A Human Powered Vision of the Future

Regulars here at the Bicycle Safari will notice the two new ad banners on the pages for Vision of the Future. But rather than this being some smart company buying in on the ground floor, it's my new project! I had the idea for making a shirt celebrating the choice of being human powered, whilst maybe staying a bit more stylish for the bicycle lane fashion parade, knocking around for a while, and it felt like the time to give it a try and see how it goes!

They're printed on sweat-shop labour free ringspun cotton t-shirts, and are screen printed by hand in the UK using only waterbased inks to avoid the toxic by products of chemical printing inks.

It's called Vision of the Future, and have a click over the new site, to see what you think!

How to find a puncture using a mudguard

Here's a little change of pace from the usual old bike logos that make up the bread and butter of The Bicycle Safari. It's a little trick I stumbled into when my Hateful Raleigh Beater bike took a puncture yesterday morning. Strangely I haven't heard of it as a tip before, and google isn't showing much, so maybe this will be new to you too!

Rear tire was completely flat when I went to take the bike out, so tried my usual tactic of re- inflating the tube and seeing if I could hear the air coming out from anywhere. Unfortunately, no luck, and I didn't fancy taking the wheel and tyre off to do a more thorough job of finding the hole. But then I had a little brain wave.

Being my everyday commuter, it's got proper mudguards (fenders, if you like) and the rear one is a decent tyre enclosing full length affair. So I fetched a glass of water, and with the bike upside down, filled the fender!

My fender runneth over!

With a quick spin of the wheel, a tell-tale stream of little bubbles appeared from a near imperceivable hole in the tyre, now submerged in my flooded fender!

So then I was able to lever off that one section, pull the tube out for a quick patching, then back together for a speedy repair! Pulling this trick off with the much shorter front mudguard would be a bit more challenging, but maybe one day this little hack will help you out!

When your bike meets a snow plow!

A while back I shared a picture of a bike absolutely buried in a snow drift in snowy Sweden. At the time I joked this might be a good alternative to a lock, because no one's going to bother digging your bike out. Well here's the retort to that idea...

As spring starts to melt the giant snow drifts left by the snow plows in Sweden, this mangled wreck appears out of the ice.

I guess this is why...

...you shouldn't trust your bike to be safe in the snow!

Is it an old bike, or is this just retro?

Pashley are a strange bicycle make, as they remain as basically the only large scale domestic bike manufacturer in the UK, but their dominant product are bikes modelled on old bikes.

Which makes it strange when you see a Pashley, because you don't know if it's an old Pashley bike form back in the day, or a modern version which is built almost exactly the same.

The rod brakes on this one makes me think it is at least a few decades old, but who knows.

The Concorde Lepper saddle from Holland does answer anyone's questions.