Surly?

This winter has been quite hard in the cycle trade with poor weather followed by poorer weather followed by unbeleivably poor weather. This puts off most people with a brain from riding a bike with any kind of regularity and means the shop is quieter than normal. The advantage from my point of view is it gives all of us the chance to cnsume huge amounts of tea/coffee and talk about how the shop develops further. Our store is not blessed with huge amounts of passing trade and having half the catchment area populated by fish is not a great help either. We need to offer a range of products that maybe aren't available in every store  but suit our customer base the modern term for this is a "destination store." So after many cups of tea and packets of biscuits we decieded that we were perfect and didn't need to do anything!

That was my conclusion but apparantly everyone else thought differently so after a bit of research and 500 miles of driving in 12 hours we are pleased to become SURLY dealers. They offer a wide range of touring, cross and mountain bikes that we can have as frame only or complete bikes. They come in a very wide range of sizes so that will allow us to offer a very custom fit. It also comes with the added advantage of matching the staff attitude :))

Folding is the future

As a forward looking company with our finger on the racing pulse of the cycle industry we were amazed to discover that you can buy a small wheel bike that folds up!! WOW.

Only joking we have thought long and hard about folding bikes over the past 2 years and have come to the conclusion that the lack of folding bike sales is directly linked to the fact we don't stock em! So with that in mind we are going to be DAHON dealers for the next couple of years. After looking at the choice of brands available to us they seem to have a great range of prices as well as models to suit different needs. As is common with all our brands we only stock something that is available, repairable, reliable and excites us. The saddle bag on the bike is actually a cover that fastens around the bike and allows you to carry it on the train or store it in the car/camper van/caravan as if it was a large holdall. Very cool and very well thought out.

Cyclefit London

I think my brain has finally stopped hurting after being down in London to learn from the bike fitting gurus at Cyclefit. I started doing bike fits about 10 years ago on a very basic level using a turbo in the corner of the shop. As the shop got busier and kids came along I just didnt have the time to fit the bike fitting in even though I enjoyed doing it and seemed to be resonably good at it. This winter I have completed a course (SICI) that has given me new understanding of bike fitting and the link between the body and contact areas (pedals/shoes, saddle and bars).

The last trip down was looking at the shoe/cleat set up and also the new technology of Dartfish motion analysis. With each trip my wish list of parts, tools and technology gets longer and longer! So what is the point of all this? Well....you will have to wait and see!