By Two riders on motorcycles head towards a ski town in the Swiss pre-Alp region, and pull into the (free) car park of the cable car station that runs throughout the year. It is a warm & dry August evening. At the point of arrival, the two riders have approximately 3
Pioneering MTB cycle design in a shed, and in Hull!
Whilst very early mountain bike design was developing over in Marin County USA, and those pioneers were figuring out how to move from fat-tired Schwinn cruisers onto something a bit more ‘mountain’, something else was going on in a shed, in the UK. East Yorkshire to be precise, and in
The ‘Make-it-Yourself’ Time Trial bike – Part 1
Question: Have you ever made a model kit by companies like Airfix, Revell, Tamiya, IKEA or followed a complicated knitting or crochet pattern? Well here’s the same make-it-yourself format, but applied to a Time Trial bike. Much, much more information, instructions, pictures and wait for it, a ROAD TEST, will
The rare Swiss Barn Find
The bike featured here was for me, a genuine barn find, in that it was in the upstairs hay loft of a massive Swiss barn when I first set eyes on it for real. Before we say any more about the bike, lets just deal with this ‘barn find’ phenomenon
Broken Bones
My boss broke her elbow skiing in the early, unstable-snow part of the ski season. That’s cool! Having a boss who will aim high and ‘wear the plaster cast of failure’ is ‘leading by example’ in my books. Of course, I’ve been there and done that. My broken bones to
Going Underground (also the title of a well known song by The Jam) & hill climbing
I press the lift button to take us down to level 5. There are two of us in the lift and each with a bike. I’ve brought along my Cilo track bike as I’m not anticipating the need for brakes in this event. If I do need brakes, things have
I’ll never be good enough to pay the mortgage with my time trialling results, but that’s not the point is it?…..
Its 17:45, I look across the production lines over to my mate and then gesture with my head and eyes towards the door “let’s go”. We change out of our work kit and both briskly walk down the roadway between the two big production plants to our cars in the
The story of the Swiss Cilo bicycle company
In the 20th century, it is estimated that Switzerland was home to 200-300 bicycle brands, and the national Helvetia Bicycle Museum is in Brügg, near Biel, in the Canton Bern. With 16 manufacturers in the town, Biel was the Swiss bike capital. The top Swiss brands like Tebag, Staco, Cilo,
Tour de France Cinderella shoes
Two people meet at a party one summer evening in the middle of France somewhere, and in late June, 1975. They are dancing that evening to songs like ‘Jive Talking’ by The Bee Gees. They are having fun, fuelled by a couple of glasses of champagne. This means they are
Nice salami sir. Is that bicycle yours?
9 times out of 10, when you’re driving down the road in the Car, and one of the passengers spots something he/she/they want to stop and look at, either you’re going too fast to stop, there’s another car behind you, there’s nowhere to park or, you just can’t be arsed.