The other day at London Bike Kitchen, where I teach as a freelance tutor, I ran a ‘introduction to maintenance’ class for two people who were several decades older than me. Correspondingly, they probably had in the order of 40 years more of experience regarding riding bikes than I did, since I only really began cycling properly (in the sense of leisure and transportation) in around 2017. Writing this, I’ve been teaching classes like this, or working as a community mechanic, for about 6 months now, and thought a blog post about what I’ve learned and how I’m feeling about it may be interesting to you.
Tag Archives: bikes
What I learned doing the Dunwich Dynamo on my fixed gear bike
Despite me having been a cyclist in and around London for about 6-7 years, I’d never done the ‘Dun Run’ before. It had coincided with the now sadly discontinued London Orbital Audax (the night of a full moon being particularly good for long rides to spare you cycle lights battery life). But in 2024 the calendar worked out that I could give it a go.
I’d done some longer fixed gear rides before, such as the Audax I did a few years ago before the pandemic, but it had been a bit of a break so the nerves were getting to me a little in the run-up. Luckily, it ended up being a marvellous ride. Hopefully you can learn a bit from this blog post and feel like a fixed gear Dun Run might be the thing for you in 2025.
A permament fix for stuck/broken Suntour Q-Loc suspension fork thru-axles
If you’ve ever owned a Suntour suspension fork, like that on my Voodoo Bizango (which has a Suntour Raidon), you might have already been a bit thrown by the proprietary Suntour thru-axle system, Q-Loc. Unfortunately, Q-Loc is prone to breaking, and then you have a wheel stuck in the fork. This once bit me in the bum quite badly because I’d let my front tubelessly-set-up wheel run out of sealant, and it deflated on a ride and wouldn’t stay up after I reinflated it with my mini pump. I couldn’t get the wheel off to put an inner tube in, so had to resort to public transport.
Getting home I did a lot of online research, many people found they were having the same issue, but the solution as per the bike shops’ advice was to just buy a new Q-Loc axle. Being unhappy to just spend more money on a clearly poor quality component, I found a permanent fix to this problem using a third-party provider, Hexlox. This is a short article on how to find the right replacement for your Suntour fork.
2 flops and 2 wins at the Pan Celtic Gravel Rally 2024
Last weekend I rented a van with my pal and drove from London to Eryri National Park (Snowdonia) with our tickets for the Pan Celtic Gravel Rally in our pockets. This meant a 19km ‘night stage’ on the evening of the Friday, starting at 2030, and the 136km ‘long’ route the next day starting atContinue reading “2 flops and 2 wins at the Pan Celtic Gravel Rally 2024”
Calum On Wheels 