I’ve been a bit too ill to cycle over the past week or so, with my head and lungs all full of snot and bogies. It’s not pretty, and on Friday, I didn’t even get to work! As bad as the trains are (they are really bad), I haven’t missed cycling – the weather’s been awful! I don’t mind the rain; it’s the wind that I hate the most, and it’s been particularly windy of late.
My life hasn’t been devoid of cycling stuff, though – I found some excuses to buy a few new bits! 🙂
First on the list is an Electronic Digital Vernier Caliper.
phoaaar! Electronic toolage! It’s a digital ruler, basically. 🙂 I bought it primarily to measure my seat tube, but I’m sure it’ll come in useful for measuring lots of other things. I can measure the width of my toes, or.. er.. why is that the only thing I can think of? :s
The seat tube was roughly 26.2mm, by the way. Measuring it with the caliper was trickier than expected..
The inner-width measurement guides had flat outers at the top, so it wasn’t completely flush to the inside of the tube. It could’ve possibly been 26mm, so I looked it up on Sheldon Brown’s Seatpost Size Database.
No Carlton’s from the right era, so check Raleighs.. 1974-ish.. 26.2mm… Super Course Mark II! 531 plain guage.
Wanna know what’s interesting about that? When I was trying to identify my bike from photos on the interweb, I only found two bikes that had the same lugs and seat stays as mine – a Carlton Ten, and a Raleigh Super Course Mark II! All 531-tubed Raleighs were built by Carlton in those days, so there’s a pretty good chance that they’re the same frames.
Add a 26.2mm seat post to the list!
The last purchase is something that I wasn’t sure if I needed; a helmet camera. Well, in my case it’s going to have to be a bag or frame camera, or a wooly hat camera, maybe. 😛 I bought it as a sort of security, and also out of curiosity, but mostly out of outright nerdiness!
I didn’t want to spend much on a camera, though. £40 tops. Without resorting to dubious-looking Chinese imports, that limited me to 640×480 resolution cameras. The Veho Muvi had good reviews, and came with a wealth of fitting options, but 640×480 seemed too small for the money. In this day and age, cameras with that resolution must be dirt cheap, so they must be absolutely raking in the cash! I don’t want to support that kind of operation, so I investigated something else that I’d seen recommended an awful lot – A Chinese ‘Mini DVR 808 #16‘ keychain camera.
This thing costs £30, has a 1280×720 resolution, and a lot of options. Battery life is a bit naff, but it can be upgraded with an external battery. They’re actually built by the ebay seller himself, which is pretty cool. Kind’ve like someone selling their amateur electronics projects, I guess. There’s a wealth of information about the cameras.. more than most ‘professional’ cameras have, so I feel a lot better about buying this than some of the suspicious Chinese stuff you see on ebay.
The only downside is that it’s going to take a couple of weeks to arrive. Naturally, I’ll update the blog a lot when I get it. 🙂