spikey

Sorry, I really am trying here but I seem to having some kind of mental block. I just can't see how I can ride a bike while using heat pads to keep my hands warm. How does that work?

Maybe I'm being a bit thick here, but I don't understand. Heat pads would certainly warm my hands up quickly once they were cold, but that would be guaranteed to cause chilblains. How might they stop them getting cold in the first place?

Would that it were that simple. Apparently they work well for folk with normal fingers, but those of my right hand are anything but nowadays. The capillaries are in a bit of a state, so the crux of the matter is that whatever I wear on my hands, if I ride a bike for more than 15 minutes or so when it's really cold, I risk a couple of days of debilitating itching and extreme tenderness in the fingers followed by 10-14 days of susceptibility to further damage if a finger is knocked or scraped. Hence me typing this with a woollen glove on my right hand. I've tried just about everything else, so the next step is heated gloves and sod the expense. It's either that or give up riding my bike when it gets a bit nippy. ETA - Three different pairs of electrically-heated gloves now ordered, at least two of which will be going back PDQ. Keep tuned for the next thrilling instalment in this saga.

I didn't know that, so thank you. Always good to keep up to speed with these things

Indeed. What I would really like though is a pair of gloves which will allow me to keep riding a bike in very low temperatures + windchill without risking a recurrence of the debilitating chilblains in the fingers of my right hand, to which I am alas prone nowadays. Silk inners + a pair of Lowe Alpine mountaineering gloves works up to a point, as does inners + Thinsulate-lined claw gloves, but that's about it. I've tried adapting some neoprene handlebar muffs of the type favoured by riders of old MZ and Jawa motorcycles but to no avail, and I am advised by a biker friend that a worthwhile pair of heated gloves with their own battery is upwards of £140.

Gosh. I'm out somewhere on one bike or the other every day of the week, rain or shine, all year round unless there's ice about, but I guess the last "proper ride" I had was 20-odd years ago. Even then, though, it was barely 40 miles. But whatever, it was interesting yesterday coming home the pretty way from the next village. As I was climbing the steepest hill, which was also the most open to the incredibly blustery sidewind from the left, just before the right-hand bend at the top I spotted in the mirror a car closing rapidly. I heard him drop a gear and put his foot down, I instinctively started braking and pulled tight into the nearside verge, he just missed clipping my right hand - and he came very close indeed to smacking into the car coming the other way round the bend braking hard. Nothing particularly unusual so far, but the interesting bit was what matey was driving - black Audi, mystery glass, personalised plate ... and across the back of it a very fancy-looking black road bike with tri bars.

It would help greatly if car manufacturers were obliged to make indicators clearly visible from as wide an angle as possible, rather than prioritising styling and only just complying with the minimal legal requirements on position, size and brightness. Then we might have a better chance of seeing them, especially when the car is turning. Maybe everybody should be compelled to drive a Mk3 or Mk4 Ford Cortina ...

Gosh, thank you gentlemen for your prompt assistance! That does indeed work, but oh my what a great deal of faffing. I shall have to be very selective about what we save ...

The Lady Wife and I have both recently gone over to Chromebooks after years of Windoze, on which we used LibreOffice. We consequently have a fair few .odt files, with which a Chromebook doesn't want to play. What's the best format to change those files into so that henceforth we can open them on any variety of puter, and what's the best way of doing the conversion? It would be nice if we can edit them after conversion if we need to, and if we can do all of this without spending any money, that would be even better. I have done a fair bit of searching for the answers, but tbh this kind of lark is well outside my comfort zone and I'm afeared of ending up with a bunch of corrupted files in an unreadable format ...

Psychologists have a term for that argument/mindset but I'm damned if I can remember what it is now. It's the same frame of mind that attributes all of the blame for a car-dooring to the driver who opened the door just as the cyclist was passing. It never occurs to them to wonder how much at fault the cyclist might be the for allowing themselves to get into a position in which they could be car-doored ...

Ref the above, it always puzzles me why, particularly at this time of year of low sun and often wet roads, so many roadies in this neck of the woods go out in stealth mode. Matching matt black bike, Lycra and helmet seem to be the current epitome of roadie cool, and any kind of light is seemingly out of fashion. It also seems not to occur to many Cyclists that if the vehicle approaching head-on is heading straight into the sun, the driver thereof may well have trouble seeing them, even in the unlikely event that he or she (or whatever else) is paying proper attention to their driving.

But how is the j-cloth affixed to the roller so as to stay put even when soaked in fluid?

Don't forget to go up on the outer track if your helix is twin track ...

Cheers chaps. I should have made it clear that the facing points are both fired by the CDU via the one centre-off momentary SPDT switch. The GM500 is used for switching the frogs on both points simultaneously. I note the suggestion of changing to a DPDT switch + pushbuttons, but for me the obvious thing to do is introduce a second GM500 so each point has its own, keep the one momentary switch, and use one of the spare sets of relay contacts to switch the LEDs.

I'm actually in my mid-seventies, hence by my definition I'm certainly a wrinkly. However, the only time we've ever had an issue getting a slot for home deliveries was right at the start of lockdown 1 when the supermarkets hadn't yet got their acts together. Since then we've averaged one delivery every 12 days and I can truthfully say that we've never once had a problem getting a slot. "You should also recognise" that in my post I did say There will obviously be some people somewhere who simply cannot get a delivery from a supermarket. That's why in the above quote I said "most of".

While lack of funds prevent me from progressing with my facing three-ways/frog switching/point motors issue as per my other thread, I'm now wondering if I can effect an improvement in another area of the layout. I have a pair of facing points (i.e. standard 2-way electrofrog) with Gaugemaster PM2 solenoids which are fired via a single GM500 relay in order that both respond to the same switch movement on the panel. This means that all six outputs of the GM500 are used. It would be nice if I could have indication on the panel of which way the relay/points are switched, but it's not obvious to me how I might do that, given that the relay output I'd normally use is already used. Is there a relatively simple way of achieving my objective?

True indeed - up to a point. But most people nowadays do have access to the internet, or they know somebody who does, or they can get assistance from various sources which will enable them to shop online. Therefore the only reason why most of the wrinklies who keep shopping in person continue to do so is because they want to. Not because they have to. And from that it follows that it's their choice to accept the risk of infection.

Cheers for the link. I actually stumbled upon it earlier this afternoon. I'm still in shock at the likely cost of solving this little problem ...

Thank you, but the recurrent theme in my later posts is that nobody has any stock of MTB point motors. It's them I need to find a supplier of.

Thank you very much indeed, gentlemen. I'm rather partial to rotary switches Right then, all I have to do is save up some money and find somewhere that actually has four of these things which I can buy ...

That is indeed the arrangement of the facing three-ways. If it ever gets light enough, I'll try and get a snap of the diodes later on.

And if you would care to refer back to my post immediately below that, you will see that on the first line it says

Sorry, but I can't make sense of that. You use self-latching relays to do what? What type exactly (eg a part number?)? How exactly do you "just" connect them to the point motor? They are code 75 and the diodes are 1N400x. So are you saying that instead of the "outputs" of the existing matrix going from the CDU to one coil or the other of the relevant solenoid as required, they would simply feed the 12v to the appropriate side of the BMP unit as if from an SPDT switch?

Thinking further about this, if I were to swap my four solenoids for MTB motors (assuming of course that it's ever possible to buy some), how might I go about switching my pair of facing three-ways? They form three storage loops, and at present the solenoids are activated by the CDU via a basic diode matrix and three push-buttons, one for each loop. I can't see an obvious way of keeping things that simple ...

I don't mind you commenting at all. I've probably only done 40 or so of them over the years, and what with deteriorating eyesight and the advancing arthritis in my hands, it's true that the more recent ones are less than perfect. However, nobody but me will ever see that and it's made no difference whatsoever to the mechanical integrity of the point, so I can live with it. WIT operating is attractive on the face of it, but if nothing else I really couldn't be doing with all the pushing and pulling required to operate a pair of facing three-way points every time I need to use my storage loops.