Tuesday 23 November 2010

Cycling Videos

A series of videos of routes in and around Cambridge, Oxfordshire, and other rural places

This series of videos were taken by a simple Canon IXUS 105 running 640x480 (and converted smaller) on a homemade lightweight wooden mount on the front of my bike. I've gone away from specialised helmet-mounted cameras as they seem very expensive and deliver very little. The foreshortening of the video pictures does make this series seem a little racy in sections. I was not dangerous at any time, despite the view!

This blog was put together with a few aims in mind.

  • To encourage cycling, taking town cyclists out into the lovely country around and getting new cyclists on their bikes
  • To show easier ways to handle certain junctions
  • To highlight good and poor road layout and design
  • To highlight good and poor behaviour by (other!) road users


Sometimes I do get on my high horse about some aspects of poor behaviour. I think all I'd like to say is that it's a adenaline buzz usually, caused by feeling very vunerable next to anything between 1 and 10 tons of metal.

I want more people to get out on their bikes to challenge that kind of behaviour. It's been shown that the more bikes on the road leads to less accidents due to more familarity.

I cannot emphasise enough that despite some ranting and rolling, there's nothing better than getting out on your bike and the joys of the cycling and being out in the countryside far, far outweigh the perceived dangers. This blog can help people to find the right way to reduce the sometimes scary moments and good ways of avoiding them completely.

I have tri-bars (yes, I'm that fast!) which give me a nice mount position.


I've fashioned a wooden mount for the Canon Ixus camera. It does need the odd tweak to keep the camera steady, although road noise coming up the frame is a problem.


And this is how the screw mounting works.


Recently I've also adjusted the bars to handle maps. The paper create-by-yourself kind. Found it really worked. Cable ties are used to clip keyring mounts for multiple pages. Elastic bands enable a sheet to be rolled up and kept out of the way.



It flaps a bit in the wind, but not enough to be unreadable.

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