All my housemates have finished their degrees, and have now disappeared for good. It seems that all my friends are dropping off the edge. I still have another year to go, and sitting here in an empty house that for the past two years has been home to some of the special people in my life is a strange feeling. It is the end of an era, and the beginning of a new one.

Each of my housemates have their quirks, such as the inability to stay silent or being unable to shower in less than 4 hours, but the fact remains that I have enjoyed living and sharing my life with them over the past two years, and wish them the best of luck in whatever is round the corner.

In the meantime, I have Bryan Adams to keep me company, with helpful lyrics such as:

I’ve been wandering around the house all night
wondering what the hell to do …
well the phone don’t ring ’cause my friends ain’t home
I’m tired of being all alone
Got the tv on …
days go on and on, and the nights just seem so long
Even food don’t taste that good, drink ain’t doing what it should
things just feel so wrong …
I keep driving up and down these streets
trying to find somewhere to go
Yeah i’m looking for a familiar face, but there’s no one I know
oh, this is torture, this is pain, it feels like I’m gonna go insane
I hope you’re coming back real soon, ’cause i don’t know what to do

Since my exams I have had a lot to do, but much of it has been general admin stuff: not really inspiring. However, in the past few weeks I have had the opportunity to consider what really inspires me, and a few people have helped me through the thought process.

Last week I went to a meeting of Christan entrepreneurs which considers the role the church can play within running successful and ethical businesses. There I talked to a gentleman who works with business startups in Birmingham about the book ‘Now discover your strengths’ and the associated online strengths finder test. He took the test a while ago, and although finding no startling revelation about himself, it did allow his to reassess his priorities in light of what he enjoyed.

I recently talked to an old friend on the phone, who explained to me how since her term had finished she had been learning all the world’s countries and their capitals. This struck a cord in me, because since organising my trip to South Africa I decided that I should know all the countries in Africa and something about the geography of the area, and have been trying to learn them.

In the past few days, one of my housemates has started playing the guitar. I have still not been able to overcome my first hurdle (spelling guitar!) but I have been inspired to give it a go. I have no idea how long this attempt will last, but time will tell. I’m currently on the lookout for songs that I know that consist only of A,C,D,G and E: Bryan Adams and The Corrs are scoring highly, although both have nasty bar cords in them occasionally.

Many people do not admit to like schooling, but I love learning, I like knowing things and look forward to a challenge, and I don’t think I am alone.

It felt like it might never come, but here it is, finally! Eight exams later I can emerge from my procrastination state to complete the many tasks that have been waiting for this very moment.

Forms for stuff I am doing over the summer and a call to return off the bank wondering why I have no money are just a few of the many tasks I now have to complete. At least I have almost made a to-do list- virtual post-it notes on my computer desktop.

Anyway, back to the exams: Six of the eight exams were, perhaps as I arrogantly put it ‘A walk in the park on a sunny day’, one was mediocre and one was really quite nasty. I don’t think I would have done badly in it, but I annoyed myself how much I had forgotten since last year.

Roll on the summer!

It was a while since I last posted an update on my bike project. On 1st May I had to give a presentation to a few folks in the Engineering department and this spurred me on to make some progress.

Over the past eight months many designs were come upon, some more sensible than others, but each sporting at least one good idea. Here are a few of those designs:

The final design takes aspects of many of the ideas, and is currently under construction.

Today we went on a uni trip to Hockerton Housing Project. It was organised by Colin, who in lectures has always seemed very enthusiastic about this housing development. After visiting for myself I can see why!

“The Hockerton Housing Project is the UK’s first earth sheltered, self-sufficient ecological housing development. Project members live a holistic way of life in harmony with the environment, in which all ecological impacts have been considered and accounted for. The residents of the five houses generate their own clean energy, harvest their own water and recycle waste materials causing no pollution or carbon dioxide emissions. The houses are amongst the most energy efficient, purpose built dwellings in Europe.” [link to their website]

Before I arrived, I had mixed feelings about this place. I assumed that anyone that lives underground must be a hippy who lives an ethical but boring life, and needs regular large spliff of ganja to maintain the illusion that all is well.

On arrival, apart from the coach almost getting stuck in the lane we were greeted by a three fairly normal looking people (they were normal when you were expecting hobbits) and one other person which I am reliably informed was the infamous Colin himself. We were split into four groups and led on a tour around the few acres that the settlement owned.

The land looked well tended, and the few sheep that they had seemed well looked after. In places there were quite a few weeds, but I guess they are not keen on the monoculture that we are so accustomed too.

They grow 80% of the veg they eat themselves, and a decent proportion of their own fruit. They produce pretty much all of the electricity they use, and eat their own reared meat. If all the world stopped, I am not sure they would really notice!

What surprised me most about the place is how normal it all was. Yes, there was grass on the roof, and the insides of the homes were quite quaint but they certainly were not dark, damp caves I might have been expecting. They were large, light and airy – and plenty warm enough too.

Inside were telephones, toasters, computers, even broadband wireless routers! These cave dwellers seemed to have taken our western lifestyle, made a couple of excellent changes to the construction of their house, learnt how to grow a few herbs and live happily ever after.

I was very impressed. The guy who took us on our tour told us that when they were built, they only cost about £60k. Ok, that was 8 years ago now and they did do much labour themselves, but seriously that is very little when you consider the intelligent design that has gone into these buildings and the fact that they cost peanuts to run.

After the tour there was a short presentation, which was quite informal but certainly interesting. I very nearly bought a book on green design, but refrained after I realised that I spend enough of my time procrastinating, let alone designing again the house I want to self build.

All in all it was a very interesting trip, and one which has really made me think about how the construction of houses has to improve – perhaps not though legislation and the dreaded part L but through people wanting to change the way they live by embracing new technology and materials in a traditional and sensible energy efficient setting.

My only concern is for my good friend Steve the plumber, who installs central heating. This house (and my house when I build it) has none!

We have been wanting to do some coast-down tests on the recumbent bike for a while in order to find out the drag coefficient, but have been unable to collect the relevant data. What you need is speed against time – on a graph then the gradient would be accelleration, and the area under would be distance.

We thought of a number of ingenious ways to do this, but none seemed very simple. Here is a quick summary of ideas we had.

• Using a cycle computer, shout out the speed at regular intevals to someone writing them down. We decided this was impractial.
• Put pressure sensors in the road at regular intevals connected to an old computer. The computers that we had data loggers for were old bbc’s – and they don’t transport on a bike very well unless we had 100m of power cable!
• Using a camcorder, record the speed on the cycle computer over the journey. The problem with this was finding a suitable mouting point on the bike for the camera (I spent ages hunting around at uni and shops for a 1/4 inch witworth thread, before I found one in my junk box). After thinking some more about this, we came to the conclusion that the cycle computer must average the speed over some time, and so the data is not as accurate as it could be.
• Mount some bright flags on some of the spokes, and then mount a camcorder on the bike. After filiming the motion of the wheel over the run, step through the frames and record the positon of the flags. Aside from the issue of mounting the camera over the wheel, I didn’t fancy stepping through (3 runs x 6 speeds x 30fps x 60seconds) 32400 frames and marking the position of flags. I am sure it would be possible to write a program to do this, but just don’t go there.

It seemed like what should be a simple task was getting needlesly complicated, until I had an idea.

At home I found an old wireless mouse, and with the middle finger scroll butted against the wheel and some gaffer tape around the bike, I span the wheel. A few lines of code later on my linux box, I had a lovely list of numbers in front of me!

I plotted the numbers, and found that they didn’t plot well. The mouse was trying to scream ‘I’ve just moved’ about 8000 times a second, and something didn’t like all that screaming.

My bike wheel is 700mm in diameter, and the mouse scroll wheel was about 20mm. At 30mph my bike wheel spins 6.1 times per second, and the poor mouse wheel would be spinning at 214 revs per second. That 12810 rpm, and it is no wonder something couldn’t cope!

Going back to the drawing board I decided that I must take a mouse apart. Not wanting to destroy my nice wireless mouse, I found an old ps2 mouse which I soon had in peices. I soldered a few more wires and a reed switch onto it, and did a bit of jigery pokery with magnets on my bike and hey presto, I had a data logger!

If only life was so simple. I turned my laptop on, transferred the few lines of code I had written to collect the data, and plugged my mouse in – or at least I tried to. Apparently ps2 was not on the menu when my laptop was ordered, and so that port that I had never used on the back of my lappy which I thought was ps2 on closer inspection turned out to be a s-video out.

Back to ebay, and a usb to ps2 converter solved the problem. It now all works well! Now to get this gear on the recumbent.

Now for the next issue – There is nowhere to put a bag on a recument, because your back is against a seat. It is possible to put a small bag on your front, but your knees bang it every cycle. Not really the treatment for a laptop, but hey, anything for science. Lets do it!

Not so fast! Overnight it had snowed. I couldn’t take the recumbent out in the snow – it is unstable enough in the dry, especially at the kinds of speeds I was hoping to reach.

Tomorrow, Tomorrow, Tomorrow. Maybe one day.

At the beginning of second year, I bought a cheap new bike off ebay. As well as being brand new and dirt cheap, it was also rubbish.

For a term it got be to uni and back, and I even bought a trailer for it. It soon began to let me down after I snapped a spoke cycling down a set of steps on campus and I had to replace the spoke and retune my rear wheel.

Coming back after Christmas, I was cycling to uni and the freewheel went. John had to push me the rest of the way. I later walked back home with my bike, and took the freewheel apart. The small metal parts which engages the teeth had disintegrated, and so were pretty useless.

I attempted to put it back together, and it lasted a few more cycling minutes before failing again, and again. The only real solution was to get a new freewheel, but the bike wasn’t worth it.

Time to go shopping.

Today me and John spent about 3 hours cycling as different speeds up and down Lakeside, measuring our speeds and distance travelled when we stopped peddling.

First we found a bit that was flat, or at least consistently uphill. Then we found a marker at the start of this flat patch where we would stop peddling.

Cycling back about 100 meters, we sped towards the marker at a ‘constant’ known speed, stopped peddling then measured the distance it took us to stop.

The recumbent always went further, although at lower speeds the difference was less marked.

Today me and John bought some bamboo canes from Homebase, together with some cable ties and twine and made a frame around his upright bike.

We had a basic idea of what it would look like, but it is quite hard to think about where cross members shouldn’t be, as they tend to get in the way.

After getting most of the way though the construction of it in my bedroom, we realised that it had to fit through the door and so shaved a few inches of a couple of bits ‘just to make sure’.

When we finished it was dark outside, but we took it out anyway. It was strange to ride, and it felt like driving a bus. Corners had to be taken wider as this frame stuck out both in front and behind. Due to the quality of engineering that went into making it, your feet often got caught on a structral part which was a bit awkward. Getting on an off was a pain, and nearly resulted in me in a hedge. Other than that, it rode fine and did not impair the riders visability in any way.

When I moved back to uni, I visited Tescos and bought all the neccessary bits and peices of food for the next week or so. I came to cycle the 1.5 miles home, and found it a bit of a strugle. A large backpack with all my uni stuff in, and bags of food hanging off every surface.

On the way back, when I was not fully occupied keeping the bike balanced I realised that a trailer would be a helpful addition to my random collection of bike parts, and decided to look into making one.

When I got home I did some research on the legality of using trailers on bikes, and there did not seem to be much, other than reflectors and lights being needed at night.

Then my attention turned to ebay. There were new bike trailers selling for £30 + £10 postage, and I did not think that I could make one for less than that even with the generous amounts of bike parts in my back garden. It also came complete with a towball, and had a rating of 50kg. Now I will not mention names, but I have a small female housemate who weighs in at 45kg, so even she could sit in my trailer, being pulled around like a dog.

A few weeks later, and a very large parcel arrives from Germany. Carefully unpacking it yeilded a large grey box, lots of steel tubing, two wheels and a pile of bolts. The instructions that came with it were useless, and I resorted back to my intuition and managed to get something that looked roughtly how it should. The bolts that were supplied were of very poor quality, and I sheared a lot of the threads off when tightning things up. I was not using a torque wrench, but I know that bolts should not be loose.

The next problem was the towball. It was all nice and shiney, but I could not figure a way to fix it on. After hitting it with a large hammer, I got it to fit around my seat post stem. However, when the trailer was loaded it tended to bend the ball downwards, putting a large force on the locking screw keeping the trailer fixed to the ball.

About a week later, I realised how the ball was meant to be fixed on. Of course it needed some modification to work, but it was a much better solution. All I needed to do was saw through the 3mm steel bracket with my junior hacksaw with 50p blades. Needless to say, the blades took most of the impact and my trusty swiss army knife saw to the rest of the bracket. Once I had taken the right amount of steel off (and replaced the poor quality bolt that had sheared) the bolt was threaded though the seat post bolt, and the bottom of the bracket rested on the top of the A frame, as shown in the picture. This resulted in a horizontal ball that was fairly sturdy. However, now the beam of the trailer could potentially interfere with the pannier rack, and so I lowered the back of the panier rack to give plenty of clearance.

I have used the trailer for quite a few shopping trips, and have found it very useful. It allows me to save on plastic bags, as the items go straight in the grey box. However, the trailer does have some problems associated with it, which I will now consider.

When you have a load in the box, perhaps greater than 15kg you can feel the affect on your bike brakes. The trailer wants to continue going forward and if you primarily use your front brake to stop yourself (which you should!) it creates a moment above the center of the rear wheel, and so helps you go over your handlebars. If the trailer was fixed onto the bike at the centre of the rear wheel, as in the photo on the right you would still have to brake harder but you would not get the turning moment to help you over your handlebars.

The grey box is loose, and it rattles around a lot, especially when ridden on the lovely Coventry roads. I fixed this issue with a few bungie cords strapped around it, which also help stop your shopping dispensing itself on the road.

When you are cycling with it on, you have to be constantly aware that it is there – otherwise you could find yourself stopped abruptly by a bollard. There can be no weaving in and around traffic, and you have to be careful when turning because it turns a little later than the bike does and tends to catch on things. I improved the design slightly by insetting the capped nuts for the wheels by a few milimeters, just to take them to the inside of the main sidebar. This reduces the amount of paint I knock off things when I get too close.

The final problem with the trailer is keeping it. When I take it shopping I have to take two locks with me, as my one D-lock is not big enough to go around both my bike and trailer.

Despite the problems, the trailer is very useful to me and although I get some funny looks when it is attatched to my rear end it was well worth the money in novelty value and usefulness.