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”