Rubber abuse#
Sun, 05 Mar 2006 12:00:00 +0000
No, I'm not completely shameless. If I were completely shameless, the post title would mention rubber and would pun on the word "screw". But the fact remains that yes, it's still all a big fraud to get misdirected traffic from people searching google for their favourite fetishes.
(Anything I say about Lycratm, if you insist, on the other hand, is entirely legitimate. Erm)
Yes, well. As I said a while back, I tabbed my frames to get rid of the ten degree cant. Inspecting them again recently I found that a couple of weeks even of low-intensity skating had compressed the non-slip PVC tape I'd used for that purpose so that what had started out as a couple of mm of rise had become much less pronounced over time, so this morning I decided to look for some alternative solution. The answer appeared to be a non-slip rubber bathmat which was half-price in Woolworths: cut bits out of it and stick them in the frame. Unfortunately, my first foray out with this new approach was the Sunday Stroll, during the course of which they also compressed slightly, or in fact enough that the heel bolt on the left frame came loose and then fell out. Fortunately I noticed the resulting rather odd skating experience ("what's that clicking noise?") before anything really bad happened, and was able to get a taxi to a skate shop from the Stroll halfway point. My luck continued to be good: the shop in question (Slick Willies; all hail Slick Wllies) had a suitably sized replacement bolt and I was in and out of it in just about enough time to rejoin the skate as it arrived on Knightsbridge just before it re-entered the Park. The moral: after playing with frames, tighten the bolts: in fact, probably leave them overnight to see what happens, then tighten them again before skating on them, then stop after a mile and tighten them again.
I am resigned to the prospect of having to get a second pair of skates for Sardinia (my current Crossmax are probably not ideal, really). Sucks, but there you are.
The good news is that the Sunday Stroll (using the same route as I designed a few weeks ago but was rained off) went ahead as planned. Which was nice.
[ Skating log: continues to be not a lot. Had planned to ride the bike on the LFNS, but it had mechanical troubles of its own (broken spokes) and by the time we'd got it back into storage from the start point - which involved carrying bits of it part of the way - the skate was pretty much finished. So, total for this week: Stroll RC yesterday ~ 12k; Half a stroll plus tarting in the park today: ~20k. Frankly, I feel worse now I've worked that out ]
I don't know what I've done to my hip abductors, but I'm really feeling it every time I snowplough. Damnit, I'm just falling apart completely, really.