Bikes? Bike racing? Italian cars? Images? Music? Sustainable corporate environmental-ism? Ouch, my brain hurts! Just search gtveloce thanks!

Lijit Search

OffLine

For sustainability --> villages not motorways and car parks --> eco-friendly gadgets --> small cars, fast bicycles and a smaller footprint for humanity on this planet...

Saturday, March 27, 2010

This blog has moved


This blog is now located at http://welloffline.blogspot.com/.
You will be automatically redirected in 30 seconds, or you may click here.

For feed subscribers, please update your feed subscriptions to
http://welloffline.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default.

Friday, March 12, 2010

Caterpillar into butterfly: proving metamorphosis works to a 3 year-old (almost 4!)

We've read about it, and like most of us he knows the theory. But is it for real? Like tadpoles growing into frogs, caterpillars turn into butterflies. Yeah, right. As if. So we carefully captured a fat stripey caterpillar and temporarily relocated him/her/it from a ficus in a pot to a plastic bug holder. Within 2 days we had a lumpy blobby chrysalis that dried overnight to a dramatic gold sheen. And a week or so later emerged a Common Crow butterfly (black with white spots). Theory turned into practice, we let the butterfly flutter by, off to sip nectar somewhere nice....

Posted via email from gtveloce's posterous

Friday, March 05, 2010

The 20 year old Look KG76 wore out so I got another Felt. (Warning: bicycle pics attached.)

Monday, February 01, 2010

Some pics of local central coast cockatoos including full-flap landings at my seed bowl (OK, their seed bowl)

Bike stuff. I swear this shifter cable was perfectly fine a week, or maybe a month, ago. Or was it?

Clearly it wasn't. Despite knowing that I should clean, inspect, lube and replace cables (having broken plenty of gear cables in my time, and clutch and accelerator cables in cars, too) somehow this one passed me by. In hindsight I knew I had a problem. I saw the cable wearing against the head tube and I should have wrapped it with some tape. I also noticed the lack of responsiveness in shifting but I assumed it was related to cable tension and friction, and having lubed it where I thought it "needed it", I left it at that. Indeed, performance had improved markedly, so I thought I had nailed it. Then yesterday it started to skip gears, or shift belatedly under power. At the end of the ride it refused to go into the smallest gear. No big deal, I thought. I'll adjust it later. But later didn't come.

Instead I went for another training ride today and forgot about yesterday's problems. Until I tried to grab a bigger-diametre rear cog. No dice. It would go up but not down the range. (Which is to say I could grind out a bigger, harder gear but I wasn't going to get a smaller, easier ratio if I needed it. Considering I live on a hill this was no small thing.) That's when I started playing with the cables, looking for a kink - whoa. That's not a kink. That's a snap. You'd think after almost 30 years of bike riding I'd be on top of this stuff... but complacency never lets up, does it?

Posted via email from gtveloce's posterous

blog comments powered by Disqus

-->

These posts represent my opinions only and may have little or no association with the facts as you see them. Look elsewhere, think, make up your own minds. If I quote someone else I attribute. If I recommend a web site it's because I use it myself. If an advert appears it's because I affiliate with Google and others similar in nature and usually means nothing more than that... the Internet is a wild and untamed place folks, so please tread warily. My opinions are just that and do not constitute advice or legal opinion of any sort.
All original material is copyright 2008 by myself, too, in accord with the Creative Commons licence (see below).



QuickLinks: Addicted2Wheels Autoexpo 2000 GTVeloce Automotive Gallery GTVeloce.com GTVeloce Image Library Fort Street High School Class of 75 All purpose Chatroom Userplane Chat Fortian Image Gallery 1975 Flora Gallery Miscellaneous Image Gallery Bike Racing Gallery Airliner Gallery Airline Postcard Gallery Gerry's Gallery GTVeloce rave on Alfa Romeos Alfa Gallery Automotive How-to Index Staying Alive Handling 101 Handling 102 Handling 103 Tyrepressures Camber Toe Caster Polar Moment Roll Oversteer Understeer Weight transfer Coil springs Wheels and Tyres Pitch Heel and Toe Double Declutch Offset Rollbars BMEP calculator Cornering load calculator GTVeloce Blog Offline Blog Out Out Damned Blog Addicted2Wheels Blog The Spiel on business MBA Resources HR Resources KM Reframed Bike Racing forum KlausenRussell Com-munity Chain Chatter Unofficial RBCC info Official RBCC info Unofficial CCCC info Official CCCC info Rob's Guide to Road, Crit and Track Racing Rob's Guide, part 2 Track race tips Sydney's Velodromes What do those lines mean? Automobile links Mustknow links Philosophy links Music Links Images of the Russell, Matthews, O'Brien and Brown families in Australia Rob's Amateur Art Gallery The GTVeloce GiftShop The GTVeloce Shopfront Rob Russell's images at Image Tank



Creative Commons License