As a teacher at London Bike Kitchen, and doing my own bike maintenance work, one of the first things I talk to people about is how much money maintenance can save you. It’s tempting to tell people that cycling is ‘free once you buy the bike,’ but this quickly becomes untrue if you let maintenance problems build up, and let your more expensive components become unduly damaged and worn ahead of time. This is a short blog about the best ways to ruin your bike through lack of maintenance, which hopefully you’d use more in a what not to do sense. But it’s more fun to talk about it this way!
Tag Archives: travel
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.
What I learned riding ‘the Purbeck bimble’ aka ‘Purbeckspedition,’ a MTB/gravel and bikepacking route on the Isle of Purbeck in Dorset
I’ve just come back from the Isle of Purbeck in Dorset, where I re-rode a route I did a few years ago. It’s a really great weekend away so this is a short blog about how to make the most of it and what I learned on the ride (and the camp).
What I learned: Riding on the ‘old chalk way’ from Tring to Pangbourne
To try and focus my blogs and keep them from being an unstructured mess, I fix them around ‘wins and losses’ from a given ride. This time it’s around a great day out from last Sunday, where I got the train out to Tring from London Euston, and followed a route called ‘the old chalkContinue reading “What I learned: Riding on the ‘old chalk way’ from Tring to Pangbourne”
Calum On Wheels 