What to Look for (registration rights) in a Bicycle Frame
No commentsBy Daron Soto
For most of us, well-intentioned but casual bike riders who secretly believe we might be Lance Armstrong’s heir if we only had a few more hours a day to spend on our bicycles, buying a new road bike is tantamount to buying a road bike frame. The frame is what we’re thinking of, something new and shiny and colorful, something we suspect even car drivers envy when they see us flash through the snarl of traffic. Truly, a road bike frame is a beautiful thing and part of the reason we love bicycling.
When you have the good fortune to be looking at new bicycles, though, you definitely want to look at a few elements besides the color of a road bike frame. Face it. When you’re on your way back home from a long Sunday ride and you’re riding your thirty-fifth mile smack into a stiff headwind, the fact that your frame is cobalt blue or even Bianchi green is not going to help you. The length of your seat tube is going to help you and the length of your top tube and even the angle of the three main tubes all put together is going to help (or hinder) you, but color is not.
If you shop at a discount store or even a general purpose sports store, if you get any help at all in choosing a bike that fits you, it will probably consist of a clerk instructing you to stand over the top bar of the frame and see if you can comfortably straddle it with your feet on the floor. This is not really particularly helpful, especially if you happen to have anything unique about your physique, like long legs combined with a short torso. If you have long legs, you can straddle almost any bike, but will your body be able to relax comfortable in the stretch between your saddle and the handlebars? The whole geometry of the road bike frame matters a lot to fit. And fit matters excessively to comfort.
If you’re a racer, comfort will not be your only consideration. Indeed, it may be down among the last elements you consider. Speed is not usually built from comfort, and the road bike frame that promotes speed is built of different materials than one used primarily for recreational riding. Frames can be made of titanium, chrome-moly, aluminum or steel, and each metal has different advantages of weight and strength. Frame geometry varies, too, with touring bikes featuring a longer vertical base and top tube than the skittish racing models.
So when you’re looking at road bike frames, think beyond the paint. Get a frame that fits both you and your purpose. Whether you do your research online or in a good bike store, you’ll be glad you took the time.
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Customized Rims for Your Bike
By Daron Soto
Barring a serious crash or the most frequent bike accident of all-entering the garage with a bicycle on your car roof rack-your bicycle rims will probably last as long as you can stand riding the same old bike. Usually made of aluminum, rims are lightweight and strong and are hardly ever the source of trouble on a bicycle, even in the most arduous riding conditions.
In fact, most bicycle riders probably never give a single thought to their bicycle rims. The circular band of metal that holds in the bike tire and connects it to the wheel hub via spokes is easily overlooked. Unlike spokes, a bicycle rim hardly ever breaks. Unlike the hub, it hardly ever causes problems. Unlike tires, it never goes flat or explodes. Serious bicycle racers have some pretty fancy rims, full of the same outrageously colorful advertising that covers their clothing usually, but most riders really don’t need these. Even the fanciest rims, the flattened out, wide, presumably aerodynamic rims you’ll see on the wheels of the pros, are not certainly all that much better. They are, however, flashier, and in the world of bicycling, this apparently does count for something, maybe for intimidation.
Do you need to know anything special about your bicycle rims? Not really. Most bicycles come with rims appropriate to their overall quality. You can spend as much money as you want on a rim-like everything else associated with the sport of bicycling-but what comes standard on a bike is probably sufficient. Customizing your rims will bring you fancier rims, maybe lighter rims, probably stronger rims, but the research on what constitutes the best rim weight, strength and shape is still largely inconclusive, and since this feature causes so few problems to the recreational rider, you can leave this issue to the professional mechanic who services the bicycles of world class racers. When they’ve resolved the issue, you will know about it!
Meanwhile, if your bicycle rims are aluminum, as most are today (steel rims being heavy, carbon rims being expensive), there is very little you need to do for them. As with all parts of your bicycle, rims should be kept clean of dirt and corrosive oils, wiped after long dusty rides and examined after any crash. Otherwise, do what most riders have always done: forget about your bicycle rims. You may not be able to ride a bike without them, but you really cannot ride a bike better for thinking about this vital but happily innocuous part.
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The Changing Face Of Sports Reporting
By Alex Mahone
In the old days, getting the latest slice of news about your favourite sports team would typically involve waiting a day before the newspaper reaches your doorstep. Those without the ability of getting their hands on such major papers would instead have to rely on television news programmes. This would be of little hassle to people who live in the same country that the sport event originates from, such as Americans following their NFL franchise. However, for fans living in other countries outside of America, it might mean having to wait days, weeks or even months for such news to be made to them on the airwaves.
The reasons for this are manyfold. One of them was obviously the difficulty of reporters providing quick and instant reporting back to the head offices where the news would be centrally disseminated. There were also printing deadlines that has to be waited on each day before everything could be made available to the public. If the sports event was based overseas, local reporters would also have to battle long distances, time zones and other factors such as weather conditions before the latest scoops or results were readily available. All of this combined together to make it both a challenging but equally rewarding endeavour for sports journalists.
When the Internet took the world by storm over a decade ago, the face of sports reporting slowly rode on the revolutionary wave of information provision enabled by advanced technology. News broadcasters and reporters could now rely on the rapid transmission of data and information via digital means over the Web from one location to another, regardless of the distance. As long as the Internet was available, it made the delivery of sports news much easier, faster and more accurate to fans all over the world. However, the beginning of the information age was still restricted to text based sports news reporting before other media forms were capable of being sent using such means. That did not deter fans from glueing themselves to websites or message boards that had independent or amateur sports reporters doing their bit to share what they knew about their teams with others.
Once video and new media hit the online world, the possibilities of sports reporting became virtually endless. On the surface, videos helped to liven up bare text and photo articles on many web sites. The more discerning journalists were able to make greater use of the limitless features that were provided with such a media form. They could now broadcast interviews with sports stars, fans and even people on the street. Advertising was also leveraged on since videos were more engaging and could reach a wider audience. Teams and sports governing bodies also jumped at the chance to use technology that allowed live broadcasts of both news and the actual events or games. That would prompt even more sports fans joining the Internet revolution as greater options were made available. Terrestrial and traditional sports reporting have even been pushed to the backseat with such developments.
As technology becomes more advanced with time, there will be more fantastic avenues that could help push reporting of sports through current boundaries. It has not only allowed mainstream news media to widen their scope but many more aspiring journalists have been able to pursue their passion of chronicling their favourite sports through their own means. This can only benefit sports as a whole on a positive social level.
Alex Mahone is an aspiring sports journalist with a passion for various disciplines. Find out his reviews on the best sports directory on the Internet, as well as the interesting soccer news sites based on Alex’s personal measures.
Saturday, February 27th, 2010 at 6:00 am and is filed under sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
