Fancy Cars

Myself and Hugh went driving cars in an abandoned airfield outside Oxford yesterday. It was with a company called U Drive Cars. They have a range of kick ass cars, and you can take your choice of cars out for a few laps with a professional driver as a passenger to make sure you don't plough yourself into a wall somewhere. Hugh drove a silver one, a red one and a green one. For any more detailed information you'll have to ask the man himself. One was a ferrari and one was a James Bond car. Here's Hugh with all of them.




Hugh didn't drive this one, but I thought it was hilarious. It's some form of crazy English car.

Sleepy puppies

These are Hugh's parents' puppies. We rented a boat recently and they were good as gold on board. They alternated between ripping things up and sleeping, but at least they weren't running around or jumping out. The first puppy is Jaffa. She is small but diabolically clever. The next is Beamer who is a real pedigree looking beagle, and Jaffa's Igor type servant.

Godmanchester

Hugh's family had a big house party a few weekends back. Ian and Roisin came to visit us for it. We took a rowing boat out in Finsbury Park near our flat, and we got mobbed by baby swans looking for food. Ian managed to pet one but the rest of us chickened out for fear of having our hands pecked off.


Then on the way to Hugh's parent's house we had to go through a field of huge cows who took rather a fancying to Ian and Roisin. There were also millions of rabbits in this field which we tried chasing, but they are fierce quick. And Ian tried to catch a squirrel, but it was like lightening.


One of the neighbours in Godmanchester rebuilds monster trucks and he has a yard full of them. Here's Roisin expressing her disbelief.

Maple Tree Race

The race is on here in XBridge to grow the fastest Maple tree. My friend Kat went home for a visit and came back with some Canadian Maple tree seeds. One set has gone to the BView developers, one set has gone to us. So we have gotten off to a flying start and have already planted the little fellas in a little compost pellet thingy (technical term). More progress as it unfolds...

Nerd Fest

Last Thursday myself Meg and Kat went to the Firefox 3 launch party in the Shooting Star near the Liverpool Street Station. It was fantastic fun and we got loads of free Firefox Swag, which we are adorned with in the picture. Kat was quite dangerous with her jaunty sideways hat action, but thankfully noone actually lost any eyes, just a few close calls.

Bits

These are the other parts of Audrey. The fork and handlebars have been painted and I've put them back on. The ball bearings were filthy and coated in solid old grease, so now that they are clean and have lovely fresh grease on, they are turning brilliantly. I'll get a picture later to put up. It's pretty cool.

New Dress

It has finally happened, Audrey has been painted. During the week I sanded and rust treated the frame, forks and handlebars. Then I primed them by painting them gray. This is how the frame looked on Saturday morning:


Then myself and Kat painted it all a random mix of red and blue. Here's Kat in her wonderfully unmatching socks in the back yard. Do you see the millions of leaves by her feet? We have a bloody enormous horse chestnut tree next door that floods us with leaves in the winter and a crazy japanese tree that does the same in the summer.


When the red and blue dried we stuck on lots of little stickers, then painted it black. Using a tweezers we took the stickers off and were left with some pretty cool patterns. I was considering putting a few stars around them place, but in the end what we did was write a load of my girl friend's names on the frame! It's really cool. It's very subtle so isn't really noticable till you look closely. This is the frame looking like a normal black bike:


And this is the decal on the front. I tried to save the original paint for the decal, but it was so rusty that it had to be treated and the treatment melted the paint. I like this one though, Audrey Hepburn; and the H is very similar to the Hercules H that was there before. Below is my name on the frame, I'll put up more later.

80's Night

There's an 80's clob near where I work called Reflex. We've been trying to go for a while but it gets completely jammed, so last Friday we made it a mission to get there on time so rocked up around 7 o clock for a night of total 80's mayhem. The place itself is pretty dingy, noone has felt the need to clean since the 80s, but the music and atmosphere is excellent. I never knew the people I work with are so fanatical about the 80s. David Hasslehoff is revered as a total hero in this place, here's a picture of me giving him the adoration deserved. No girls can pass without having a mandatory hug photo taken, this gem is near the front door. The night only got madder after this and now i am the proud owner of an inflatable electric pink flying v guitar.

She's Nude!!!

OK so this is what Audrey looked like for the last few weeks. I decided to take her apart completely, but soon found that stubborn rust and crazy attachments meant that I didn't have the tools necessary to take everything off. Especially the handlebars and fork gave me huge problems. Never fear though, the solution came to me yesterday - the wrench-master 4000. Well I don't know what it's real name is, but it's fantastic. It's a ginormous wrench with good teeth so it can get purchase on about anything. It also doubles as a hammer. Nice.

These are the parts of the handlebars and fork after myself and Hugh eventually managed to beat it into it's individual parts.


And this is me with the indecently naked frame, wielding the wrench-master itself. I've started sanding the main frame now in preparation for priming. Note the tiny silver patch towards the front of the bike? Great eh? Only around 500 more hours of sanding to go...

Exhibition

Last weekend myself and Hugh went to his school, Ampleforth, to see his brother Peter playing cricket. It was a weekend called Exhibition, where the parents are invited to come see various sporting events and shows around the school, and annual awards are given to the students.

This first picture is the pavillion on the 1st cricket pitch with the school in the background. It's a monastery school. The big building in the middle is the church, to the left is the monk's area, and to the right is the school itself. The living areas for the students is off the right of the picture. It's an amazing place.

On the first day of the cricket, the opposition batted first and got 228. Peter and one of the lads on his team opened the batting and between them got 229 not out. Pretty impressive! The other lad was "given his colours" for such an outstanding show. This means that he is given a red school jacket and hat, an award given to only the best cricketers. It's pretty sought after! The guy was delighted with it and his father was there to see him being awarded it and everything. It was really cool. Below is Peter batting.

Baby Duckies

I'm too lazy at the moment to get any new pictures off the camera, so here's another from Canter Parcs a few weekends back. There were ducks and ducklings everywhere. They weren't that shy of people either, so walking through the main village there'd be kids legging it after ducklings with the Mom in hysterics, of both species.

Vegetables 2008

It's raining here at the moment so I'm not able to do anything with the bike, so here's a few pictures of this years vegetables. I started them from seed around 6 weeks ago, in seedling trays out the back garden. I planted tomatoes, broccoli, onions, carrots, leek and lettuce.


Since then they have started getting pretty big! First here is a pot of broccoli and next is a tomato plant. The tomatoes are definitely my favorites and I like to water them and talk to them before going to work in the morning. Hugh is looking into loony bins for me.

Cool New Wheel!

Over the weekend I took Audrey's wheel apart. This is what the hub looked like at the start - pretty gross. The spokes snapped very easily so I was able to pull them all out of the wheel pretty easily.


As soon as they were all gone it was very easy to take the hub apart. These are all the parts. The balls sit in a rim just inside the hub and they are held in place by the bar and the shaped nuts. They are covered in grease which makes the bar able to turn around against the balls easily instead of rubbing off flat metal. I cleaned and rusted and treated the metal and it turn out like the next photo - pretty good improvement!



I took one of the old spokes to my local bike shop and was able to buy replacement ones. They come in 2 parts - they have a nipple (he he he) at the end that goes through the hub and they look like a screw at the top. Then there is a bit that looks like a long nut that goes in through the rim and connects onto the spoke. You can tighten it with a normal screwdriver and the idea is to keep the spoke from coming up though the screw cause it will puncture the tube.

I followed Sheldon Brown's instructions on how to respoke the wheel. It's a great article and really easy to follow. It's a lot easier than I thought. It's not completely true, as I obviously don't have a truing stand, but I got is as close as possible by looking at it spinning on the bike upsidedown. The spokes alternate at being on the right and left sides of the rim. If the rim is bending to the right, tighten a spoke on the left to pull it back. And hey presto - a shiny new wheel! When the rear wheel is ready I'll bring them both to the bike shop to be trued properly.

Center Parcs

Myself and Hugh went to Center Parcs a few weekends back. It's a holiday village in a forest called Elveden near Cambridge, just a bit North of London. It's really brilliant fun. They have all sorts of sports and stuff to do. We did quad biking, archery and learned to scuba dive. We spent loads of time in the massive swimming pool with its many slides and rapids and lazy river etc. Hugh is a bit of a speed demon and would dive head first down all of them. I however am a chicken and would slide down as slowly as possible causing massive queues and generally being a bit embarrassing. One time there was a little girl in the queue for the biggest slide in front of Hugh. She changed her mind when she got to the front so Hugh went down in her place. At the end he was caught by the girl's very surprised Mom. Quality.


This is the view from our hotel room balcony. It's a bit different from the traffic and carnage visible from our flat in London. Below is a cute Elveden squirel, which are by far my favourite animal. At the bottom is Hugh lording over the snooker table.

Operation "Wheel"

The next thing I have done with audrey is to take off her front wheel. In modern bikes, when you are taking a wheel off, you can loosen the brakes so the tyre can fit through. Not so with Audrey alas. The wheel came off the fork very easily, a nut on either side of the hub, but then it got stuck in the brakes.



The way rod brakes work is that they are pulled up to rub off the rim. So they are always narrower than the rim so that it can work. The only way to take the wheel off bikes like this is to take the brake blocks off completely. So I did, and now poor Audrey looks very unhappy altogether missing her mud guard, brake blocks and wheel.


This is what the outside of the tyre looks like. Most of the exterior has fallen off, and it has left a cool looking weaved twine pattern. Is this what modern tyres look like too?


It was impossible to pull off so what I did in the end was wedge a screwdriver underneath it and cut through it with a junior hacksaw. It smelled awful too. Gross. The tube inside was very brittle and i was able to tear it with just my hands. The tape between the rim and the tube was still in great condition. It says "Halford's for cycles and accessories". Apparently Halfords was set up in the late 1800s so this must have been among it's first products. I wonder did they make any other parts of the bike?



This is what the connection looks like from the top of the spoke into the rim. I hope these haven't changed much so I can get a tool to remove them.

Rust Treatment

I applied the rust treatment to the front mudguard. It has turned the thing black! But that's what it says to expect on the bottle, so I'm happy with it. Already it's looking more like flat metal instead of a collection of dirt. See the difference it's made in the colour and the smoothness after the many sandings? It's going to look brilliant when it's done!

Front Fender

I have started the mightly Audrey clean-up. First to get the once over is the front fender, or mudguard to us europeans. It was easy to take off - a nut on either side of the front wheel and a nut on the frame just above the top of the wheel were holding it in place. As you can see, it is brown with the rust. See in the second picture the rust is actually lumpy like barnacles? Madness. I took it off a few days ago and rubbed it with some pretty harsh sandpaper. So much rust came off! It was all over the floor. Then I washed it with a hose and let it dry. Then i sanded it again and washed it with Mr Muscle bathroom cleaner. Amazing! It's no longer brown but it is black in patches and slightly pock-marked. This evening I plan on painting it with a kind of rust-killing liquid. I'll get a photo of the pack to put up. It claims to kind of melt rust and harden it so it's strong like metal, but it turns the surface black. This is fine for most of the bike as it will then be painted over, but i'm going to have to come up with some better idea for the shiny metal parts. More to report later. Oh, loads of cobwebs and dead crap fell off the frame which had been wedged in by the mudguard. Gross. And i noticed a nice big spider hiding under the saddle too. Eek.

The Crack

This is the great almighty crack in the Tate Modern. I hear it's gone now, this picture was taken a good while back. The green flamboyant shoes are Hugh's and the more normal shoes belong to one Mr John Hearne. The crack is a massive crack, surprise surprise, which has been cut into the floor of the turbine room of the Tate Modern art gallery. It's really long and stretches the length of the room. It's quite deep in parts, i'd say around 3 or 4 feet. There's great mystery around how it was constructed, there were massive curtains hung around the turbine room so noone could see. The building is 5 floors high and the turbine room stretches up to the top on around 1/3 of the building. I'm not sure how they could have driven the crack in without disturbing the foundations, so chances are the Tate is a ticking time bomb at the moment.

The previous installation in the turbine room was the slides, which were, surprise surprise, 3 big slides. One of the walls of the turbine room is glass and looks into each of the 5 floors. On the 1st, 3rd and 5th I think, they started yellow slides which curved down to the turbine floor. It was very funny to see people shooting down them and you could hear them yeeping as they went, but I much prefer the crack. Loads more people can enjoy it at the same time. The second photo shows loads of people milling around a fork in the crack. Hundreds of people were in the room strolling around, pretending to fall in, seeing how far they could get their arms and legs in, etc. It's brilliant!

Audrey arrives!

So this is my new old bike. She answers to the name "Audrey Hepburn"and she is one demanding lady. She has some absolutely beautiful features though. Primarily amongst them some pretty well established rust and a desire to shed spokes like there's no tomorrow. This is the current view that a rider would behold if she were willing to be cycled:


Not so pretty with the rust, but totally enchanting if it's actually in front of you. This is what she looks like from the front.


The brakes are 2 long bars, shaped very like the handle bars, but a little bit lower. They are very comfortable to hold. The rear one is actually working! The handlebars themselves are very curved so you hold them like you would hold say the arms of a hedge clippers. They are remarkably comfortable and will be really handy for fitting on the inside of cars and busses.

My plan is to take her apart piece by piece and de-rust and clean everything thoroughly. I'll replace any parts that are beyond repair but fix up as much as i can. I'm really looking forward to tackling the rear hub - it's an internal 3 gear system which are reputedly foolish to take apart. Nice one! When everything is clean, possibly repainted and varnished etc i'll put her back together and hope for a miracle.