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With a bit of bodging and machining special parts, I’ve fitted a Schlumpf High Speed Drive to a Brompton…

It took a lot more bodging than I thought it would, but I’ve just finished the first Brompton with the new wide-range Sturmey Archer 8-speed hub. Now I know how to do it, the other 10 on the waiting list will be easy 😉

This bike also has a Mountain Drive…

Also in the stack of old brochures I found was this Neatwork brochure. Neatwork were one of the very first reumbent companies, based in Coldstream in the Scottish Borders, and they had a really fun weekend event every year with pub crawls by bike, trips around the countryside, the chance to try out lots of expensive toys, and camping by the river.

Unfortunately they were too ahead of their time, and went bust more than a decade ago. As have, unfortunately, every manufacturer on this brochure 😉

(Well, Kingcycle didn’t go bust, but they quit making bikes a long time ago)

I found an old brochure, from when Kinetics was called Griffon Cycles (there was a good reason, but I can’t remember what it was), more than 10 years ago.

The interesting thing, though – check out the price of a Streetmachine, add on 10 years of inflation, and see how good value they are now 😉

I found a small stack of these old postcards amongst some bike papers – I think my parents found them a few years ago…

Just fitted a Rohloff hub to an Optibike electric bike – the internal cabling was a bit fiddly, but it looks very tidy…

Yesterday I spent the day filming with The Gadget Show (Channel 5) – they were having a race between two unusual tandems; a Hase Pino and a Greenspeed tandem trike – racing from Arthur’s Seat to Edinburgh Castle.

The Pino won – though, for the sake of accuracy, I should point out that the race was run in several stages with lots of takes 😉

I’m very grateful to Keith Russell for the loan of his Pino – due to a mix-up with timing, the one Hase sent is still in transit. I’ll have a demo Pino in the shop by the end of the week, though – it’s one of the new folding aluminium ones…

With a bit of modification, the Heinzmann Lithium batteries fit very neatly into the frame of even a small MTB…

I’ve just realised – this week is the 10th anniversary of Kinetics 🙂

10 years ago on Monday, I opened the doors of a wee shop just around the corner from here – it was looking a bit sparse as the demo bikes were really my old hacked-about StreetMachine and a few other things, and I couldn’t afford any proper shop fittings or decoration so a few friends came over to help with the painting and building counters and benches out of scrap wood.

10 years on, and quite a bit has changed – for one thing, in that first week where I took £43, I wasn’t sure that the business would survive 6 months, let alone still be going 10 years later. Then, about a dozen Bromptons a year were being sold in Glasgow, and it took a whole year before I sold my first recumbent – back then, I survived on repairing cheap bikes and selling parts and accessories.

It’s still a lot of hard work, and in a lot of ways I still miss the security of having a proper job (though, perhaps, not in the current climate) – I left a well-paid job at IBM to do this, which at the time seemed very reckless, but I’ve never regretted it. The money isn’t as good, the stress is at least as high, and the responsibility is much greater, but instead of sitting in a suit in a big office all day, I get to play with bikes 🙂

Just finished fitting S&S torque couplings to this frame…