They do not, the chains is always falling off, usually when you're stood up on the pedals, and end up with your groin on the crossbar.
There's another thing, why do women's bikes have a lower crossbar? It's the men who don't want to land on it!
How does 1 to 12 work then? The angle must be absurd.
What we really need are legs like motors with a wider range of speeds.
They should have a gearbox like a car or motorbike.
Chains stretch in use. You need to move the back axle back in its slot from time to time to keep the chain from finding enough slack to be able to jump of the gear wheels. You are too dim to bother. eventually you have to shorten the chain by a link, or buy a new one.
It was a modesty thing. For a woman to get her leg high enough to get it across the crossbar she had to get it high enough to briefly reveal her underwear
You can buy them - they are called hub gears but they are less efficient. More of your effort goes to keeping the hub warmer than ambient.
Indeed, some prat thought girls were the ones who didn't want a wedgie? WTF?
I once gave someone a cracker (perhaps literally). He was climbing a tree and fell astride a branch. I was on the ground and laughed, then saw an opportunity to get him back for damaging my bike I'd leant him the other week. I grabbed both of his feet and hung from him. I've never heard a boy scream so girly since.
Modesty, a forgotten concept...
The chain wheel is centered relative to the cluster. I often stay on the middle chain wheel and it works fairly well across the cluster, unlike the little chain wheel and the outside gear on the cluster. I believe the chains are narrower allowing the cassette gears to be closer too.
There's a fairly wide range. I'm generally in the 70 - 80 rpm range. I'm not in the Clydesdale class but I'm not a gracile sort that can crank out
110 rpm.
The Sturmey-Archer planetary hubs are sort of like TorqueFlite transmission. I've taken both apart. Lot of little bits and pieces.
A third company? No wonder electricity costs so much.
A speed limit for a bicycle is beyond a joke. Most of the weight of a bicycle is the rider. Are you going to have speed limits for people running too? Perhaps police monitoring if you lift two feet off the ground at once?
The only people afraid of speed are those with slow brains that can't handle someone else doing things quickly.
Nobody realised paint wears off? [facepalm]
Don't valves do the same job?
Read the manual for you new newsreader and work out what you are doing wrong. Or just shut up. Your contributions are totally worthless anyway. Down there with a a, Flyguy and Skybuck Flying.
True. When a car ran into the back of me at a roundabout (he thought it was safe for me to set off, I didn't!) my tailgate was dented and the lock didn't quite engage with the striker plate, though my tow rope round the inside metalwork of the tailgate made the car safe to drive until I took it to a garage.
His car suffered a ruptured radiator. I couldn't work out which bit of my car had punctured his radiator - it's not even as if I had a tow bar. So he was stranded.
My feeling is that *all* wheeled vehicles should be subject to the same rules and the same penalties for failing to obey them: speed limits, stopping at red traffic lights and occupied zebra crossings, going the wrong way on one-way streets. The fact that bicycles are lighter than cars is irrelevant: one rule for all, no favouritism. The only get-out-clause is that bikes can be wheeled on a pavement to get round a queue of traffic or to go the wrong way down a one-way street - done that many times, been shouted at by pedestrians even for *wheeling* my bike on a pavement, probably slower than I would walk :-(
But I believe that the concept of a speed limit for bicycles doesn't exist, beyond an offence of (IIRC) "furious cycling" or some such wording.
I find that when I'm going downhill I wimp out before I reach the speed limit: even 30 mph seems bloody fast on a road that has imperfections in the surface - and the sort of roads that have steep hills tend to be those outside a town, so with a 60 limit.
About the only limit that I might be able to break is a 20 mph limit - and that is harder to do on my new electric bike than a "manual" bike because the electrical assistance stops when you reach 17 mph and the electric bike is heavier and is lower-geared in top gear than my manual bike. It's a great shame that electric bikes don't have an extra higher gear (equivalent of top gear on both the front and rear cogs on a manual bike) for use when supplying a bit more power than gravity alone provides when going down a moderate hill.
I've never know it by any other name than "fabric conditioner". I must be too young to remember "soft rinse". I wonder when the change occurred
- I realise that it will have been a gradual change in *usage* even if the labelling on all bottles had changed on the same date.
True: quite a few British-English spellings are derived from French spellings - maybe dating back to the Norman Conquest, or maybe just pretentious-French spelling :-)
Programme versus Program Theatre versus Theater Colour / Honour versus Color / Honor
They are daft spellings, and hard to justify. But... they are how we spell them, and I will resist attempts to Americanise them.
The only exception is "program" in the sense of computer instructions, as opposed to what is shown on TV.
OK, so some British-English spellings have mutated over the years: few people uses "gaol" instead of "jail", and "disk" is becoming common as an alternative to "disc" - and not just in computing. Of course CD is "compact disc" with a C, so British spelling rules there ;-)
The one difference that works the opposite way round is the pronunciation of "herb". British pronounces the H whereas American often omits the H sound "erb" as if it were French.
Do other English-speaking counties than the UK have the absurd "an historic event" where "an" is used even though the H in "historic" is sounded? I would normally say "a historic event", "a hotel" just like "a hedge" or "a helmet". If I wanted to be pretentious I suppose "an 'istoric event" or "an 'otel" are acceptable, but never "an" with a consonant or consonant-sound, nor "a" with a vowel or vowel-sound.
When I bought my first bike with derailleur gears, having been used to riding a bike with 3-speed Sturmey Archer, the one thing that always caught me out was approaching a junction in high gear and forgetting to change down as I was coasting to a stop. Changing from high gear to low gear when stationary and about to set off doesn't work well :-(
I've not had the chain come off many times, and when it does, it's usually off the front cog which is not being changed, rather than the rear one which is changing from one sprocket to another.
I suppose a higher crossbar was thought to be stronger, and men don't mind cocking their leg higher whereas women in skirts don't want to flash their knickers (if worn).
I suppose it relies on a long enough reach from the pedal cog to the rear wheel cog that the angle is not too great.
Miniaturising a synchromesh gearbox with lay shaft or designing a planetary gearbox (like an automatic) with enough gears might be the stumbling block.
A single-speed bike would not be much use: the ratio would be too high to make it easy to climb a hill, whereas it would be much too low to be able to pedal fast enough at a high speed. As with all vehicles (except those with electric motors) you have to match a very limited range of engine/pedal speeds to a very wide range of road speeds, in some cases needing the torque magnification of a low gear.
I wish my electric bike had an extra really high-ratio gear: I find the highest gear still has my legs whizzing round uncomfortably fast when pedalling down a gentle hill to supplement gravity. But when I bought mine, the extra gears of the higher-spec models were all at the low-ratio end.
I think the old statues mainly encouraged the Renaissance sculptors to make pure white statues with their oddly looking sightless eyes.
They didn't realise that the statues would have been painted as it wasn't the current practice.
You tell me. I'd never heard of "buck convertors". Anyway, valve things are more complicated than solid state due to power requirements, heat produced and a shorter lifespan.
Valve circuits are usually far simpler. Due to the high energy short lifetime and capital cost of valves.
Tommy Flowers just about managed to make a crude computer out of them...
or buy a Ludlow Kissel dago bomb
And the weird 'sodering' instead of 'soldering'
Yes, we do.
I wouln't with the first two.
And can't with tighter skirts
I only ever rode one as a teenager.
Aaah! I'd forgotten the "sodder" / "soddering" pronunciation of solder / soldering. Sounds *very* dodgy, like their stress on laboratory (LABratry, rather than labORatry) which sounds almost as if scientists all work in the loo ;-)
Have something to add? Share your thoughts — no account required.
Ask the community — no account required