Snow!

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Bezzen wrote:
Yup. About 10 centimeters of snow when I went to the mailbox today. Fun fun!

Time to get the car and go out on the roads for some amateur ice racing.  :-D

Sounds like fun to me.  In this corner of Essex (which officially qualifies as being a desert) we rarely get snow and if we do it only settles for a few hours.  One winter evening I was driving my old Golf GIT back through some snow covered country roads liberally applying the handbrake...  I'm such a child sometimes.

My mate is working on a project for his mountain bike; he's got a pair of old tyres and is punching some toughened steel screws through the treads to give him grip on ice....

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@X-ray,

Thanks for that...

My mate is going to trim the screws down to a short length and insert a proprietary anti-puncture kevlar strip between the body of the tyre and the inner tube to ensure the screws stay put.  

It will be interesting to see how his bike handles non-frozen patches of concrete!  

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Dan wrote:
There already are studded bicycle tyres, why make your own?  :-?

@Dan,

Because the only one's we've seen for sale in the UK are (courtesy of Schwalbe) are around £40 a pop which is expensive for something that we'll only use once or twice a year maximum.

Better to take a worn all weather tyre on it's last legs and modify it on the quiet (my pal is a metalworker by trade and has all the materials / tools required free of charge).

BTW, almost no-one in the UK uses winter tyres on our cars.  The last long term "big freeze" I recall here East Anglia was back in February 1991!  Most drivers here have little or no experience of driving on snow, hence we had major problems in 2002 when a brief snowfall ground the M11 motorway to halt for 24 hours (trapping many drivers in their cars overnight) because our local councils aren't bothering to use proper grit on our highways.

It's no accident that Scandinavian drivers seem to dominate the WRC!

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redrumloa wrote:
I've never seen snow :-(

I miss winters when snow would fall and settle for days at a time.  It's supposed to relieve symptoms of SAD (of which I'm a chronic sufferer) by maximising the meagre sunlight.

That said, it's cold, slippery, a bugger to drive/walk/cycle on, freezes up your pipes and turns to a horrible grey mush at the slightest provocation...

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@Blob

Not a bad idea at all, the bigger tyres fit over the smaller ones but don't have to be squeezed into the rim I assume?  I can see a "Blobrana's Guide to Cycle Maintenance" thread appearing soon...

Strange thing last night, just after I wrote about East Anglia's lack of snow I peeped out of my lounge window to see the loads of the stuff covering the landscape!  Of course, by 07:45 this morning it had turned to grey/brown mush which has been liberally applied to the side of my car.

I remember way back in '91 when I was at college and we have what can only be described as a blizzard.  We were allowed to go home early and promptly headed straight to our local playing field where I discovered an abandoned car bonnet in the bushes.

Seconds later, five of us were perched upon this upturned bonnet hurtling downhill scattering small children on sledges as we went.  Later that day some people from a local supermarket turned up with one of those rubber door type thingies that proved to be an excellent sledge for six people.  Poor chap on the front didn't share our amusement when he managed to suddenly stop all six of us using a large oak tree and his groin...  This was a perfect excuse to make for the nearest pub for a few fortifying ales.  Ah, them were the days....

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@X-ray

The Cape gets quite cold IIRC, I remember cycling to school in Mowbray one May morning feeling surprisingly cold.  

Our school uniform consisted of a green blazer, green and yellow tie, white shirt, khaki shorts and khaki long socks...

Brr!