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March 20th, 2009

Small widget competition answer

I’ve really enjoyed all of your competition answers – thank you.

Kennedy Fraser got the answer right, although most of you were winners too with your entertaining answers. Here’s the widget in its final resting place:

widget

The widget was the piece I was missing to make the gears work on one of my bicycles, hence the joy. Unfortunately the gears still do not work properly as I am not very good Sturmey Archer adjuster.

The bicycle is my circa 1976 Raleigh Twenty Stowaway folding bicycle. I bought it from eBay for about £43.

raleigh twenty stowaway

It is one of two and a half folding bikes I own (the half is a scrap raleigh twenty which I’m using for parts). It does not fold very well, but I plan to use it when I go places and want to lock a folding bicycle outside. I quite like the challenge of bringing the old fashioned granny shopper bike back into vogue. Other people have done so in far more convincing ways – see Sheldon Brown’s Raleigh Twenty page, and in the UK Littlepixel’s one.

I have a more sophisticated folding bike about which I might write more another time. I am a great believer in folding bicycles – see for example this post and some of the ones in my cycling category. I will perhaps write more about how I believe folding bicycles can save the world at some other point if anyone shows the mildest bit of interest.

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This is a single post on the Cartoon Blog by Dave posted on Friday, March 20th, 2009 at 9:24 am. Click here to read all of the latest posts. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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4 Responses to “Small widget competition answer”


  1. Phil Groom says:

    See: exactly what I said: an old Google blog spanner. It’s amazing what people use them for these days! I saw a photocopier engineer using one yesterday, but the bike’s probably as good a use as any.

  2. Russ says:

    Dave, you’ll be amazed to know that I owned a Raleigh Twenty ‘shopper bike’ when I was about 10. It had a bright green frame, and white tyres, and was possibly the naffest bike you could imagine in the early 70s. I hated it with a passion once I realised it was decidedly uncool (then), and can still remember the deep joy I felt when I got a racer with five gears one birthday.

    The 20 wasn’t a folding version, and also had a spring-loaded trap thingy behind the saddle for securing shopping, bags or possibly small items of roadkill.

    Now, of course, folding bikes with small wheels (sometimes *very* small) are green, cool and highly useful. I shall follow your cycling thoughts with interest – they might encourage me to cycle to work more often (albeit on a rather boring MTB).

  3. ChippyPilot says:

    I’m glad I got it right, but I was not quick enough to get my answer in before the winner.

    It takes me back to my teens when I used to enjoy fettling my bicycle. Particularly adjusting the Sturmey Archer 3 speed.

    But, then I got a motor bike…

  4. Tim Abbott says:

    Wow! Memories. I had one of these (the non-folding variety, in red). I remember forever adjusting the gears – it seems to be possible to have 1st & 2nd, but not 3rd, or all three gears most of the time except for when it jumps our of 2nd into ‘neutral’ at critical moments.
    As a student I rode mine from Plymouth to Exeter across Dartmoor once. Made perfect sense at the time…