A Blog is a strange way to tell a story.
If you start here, at the top, and read down, the story comes in jerking flash backs, beginning near the end, going forward then jumping back before the place you began, then running forward and jumping back further again to the beginning.
If you go to the bottom and read up, it makes sense at first. The first short post fits nicely on the screen, then scroll up to the second post, then the posts get bigger and you're scrolling up and down and you see the pictures in the wrong order and get distracted by a link that you should have already seen and...
...or you could come in somewhere in the middle, probably because you asked google what there was on the internet about "dingle gearing", and read random posts till you get bored or need to do something else.
But if you followed each post in turn from the beginning, you would read the story of my emergence from early parenthood, to re-discover the joy of cycling when my wife bought me a design-your-own multicoloured single speed bike off the internet. And then the story of its transformation into a custom 2 speed racer, with a fast down hill and flat land gear, and a lower gear for the climb back home. 2 single speeds in one, with gears changed by loosening the rear wheel and moving the chain manually between cogs.
So I rode like that for a while. 52T front cog / 16T rear freewheel for the down hill, then change to 48/18 for the climb home. And I got fitter, and stronger, and after a while I could get back home in the high gear. In fact I could go most of the places I wanted to go in the high gear, even on a longer loop across the river and around to the university, with the final climb over the bridge and up to the top of Highgate Hill with my legs burning and chest heaving. At least it got to a point that, if I needed a lower gear, 52/18 was enough of a step down, and I took the 48T chain ring off. I experimented for a while with 170mm cranks, but I felt like I could spin the 160s faster so I went back to them.
And for a while that was the set up for the Dornoch Dingle. Big green frame with track forks, 52T chain ring on 160mm cranks, 16/18, 2 speed freewheel on the back, aero rims with skinny red tyres, a slight rise to straight handle bars with small bar ends, and a hard, narrow, white saddle.
Then winter came and I got the flu. I started riding more on the 18T than the 16T sprocket. Then I got sick again, that tends to happen when you have small kids, and I let the dingle hang in the garage for a while.... and a bit longer... and then, when I was starting to feel better, but not up to full strength yet, and looking for something to do... I built another bike.
Which I'll tell you about before this.
