Briztreadley

And to love you.

As I mention often on this site, I have a fleet of bicycles. And one of the key maintenance tasks when you have more than one or two bikes is to make sure that each machine is ready to ride. And the most basic part of that is that your tyres are inflated to the right pressure.

For most of my bike-riding life, this has been pretty simple. A butyl inner tube sits inside a tyre, whether its a mountain bike tyre or a road tyre or a touring bike tyre. You pump up the tube/tyre and its good for a couple of weeks. And if you get a flat, replacing the tube is a piece of cake once you have mastered the John Pittendreigh method of tyre removal. The only caveat that you must find the cause of the flat for it to be fixed properly.

But for the last 10-15 years, mountain bikes have been all about tubeless. I currently have two mountain bikes, sort of, and they both have always been set up tubeless. I don’t own a compressor, so the challenge for mtb tubeless is seating the tyre on the rim. In recent times I’ve been using a CO2 cartridge with its burst of gas to provide the impetus required for a mtb tyre to push out onto the shoulder of the rim bed.

I also have a road bike and a gravel bike, of course. Road tubeless has been a thing for a little while, but I remain on the fence about that development. The much smaller volume of air in a road tyre gives a much shorter window for the sealant to fill any puncture and seal it in time.

So the road bike currently runs TPU inner tubes, inside 30mm wide road tyres. That’s working well. TPU tubes are much lighter than butyl tubes, so for the first few rides on the road machine after I swapped to TPU, the bike felt livelier than ever. Of course, now I am habituated to the new feel of the bike and its just the new normal.

So a few weeks ago I switched my gravel bike to tubeless. So far its working fine, and really I think that after roughly 45 years of bike ownership I think I’m in a pretty good place as regards my relationship with the miracle of pneumatism.

And the hidden key to making all of these person/bike/tyre interactions as seamless and simple as possible is the Clik valve.

The Clik valve has only been around a couple of years, and it has already long surpassed the Presta valve as my inflation method of choice.

I’m not here to carry on about the deficiencies of the Presta valve. Lots of people see no reason to discard the Presta, and I was the same until the Clik valve came along.

Clik valves just make everything to do with tyres just a little bit easier. And as I once again note, I am trying to keep six bikes in constant working order.

Three tubed bikes: the Frezoni road bike, my commuting city e-bike and Brommie the folding bike.

Three tubeless bikes: the rigid 29er bikepacking machine, the Kona Precept mtb, and my Merida Silex 700 gravel bike.

And on every bike a set of Clik valves, replacing the Presta valves of yore, except on the Brompton. There a Clik valves adapter improves a Schrader (car-type) valve.

Which bits of kit do I rate as the most helpful in making the transition away from Presta valves into the 21st century?

1. The replacement Clik valve pump head on my Joe Blow track pump. Just push the pump head onto the valve. It Cliks. You pump. You pull it off when done. The efforts are small, simple, non-violent. It’s a joy to add some air to your tyres. And it’s so quick.
2. 3D printed screw-on funnel for adding sealant to a tubeless tyre. Unscrew the Clik valve (its easy, they are only finger tight anyway). Screw on the Straz funnel. Pour in the sealant. Unscrew funnel, re-fit the Clik valve.
3. A Clik CO2 inflator. I finally think that I have close to a 90% success rate in seating tubeless tyres. Most recently fitting Pirella Cinturatos to the Silex … no dramas whatsoever. I am considering pushing my luck to the nth degree by re-fitting the Rene Herse tyres as tubeless.
4. The Clik adapter for Schrader tubes is brilliant. You don’t even replace the valve core. You just screw the adapter onto the Schrader valve, job done.
5. TPU tubes with removable (Presta) cores. Removable cores have been standard on butyl tubes since forever. But when TPU tubes came out a couple of years ago, the early models all had plastic stems with the core glued into them. Fortunately you can now buy pretty fancy TPU tubes from Schwalbe, Rene Herse, Cadence and others that have steel valve cores. Or less fancy ones from Amazon (Cyclami is the brand that’s working for me) that seem fine and also have removable cores.

(Side note: I’ve tried plenty of TPU tubes that did not last well, and had disappointing records of retaining the miracle of pneumatism in my tyres. Brands I now steer clear of: Guee, RideNow. Brands that were good at keeping the air inside, but still don’t make removable core tubes: Pirelli, Tubolito.)

In summary, Clik valves are so great that I have given sets to several of my cycling friends. I want these things to be available for the rest of my cycling life, so I really hope they catch on and the company is profitable.

Recommendation: BUY.

Your Bike Is Enough Bike: There are lots of fancy bikes featured on YouTube channels and review sites. But you already have a bike and it’s probably perfectly fine. Really, it’s not the bike which is holding you back.

This is not an article trying to argue that you shouldn’t buy a new bike. I like New Bike Day just as much as the next bike nerd. Last year (2025) I had New Bike Day twice in a couple of months, after no new bike day for more than 10 years.

No, the premise of this piece is that all your bike wants is for you to ride it. Your bike — whatever type of bike it is — probably isn’t perfect. That’s fine, you’re not perfect either.

Your bike probably has some quirks. There’s a ding in the top tube, there’s quite a lot of accumulated dirt behind the fork crown, and sometimes it doesn’t shift exactly perfectly. The rear tyre profile is squaring off cos that tyre is pretty ancient and you should have replaced it a couple of years ago.

But that’s part of its charm. You have quirks too. You do and you know it.

But you know what? Any fancy new bike you buy just ends up being that old bike that sometimes you love and sometimes you hate. Regardless of whether it’s a new bike or your old faithful, you never can get away from the fact that to make your bike go somewhere, you have to pedal it. To go up a hill you gotta dig in and suffer, doesn’t matter if your bike is made entirely of carbon and you are made entirely of balsa wood. As Greg Lemond is supposed to have said: “Bike riding never gets any easier, you just go faster.” (Until you don’t go faster, you go slower).

Never let the siren call of New Bike Day deter you from getting outside and on the road, trail or path with the bikes you have now. Because each day that you spend going on a bike ride right now is exactly one million percent better than each day you spend planning your budget for how much you think you can get away with spending on your next bike.

Arthur C. Clarke wrote that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”, and of course for most of us, that is absolutely true.

But I don’t think that mechanical things around us need to be very high-tech to seem like magic.

Magnets, for instance. 100% magical. I now have a helmet (POC Cularis) which has a magnetic buckle. That’s so fancy that I can barely believe how fancy I am. The sling bag in which I carry my daily essentials uses magnetics for the buckles.

Pneumatic tyres. Pneumatic tyres seem almost magical in their ability to transform the experience of moving on wheels. The tyre filled with air was an invention (thanks to Scottish vet John Boyd Dunlop!) with extraordinary consequences. The air inside our tyres, precisely pressurised to support our exact system weight acts as a natural shock absorber, cushioning impacts and smoothing out the world beneath us. It’s like we have captured a cloud and imprisoned it around our wheels. If that’s not magic, I know not what is.

Then let’s think about traction, and how a tyre interacts with the road or path. A pneumatic tyre deforms ever so slightly as it rolls. This subtle transformation of the tyre’s shape allows it to conform to the surface below, giving the rider confidence in their bike’s grip on the road. The air pressure in the tyre provides just enough rigidity to maintain structure while allowing this essential flexibility — a fine balance indeed.

And the final piece of magic is the efficiency of the good old pneumatic tyre, unchanged conceptually since 1887. By absorbing the energy that would otherwise be lost to vibration and shock, pneumatic tyres allow us to travel farther with less effort. This efficiency transforms the entire experience of riding a bike. That feeling when you are rolling along a steady descent without pedalling, and it seems possible that you could ride off the edge of the earth before you have to pedal again. Magical.

But the genius of pneumatism (not a proper word, but usage = legitimacy) is also infected by its fatal flaw.

Because the magic of pneumatic tyres is fragile, vulnerable to the smallest betrayal. A a thorn, a nail, a shard of glass—and the miracle evaporates into the disappointment of the puncture.

What was enchantment transforms into disappointment so quickly that it feels cruel. We have to face just how utterly dependent we are on that invisible cloud which until just moments ago, lived in our tyres. When the cloud departs silently and instantly like a will-o-the-wisp, it reveals just how much of our confidence was built on this delicate foundation.

Worse still, the puncture comes at the worst moments: far from home, in bad weather, or when we’re already running late. In those moments, the pneumatic tyre feels less like magic and more like a reminder that life is nasty, brutish and short. The rider is left stranded leaving them with nothing but disappointment and the long walk to the nearest train station.

May the spirit of John Boyd Dunlop ride beside you, keeping your tyres safe from the vicissitudes of the road, and may the miracle of pneumatism always be the wind beneath your wheels.

You are looking at the simplest possible personal website. Briztreadley serves my memory and my vanity, in equal measure.

And to achieve those ends, all that the software that runs briztreadley.com has to do is present the articles and photos in some sort of logical way.

In the 25-ish years that personal websites have been a thing, there have been numerous ways to do this. Programs I have used to make websites include but are not restricted to: Blogger, Movable Type, Coranto, Expression Engine, and Wordpress.

This current iteration of briztreadley.com is powered by Micro.blog. It’s adequate for what I want to do here, so that’s useful. It is much more suitable for me than Wordpress, cos Wordpress has a lot going on in the backend.

And I’m a big fan of the minimal but stylish theme that I have selected to display my articles. As you can see at the bottom of each page, it is called Mythos and it was designed by a pastor in the US, Matt Langford. Nice work, Matt.

So five paragraphs in and you are probably wondering: “Is this the most pointless colophon in the history of personal websites?”

Patience, my devoted audience. We are getting there. Slowly.

My writing environment is a program called Craft. And it is both a “word processor” but also a way of keeping all my writing work in one place, for reference. I’ve been writing in Craft for 5 years, and there are apparently 1157 documents in my Craft space, totalling perhaps around 400,000 words (although I think that estimate must be high).

So while I draft all my written work in Craft, both for work and church and personal projects, the output is used in various ways. Most commonly for work, I export a Word document. For church stuff, orders of worship for instance, Craft writes documents to the web, and I can specify the URL I want the program to write to at briztreadley.craft.me.

But articles for briztreadley.com? I was stuck in the archaic process of writing the article in Craft, and then select all, copy and paste into Micro.blog’s web back end. That’s not super clunky, but its also not all that smooth either. And to be frank, I am not a big fan of Micro.blog’s web interface. It IS clunky.

So what has Claude helped me put together, which spurred me on to write this page?

I now have a Shortcut which enables me to post to Briztreadley from Craft, with barely any friction. From Craft, once I am happy with the article, I can run the Shortcut ‘Craft to Micro.blog’ (I have it saved as an icon in the dock of my Mac) and boom the job is done.

Are you the only other person in the world who writes in Craft on the Mac and also then publishes to a Micro.blog website? Get in touch, I would love to share my Shortcut with you.

Most of the content on this site is about bike touring, and that’s because it is pretty much my favourite aspect of bike riding.

I ride to work on week days, I ride every Saturday, I try to never have a week where I don’t ride a bike. But unless I am bike touring or planning a bike tour, something’s missing in my life.

2026 has been different. I had heart issues which started to make themselves known in November-December last year, and soon after New Year I went into hospital with atrial fibrillation and symptoms which suggested imminent heart failure.

And a week or so later I emerged after having a couple of arteries widened, and since then I have had a couple more cardio procedures, to ensure my continued living presence on this planet.

So that’s nice. I’m fine to commute to work on my lovely e-bike.

What does that mean for bike touring? Well, my riding at present is somewhat restricted, not directly by my heart health, but secondarily through the medication which makes sure my heart gets an easy ride.

Of all the medications that I am currently taking (and their name is legion), the one which affects bike riding is metoprolol. It’s a beta blocker, which works by “relaxing blood vessels and slowing heart rate to improve blood flow and decrease blood pressure”.

What that means is that your heart can barely get above a canter. For me, the maximum heartrate I’ve seen lately is about 115bpm.

And if you are a bike rider, you know that if you looked at your heart rate monitor and it says 115, you are just cruising along, barely raising a sweat.

So that’s me on the bike at the moment. Just cruising along.

But Andrew, why don’t you just try harder?

The answer is that when you try to go harder you just don’t. And about 15 seconds later you sit back on the saddle and say ‘where has all my power gone?’ And there’s a dull ache in your arms and legs that seems to be related to lack of circulation of blood.

So this might not rule out touring. It just means I need to adjust my expectations around how far and how hard I can ride each day.

I am in the middle of my own self-conducted tests around that right now, with the idea that maybe I can do one gentle tour before the year 2026 slips away entirely. And how are those self-conducted tests going? To be honest, not so great.

After this ride, which was not at all a difficult ride, I got home and needed quite some couch time before Annette and I could leave the house for a social appointment with a friend.

So, maybe watch this space, but probably don’t get your hopes up. It might be a while before a “proper” tour is back on my agenda. Sorry Emma, sorry Fi, sorry to all my other touring companions.

Bikes sold since 2024: Sholto Alpine GT, and Cannondale CAAD-X. They were both great bikes for many years, that I loved riding. But with the new gravel bike, and an impending down-sizing of my house, I’ve been thinning the herd, so to speak. I am back down to six bikes!

New bikes since 2024: 2025 Merida Silex 700 gravel bike, and Kalhoff commuter e-bike.

Road bike. Frezoni made by Joe Cosgrove, a framebuilder who lives about 2 km from me in Brisbane Australia. Joe’s primarily known for doing the paintwork on Llewellyn bikes. He built the frame for me in 2004, for my 40th birthday. Seeing that I just turned 62, I’ve had this bike for 22 years. My requirement when we designed the bike was to accommodate wider tyres than most road bikes could fit. Back then a road bike mostly had 700x23 tyres, with 700x25 being a common maximum tyre width. This bike takes up to 700x30, mostly as a result of designing for “long reach” caliper brakes. And as road tyres have got wider, I now run 30s … Grand Bois Cypres, which you can get from Kumo.

Gravel bike. Merida Silex 700. I was very fortunate to get a wholesale price on Merida through Bicycle Queensland’s links with Pedal Group, the importers of Merida. My thoughts on carbon bikes vs aluminium bikes are expressed elsewhere on this site, but suffice to say this 12-speed GRX 800 mechanical, aluminium-framed gravel-eater is serving me very well indeed. Since I got it for a great price, I did not have the slightest hesitation in splurging on Rene Herse tyres for this new machine. 700x44 Snoqualmie Pass are ‘road’ tyres, but as I have also said before, wide slick tyres are my favourites for bitumen and smooth gravel duties. If the road gets gnarly I am on the wrong bike, I should brought the Carve. One odd quirk about the Merida Silex is that the sizing is super stretched out. Mine is a ‘Small’, which is the first time in my cycling history that my bike has not been a ‘Medium’.

Bikepacking bike. Based on a 2011 Specialized Carve aluminium frame. Currently has a Trifox carbon fork. Fantastic device for long steady days on a rail trail or a back road through the bush. The carbon fork with its extra carrying capacity on the forks, and the Jack’s Rack upfront for the Buffalo Bag (it’s a Big Buffalo, size small, ha) work super well. Also love the Vittoria Mezcal tyres in 29 x 2.1. The Carve was the machine of choice for my most recent big adventure, the Munda Biddi Trail in Western Australia in September/October 2024.

Mountain bike. 2016 Kona Precept. 27.5 wheels, dual suspension. Cos singletrack is the best fun. I hunted around for ages when I wanted to buy a “new” mountain bike. Geometry for mountain bikes has changed so much, and these days really focusses on the downhill experience. For that purpose, the dropper post is an integral part of what makes the geo effective, cos when you are descending you’re off the saddle but still in the middle of the bike. This bike is a few years old, and slightly out of date geometry wise. Which probably makes it perfect for me. It goes great on the trails I ride in SEQ.

Folding bike. Brompton. Cos every home needs a Brompton. Not every day, but when you have a Brompton, it makes the suburban train network so much more useful! Any destination within 5km of a train station is now somewhere I can get to under my own steam. I just love being the custodian of a Brompton, thanks to my family friend Kate.

Commuter e-bike. This is a Kalkhoff Image LB Advance, which I am showing off with my friend Sam, from Electric Bikes Brisbane. The model name is horrendous, but the bike is very pleasant and chilled to ride. I run it with just a single pannier at the back to hold my clothes and/or lunch, and put my small essentials bag in the front basket. It has bulletproof Marathon tyres, a 7-speed Shimano internal geared rear hub, and a belt drive. All of which means that the sole maintenance required in daily use is pumping the tyres up every couple of weeks. Built-in lights and quality mudguards make this a commuter for all times and all seasons.

Bike computers are crazy expensive. Garmin’s cheapest current model on their website is listed at $500, and Wahoo Element Bolt is even pricier ($530). And these are the market-leading brands.

There are budget brands, such as Bryton and IGP Sport which come in around $100-200 for the entry level device. But for some mystery reason, many bike riders seem to be OK with paying more than $500 for their bike computers. I suppose if you spent $10,000 on your bike this makes sense?

Every rider has a slightly different use case for their computer. I wear an Apple Watch, and the main thing I want a bike computer to do is record stats for my rides. So I don’t bother with a computer on the handlebars for the majority of my rides. It’s recorded by the Strava app on my watch.

A computer on the handlebars, therefore, is not very important to me. I am not interested in how fast I am going. If I am riding with the bunch and I am not dropped, then I am going fast enough. If I am riding by myself, who cares what speed I’m going?

But there is a time when a bike computer that you can view on the handlebars is indispensable. That is when you need to navigate to your destination. For me this is when I am bike touring, but also for exploratory rides around the paths and back streets of Queensland cities and towns.

I am a super-user of the website ‘Ride With GPS’, and I have literally hundreds of routes planned there, going back to 2014.

And my experience of the Garmin Edge 530 is that following GPX tracks on a Garmin absolutely sucks.

The Garmin has a habit of telling me that I am off trail, and that I should take a U-turn to return to my course. This will happen when the road or trail I am following is outside the margin of error of the GPS device or the RideWithGPS plot, but still actually following the correct trail. And this is very common.

There are lots of tricks you can try to stop the Garmin doing this as you prepare the GPS file. None of them work all the time.

I have ridden for kilometres at a time with my Garmin device telling me to make a U-turn, when I know I am still on the right trail. This is, of course, infuriating.

The display of the Garmin 530 is also configurable to the nth degree. I am a person who fiddles with their gear, so have I ever gone through and optimised the 530 to show the data fields and display items that I want? No, I tried a couple of times and it was so complicated that I gave up.

But here’s what I’ve been doing for the last couple of years. I have left my Garmin 530 in the bedside drawer, and instead I use a Beeline Velo 2.

The Beeline Velo is a smaller device, which is made by a company in the UK. It’s round, and sits unobtrusively on handlebars or stem cap. Diameter is about 45mm, roughly the size of many sports watches, even though you mount it to bars or stem, you don’t wear it as a watch.

It does not have “buttons”, instead the body of the device and the base of the device have a defined click between them, which can be done on any of the four cardinal points of the compass. The click selects a menu item or navigates to another menu item.

And the main thing the Velo does better than any other device that I have tried, is provide clear navigation.

The device has a simple but cheerful aesthetic, all curves and bright colours. It is the most visible bike computer I have ever used. Often when navigating with the Garmin I would have to come to a stop to peer at the screen to understand what the map is saying. The on-screen map of the Garmin is usually at an attempt at accuracy, which fails by being too low-res.

That is never a problem with the Beeline. The device does not attempt a real on-screen map. Instead the Beeline shows you a stylised version of the upcoming intersection, and clearly highlights the way your route is indicating that you should go. It is much simpler and less detailed way to operate, but I find the Beeline a delight to navigate with, and the Garmin was simply painful.

OK, so the Beeline is much cheaper than the Garmin 530, and you like it better for navigation. There must be some downsides surely?

Yes, there are a couple of little quirks about the Beeline.

The first is that it does not have its own GPS chip. So it needs to be linked to your phone whenever it is operating, so that it can know where it is. And that creates a drain on your phone’s battery. If your iPhone (just as an example!) is getting to an age where the battery life is already problematic, then asking your phone to also do GPS navigation duties on behalf of the Beeline will not be a good thing.

The second downside is that the Beeline mount is not compatible with Garmin or Wahoo mounts. This is I think the only major drawback to the Beeline. I think the reason the designers have not simply used the Garmin mount is that the body-base click system used for menu selection means that the base has to be shaped accordingly. But it is still the only thing about the Beeline that I would change if given the chance.

The upside to no GPS chip is that the device is low cost (relatively). And I don’t have any occasion where I am deliberately leaving my phone at home. If I am out on a bike ride, my phone comes along too. My current iPhone is doing OK on the battery front at present.

The upside of the Beeline is just the delight of using the device, especially when compared with the frustrations of navigating on the Garmin. Battery life is adequate, not stellar. It charges via USB C. The mounting system works fine, but you need the Beeline mounts for both handlebar and stem cap mounts. Of course the 3D printing nerds are onto this.

I sold my Garmin 530 at a bargain price, because I had no further use for it.

NB: I’ve owned a Beeline Velo for a couple of years, but as of a month ago I am now an ambassador for Beeline. Upshot of that is we’ve got a Beeline Velo to give away to the Bicycle Queensland members soon. What did I get out of this deal? A second Beeline stem cap mount, so I now have one on my gravel bike and one on my bike-packing bike.

I really like this sort of thing: Bikepackbaggregator.

Get over there and add your bike!

I really enjoyed the process of clearing out the dead wood from my shed (two wheelie bins worth, plus one van-load to the dump / recycling place).

Here’s the “final” version. Of course it’s never final.

The 'highlight' here is the home-made stand the three-drawer tool chest is resting on. The simplest possible carpentry job, but doesn't mean it was that easy for me. Recent heavy rain fast-tracked the removal of the wooden chest of drawers that has held my tools and spare parts for about 5 years. It was never designed for the exposure to moisture that is prevalent in my bike shed.

The steel shelving is of course from the best source of second-hand shelving: Absoe.

My friend Emma gave me these three sorters full of small parts one time when she was down-sizing. Here you can see what I'm like ... if I can do anything to give future me a clue about what's stored in there, it will mean that I use a part that I have, rather than jumping online to Pushys and spending money that I don't need to spend.

What I’m working on: my home workshop

Inspiration: From the iBob list, and from an article on the Escape Collective.