted to the seat tube and plonking two struts into a pair of brackets secured to the chainstays. This produces a triangulated structure, but unlike a conventional rack, which generally puts a pair of struts under the load, the supporting legs of the Junior are positioned well forward of the seat.When the child sits down, the seat base bends down and back, putting far more strain on the assembly than is really necessary. Fortunately, the mountings and bolts are the types used to secure truck bumpers, but we never really worked out why it had been made this way. Another slightly odd feature is that the manufacturer assumes you’ll be keeping the luggage rack in place under the seat, which seems like a lot of unnecessary weight (a kilogram in our case) when you’ve just bought an expensive child carrier and rack combined.The Junior weighs 4.8kg, even before you’ve mustered that podgy ten-year-old, so you’ll probably want to remove the rack, as we did at first.

The odd geometry, plus the rather woolly plastic joint bushes, make the thing feel a bit insecure. From the sharp end, we’re told this is great news, or as Alexander puts it cheerfully, ‘a seat with suspension’. He’s right up to a point – the Junior does a good job of cushioning road shocks, albeit by the slightly downmarket expedient of bowing and flexing.

Is it safe? Yes, but bear in mind that a child hanging off the side making rude noises at his friends will cause a lot more strain than a heavier child reading a book. Alexander weighs 22kg, which is well within the 32kg limit, but his weight makes the Junior drop by 4mm, plus another 3mm or so on the bumps. So for us, the chair needs to be at least 10mm clear of the mudguard or rack to avoid noisy contact on bumps. A heavier child and/or luggage will need greater clearance unless the seat was deliberately allowed to rest on the rack. In the end, we refitted the rack and allowed it to do just that.

Another area that causes us a slight concern was the lack of leg protection. We’re used to a child seat with molded plastic sides that make it impossible for the child to put a foot anywhere near the wheel. This omission on the Junior was puzzling until we read the instruction leaflet; ‘Fit Bobike foot protection plates if your bicycle is not fitted with dress guards’. Dress guards are rare in the UK, but we’d strongly advise fitting one or the other.

Similarly, the safety harness is a bit wimpy, and rather poorly mounted on the top of the seatback, which will – in any event – fold forward under stress. The front mounting is better, but the buckle may prove a temptation for small inquisitive fingers. The belt also has a tendency to fall off the shoulders, something that can be improved by crossing it over behind the child’s back. With no sides to the chair (again, this is something we’re used to) we’d really want to see a better safety harness. After a fun-packed day chasing granny’s sheep, Alexander usually falls asleep within ten minutes, and a sleepy child will sag forwards, backward or – most unnervingly – sideways. Check out fernco clamp rochester.

Conclusion

We were prompted to look at the Bobike Junior because we were worried about the integrity of a cycle rack for carrying larger children, but we’re not convinced this folding seat does a better or safer job. In some areas, such as the footpegs, it’s massively engineered, but in others, it doesn’t seem man enough for the task. Of course, we have one large child – for larger families juggling awkward logistical problems with several smaller ones, it could be useful, especially if you already have a Bobike Maxi.

The A to B child seat of the future would fit on a standard rack

This design clearly isn’t perfect, but where do child seats go from here? Most ‘sensible’ bicycles have a rack and removing the rack rather narrows your carrying options. So we’d suggest a moulded plastic bucket seat that clamps to the rack, but with extra stays to spread the weight of a child into the frame best English language schools in san diego. We’d also suggest a two-position reclining seatback, both for sleeping children and awkward luggage, but not necessarily folding flat, provided the seat can be fitted and removed in a minute or two. The harness has to be really good – preferably the five-point type.

Heavy and expensive, surely? Not in our experience. We’ve solved the six-year-old problem by putting some extra struts on a basic child seat – the final structure weighing less than 1.8kg. Even if a reclining mechanism doubled the weight, it would still be lighter than the Junior.

Specification

Bobike Junior Child Seat £85 (plus £15 for the MTB kit used on our bike) .Weight 4.8kg (101/2lb) Manufacturer Dremefa BV web www.bobobline.nl mail info@dremefa.nl UK Distributor Amba Marketing tel 01392 840030 mail sales@amba-marketing.com web Amba Marketing

Puncture proof? Well, not exactly. As Schwalbe carefully points out, ‘…like everything in the world – this tyre isn’t indestructible. But against the typical tyre killers that everyday cyclists encounter, like pieces of broken glass, flints and small thorns, it’s the best protection we could devise…’

The secret is in the ‘SmartGuard’ layer under the tread. Unlike kevlar and other high-tech reinforcement bands that resist tyre penetration, SmartGuard is a thick layer of soft rubber that lets them in, then smothers ‘em. Some nasties just bounce straight out, while others begin to penetrate, but are defeated by the sheer depth of rubber. To reach the inner tube, a sharp pointy thing needs to be rigid and 6 – 8mm long, which is enough to see off all but the most humungous thorns, nails and glass shards.

…the Marathon Plus feels like an ordinary, if slightly frumpy tyre…

The downside is a tyre weighing 740g on our 406mm samples (more than a kilogram for some bigger tyres).That’s about 350g heavier than a typical 406mm tyre, and a massive 500g heavier than the lightweight Primos we were replacing. In other words, you could be looking at a weight penalty of up to a kilogram for the pair. With a thick layer of rubber around the tyre, you might expect rolling resistance to be high too, but it’s actually remarkably good. We’ve tried all kinds of ‘puncture-proof’ technology over the years, and most added enough rolling resistance to feel lethargic and slow on the road. But the Marathon Plus feels like an ordinary, if slightly frumpy tyre, and the figures confirm this. Roll-down speed on our test hill was between 14mph and 15mph, which is broadly typical for a 20-inch tyre. In fact, our best figures were right up with the narrow, high-pressure tread- free jobs. Having said that, the Marathon Plus seems to be affected by temperature more than most, and the figures vary a great deal. Most of our tests were carried out at 15C but at 10C, the tyres are 1mph slower, which suggests there could be a real penalty to Grey pay on frosty mornings. blobs are actual We’ll have to wait a few results at around 15C. The months to find out, but in black blobs are at lower temperatures most circumstances, most people would be unaware of the difference.

Puncture-proof?

When we first saw the technology on display at a bike show, Schwalbe was encouraging punters to stick pins in the tyres. So in an A to B first, we put down a row of five drawing pins, accelerated towards them, and ran straight over the lot. All the pins stuck in the front tyre and stayed there, but when we prised them out, the air stayed put. It’s difficult to be scientific with tyres, which are notoriously fickle in the way they fail, but for the time being, we’re thoroughly convinced – no ordinary tyre could have done that.

Grey blobs are actual results at around 15C. The black blobs are at lower temperatures.

Conclusion

…Have we accidentally created the most reliable bicycle in the world?

We’ll keep using the Marathon Plus to see how things progress, but on a short acquaintance, we’re impressed. A near one kilogram weight penalty would not suit a bike that gets carried regularly, but if punctures are your biggest fear, these tyres will give some peace of mind, although at £23.99 each, they’re quite a pricey option.The Marathon Plus is available in all the common sizes, down to 47-406mm (20-inch). Schwalbe is planning to release a 349mm (16-inch) version soon, bringing this sort of puncture technology to compact folding bikes too. Performance gets a bit trickier to predict in the small sizes, but if the 20-inch tyre is anything to go by, performance should not be greatly affected.

Incidentally, we tested the tyres on our ancient Heinzmann- assisted Cresswell (now Pashley) Fold-It, currently giving granny-with-train (don’t ask) some gentle assistance to the shops. Have we accidentally created the most reliable bicycle in the world? Simple rugged steel frame, drum brakes (rear only on our example), puncture-resistant tyres and a bullet-proof SRAM 7-speed hub. The only weak points we can see are the cranks and chain, and if they break, the bike still has a front-mounted Heinzmann motor to get you home… If all else fails, it will fold small enough for the train.

Schwalbe Marathon Plus £23.99 each from good cycle shops. Manufacturer Ralf Bohle GmbH web www.schwalbe.com. UK distributor Bohle UK tel 01743 874496 mail info@bohle.co.uk

A to B 48 – June 2005

These days (touch wood) the best folding bikes are pretty reliable, clocking up a similar mileage between failures to a conventional bicycle, but wheel rims and spokes can still cause problems on hard-used small-wheelers.We’re not sure why the spokes suffer, but most of the problems with rims are caused by the brakes. A 16-inch rim has little more than half the braking area of a big wheel, so it can overheat on long descents, and will wear out at least twice as fast.Worn rims can be dangerous, but even if they don’t disintegrate, rebuilding a wheel can be a time-consuming and/or expensive process.

Internal drum brakes are an obvious solution, and they’re fairly easy to fit to most folders if you have the time and the inclination. But you won’t get one on the Brompton, which has a slender 72mm front ‘drop-out’ width.Various attempts have been made to slice drum brakes down to size over the years, but there were always technical problems.The answer came – as it so often does – with a bit of lateral thinking.The Australian-made Greenspeed recumbent trike uses Sturmey Archer drums, and Greenspeed remanufactures the hubs to reduce the 100mm width.When the company took on the sideline of distributing the Brompton last year, it occurred to proprietor Ian Sims that with a little more machining, the Sturmey brake might be squeezed onto the Brompton.

Bred on the antipodean HPV racing circuits, the Greenspeed/Sturmey hub is substantially stronger than a normal Brompton wheel, with oversize 12mm ball-bearings (normal Sturmey bearings are 10mm) and 36 instead of 28 spokes.The result is a rigid, maintenance-free front wheel and consistent braking in all weather conditions.

Fitting & Removal

Very easy.The hub brake comes with a long torque reaction arm that slots into a clamp placed around the fork. It’s then just a case of refitting the cable. Brompton cable runs are precisely measured and the cables can get in a tangle if misrouted or misaligned. It’s essential that the front brake cable runs in front of the other two and down through the cable gatherer brazed to the right side of the frame. If it doesn’t, something will get trapped when the bike is folded. By pure chance, the standard outer cable is about the right length for the Sturmey hub, but a longer inner cable will be needed.

Drum brakes are generally a heavy option, but this narrow hub isn’t too bad, giving a total wheel weight of 1,120g. Subtract the weight of the old wheel and caliper brake, and the net gain is only 385g, or just under a pound, which is quite acceptable for a stronger and more reliable wheel.

With the flange removed, the off-side spokes anchor directly into the drum

Removing the wheel is particularly easy – the axle nuts come off as usual, the cable slips off and the torque arm slides out.The operation is cleaner too, because the rim isn’t caked in the usual slippery mixture of oil and aluminium powder, and there’s no caliper to trap mud and debris. Another advantage of doing away with the caliper is that the tyre can be inflated before you refit it – useful if you’re struggling to repair a puncture.

On the road, the first impression is of near silence compared to a caliper or V-brake. The drum is powerful, but progressive. A gentle squeeze on the lever gives a strong stop of 0.3G – 0.4G, but grab the lever in panic and brake force rarely exceeds 0.56G. In practice, this means that a drum brake is less likely to send you flying over the handlebars than a fiercer and less forgiving V-brake.The drum will also be unaffected by water, oil or mud. In extreme conditions it gets warm, but there’s no risk to the tyre, and it soon cools down. The rear caliper brake is still grinding away at the rim, of course, but we found we tended to make more use of the front drum, so rear brake life should be slightly extended too. When you come to fold the bike, the cleaner front wheel is very welcome.

Two small provisos: if you ride through a deep flood, the drum brake could be out of action for some time, and ours had a slight judder, possibly a side-effect of the adaptation.

Conclusion

The Greenspeed hub seems good value for money, and in terms of servicing, it should prove to be fit-and-forget technology. If your Brompton has a tendency to eat rims, spokes or bearings, a drum brake upgrade will pay for itself fairly quickly, even ignoring the hassle of breakdowns and the danger of exploding rims. It also looks jolly nice, should aesthetics influence you in any way.

Brompton front drum conversion

Price £80 (hub only), or £120 (entire kit), plus £10 to £15 postage outside Australia. Greenspeed Recumbent Trikes tel +61 3 9758 5088 mail ian@greenspeed.com.au

UK Distributor: Westcountry Recumbents

A to B 48 – June 2005

Fitted to a Brompton. Note the scuffing on the top edge of this (left) grip - it can touch the ground when the bike is folded

The problem with adapting bicycles is that almost everything you do adds weight. A few seemingly practical extras can make a folding bike almost unliftable, so it pays to be a bit selective. Replace your old handlebar grips with Ergo Race grips, and the penalty will be in the region of 200g. Not much? Not on its own perhaps, but this is a slippery slope. Are they worth the weight and expense?

The grips incorporate flat plates that spread the load over the meatier parts of the palm.The grips come in ladies and gents sizes, and two styles, with or without miniature bar-ends.The basic palm-support jobs (FP-1 or MP-1) cost £20, but with the bar-ends (FR-1 or MR-1), you’re looking at a slightly scarier £28.95, plus the 200g weight penalty.

Fitting should be straightforward enough on a conventional bike, but the importers have had enquiries from Brompton owners, so we chose this more difficult option and converted a Brompton.This means quite a lot of cutting and shaping to the plastic and foam of the grips, the final position being quite critical to prevent the left-hand grip hitting the ground when the bike is folded.There are two adjustments – the angle of the palm support and the angle of the bar-ends, which come with a sort of micrometer scale for the really nerdy.

Once fitted and adjusted, the grips seem to work well, spreading the load in a more comfortable way, and giving a number of alternative riding positions. For touring, the comfort level was universally praised – even after some hours in the saddle.The manufacturers claim the improved riding position will alleviate all manner of ailments, which is possible, but we’ll stick with comfortable hands and wrists for now. If handlebar grips give you odd aches and pains, this may well be a solution. If you can live without bar- ends, the cheaper, lighter FP-1 or MP-1 should work just as well.

Ergon MR-1 Grips

Price £28.95 . Weight 130g each . Distributor Fine-adc mail: info@fine-adc.com

A to B 48 – June 2005

There’s a real demand for carrying children on the Brompton, something we can vouch for from personal experience. It’s also probably the most common question we get asked. Integrating the bike itself with rail or bus is straightforward, but children make life much more complicated.Trailers are great, but even the most compact takes up more space than a folding bike designed for an adult, so they present a bit of a challenge on public transport.

When Alexander was two, we solved the problem by adapting a conventional child seat to fit on a Brompton seat pillar, a device that went on to give four years of priceless service.Wonderful for long trips, the child seat was nevertheless a bit clumsy for shorter journeys to shops, and later, to school. Fitting and removing it required an allen key, which was invariably at the bottom of a bag, in the wrong pocket, or worst of all, on the kitchen table at home. Strapped on top of the folded bike, the seat produced a small package, but the operation required a strap, which was invariably at the bottom of the bag, on the kitchen table, etc.

Our SP Brompton trailer bike proved to be a practical alternative – great for longer rides, but in terms of folded size, effectively two Bromptons. And guess who gets to carry the two Bromptons and the bag?

…ten minutes later, wife battles through traffic to deliver child…

The ITChair

When we first came across the ITchair, it seemed to promise a practical tool-free solution for short trips, although we were sceptical that a Brompton was roomy enough for two, or that the device could be fitted and removed as quickly as was claimed.

Note the folding footrests and frame yoke

Who is it aimed at? Leisure seems the obvious market, but we’ve heard from several readers who long to eliminate that daily school-run nonsense: dad rides Brompton past school to station, ten minutes later wife battles through traffic in Volvo to deliver child, then runs home empty.The ITchair promises to carry a smallish child a modest distance, then fold away more or less out of sight, with the exercise being repeated in the evening, or not, as the case may be – it sounds like a flexible solution.There are a few complications and traps for the unwary, but by and large, it really does what it’s supposed to do.

The device is disarmingly simple.You get a steel tube (aluminium is in development), fitted with a yoke at one end and a clamp at the other.To fit it to the bike, you slide the cushioned yoke over the frame tube and push it up against the frame hinge plate, where a hook on one of the yoke arms engages with the plate, to prevent the ITchair from lifting off again. At the other end, the clamp goes round the seat post and is secured with a standard hinge clamp lever borrowed from the Brompton parts bin.

The ITchair can even be used as a temporary seat on the train

Newer Bromptons have a subtly different hinge, but the ITchair cleverly gets around this with a reversible yoke, giving two alternative hooks.This operation needs an allen key, but unless you regularly swap Bromptons of mixed vintage, you will only need to do it when initially setting the ITchair up.

From the top of the tube, a seat post protrudes horizontally, giving about 10cm fore and aft adjustment to the child saddle, and a pair of neat motorcycle footrests pop out lower down.

In Use

Alexander is slightly taller and slimmer than the average very-nearly-six year old, and as he can ride the ITchair with reasonable ease, we’d say it was suitable for children of up to six. Climbing aboard will be a problem for a nervous child (some refused to even consider it), but the more outward bound types scramble on and off like monkeys, an operation made easier if the adult is already firmly aboard.

The clamp has to do a lot of work, but looks strong enough

The ITchair adds virtually nothing to the size of the folded package

Once in the seat, Alexander’s knees nestled comfortably below the handlebars.You might think handgrips would be useful, but in practice the child either holds the bars, puts his hands in his pockets, scratches his head or does a Mexican wave. The saddle and footrests give plenty of stability, and the rider’s arms tend to cradle the child, so they really would find it hard to fall off.With a bit of experimentation we found it was surprisingly easy to take three hands off the handlebars, so indicating is not the problem you might expect. One word of warning – if the child holds the gear shift and you change up unexpectedly, you will squidge a tiny finger.

For younger children, this central position feels secure, and there’s a perceived advantage in keeping an eye on the child too. In theory, you can carry a baby in a suitable carrier, but for the sake of your knees, you’ll need to find something very narrow. Sadly, we had neither baby nor carrier to hand, but it’s clearly possible.

Disadvantages

The primary disadvantage for the rider is pedalling with your knees further apart than normal.This has little effect on power output, but we wouldn’t recommend putting knee joints through too much of this sort of stress.With a large five-year-old and an old short-frame Brompton, we’re looking at a worst-case scenario. Any combination of a smaller child, a post-2004 bike and a saddle set well back will make life much easier. A narrow child saddle would help too – we used a conventional saddle and found it annoyingly wide even without a child on board.

Whilst looking for disadvantages, the increased weight over the front wheel might encourage a slide on gratings and low kerbs.We didn’t experience any problems, but would certainly suggest riding with more care than usual.That’s obviously a matter of common sense with any child carrier, but our lower rear-mounted child seat handled superbly even at high speed – something we wouldn’t recommend with the child upfront.

…with 10kg in the bag, an 85kg rider and a 20kg child, we’re on the limit…

Staying with weight, Brompton suggest a gross bicycle load of about 115kg.With 10kg in the front bag, an 85kg rider and a 20kg child, we’re right on the limit.This might be all right, and it might not – we certainly noticed some slight fretting where the ITchair pushes up against the hinge, indicating that the bicycle frame and saddle stem had been bowing slightly under the stress. Once again, this is an extreme example – most adult/child combinations would be safe enough.

Folding

Folding takes just a few seconds: release the clamp, lift off the ITchair, fold the bike, and reclamp the ITchair to the lowered seat pillar, sticking out and down along the left side of the bicycle frame. This leaves a folded package little bigger than normal. It’s a bit heavier, adding 1.6kg in this case, but lighter and smaller than the alternatives. Incidentally, Alexander rather enjoys carrying the ITchair himself, but you have to watch five-year-olds – they’re liable to put things down and wander off. Luckily, you’ve got the bike. Another useful feature, as we discovered on a busy post-Christmas train, is that the ITchair can be clamped to any suitable vertical post, making an extra seat. Small boys love this kind of thing.

Conclusion

The ITchair is far from ideal, but it’s a brilliant bit of lateral thinking, and within reasonable limits of child size and weight, journey length and so on, it really does perform well. The real proof is whether we use it ourselves. In practice, the ITchair proved hard work on our steeply inclined school run, but has been used almost without exception on rail trips, where compact size and folding speed are more important.To date, we must have used the chair on a dozen trains (some quite busy) and ridden 50 miles or so.We very much wish it had been around three years ago, but we’re delighted to have found it now.

ITchair E199 (£135) inc European airmail delivery . mail info@bike-tech.net . web www.itchair.info

We’re not actually that keen on bags since the railway companies got folder-friendly, but they have their uses.Yachtsfolk need to protect their bikes from salt spray and flying bowsprites, whatever they might be, and the same principle applies to those regularly checking a bike in as anonymous luggage, whether at the airport, the restaurant or even (particularly even) Mrs Hampton’s Bordello & Old Time Massage Parlour. Of course, you may think you need a bike bag for another reason; whatever, it will leave your wallet thirty quid lighter and your Brompton nearly a kilogram heavier.

The Bigfoot Bag is made in Britain, from grey, green, navy blue or red cordura. It’s a waterproof fabric, but you can expect the untaped seams and very long zip to leak under extreme conditions.The bag has carrying handles and a shoulder strap, makes a nice snug fit around a typical Brompton and will just accept a bike fitted with the extended seat pillar too.The bag also comes without branding to reduce the risk of theft. Maybe, but that’s not much use if the thief is working on the lucky dip principle.

At 910g, the Bigfoot is mid-range in the Brompton bag world – somewhere between the Brompton cover and the ‘B’ bag reviewed in A to B 44. Just for the record, the ‘B’ weighs 2.3kg and gives serious protection; the basic Brompton cover weighs 290g and gives very little protection; and the super-lightweight cover we use ourselves for libraries and the like, weighs 100g and gives no protection at all. Horses for courses.

We wouldn’t recommend buying a bag unless you’re sure you need one, but for certain applications,something of this weight could be quite useful.The downside is the 910g of extra baggage, and a packed size of about 40cm x 10cm x 10cm.

Bigfoot Brompton Bag £30 (trade enquires welcome) . Bigfoot Bikes 50 Hayes Street, Bromley, Kent BR2 7LD . tel 0208 462 5004 mail bigfootbikes@yahoo.com

If you read the Oyama Victor test in A to B 44 you may have noticed our brief mention of the Xerama folding pedals (‘similar to, but neater than the better- known VP117’).We rarely have space to say much about accessories in these bike tests, but we were quite impressed with the Xerama. Once upon a time, the Chinese produced heavy, ugly (or even dangerous) copies of Western or Taiwanese products, but the tendency now is to copy foreign ideas, improve them, and still send them round the world at knock-down prices.

The Xerama folding pedal is typical. Pull outwards on a spring-loaded locking tongue in the middle of the pedal, and the platform folds down, leaving a relatively small bearing block protruding. It’s easy to do with gloved hands, or in the dark, even for the terminally mechanically inept, and there’s little risk of slicing a hole in your finger as with some similar designs. Unfolding the pedal is a simple reversal of the procedure, the platform coming back together with a nice satisfying clonk.

The useable pedal area is 95mm x 70mm (about average), the stickey-outey bit when folded 55mm long (average again), and the ratio of folded/unfolded size is 2 to 1 – again, more or less typical. But the Xerama pedals weigh only 205g each, making them the second lightest on the market, and they cost £10 a pair in the UK.When you consider that not so long ago, a pair of nondescript folding pedals cost £30, that really is quite a bargain.

We can’t say how long they’ll last in service, but the pedals have ‘proper’ cup and cone adjustable bearings, and (as far as we can judge) reasonably well engineered components elsewhere. The weak point of this design is usually the sliding tongue:VP produced one a while back and were forced to replace the plastic tongue with aluminium after a few months. This one is plastic, but looks up to the job.

Just to encourage you to buy loads and loads (they must have a container-full), the importer is offering a further £1 discount to A to B subscribers. Now if that isn’t the perfect Christmas stocking filler for a folding bike owner, we don’t know what is.

Xerama folding pedals . £10 per pair (£9 to subscribers) + £2.60 p&p . Bigfoot Bikes 50 Hayes Street, Bromley, Kent BR2 7LD . tel 0208 462 5004 mail bigfootbikes@yahoo.com

Goodness gracious.There we were, getting used to the idea of bicycle lights with three ultra-bright white LEDs, when a single much brighter LED came along (see A to B 43). A few weeks later, and that light has already been overtaken by events, because power has trebled once again.Yes, the future has arrived, and rather more rapidly than we would have dared predict a few months ago.

Why join this candle-power arms race at all? The problem (if you haven’t noticed) is that car lights have become more effective in recent years, while bicycle lights are stuck in the 1970s, thanks in part to archaic regulations, of which more below. Bright lights make it easier to see and be seen, particularly when you’re moving fast and have just been blinded by 200 watts of quartz-halogen.

The Solidlights range are produced and marketed as a cottage industry, so this small British company has been able to gear up to introduce new technology while the big Japanese manufacturers are still bartering over wholesale prices.Two options are currently available – the 1103, with a single three watt LED, and the 1303, with three similar ‘bulbs’ and three times the power output.

We’ve decided to test the smaller 1103, because it’s cheaper, lighter, and more than adequate for most purposes. Unlike the chunky Cateye EL500 tested in A to B 43, the 1103 is tiny, measuring just 40mm square if viewed from the front, by 62mm deep.The mounting bracket (similar to, but incompatible with, the Cateye bracket) more or less doubles the size.

…taste the forbidden fruits of full power, and there’s no going back…

Solidlights has achieved this compact package by putting the battery elsewhere, not that it’s particularly large or heavy. Like the Powabyke on page 20, power comes from Lithium-ion rechargeable batteries.The capacity is nominally 16.5 watt/hours, from a pack measuring 90mm by 42mm by 26mm and weighing 130g (Solidlight’s figures are refreshingly accurate). By comparison, a typical set of four ye olde AA NiCd rechargeable batteries weigh only 100g, but deliver a less than devastating three watt/hour punch. Or a set of the very latest, sexiest NiMH AA batteries weigh a similar 100g and can achieve 6.3 watt/hours. So, as a rule of thumb, the Li-ion pack is about five times as effective weight for weight as typical rechargeables, and twice as good as the very best.

Road Testing

The battery is small enough to fix to the handlebars, but you need to avoid loops of cable that could be snagged

How does it work? We haven’t the faintest idea, but you clip the lamp bracket to your handlebars, velcro the battery pack to something suitable (it comes with a non-slip silicon rubber pad) and plug in. Everything is neatly and functionally designed – one long press on the big waterproof switch ignites the LED, and another long press turns it off, which  should make it difficult to turn on or off by  mistake with frozen fingers.

The lamp has three power settings that can be found in sequence with quick prods at the button.The lowest setting gives the sort of output you might have expected from a cutting edge lamp back in 2003, such as the Cateye EL200. It’s a soft blue light, bright enough to ride by, but not really up to illuminating pot-holes and other nasties.The mid setting is similar to one of those quaint old-fashioned halogen dynamo lamps, or the LED star of last summer, the EL500, but the beam is broader, giving a softer, more even spread of light, without the sharply focussed centre spot.

Those who don’t know any better (poor innocent darlings) could live quite happily with this mid-power setting. But, once you’ve tasted the forbidden fruits of full power, there’s no going back.The beam is completely round in shape, comparatively broad in reach, and of an intensely cold blue-white light. Illumination is good enough to read the road with confidence, and about the same brightness as a pair of halogen lamps.With this sort of light output, ignorant motorists dart for cover, presumably expecting a Kawasaki G-1300 turbo to spring at them out of the dusk.The lack of a central bright spot leaves you a little short on long- range information when riding fast on really dark roads, but for most other purposes, the light is superb. One of the strange quirks of LED lights is that you might not be able to see the road at a great distance, but the lamp will pick out reflective signs far beyond your ability to actually read the small print. Perhaps more importantly, it demands attention from oncoming traffic at a kilometre or more.

…German approval makes them legal in our own sad, forgotten little country…

Up to now, this sort of power meant great big lead-acid batteries, and/or rather limited battery life. But with its LED ‘bulb’ and tiddly, but efficient, Li-ion battery pack, the 1103 is claimed to run for 33/4 hours on full brightness (we did a little better – about four hours), or double that on the middle power setting.When the battery is almost flat, the lamp flashes three times and reverts to low power, giving a further twenty minutes on ‘reserve’.

The charger is equally compact (35mm x 42mm x 90mm), lightweight (230g) and intelligent. It will run from any mains power source worldwide, and gives a full charge in three hours 20 minutes (on Castle Cary voltage, at least), reaching 90% capacity in less than two hours, which is worth knowing.The downside of a separate battery is that everything has to be disconnected and reconnected to charge it.The tiny three-way connector is a bit fiddly, and would be difficult to fit with cold hands.

Conclusion

A compact and powerful front light would suit a folding bike very well, mounted either on the handlebars or bolted permanently above the front brake caliper. Fitted as such to a Brompton, there’s still plenty of room to fold as normal, although whether you’d want to leave something this special on the bike is another matter.The battery lead is only 50cm long, so you have to find somewhere close to the light, but the velcro fixing works well.

If you’re not keen on batteries, we’re told a dynamo-powered kit is on the way.Team this tiny, indestructible lamp with a good hub dynamo and – for a price – you have created one of the toughest and brightest bicycle lights around.

Ah yes, price. As tested, complete with Li-ion battery and charger, the Solidlights 1103 costs £195. If you want to use your own batteries (5 x AA cells should last nearly two hours), the light alone costs £120. It’s difficult to put these sort of figures into perspective. A Schmidt hub dynamo plus B&M halogen headlamp will cost you about £150, but give rather less light.The Cateye EL500 one watt LED costs £45, but lacks a plug-in charger and is similarly lacking in oomph against the 1103.You pays your money and takes your choice.

Incidentally, if you’re one of these annoying people who can’t live without the biggest and best of everything, the triple LED 1303 is bigger, brighter and more expensive. It’s hard to see why anyone would need this sort of power on-road, but boys will be boys.

We should also point out that LED lamps are technically illegal in the UK – well, probably. The Germans, eons ahead of us as usual, are now approving individual products, including the new Trelock LS-600 and the Cateye EL500 (look for the EL500G if you can find it).As far as anyone can tell, German approval makes them legal in our own sad, forgotten little country, provided of course, your local judiciary are Euro-friendly.At three watts, the Solidlights 1103 just scrapes in under the power limit, but it’s still an LED and it hasn’t passed those German tests.Thus, ironically, you could be riding with one of the most eye- catching lamps available, get mown down by a dumb motorist and end up losing all hope of compensation because your front light hadn’t passed some test in Germany, and our own legislators are dithering in the 1950s.Take our advice and go for powerful lights.

Specification

Solidlights 1103 LED Complete kit £195 Lamp only £120 .Weight Lamp 130g Battery 130g Total 260g Battery Lithium-ion . Battery Capacity 16.5Wh . Run time full-power 4 hours . Charge time 3 hours 20 mins . Manufacturer Martin-Jones Technology Ltd mail info@solidlights.co.uk web www.solidlights.co.uk

If you regularly fly with a folding bike, you will know all about baggage handlers, the meticulously trained gorillas employed by airlines to heave your precious possessions from tarmac to hold and vice versa.

With a full-size bike, air-carriage may be expensive and time- consuming, but you can at least be confident that something so evidently fragile won’t get lobbed around too much. For folding bikes like the Brompton – that look much like other bit of luggage, but are both heavier and more fragile – it’s a different story.

Brompton has produced a bike cover for many years, but it’s more about disguise than protection, and there’s a coherent argument for leaving the cover off, in the hope that the handling-gorillas will show a little compassion.

The only real alternative is a conventional hard case – we usually suggest marching into a luggage shop with your Brompton and choosing a size that will comfortably take the bike, plus a few pairs of knickers and classic lightweight trousers tucked in where space permits.This will protect the bike against most eventualities, but makes life mighty difficult at point B. In short, what do you do with the case when you arrive? One option is to throw the whole lot in a taxi, but cycling straight out of the airport is one of the joys of folding bikedom, and you’ll need a better solution if you’re touring. Bike Friday gets around the problem with its patented TravelTrailer – basically a hard case that sprouts wheels and becomes a trailer. But the wheels add extra drag, weight, expense and complication.

The boffins at Brompton think they have come up with a compromise in the form of a padded soft bag, tough enough to give some protection during and after the flight, but light and compact enough to carry away on the bike.This, to avoid confusion with soft bags and hard bags, has been christened the ‘B’ bag. So in this crazy world, you might just find yourself explaining to a ‘one’ booking clerk in Bombay that you need space for a ‘B’ bag in coach C of the 8.20 ‘one’ service to Diss. No room for confusion there, then.

A Brief Description

The ‘B’ is made of a ruggedly woven nylon cordura fabric, padded to a depth of 5mm on the sides, with a solid base of laminated alloy and plastic.The result is very strong, but flexible enough to roll away into a manageable package. At the rear of the bag are two rugged little castors, supported on ball bearings, to give mobility on smooth surfaces. In ‘wheeled suitcase’ mode, you lift the bag with a little strap at the front and it whizzes along beautifully. For tougher customers, there’s also a broad shoulder strap, and a pair of conventional handles.

Weight is 2.3kg – a lot less than a hard case, of course, but rather more than a conventional soft bag. Dimensions when loaded are approximately (the bag is sculpted to some extent around the bike) 24cm wide, 64cm long and 58cm to 67cm tall. Any Brompton will fit, even those without a folding pedal (though we’d strongly recommend getting one) and/or with the longer SP6 seat post.The packed bag is little larger than the bike, but there’s enough space for carefully packed clothes, and even documents in the near (but not quite) A4-size zipped internal pocket. Another clear-fronted pocket just happens to take a copy of your favourite folding bicycle magazine, which may be pure coincidence, but thanks anyway lads.

With quick-releases on the straps, and floor to floor zips, the bag opens right out, so there’s little or no lifting required to load the bike. Ride off, and you’re dealing with a bag measuring 15cm x 25cm x 65cm – relatively cumbersome, but manageable enough, either on your back, strapped to the rack, or even poking out of the ‘Touring’ pannier bag.

In Practice

No doubt, the bag will be used in innumerable different ways.We would suggest carrying the ‘B’ on your back, and packing clothes into several plastic bags stuffed into a touring pannier for the trip to the airport. At the check-in, the bike and clothes go in the ‘B’ as hold luggage, and the Touring pannier plus essentials stays with you as hand luggage, with the packing and unpacking operation reversed at the other end.

Without the bike, the ‘B’ has an 80 litre capacity, although you wouldn’t want to carry too much weight in it. One question we had to answer was whether you can ride a Brompton carrying a second bike in the ‘B’ bag? Well, you can, but it’s not an operation for the faint-hearted, and you wouldn’t want to carry 12kg too far…The other classic use will be for yachting folk – yes, the straps are long enough, and the bike small enough, to dangle down through a 60cm x 60cm hatch. Hopefully, there’s enough padding should you forget the bike’s there and chuck the anchor down after it…

We’ve seen all sorts of travel bags over the years, from the basic (our own lightweight covers), through the cumbersome, to the plain useless (see Trek F600, A to B 41).This new Brompton-specific bag answers most of the criticisms of previous designs, being light enough and small enough to transport, but tough enough to give the bike some real protection. If the handlers drop it three metres off the end of an elevator, the bike will suffer, but it should survive the everyday knocks and bangs of air travel.

Brompton ‘B’ Bag £95 . Weight 2.3kg . Unfolded Dimensions H67cm W24cm L64cm Folded dimensions H15cm W25cm L65cm . Manufacturer Brompton tel 020 8232 8484

Light Emitting Diodes, or LEDs, have been around for years.We don’t need to worry too much about how they work except that in place of the old-fashioned white-hot bulb filament, there’s a gap where electrons, er, sort of vault across, giving off light in the process. No filament to burn out or vibrate to bits (life is effectively infinite in bicycle terms), greater efficiency, so batteries last longer and/or weigh less.

Initially, you could have any colour you liked as long as it was red and rather dim, but the power, efficiency and colour range has expanded enormously.Three or four years ago, the best red LEDs began to exceed the brightness of traditional rear lights and a few are now approved for use in Germany, although the situation here is a bit confused (so what’s new?).White LEDs, like black tulips, seemed an impossible dream, but they soon began to appear, although brightness and colour were not what they might have been.

In December 2002, we tested the best white LED lamps around – the Cateye EL200 and EL300 – and were quite impressed. One of the oddities of these lights is that they can scare off motorists or seek out a reflective sign at a kilometre, but fail to illuminate a large pothole right under your nose.The reason for this, so the boffins tell us, is tied up with wavelengths, photons and other mysterious things. Suffice to say, white LEDs are great in town, but less practical in open country where reflective signs and motorists are thin on the ground, and potholes more prevalent.

In the past, LEDs were small (typically consuming 200mW), so lights tended to be fitted with a handful of them, making reflectors complex and inefficient.The breakthrough has come with the advent of the powerful Luxeon 1,000mW white LED, combining the brightness of the best halogen bulbs, with the long-range penetrative power and lower battery consumption of a white LED.The first one watt LED torches surfaced about a year ago (several are now available, mainly on US websites), and they’ve just started to appear in bicycle lights.We were lucky enough to raid the first consignment of Cateye EL500s to arrive on these shores – they should soon be in the shops for about £45.

Prayers Answered

On paper, this is the answer to every bicyclist’s prayers.Where our EL200 used to fill with water at the first sign of rain, the EL500 is claimed to be waterproof to 30 metres or 100ft.Whether that’s true, we can’t say, but Alexander said it worked well in the bath and it scared the wits out of our goldfish at 300mm. Even if water does get past the neoprene sealing ring, the reflector/LED assembly is sealed, the electronics are encapsulated in silicon rubber and the on/off switch (clever this) is a sealed magnetic switch.We feel confident enough to say that this torch is waterproof for most cycling/outdoor activities, except perhaps, deep water scuba-unicycling.

Like other LED front lights, the EL500 is not legal on its own in the UK, but to be honest, approval here can be only a matter of time. The far wimpier EL300 has gained approval in Germany as the EL300G and UK lighting laws are so discredited as to be virtually worthless. We’d have no qualms about using this as a sole light source, and we’re sure the police would nod in approval. Thanks to some clever reflector technology, the EL500 casts an intense ‘slot’ of light to the sides for those awkward roundabout moments, and gives a nicely focussed beam, with just enough scatter to illuminate verges close by. It’s not as good as the best halogen dynamo lighting set, but brighter than almost everything else.

The mounting bracket is the standard Cateye H-32 – not the cleverest design, but quick-release and easy to adjust.The light only weighs 190g complete with batteries, just 40g more than the smaller EL200 and 105g less than the chunky EL300.

Power hungry

The bad news is high power consumption.The Luxeon is more efficient than a traditional bulb, but not by much, and battery life is nowhere near Cateye’s ‘up to 30 hours’ claim. Power consumption is 2.2 watts with conventional alkaline batteries, or 1.3 watts with rechargeables, at slightly reduced brightness. Depending on battery quality, run time will be 3 to 81/2 hours with rechargeables, or 51/2 – 71/2 hours with conventional batteries. In practice, the EL500 can run for another 50 hours, but at much reduced brightness, so you won’t be left groping in the dark when the battery fails, but you may end up changing batteries (4 x AA cells) more than you would like.

Get More Info, This would make an excellent caving light because of it’s compact size, water- resistance and extended ‘back-up’ run time. No doubt the run time and brightness will improve with more intuitive electronics, but in the meantime, delight your friends with the brightest, most penetrating light around.

Specification

Cateye EL500 . £44.99 . Weight c/w batteries 190g . Power consumption 1.3 – 2.2 watts Battery life full brightness 3 to 81/2 hours reduced brightness Up to 60 hours .Manufacturer Cateye web www.cateye.com . UK distributor Zyro PLC tel 01423 325325 mail zyro@zyro.co.uk

Living without a car brings its own joys, but add a tandem to the equation and life gets more complicated. Given the attitude of most train operating companies to tandem carriage, long distance rides are tricky indeed. My wife Anna and I planned an epic from Portland Bill in Dorset to John O’ Groats in the far north: ride up, train back, simple. Except that the Thurso-southwards train doesn’t take tandems, and nor does the Scotrail bike-carrying road van which runs parallel to it in the summer.

What to do? One very pleasant, but decidedly round-about option, was to hop on a boat to the Orkney islands, transfer to the overnight Stromness-Aberdeen ferry, and then board the mainline GNER service next morning; and that would take tandems, as long as we bagged the one space quickly enough. It remained the preferred option until pressure of work forced us to cut the trip short – now Anna, myself and ‘Black Lightning’ would be boarding at Glasgow. So we were back to square one.

Eek!! With the frame carefully marked, a short section is cut out of each tube

But trains do accept folding bikes (even tandems), so another solution presented itself – fit S & S frame couplings to the bike.The couplings are precision-made stainless steel threaded lugs that allow any full-size frame to separate in 60 seconds or so. American Steve Smilanick invented them about ten years ago. He was due to board a Mediterranean cruise, and wanted to take his Bianchi race bike along for 100- mile day rides while other cruisers were lolling in port. With a degree in Industrial Technology (not to mention his own machine shop) he had no trouble designing and producing the first S&S couplings.

Three pieces of tube, with the couplings behind

They worked so well that he went into business, and ten years later is kept busy producing ‘thousands’ (he wouldn’t tell me how many thousands) of the things a year, for cyclists who want the performance and rigidity of a full-size bike (‘cumbersome’ to A to B veterans) with at least some of the convenience of a folder.

Naturally, a couple of old Bickerton hinges pop-rivetted onto the frame tube wouldn’t do the trick, and the S&S couplings are impressively machined from solid billets of stainless steel.They do a 6Al 4V titanium version as well (for titanium and carbon fibre frames), an aluminium one (for ally frames) and even a chrome-moly coupling. All of these are intended for new frames, not retro-fit, and they come in various sizes, to suit most frames.The couplings are produced on a Mazak Multiplex CNC lathe; one of those all-singing, all-dancing machine tools. Solid bar goes in one end, and finished couplings pop out the other. For further and more detailed information, you can visit www.alliedexperts.com. Demand is such that this particular machine churns out nothing but Bicycle Torque Couplings, as they’re also called, though the company also makes specialised machinings for all sorts of other uses, including rockets.That might explain why some people insist that Steve Smilanick is an ex-NASA engineer; he isn’t, and never has been. Incidentally, you can’t just wander into your local bike shop, buy a set of couplings and fit them yourself. S&S will only sell the parts to recognised professional frame builders (they list 100, from all over the world), which underlines just what a precision job this is. St John Street Cycles of Bridgwater fitted ours.

…ordering from new makes sense, as fitting involves stripping the frame bare and repainting it…

Strong Nerve

That’s how I found myself ensconced in SJS’s kitchen (which appears to double as a wheel- building station) with Graham Tomlinson, who has been doing bikey things in Bridgwater for nine years. ‘I started off building frames for St John Street, but now I do most of their S&S work. It’s pretty seasonal, but I suppose it averages out at one or two sets a week. Most of those, maybe 60-70%, are for tandems, and most are on new bikes rather than retro-fits.’

Brazing the couplings into place

Ordering the couplings from new makes a lot of sense, as fitting them involves stripping the frame bare and repainting it. In theory, brazing only burns the paint off either side of the coupling, but St John Street prefer to repaint (or in our case, powder coat) everything. Once you have a bare frame, it really is a case of taking a hacksaw to it in exactly the right place, and removing a short section of frame tube, though I’d say it needs a strong nerve, keen eye and steady hand. Graham, thankfully, appears to have all three.

The finished frame ready for painting and reassembly - the three connectors must be perfectly aligned in the front tubes

‘I do the tubes one at a time,’ he told me; ‘cut, then braze on the coupling.That way the frame is always held rigidly in line by a solid tube – if you tried to cut all three at once, the frame would go all over the place.’ By now we’d been joined by Kevin Sayles, St John Street’s main frame builder, who settled down, mug of tea in one hand, banana in the other. ‘The brazing can be tricky,’ he added. ‘We use 55% silver braze, and that can be contaminated by the stainless. It’s tricky, but it can be done.’ The chrome- moly couplings are TIG welded rather than brazed, the metal plated to avoid corrosion and with rubber sleeves to cover the weld, and avoid the need for repainting. It’s cheaper than the stainless steel route, but intended for fitting to new frames only.

…Once fitted and tightened up, the couplings should be stronger than the frame…

Once fitted and tightened up, the couplings should be stronger than the frame tube itself. According to Steve Smilanick, tests have shown them to be both stronger and stiffer than Reynolds 531. ‘You can jump kerbs,’ he told me, ‘race downhill on a mountain bike, carry heavy loads while touring, crash the bike etc, it’s all no problem. In ten years, we haven’t had a single failure or return.’

Brake and gear cables need to be refitted with special quick-release joints

Well, I suppose that’s what you’d expect him to say, but the S&S website is littered with testimonials from people who’ve done epic round the world trips, with no ill-effects.That appeared to be backed up by a customer we met in St John Street’s showroom: ‘They’re terrific,’ he said. ‘I’ve had them fitted to my solo bike as well as my tandem, and they don’t make any difference to the ride at all – I can’t detect any frame flex.’ He might have added that there’s little weight difference either, as each stainless coupling tips the scales at just 115g, so adding three of them to a 18kg tandem won’t turn it into an overweight lump.

…we should be OK boarding trains that have a couple of normal bike spaces…

Final assembly is a big task, involving almost as much work as building a new machine

There’s one thing you can’t do with S&S couplings, and that’s fit them to a monotube frame, like that on the Giant LaFree. (Of course, even if you could, it wouldn’t do much good on the Lafree’s oval-section tubing – I have it on good authority that oval-shaped threads don’t work very well). According to Steve Smilanick, this is because the coupling is designed to cope with tension and compression loads only, as found on a conventional frame, not the bending components to which monotubes are subjected.They will work on a monotube recumbent though, or if the frame has a structural seat tube that connects front and rear halves together.

Practicalities

So, we now have a Thorn tandem with three S&S couplings, which allow the front third of the bike to part company with the rest in about a minute.You can have two sets fitted to a tandem if you want, splitting it into three parts (like Ancient Gaul, if you know your Asterix) but for train carriage (and simplicity) we thought a two-thirds/one-third split would be enough. As it is, the big section is about as large as a conventional solo, so we should be OK boarding trains that have a couple of normal bike spaces, but won’t take tandems.

Splitting is a simple process, using the C-spanner supplied with the conversion, though of course you have to split the cables too – one just puts them on the slackest setting (lowest or highest gear, as appropriate) and unscrew the neat little threaded connectors. Putting everything back together again is a little more tricky, and you really need an accomplice to hold everything steady, but with practice the couplings go together just as you would expect greasy chunks of precision-milled stainless steel to go together.

Being stainless, they won’t corrode, and maintenance is undemanding.They do need tightening periodically, and taking apart every now and then to remove grit that may have worked its way in – water won’t do any harm, but grit will.That, and re-greasing, is just about all you need to do.As for wear, you might expect the mating teeth to get sloppy over time, but they’ve thought of that too – the teeth are tapered, with a millimetre or two of clearance at the top of each one, so as wear takes place, the faces stay in close contact.

Now all this precision engineering doesn’t come cheap. Prices start at £350 (as an extra on a new Thorn solo) and retrofits (including the full respray) are from £500. Our tandem conversion cost £650 (three tubes to split on a tandem) which included powder coating the entire frame. Sceptics might say we could have bought a couple of secondhand Bromptons for the same money, but that’s missing the point.There’s something special about riding a tandem that you don’t get from any other two-wheeler – the speed, the team working – so having all that, and being able to stick it on a train for the journey home, is very like having your cake and eating it.

Peter and Anna departed for Scotland on Saturday 31st August.
Did the couplings successfully deceive Virgin Trains? No idea, but we’ll let you know in A to B 44

Contact details

S&S UK agents Bob Jackson Cycles tel (factory) 0113 255 1144 (shop) 0113 255 9844 mail factory@bobjacksoncycles.demon.co.uk . Kinetics tel 0141 942 2552 mail UKKinetics@aol.com St John Street Cycles tel 01278 423632 mail robin@sjscycles.com . Roberts Cycles tel 0208 684 3370 mail info@robertscycles.com . For a complete list of framebuilders worldwide, see www.sandsmachine.com or mail steve@sandsmachine.com

The carrying capacity of a conventional bike shouldn’t be underestimated – it’s amazing what you can fit into a decent set of panniers. However, with cycling as my main form of transport, I often wished I could carry heavier or awkwardly-shaped items.The obvious solution was a trailer, and I picked up a great hand-built one, but found that for a number of reasons it didn’t quite suit my needs. Most crucially, with a trailer you only have the extra cargo capacity when you’ve bothered to lug it round with you.

Few people would be willing to keep even the slickest, lightest trailer permanently attached to their bike. If you’re of a well organised persuasion, this probably isn’t a worry, as you’ll just hitch a trailer on when required. But personally I decided I’d like to be able to hop on my bike knowing I could carry a big load whenever the need arose.That’s why I ended up buying a ‘FreeRadical’, a kit designed to turn a regular bike into a cargo bike.

Installation

According to the booklet, ‘installation is meant to be carried out by a professional bicycle mechanic only’. But I enjoy fiddling with bikes, and had enough confidence in my mechanical abilities to have a go.The first task is to remove the rear wheel, chain, rear derailleur and brakes.The FreeRadical frame then simply bolts into the dropouts for the rear wheel, and is also attached near the bottom bracket.This produces an extended bike frame which seems pretty sturdy – I’ve had no problems with mine as yet. Rear derailleur and brakes need to be re-fitted with the extended cables provided with the kit.

…you can even carry passengers… up to a maximum payload of 90kg…

With the rear wheel slotted into place, you’ll find the wheelbase has grown by around 38cm (15 inches), which means extending the chain by attaching the extra 30 inches of links supplied.With everything back together and re-adjusted, the remaining task is to assemble the load-carrying frame.The FreeRadical has four vertical tubes – one pair in front of the rear wheel, and one pair behind. Into these slot two U-shaped racks, one on either side of the wheel, straddled and clamped into place with what the surfer-dude designers have styled a ‘SnapDeck’, but we would call a bit of plywood.

Carrying Stuff

Load carrying is done primarily in so-called ‘FreeLoaders’: Nylon flaps which attach to the racks. These are open at the top, so shouldn’t be used simply as bags (I initially made that mistake and lost a few things as a result!).The idea is that you put your shopping in bags and put the bags in the FreeLoaders.The open- topped design allows you to carry large or awkwardly- shaped loads, such as wooden planks.

As well as lashing on loads via the FreeLoaders, you can strap big objects onto the SnapDeck platform, and you can even carry passengers this way, up to a maximum payload of 90kg. Footrests are available as an option to make the ride a bit more comfortable! Other options include horizontal racks to give even greater load- carrying capacity. I haven’t tried these, but on the web site there are lots of pictures of sporty right-on types carrying canoes and the like.The full package (bike and FreeRadical), is referred to (with more surf-jargon) as an XtraCycle.

Extending the wheelbase of your bike obviously produces a significant change in handling. I think this is best summarised as an increase in stability with a corresponding decrease in manoeuvrability – a bit like changing from a small-wheeled folder to a conventional road bike. It’s a subjective thing, but I really like the ‘cruiserish’ feel of the XtraCycle.The bike remains nippy enough, and the extra length is a key factor in the bike handling well under loads.The whole assembly adds just over 4kg to the weight of your bike.This does affect acceleration a bit, but not excessively so.

Train Friendly?

Being 38cm (15″) longer and marginally wider at the back than a regular bike, the question of compatibility with public transport is important. In my experience, on trains where bike storage is in a guards van, an XtraCycle slots in no problem.Things become a bit more complicated where bikes are forced to jostle for space with passengers. For instance an XtraCycle will fit fine in the bike space on a Virgin Voyager, provided you remove the front wheel, but on trains with space for only two conventional bikes, an XtraCycle will take up both spaces. And the guard would probably take some ersuading to let it on. Having said all this, in my recent experience you have to be pretty brave to take even a conventional bike on many journeys – I think I’ll follow A to B’s advice and get a folder for the train.

…the design is not well suited to British weather… the SnapDeck absorbed water and warped…

A Few Problems

Most significantly, the design is not as well suited to British weather as it might be, which is hardly surprising, as the designers are based in Nevada.The FreeRadical frame is made of steel, while the racks that slot into it are aluminium. Given a heavy shower the vertical tubes of the FreeRadical collect water, and corrosion occurs rapidly, all the more so because of the interface between the two metals.Thankfully, this problem can be avoided by wrapping some waterproof tape around the junction between the racks and their sockets. Another damp-related problem I encountered was that after being left outside overnight, the SnapDeck absorbed water and warped. I’ve since painted it with exterior varnish, which seems to have worked.

You may need a few extra parts too. I found the new chain did not mesh properly with some of the gears on my rather old and worn rear cassette.This meant I had to shell out for a new cassette… Not a problem with hub gears, obviously.You may also need to upgrade the brakes for the extra weight, although my V-brakes worked fine.

Conclusions

For me, the FreeRadical has been a big success, enabling me to pootle happily about with large quantities of shopping, recycling, and the occasional friend. I’m sure a trailer would be a more appropriate solution for many people, but I definitely think a FreeRadical is worth considering if you regularly pull heavy loads, or simply fancy trying something a bit different.The ability to carry a passenger will also do wonders for your popularity, and helps to extend the role of the bicycle even further.

Unfortunately XtraCycle doesn’t do itself any favours in the way it brands the product: The skater/surfer terminology grates after a bit, and the web site is full of testimonials from born-again cycling-dudes whose lives have been transformed, which can be a bit off-putting to more cynical British eyes.

Specification

FreeRadical £225 (plus £14 p&p)
Weight (claimed) 4kg (8.8lb)
Maximum load 90kg (200lb)
USA Manufacturer Xtracycle mail infousa@xtracycle.com web www.extracycle.com
UK Distributors (England) Re-Cycle tel 01845 4580854 or 4580758 mail merlin@re-cycle.org
web www.re-cycle.org . (Scotland) Edinburgh Cycle Co-op tel 0131 3371484

Dynamo lights have many advantages.They’re always on call, lightweight, and extra- bright, but traditional dynamos are noisy, inefficient and unreliable.These days, there’s a renewed interest in hub dynamos, which are virtually silent and more reliable, but expensive to buy and fit.We’ve looked at the best bottle dynamos we could find, to see if they’re: (a) worth the extra over a conventional bottle and/or (b) comparable to a hub.

Two manufacturers dominate this business – Swiss company Dynosys, manufacturer of the LightSpin, and Busch & Müller from Germany, manufacturer of the Dymotec.The LightSpin is basically a high-tech version of a conventional six volt bottle dynamo, with improved bearings and electronic voltage control, while the Dymotec comes in three forms: the ‘6’, a more efficient version of a conventional dynamo, the ‘S6’, like the ‘6’, but with voltage control, and the ‘S12’, with everything else, plus a greater output. All can be fitted in place of a conventional bottle or hub dynamo except for the S12 which has an output of 12 volts (all other systems are six volt) and thus needs dedicated lamps, or hard-to-obtain 12 volt bulbs if upgrading older (ie, electronic-free) lamps.

While we’re on the subject, if adding a new bottle to an old system, it’s worth bearing in mind that some ‘medium-tech’ lamps may contain zener diodes to dump surplus voltage and improve bulb life.With the exception of the basic Dymotec 6, these posh-end dynamos contain more sophisticated voltage control and should not be used with zener diodes, because the dynamo will do its best to supply power to the bulbs and zener, which will simply throw the surplus overboard. If in doubt, it’s a good idea to replace the dynamo and lamps at the same time.

We’ve tested the LightSpin against the top-of-the-range B&M Dymotec S12.The 6 and S6 are cheaper, and broadly similar, but with lower output. For the purposes of making the test as realistic as possible, we fitted the dynamos to a hack bike with slightly wobbly wheels, although if spending this sort of money you’d be well advised to have the wheels trued, because a wobbly wheel will reduce efficiency. Both the designs dealt manfully with wobbles and inclement weather.

Dymotec S12

The Dymotec 6 costs £38, the S6 £110, and the S12 (complete with 12v versions of the Lumotec Oval Plus front light and Toplight Plus rear lights), no less than £300. Sounds like a reasonable budget for a bicycle. But for engineers everywhere, this is more or less the dream spec for a dynamo: 12 volts, 6.2 watts and 60% efficiency. For the rest of us, let us just say it’s solidly made, reliable and efficient.

So, what do all the numbers mean? As any woman will tell you, it’s largely a man thing: big numbers meaning a generous wallet, unrivalled fertility, and so forth, but a 12 volt dynamo really does make some sense.

Most battery lights are three volts, and dynamos six volts – the voltage being a measure of the electrical ‘pressure’. On its own, this tells us nothing about the light output, but the greater the pressure, the easier it is for the power to fight its way through those embarrassing dodgy joints held together with sticky tape. In short, a 12 volt system is more reliable.

Efficiency is the difference between the power you put in and the electrical power that comes out of the dynamo. Some are atrociously inefficient, turning only 20-30% of your hard won effort into light, while the rest floats off into the night as heat and noise. Fortunately, dynamos are small, absorbing 15 watts or less for an output of three useful watts. For those who’ve forgotten their school physics, voltage (electrical pressure) multiplied by amps (the current or volume of electricity) equals watts – the measurement of electric power.

Fifteen watts doesn’t sound much, but if you’re tooling gently home on a bicycle at a modest 13mph, your total power output may be less than 75 watts, so a crummy old dynamo could be absorbing nearly a quarter of your leg power.

Better quality bearings, and other much more complicated things, bring greater efficiency. Busch & Müller claim 40% for the 6, 55% for the S6, and 60% for the S12.That efficiency is used to cut the overall power consumption on the six volt units, but with the S12, B&M has chosen instead to provide a greater output: 6.2 watts, plus the 40% chucked away as heat, giving a total drain on your legs of 10.3 watts.All a bit complicated, but the result is a bit less effort, twice as much light, and a very tiny reduction in global warming.

In practice, our test yielded a whopping peak output of 8.7 watts (the extra power recharges the standlight lamps in the first few minutes of operation). But with a steady output of 15.2 volts above 8mph, we suspect the S12 might be powerful enough to eat bulbs relatively quickly. Don’t care, eh? You will when you find the bulbs cost £12.99 each.

Rolling resistance is barely discernible.When we tested a down-market three watt dynamo in October, it knocked 1.4 mph off our typical coasting speed.The S12 (generating 8.7 watts), only reduces the coasting speed by 0.5 mph – noticeable, but insignificant.

Fitting

…not a bad chat-up line…you could ask them to come up and inspect your zener diodes…

Fitting the S12 is quite straightforward, and we managed to assemble a complete system including the front and rear lamps in about an hour. One bit of advice – do solder the connectors if you can.There’s no point in spending £300 just to see the wiring fall apart on the first soggy night. If you don’t have the technology, trim the wires to length and seek out a man or woman with a soldering iron (not a bad chat-up line, all things considered – you could ask them to come up and inspect your zener diodes too). Otherwise, assembly is fairly self-evident.The dynamo needs to be carefully aligned, like any other, but the Dymotec units also feature a crafty contact pressure adjustment, which should be set as low as possible for any particular tyre/weather combination. If the lights flicker, increase the pressure a bit. For rough conditions, the rubber roller can be swapped (hardly a roadside job) for B&M’s ‘weather-proof’ design, a rotary wire brush that would do a decent job of buffing up your small parts.This should be kept well away from frail tyre sidewalls and small fingers for obvious reasons. B&M make the point that it should only be used ‘temporarily’ in ‘rainy, snowy or icy’ conditions.We didn’t need it, but it was nice to know it was there.

Light output

We tested the S12 with Busch & Müller’s wonderful Lumotec Oval Plus front lamp and Toplight Plus rear lamp, produced in 12 volt versions specifically for this dynamo. Both have a standlight function too – the rear LEDs continue to burn at full brightness for about five minutes, while the front switches to a single white LED that lasts for ‘at least’ ten minutes. Ever tried waiting for a standlight to go out when there’s something good on the telly? Should your unsoldered connectors drop off, the front standlight is as powerful as some elderly filament bulbs, and easily bright enough to get you home.

As for the halogen main beam, don’t expect two or three times as much light as normal, just because you’re generating two or three times as much power, but in terms of brightness and spread, the Lumotec is unrivalled. Country roads are easily navigated at speed, and oncoming cars tend to assume you’re motorised, treating you with a bit of respect. Our only criticism is that enough light scatters through the transparent rim of the lens to dazzle the rider in open country, which is a bit counter- productive.The easy answer is a strip of black masking tape, but surely this should be sorted at source?

LightSpin

Unlike the B&M S12, this is a six volt device, so you can use it with conventional six volt lamps, provided you seek and destroy those pesky zener diodes. It’s also relatively cheap at £70 – a full £40 less than the B&M S6, which has a lower output. Efficiency is claimed to be 65-75%, so with our measured power output of only 2.6 watts, we estimate a power requirement of less than four watts.With such a low demand, the wheel can be spun quite easily – you can’t feel it on the road.The coasting speed was reduced from 15.3 to 15.2 mph – a barely discernible effect.

Incidentally, the low power output on our graph doesn’t necessarily make this a seven stone weakling amongst dynamos. Traditional bottle dynamos tend to call it a day at three watts, but the LightSpin provides whatever the bulb demands, up to a recommended maximum of 4.8 watts. It just happens that our bulb combination demanded only 2.6 watts. With this dynamo (and the B&M S6 too) it is permissible to fit a three watt bulb at the front and 0.6 watt at the rear, making 3.6 watts in all.

We paired the LightSpin with the neat little Hella Micro FF front lamp.The result was noticeably less exciting than the B&M S12, but the lamp throws a smaller, well defined pool of light just where you want it. Or at least, it does if you take great care aiming the lamp.

Conclusion

Value for money is a difficult concept at this level. After all, you can buy a basic dynamo for less than £10, but we wouldn’t recommend cutting corners to that extent if you commute on a regular basis.The B&M in particular is frighteningly expensive, but it offers unrivalled light output.The cheaper B&Ms and the Lightspin have a more conventional power output, but great efficiency.

They’re all better than the cooking variety, but are they as good as a hub dynamo? They’re certainly noisier, and compared to the hubs we’ve tried, the useful power kicks in at a slightly higher speed – 5mph instead of 4mph.That might seem irrelevant, but a hub will keep the lights close to full brightness at a smart walking pace, whereas the bottle dynamos will not.They’re relatively vulnerable too, both to the elements and vandalism.

On the positive side, a bottle dynamo is quick, easy and cheap to fit, and there’s no drag when it’s turned away from the tyre, although drag has been virtually eliminated from the hubs these days anyway.

Our instincts are moving towards the weather-proof, no-nonsense hub, but there are plenty of reasons why you might prefer something easier to fit, and if you want hub performance from a bottle, one of these might suit. If you’re looking for low rolling resistance above all else, the LightSpin is the best, but if power matters, go for B&M’s S12. There’s enough oomph here to recharge a mobile phone, or even a lap-top, provided you can find a suitable adaptor.

Specification

Dymotec S12 (c/w lamps) £300
Power output (claimed) 6.2 watts
Efficiency (claimed) 60%
Manufacturer Busch & Müller tel +49 2354 9156 mail info@bumm.de web www.bumm.de
UK distributor AMBA Marketing (UK) tel 01392 840030 mail sales@amba-marketing.com

Dynosys LightSpin £70
Power output (claimed) 4.8 watts
Efficiency (claimed) 65-75%
Manufacturer Dynosys tel +41 62827 4828 mail info@dynosys-ag.ch web www.dynosys-ag.ch
UK Distributor Gearshift tel 0700 0700 531 web www.gearshift.co.uk