I first drove an MX-5 in February 2007 as a test drive at a local dealer’s and couldn’t stop grinning – the gear change was perfect, the engine note was perfect, the handling was excellent, the power delivery was spot-on and the interior was very pleasant. It was a cold day, but I was comfortable in shirt sleeves with the roof down.

I bought mine through a car scheme (sadly now discontinued) provided by my employer.  It was a rather odd set-up: if you went to their website the deals on offer were worse than you could get at your local dealer, but if you called them to ask for a quote you got a price no-one was willing to get near.  The personal-contract-purchase payments I was offered on the MX-5 were £75 a month lower than my local dealer could manage.  They also managed to get my car delivered by mid-March when the local dealers were saying July.  You see why I was disappointed to see it withdrawn for “lack of interest”.  But I digress.

I remember the day I got it: it was delivered to my parents house (I was selling my Ka to a friend who lived near there) and I drove around all my favourite twisty back roads in 3rd (with the roof down to hear the engine) for the satisfaction of stringing corners together.  I was some distance from home when it started to rain, so I pulled over to put the roof up.  The 12-second button-push to put the roof up or down is pretty quick, and I still find the mechanism impressive to watch.  With the roof up, I decided to go the short way home for tea.

It turns out that I drive mostly by sound – which can mean you end up going a little bit faster than you intended if you change gear and accelerate in an MX-5 when you’re used to a Ka: the sound insulation of an MX-5 with the roof up is much better than that in a Ka.  I think this is because the rear wheel sound goes into the boot cavity and the front wheel sound into the engine cavity, while the passenger area is isolated from both of these.  In the Ka, of course, the rear wheel arches intrude into the passenger cabin and there is no isolation between the boot and the passenger space anyway.

The MX-5 is surprisingly practical.  I have fit a complete set of golf clubs, a trolley, a brolly, golf shoes and a change of clothes in the boot.  In contrast to practically everything else you might look at (Mercedes SLK, etc) you could still put the roof down at that point.  For the non-golfists among you, Cerys and I have twice been on holiday for a week taking only what we could fit into the boot without sacrificing anything: if you want to do this it helps to have the MX-5 luggage (Roadsterbag size 24B).  Basically its cargo capacity is generally enough given adequate planning.  Another good roof feature, the envy of my elise-driving colleagues, is that you can get good use of the roof in the middle of winter: the engine is in the front so there is plenty of heat for the climate control to dispense through the vents.

One thing which will surprise you if you’ve driven cars with “sport” written anywhere near them is the MX-5′s suspension.  Compared to a Mazda3 Sport I test-drove recently, or a BMW 3-series M Sport, the suspension is more informative and less harsh in the MX-5.  In an MX-5 you know, well before you get there, exactly where the edge of grip is in the corners; and you can go over speed bumps and bad road surfaces without pain.  It’s really quite incredible compared to everything else I’ve tried.

So where doesn’t it work?  Long motorway journeys.  You don’t want the roof down on the motorway, and there are no corners where the handling can reward you.  A second issue on extremely long journeys is that you sit with your legs out straight in front of you so the back of your heel is taking the weight: I found that somewhat tiring after 4 hours driving in a day.  But driving that kind of distance is generally best avoided anyway.  It’s also a little tedious in heavy traffic, but not more so than any other manual.  Unfortunately these two classes of driving are pretty-much all I’ve been doing recently.

I’m replacing it with a 55-plate Lexus IS 250SE Automatic, which is considerably more comfortable for long motorway jaunts and considerably easier to use in heavy traffic.  It isn’t quite as rewarding through the bends, but I think it’s a better fit for my needs if my journeys over the next year are like they are now.

I was expecting to be able to sell the MX-5 to a dealer or trade it in.  I need to get £10551.57 to pay off the finance I have left, or of course I can hand it back at nominal cost.  Unfortunately, the price dealers will offer is £10k flat: although they expect to be able to sell it for around £12.5k they don’t expect to do so until March at the earliest, and they are understandably not keen to have it on their books for 4 months as that precludes having another car in that space (or spending that £10k on a more sellable vehicle).  I’ve asked all my friends if they want to buy it at the finance cost – if they wanted an MX-5 it would effectively be a £2k discount on the forecourt price, but strangely none of them are interested.  It looks like I shall be handing it back to the finance people to auction it.  I shall be sad to see it go however it goes: I’m sure I’ll buy one again when I convince myself I need to own 2 cars.

Unhappy news to report: one of our two cats, Kimahri, was struck by a car and killed on Sunday.

What we will remember is not the manner of his death but how he lived and the joy he brought to our house. I only knew him for a short time, less than 2 years, but in that period we formed quite a bond.

He was very much a traditional cat: left to himself he would spend his time eating, posing elegantly, cleaning himself, sleeping and hunting. He liked to think of himself as macho, but he was a big softy really. He would almost never ask for a cuddle, but when he did receive one unsolicited it triggered an astonishingly loud purr and an inexplicable desire to lovingly chew the cuddler’s ears and nose.

His hunting adventures took him all around the woods near our house, which he found contain a lot of burrs which stuck in his fur. After getting all burry he would come to get de-burred, a process which he didn’t enjoy but always thanked us for.

Although I said he never asked for a cuddle that isn’t strictly true – one of his favourite tricks was to go outside in the rain, get really soggy, then ask one of us to towel him dry. No doubt he would claim that this was a legitimate drying need, but judging by the purring it elicited and the frequency with which he would immediately go out, get wet, and come straight back in we can safely assume it was just a ruse.

I know all this will sound silly if you’ve never had a pet, but I do miss him terribly. I cry every time something newly reminds me of his absence; and I feel the sense of loss every time I open the fridge without him asking for cheese, walk into the kitchen and he’s not on the windowsill, walk past Cerys’s suitcase and he isn’t sleeping on it, eat dinner without him trying to steal it, or finish my cornflakes without him having the last bit of milk. I could go on, but you get the picture.

All we have now are precious memories, a few pictures, and a very short audio recording of one of his howls. We will cherish the little we have, but it will never be enough.

I was very impressed with them, their support act Donkeyboy and the Arena itself.  In a break with tradition, the Donkeyboy guys and gals were fairly well-mixed, rather than the usual listening through mud treatment support acts are prone to receive.

I have to confess that I don’t know that many a-ha tracks: basically just The Sun Always Shines on TV, Take On Me, The Living Daylights and Hunting High and Low. And I only know the last one because Cerys likes singing it in SingStar. I think now that this is my loss: everything they played was very good.

Of the new material, my favourite is the first track on the album, The Bandstand, which is sort of Kraftwerky and sort of not.

Unfortunately we had to leave partway through the encore as my fear of large crowded places was making me feel physically sick. As a result we missed Take On Me, and possibly a couple of other tracks.

The M EN arena is acoustically very good. The only similar structure in which I’ve been to a concert is Wembley Arena and that sounded very poor: echoes all over the place. It’s also easy to get in and out of the arena and find your seats once you’re in.

I should get myself back to The Priory and see if I can do anything to let me make it through complete performances in the future.

I’m less tired than I expected, at least physically. I think it uses a subset of the muscles that get used by road cycling. Mentally I’m exhausted, as there was a lot to learn; and most of it contrary to what I’m used to from cycling. For instance, if you lean into a corner on skis (placing your weight on the inner ski) you go in the wrong direction. To turn right, you need your weight on the right edge of your left ski; that takes some getting used-to.

I’m glad we learnt on real snow, as we found there is a significant qualitative difference between different sorts of snow. There were patches of crisp snow which were really easy to work with; deep fluffy bits which were difficult to traverse without losing lots of speed; and packed ice sections which were tricky to get past without picking up more speed than desired. Since the real world must have all these (and probably more) and a homogeneous dry slope can only simulate at most one of them, I think we made the right choice in choosing to learn on snow.

The training slope has 2 sections, the long lower section is shallower than the upper section. I only tried the upper part once; I ended up having to descend in a straighter line than I anticipated to miss other slope users which meant I reached the bottom going too fast and ended-up punching a new hole in the safety-net at the bottom.

By that point I was thinking too slowly to do the steep section properly, so I’ll have to save that for a future training session.

The last component I was waiting for, a compact chainset, arrived about a week ago.  Fitting it was relatively easy; there are two points at which the axial bit from the drive-side crank resists going through the bottom-bracket: these mate with the inner bearing races once everything is installed.  Sadly, the friction in the system seems barely diminished – if I repeat the spin-test I applied to the Sora cranks/BB I get pretty-much the same result.  Of course, 105-series compact cranks weigh a lot less than Sora-series double cranks, so if all else was equal you would expect the 105 set to stop slightly earlier as they have less angular momentum to fritter away.

The Shimano chain was quite easy to fit: you trim it to length in the usual way and then finish the loop with the aid of a pre-fitted connecting pin on the other end.  This means that it is very important to trim it from the other end.  SRAM’s powerlink system is as easy to use, and does mean you don’t need a chain tool if the chain is already the correct length (which it never is).

Threading the chain through the dérailleurs is always fiddly, and this time was no exception; connecting the chain once you have done so is even more fiddly as the rear mech spring is fighting against you joining the two ends.  You only have to do it once though, and it really isn’t something to worry about.

I did my initial testing in the turbo trainer to check that all the controls worked and everything felt OK, which it did.  Since then I have ridden to work and back 3 times and can confirm that my changes have made the improvements I had hoped for.  I think I need to fiddle with the saddle height a bit more now I have the shorter crank-arms, but that’s a task for a longer ride at the weekend rather than the 20 minute blast of a commute: I approach commuting as if it were a 10km time-trial, and that’s going to make your legs ache whatever else you do.

Anyway, I shall try to limit my bike-related witterings to the OpenCycleTeam site in the future.

I’ve now fitted the rear dérailleur, which is from the SRAM Rival series.  I’ve also changed the cassette on both my main and training wheels to 10-speed 12-27 units from Shimano’s 105 line.  Happily, and as advertised, these two systems seem to be compatible.  To align a dérailleur you first release the tension completely (highest gear for the rear, lowest for the front) and line it up with the sprocket or chainring it should be over with the limit screw.  You then tighten the cable tension until the tension and the limit screw are holding the dérailleur in the same place.  Then you shift to maximum tension (lowest gear for the rear, highest for the front) and set the other limit screw so everything lines up.  Having done all that, a single up- or down-shift should move the derailing mechanism up or down one gear respectively.  The SRAM rear gear system (Red shifter, Rival dérailleur) was easy to set up.

I’ve also finished the brake connections off properly, and I can confirm that the SRAM levers and Shimano callipers are compatible.  Worth mentioning too is the adjustable nature of the Red levers: you can position the gear lever and brake lever at any sensible distance from the bars that you like (provided the gear lever is closer than the brake lever).  The gear lever adjustment is a bit fiddly: it is done by rotating a small cam.  The brake lever adjustment is by contrast very easy: you peel back the hood and a small Allen-bolt reveals itself, along with a helpful arrow encouraging you to bring the lever closer.  It would be a better system if the gear-lever position was set relative to the brake-lever position rather than being set absolutely.  With the current design, the gear lever can be set further out than the brake lever in such a way that it cannot return after shifting, which is the cause of some dire warnings in the setup guide.

The other visible change I have made is to fit new gel pads and bar tape to my handlebars.  The gel pads are from Bike Ribbon and are thicker than the ones which came with the bike, so that should take a bit more vibration out of these horrible Hampshire roads.  The bar tape is a bit of a risk, in that it’s Cinelli Lumen tape which glows in the dark and I am not yet sure whether that’s cool or terribly terribly pathetic.  In daylight it appears white, which is cool for historical reasons but may mean it gets dirty quickly.  It’s also relatively ineptly fitted, so it will probably need replacing quite soon: by the time that happens I hope to know whether it was a good idea or not.

Less visibly, I have changed the bottom bracket.  The original unit looks like a non-series Shimano component, and it might well have been compatible with the 105 cranks I’ve ordered.  However, when I removed the chain and tried to spin the cranks I was appalled by the amount of friction there.  When I built my XC bike in 2002 if you spun the cranks as hard as you could throw them with no chain attached you’d get seven or eight complete revolutions before it stopped.  Applying the same test to the cranks/bottom-bracket combination which came with the bike got less than 2 revolutions, which is not so much.  I’ve replaced the bottom bracket with a Hope unit which has ceramic bearings.  Whether this will have less friction than the cheaper steel units initially is up for debate, but it should prove more durable: the bottom bracket bearings have to bear a lot of lateral load when a rider is as heavy as I am tries to dance up a hill; with any luck it’ll be a worthwhile investment.  I’ll let y’all know whether it’s better than the OEM bottom-bracket when my new cranks arrive.

I’ve also changed the gear-cable routing.  The bike came with the front- and rear-cables crossing under the down-tube, but it doesn’t look like the frame was designed for that because the cables touch each other if you do that.  I’ve therefore straightened them out by swapping which braze-on each cable uses at the top of the tube.  With any luck that will increase my gear cable’s life.

Finally for this post I’ve fitted Crud Roadracer mudguards.  They’re a little bit fiddly to fit, but they look great.  I can’t say much more yet, as my bike is currently unridable pending cranks.

Next thing to go on is the 105 50/34 compact chainset when it arrives.  After that I can put on the front dérailleur, the chain, the pedals, sort everything out properly and take it for a test ride.  It’s rather annoying to be missing only one piece!

Today I changed the control levers, gear cables and brake cables from the silver Shimano Sora set which came with the bike to black SRAM Red equipment.

The gear cables supplied with the Red set are from Gore RideOn and claim to have low-friction sheathing and special cable-sheath-ends to stop grit getting up there. I can’t say I’ve noticed that being a problem before, but presumably it makes some people feel happier about the amount they’ve just shelled out if they get some technobabble to help them post-rationalise it. My main criticism of them is that they are extremely difficult to cut, and once you have managed to cut them the cut part has been crushed out of shape so that the cable can’t get through and the ends don’t fit on. With two of the sheath runs you can put the cable into the end you didn’t cut, then force it through the one you did to make it the right shape again. Unfortunately there are three sheathing runs in a typical road bike’s gear cable system so you’re going to have to find another way to deal with the problem on at least one of those sections.

The inner cable for the gears is fitted to the control levers before you open the box, so I have no idea how easy or difficult it would be to do that: I cynically suspect it would be difficult. The brake cables are easy to fit: you squeeze the brake lever to expose the cable hole and then shove it through.

The brake cable sheathing is labeled SRAM and is considerably easier to cut than the Gore sheaths. Again there are 3 runs, but the sheathing is much better at keeping its shape so no problems getting the cable through and the ends on to any of the sections. The Red levers and Sora callipers seem to be compatible with each other, thankfully, so I don’t need to shell out another £80 on SRAM brakes (although I do think that black callipers would look nicer on my bike: maybe I’ll get some 105 ones when Cerys isn’t looking).

The obvious question is: have these achieved what I wanted them to achieve? Routing all the cables under the bar tape rather than having the gear cables fly free from the side of the shifters will definitely resolve my road-illumination issue.

The amount I need to move my fingers to change gear is vastly reduced: downshift at the rear used to mean moving the brake lever through something like 30 degrees; whereas now I am moving a gear paddle through less than 15 degrees (those numbers might be wrong but the ratio is about right). The gear paddle is nearer my fingers than the brake lever as well, which all adds up to a significantly easier shift. Upshift at the rear really is just a tap on the gear paddle: much more convenient than a button you can only reach from the hoods. Shifting the front is similarly easy. As every review of Red says, you have ‘trim’ on the big ring only: the way it works is that if you’re in the small ring you can shift to the outer part of the big ring with a single click; once in the big ring you can trim to the inner part of the big ring with a little tap (one click) or shift to the little ring with a big tap (two clicks) or another little tap. I seem to be able to shift at the front relatively well using my Sora dérailleur with the Red shifter; but I can confirm that the Tiagra derailleur at the rear doesn’t work.

Finally, I have to mention that the black control levers and cables look rather better on the black Allez frame than the original Sora/Tiagra silver-finish stuff.

I’ve ordered the SRAM derailleurs to go with this kit, and the cassette, chain, bar gel and bar tape I need to finish the project. I’ve also ordered a Crud Roadracer mudguard set so that I can use my bike in the winter months without getting horribly damp. I’ll post reviews of all that when I’ve fitted them.

About time! I have had a lot of trouble in my research into road bike componentry: you can’t tell when you read a glowing report in a blog post whether it is really a good product or a paid-for report. Even after this there are going to be some problems, in that if you’ve bought something expensive you want to convince yourself it was a good purchase, but it is going to help a lot once they start enforcing it I’m sure.

For the record, thus far no-one has paid me to review anything. Should it happen I’ll tell you up-front. If SRAM want to give me a complete set of 2011 RED or Shimano want me to take a good look at wireless DI2 I’d have no problem with either of those.

The first annoyance reared its head the first time I cycled home after dark: the gear cables come out of the inner sides of the lever units and go through the air in a nice loop to the cable stops on the down tube. This is fine, but the cable sheaths are quite reflective and when the front light is on I can see little else. Now it’s possible that I could fix this problem by replacing the cables and sheaths with matt-surfaced ones; however, the difficulty with that plan is that no-one makes matt-surfaced cable sheaths so far as I can find (even the black ones you usually get for MTBs are very shiny). Another way to fix it is to route the cables for the gears underneath the bar tape in the same manner as the brake cables are already. This scheme requires control levers which have the gear-cable exit from the back rather than the side: the good news is that such things exist; the bad news is that the ones which came with my bike do not have that facility.

The second annoyance is that I cannot change gear very easily from the drops. There are two reasons for this: firstly the Sora tension release lever is unreachable from the drops whatever you do; secondly the tension-increase lever needs to move a huge distance to engage. This means I need to move my hands to shift gears in either direction, which puts me off using the drops. The tension-increase actuation problem is possibly even worse from the hoods. In either position I cannot increase tension without inadvertently steering as well.

Both of these problems are safety issues, which makes them a little bit more urgent than the switch to compact chainrings I plan to make at some point. In particular the cable-sheath reflection problem is going to become rather acute as it starts to get dark earlier and earlier.

The collected wisdom of the intertubes tells me that the lever system with the least distance required for actuation is SRAM Red. These, and all other SRAM controls have the option of routing the cables under the bar tape, which means that they solve both my current control-related problems. The cheaper SRAM systems have the same short-throw mechanism on the front shifter but need more movement than Red for the rear shifter. I think any of them would be shorter than Sora, so I was planning to settle for Rival until: I managed to find Red shifters at 39% discount on google product search, making them similarly priced to Force. That offer was too good to pass-up: I couldn’t get them at that price even tax-free on cyclescheme next April.

Unfortunately, the SRAM levers are designed for a 10-speed system and SRAM’s derailleur actuation rate (how far it pulls the cable per click); so I will also need to replace the cassette (with Shimano 105), chain (again Shimano 105), front derailleur (SRAM Rival) and rear derailleur (more SRAM Rival). I think the brake callipers should be compatible; if not I shall have to get the Rival callipers as well.

Happily 9- and 10-speed chainrings are interchangeable, because the inner-width of the narrower links doesn’t change; that said I have the 105 compact crankset and BB cups on my wishlist as I want the 50/34 compact rings before I next go near the Isle of Wight.

I’ll also need to change the bar tape when I replace the control levers; and while I’m doing that I think I’ll put some gel pads underneath to absorb the vibrations from the road and make long rides a bit easier.

Costs:

• Seriously discounted Red controls: £280
• Derailleurs/chain/cassette/bar tape: £150
• Compact chainset/BB cups: £150

If I do all that it’ll have cost more than the bike did originally; but it should make it considerably safer and more pleasant to ride in the medium to long term. In the short term, it means I have to learn a new control system for the gears which is probably going to cause some confusion until I get used to it.