bicycle Archives | Alex Taylor

Cycling on up

Alex Taylor — Fri, 03 Aug 2018 12:09:28 +0000

I’ve been continuing with my experimentations and thoughts on cycling, and in particular extending my reflections on my first ‘Boris Bike’ journey recorded in 2014 (see this chapter). There’ll hopefully be more to come in the coming months that tie together the space-times I traversed with other records and different accounts.

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A video captured using the now defunct Autographer. It captures me purposely cycling beyond the usual routes mapped by the rental bikes. from the Aberfeldy Street docking station out through Newham to Green Street, along The Greenway/Northern Outfall Sewer, and then back to Bow.

Table of bike journeys on 3 Oct 2014. My journey from Aberfeldy Street to Bow is highlighted.

Graph of bike hires per day in 2014. Oct 3, the day of my journey is highlighted in green.

Graph of number of rides against duration on 3 Oct. My journey was 45, highlighted in green.

My heart rate variability (HRV) over the course of the bike ride.

1851 Census record of Plaistow households, including household of Elizabeth Frances Ireland.

Highlight of Elizabeth Frances Ireland in 1851 Census record of Plaistow households.

Estimated location of Prospect Fram, where Elizabeth Frances Ireland’s home is recorded in the 1851 Census — intersecting with my cycle route.

One Elizabeth Frances Ireland, beneficiary claimant to the Woodstock Plantation, St Ann, Jamaica, awarded compensation for enslaved people (see Legacies of British Slave-ownership archive).

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Newcastle APL Talk

Alex Taylor — Thu, 07 Jun 2018 10:07:24 +0000

Talking to the good people at Newcastle’s School of Architecture, Planning & Landscape (APL), I got the chance yesterday to develop and share my slowly evolving thoughts on bike journeys, bodies and fabulations.

Living Fruitfully in/with the conditions of (im-) possibilty

ABSTRACT

In this talk, I want to revisit a piece I wrote in 2016. The piece, a chapter in Dawn Nafus’ book Quantified (2016), was intended as a story of promise, a fabulation about London’s bike rental scheme and how it might be used to re-imagine new figurings of human-machine relations. Thinking across, askew, or “athwart” (Hustak & Myers 2013), my experimenting with the relational capacities of bicycles, a city, (bio)sensing and the proliferation of data-everywhere, aimed to resist the “agencies of homogenization” (Scott 1998) to explore the conditions of possibility for other worldings (Haraway 2016).

Reflecting on this work, I’ve felt a dissatisfaction with my efforts to throw together mixtures of data at all scales, with the attempts at thickening and enlivening the relations. It all felt too flat, too lacking in vitality. So, at the risk of appearing self indulgent, this talk will present some early ideas for a different story woven in and through the thicket of relations. Struggling to weave myself into London’s legacy with slavery and the violent erasures of bodies and agency (Hartman 2008), I’ll be trying to place myself at a much more fragile and tenuous juncture of space-time, but at the same time still seeking to work fruitfully in/with the conditions of (im-)possibility.

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Securing a bicycle saddle to a bike

Alex Taylor — Fri, 11 Dec 2015 22:25:57 +0000

Slightly off topic, but I thought it would be worth sharing my attempt at what might seam the trifling problem of securing a bike seat or saddle to a bike.

As many cyclists will know, seats or saddles can be a real target for thieves — I’ve had at least two stolen. The trouble is good saddles can get a reasonable price on the black market. If you’re in London, just pop down to Brick Lane on a Sunday and you’ll find the coveted and pricey Brooks saddles being flogged for 10s of £s.
To save myself the cost — not to say the uncomfortable ride home, saddle-less — I’ve been looking into ways to better secure my saddle. The crude option is to use some way of locking the saddle to the frame, like a small lock or part of a bike chain (see here for ideas). At the more expensive end there are dedicated bolts/nuts you can buy with personalised ‘keys’, such as the Saddle Lock from Atomic22 (~£29) and options from PitLock (although it’s not clear they have something to bolt the seat to the seat post). These look good, but they’re quite expensive and I’ve found if difficult to tell which options will fit my bike’s seat-post and saddle.
A solution I’ve come up with is to use a combination of a generic security bolt and nut. I’ve found both on an online shop called Security Safety Products.

Locking the seat to the seat post

First I chose a security bolt to replace the one that attaches my saddle to the seat post. To do that I measured the gauge (width) and length of the current bolt and then bought the corresponding security bolt and appropriate security screw.

I went for the M8 (8mm thread width) by 50mm long “Pin Hex Button head Mach.Screw” (M8x50mm), and the H50 security screw (the website tells you which screw you need).

What you get are 10 bolts (minimum order) and a small screw driver insert with a special fitting. The latter as the website explains “”
All I had to do is replace the original bolt that secures your saddle to the seat post, with the new security bolt.

Locking the seat and seat post to the bike frame

To secure the seat post to the bike I found a M8 security nut that fit the existing seat-post bolt, again on the Security Safety Products site. You can see from the picture on the left that the original nut was a standard well-used bolt.
Also, you need to buy the specific drive socket that fits the security nut — for me, this was a “Removable Security Nut 1/2 drive socket KM8R”. Not sure why, but this is pretty expensive at £17.99, so it may be worth looking for other options here.
The fitting is pretty straightforward. Use a standard spanner to unscrew the original nut and then the drive socket (attached to a socket ratchet or wrench) to screw on the new bolt.

A few general comments

The downside with this solution is you can only buy a minimum of 10 bolts and 10 nuts, but at £14.22 and £7.90 per pack (respectively), it’s not too painful. Don’t forget to factor in the cost of the security screw and drive socket though which in my case was £3.58 and £17.99. Also, although Security Safety Products provide a good service, their postal charges are quite steep.
Of course, nothing is failsafe, and this idea is vulnerable to thieves having the right fittings — I don’t think that’s likely, though, not until they read this post anyway.
Naturally, this idea won’t work with all seat and seat post fittings. It could work with different arrangements though, just make sure to get the right gauged nuts and bolts and that you’ve got enough room to tighten them with a screw diver or spanner.
If you’ve read this far and you think you need a M8 bolt or nut (and live close to East London) drop me a line. I’ll probably have spares of both.

Screw driver with replaceable fitting.
This kind of thing.

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