Thursday, 11 December 2014
Mince Pies
Working on the premise that our food posts get far more interaction than anything other than Eddie Merckx as promised here is @AmbaTechGuys mince pie recipe. I completely forget where I acquired it from but it is simple and very nice. I apologise for the lack of a finished item picture but I was on a roll and had boxed and delivered before realising my error.
Serves: Some, about 18 tarts per pack.
Nutritional Info: Calories; Loads. Allergies; Gluten. Diabetics: adjust levels before eating.
You Will Need:
1x 375g pack ready rolled puff pastry. (Not straight from the fridge)
1x 820g jar of mincemeat. (Get the best you can afford it's worth it)
Demerara sugar
A little milk to seal
1. Cover your pastry board with enough sugar to completely cover your sheet of pastry.
2. Lay the pastry on the sugar and press down so the sugar embeds in the pastry.
3. Cover the pastry with the mincemeat leaving a 15mm gap on on long edge.
4. Roll the pastry firmly like a Swiss roll and seal the edge with a little milk.
5. Pop in the fridge to firm up and rest for 30 minutes.
6. Pre heat your oven to Gas 6, 200C, Fan 180C
7. Take the roll from the fridge and slice into 10-15mm slices
8. Press the cut faces of the slices into the remaining sugar so they crush down a little.
9. Place the tarts on a non stick baking sheet allowing a little room between each to allow for spreading
10. Place in the centre of the pre heated oven for around 20 minutes until sticky and golden.
11. Remove from the oven and allow to cool a little on the tray. (Try to remove them too soon and they'll fall apart)
12. Remove from the tray with a fish slice before they fully cool and the caramel welds to the tray and place on a rack to cool fully.
13. These normally keep long enough to get from my house to the NT car park at White Horse Hill near Uffington, where they are devoured by a group of mulled wine fuelled cyclists in short order.
Enjoy.
Neil
Thursday, 25 September 2014
Hello,
thanks for visiting the Koolstop stand at the Cycle Show in
Birmingham UK. Sorry I couldn't be there but there is no leg room
for a 3m polar bear on modern aircraft and that Yeti is very close
with the use of his Skoda.
If
you've got here you entered our competition for two pairs of pads of
your choice, good luck, we'll announce the winners as soon as we've
contacted all of you. Now we'd like to keep in touch with you if
that's OK?
Below
are links to our various social networks, it would be really nice if
you'd click through and give us a like or follow. We won't swamp
your newsfeed with surrogate adverts they bore us as much as you.
There will be links to new products, things our retailers are up to
and what we're up to and the occasional cat on a unicycle. (It's the
web them's the rules) It would be nice to stay in touch.
Sunday, 21 September 2014
Introducing Swisseye
Introducing
Swisseye
The
team at Amba are excited to reveal that the first of the new brands
from Eurobike 2014 to go live on our B2B is the sports glasses
manufacturer Swisseye. This will go live on Monday 22 September and
we hope you'll be as impressed as we are.
We
have placed an initial order for stock items that we will hold in the
warehouse at Exeter. This will show on the B2B and price list as
Stock Items and will be with us before the end of September. Items in
the Swisseye catalogue not on this initial list will be available as
a special order and take a week or two to arrive after an order is
placed with Swisseye. With over fifty styles available the chances
of us getting what everyone would like was always a big call so with
advice from the people at Swisseye we have gone with the obvious and
popular lines elsewhere in Europe.
You,
our retailers, are at the core of everything we do here at Amba so if
there's a style you want to stock give us a call and we'll get you
and your customers sorted as quick as we can. If they prove popular
it is a fluid list and if customers demand we'll provide for you.
We
were very excited by the quality of the infant and children's glasses
available and all colours and styles will be stocked. A far wider
variety of styles are available for customers with prescription
glasses whether with clip in frames or traditionally glazed by an
optician. Spare frames and replacement lenses will be available as
well as nose pieces, arm rubbers and a selection of small parts.
There are standard, polarised and photocromic lenses and styles to
sort all faces and pockets.
As
soon as our demo stock arrives we'll be able to come out and show you
the range and we are sure you'll be as impressed as we are. In the
meantime have a browse through their website and see what you think.
Any questions or to organise a visit, contact the office or Neil.
The Amba Team
Monday, 14 July 2014
New Campagnolo Compatible Pads from Koolstop
Koolstop Campagnolo |
Campagnolo pads can be a nightmare for the unsuspecting retailer or user and the
new offering from Koolstop needn't muddy the waters. The new Super
Record designated pads have been produced to fit to the new style Skeleton
brake shoes but are compatible with Campag holders from 2000 onwards.
Amba will have these in stock very soon.
We will be stocking the pad compounds in our standard ranges, ie
Black, Salmon, Dual Compound, Ceramic & Carbon. If you want the
carbon 2 or Red Cross pads let your retailer know and we'll get them in for them. For compound details see the Koolstop page here.
For customers with old style Veloce brakes where the bolt screws into
the back of the pad, Koolstop's Dura holders can be used as they fit
the smaller slots in the calipers. Pre 2000 pad inserts replacements
are still available from us but I suspect most riders have upgraded
in the last 14 years so they'll start sliding into retro before too long.
Thursday, 19 June 2014
Stop All the Clocks
Say it quietly, but as from today the days are just getting shorter.
I know it puts a downer on the weekend but my glass is not half
empty, I'm at my Sister's celebrating her birthday so no chance of
that.
Between today and the 26 October when the clocks go back a riders
thoughts should turn to lights. Whether it's checking over last
seasons, did you discharge your rechargeable and fully recharge it
before putting it away? or researching this winter's illuminating
lovely, prior planning prevents poor performance. Retailers are
starting to plan their stock for the lighting season so you the
customer can ease their decision by deciding sooner rather than later
what you are going to use.
Are you finally going to indulge in a dynohub front wheel and light
system that just works? Upgrade to a decent rechargeable system? Or
just spend a tenner on a piece of junk off of eBay with no warranty
or beam pattern but it has a big lumen number and Cree LED in the
title? Why not do the research on what Lux, Lumen and Candella
actually mean and where manufacturers measure them. Have a look at
the beam pattern maps that more enlightened manufacturers publish
then make an informed decision. Heaven forfend but you could even
pass your information around and help to quash the torrent of BS that
is out there about bicycle lights.
The darkness is coming, be ready.
Thursday, 12 June 2014
Busch and Muller Ixon Core / IXXI Twin Pack
Busch &
Muller IXXI / Ixon Core Twin Pack
Yesterday I got my hands on the new USB rechargeable lights from
Busch & Muller. I've had access to the Ixon Core for a while but
wanted to do a user check on them both. I have been using the
original Ixon for 6 or 7 years now and am hugely happy with it. On a
personal level I couldn't understand why you'd want a lesser light. I
appreciate however, some customers buy with their pocket. In my
previous life as a retailer the head to head for rear lights went
between two well known brands. The considerably brighter light lost
out as the lesser light was ten bob cheaper. The brand name may have
come into it but at source the cheaper light was bigger, heavier and
nowhere near as bright.
So, twin packs. Usually an excellent light matched up with an okay
light at what appears a budget price. The B&M can't be called
cheap at £67.50 RRP but, “What price your safety?” as Sorrel's
Mum always says. If you live in a town this twin pack should be well
up the list for consideration IMHO. My old shop's best selling twin
pack had a poor front light and a fabulous rear light yes it was
cheaper but you'd need a second front light in reality.
Burn times. In a far from scientific test I discharged both lights
totally and then charged the IXXI from the mains for 2 ½ hours and
the IXON Core for 3 ½ as stated in the instructions. The IXXI
stayed lit for around eighteen hours. The Ixon Core burn time is
quoted as more than 3 hours actually ran for the best part of four.
This does include the time in low power mode which is considerably
longer than the 10-15 minutes my old Ixon gives me. So no mean
shakes for a 50 Lux light with a good beam spread on the road.
Attachment to the bike for both lights is by the now ubiquitous
rubber strap. The Ixon can be clicked out of its' mount as well so
if you have to thread your strap through cables you can leave the
mount on the bike.
Charging. Both lights charge with the industry standard micro USB
plug so unless you insist on using CDHoJ products your phone/tablet
cable will fit. I'm not a great fan of charging off your computers
USB ports but over the course of a working day you'll get a fair top
up. Come the revolution charging towers will be a part of secure bike
parking areas.
So as an in town commuter twin pack I think this is a good package no
matter what rear light you use, in town you'd double up with a
flashing light as an attention getter. So there is my early punt into the 2014 lighting season
Monday, 3 March 2014
On Bicycle Lighting 3
If
you have a basic physics grounding and/or have researched buying a
bike light lately you are probably a mite confused right now. All
the manufacturers seem to rate their lights with different methods
whether that is watts, candela, lumen or lux and it just muddies the
water for the punter on the street.
To
clarify my stance early on, I work for Amba-Marketing, the UK
distributor for Busch & Muller and Supernova. I bought my first
B&M light in the late 1990s (Thank you SJS Cycles) nearly a
decade before I left the military and entered the bike world . Over
the last 20 years I have used lights from B&M, Smart, Axa, BLT
and Cateye for both battery and dynamo. I was given a B&M Ixon
IQ by Amba the first winter they were on the market as a sales
bonus/trial. I will not hide my respect of B&M's lights they
have served me well on tours, club rides and some mostly unlit rural
commutes. From my first halogen fuelled Oval to my current LED Oval+
with my trusty Seculite or D-Toplight depending on the bike, I'm now
a kid in a sweetshop genuinely unsure what to replace the Oval with.
You
only have to visit a cycling forum to discover a variety of differing
opinions on what light to have. The trouble is once you get past,
“It says 300 million lumens and only cost me a tenner” what do
you actually know? So in the third of a number of blogs on
terminology todays subject is;
Lux
This
is where the two previous articles meet up and all nearly becomes
sweetness and light. Lux is the SI unit of
illuminance and
luminous emmitance, measuring luminous flux per unit area.
Illuminance is the total luminous flux incedent on a surface per unit
area, it is a measure of how much light illuminates the surface based
on an average sensitivity of human perception of brightness. We all
see light differently depending on our eyes so science uses a known
average, So what we have is lumens = Quantity and Lux = intensity on
a surface.
It
is arguable that Lux is a more useful unit for the comparison of bike
lights which is our initial quandary. However, alone it is also
fairly useless unless you have the distance the light is measured
from the source. Also it says nothing about field, consistency or
colour of the light. So we may have 100 lumens at a point x metres
from the lamp but what is the reading 5cm in any direction? We just
dont know. So a field map of the light intensity helps us but only
if all the manufacturers produced their output in a standard format
(Flying Pig1, this is air traffic, remain on pan awaiting clearance
to taxi) Power isn't everything, because how you feed all this light
through a lens also varies how much light goes where. My old IxonIQ
has a third more lumens than the new IQ but the field pattern is much
improved on the new model so in this case more lumens doesn't mean
more light.
In
conclusion while our three main measures used in bicycle lighting are
all linked non of them tell us precisely what we want to know. If
however a few key distances and comparable lumoinosity maps were
included in the promotional bumph we might have half a chance of
accurately comparing light a to light b. As it stands the closest we
can get is the reviews in the paper press hoping the photog switched
off autocorrect so they're all on the same aperture and shutter
speed. Will the bike light industry buy into this? Some have but as
there are so many tuppeny ha'penny mass manufacturers out there
putting quantity over quality it's doubtful. So we're still going to
be stuck with the guy on the club forum banging on about the 3K Lux
light he got mail order from Ulan Bator. You know the one he'll have
two on his handlebars and one on his helmet secured with duct tape
and melting the retina's of any poor soul coming towards him so they
cant see where they are going, he's fine though.
Labels:
bicycle lighting,
Busch & Muller,
commuting,
lumen,
lux,
physics
Location:
Wantage OX12, UK
Tuesday, 25 February 2014
On Bicycle Lighting 2
The second in a number of items vainly intended to clarify the muddy waters of bicycle lighting terminology.
If
you have a basic physics grounding and/or have researched buying a
bike light lately you are probably a mite confused right now. All
the manufacturers seem to rate their lights with different methods
whether that is watts, candela, lumen or lux and it just muddies the
water for the punter on the street.
To
clarify my stance early on, I work for Amba-Marketing, the UK
distributor for Busch & Muller and Supernova. I bought my first
B&M light in the late 1990s (Thank you SJS Cycles) nearly a
decade before I left the military and entered the bike world . Over
the last 20 years I have used lights from B&M, Smart, Axa, BLT
and Cateye for both battery and dynamo. I was given a B&M Ixon
IQ by Amba the first winter they were on the market as a sales
bonus/trial. I will not hide my respect of B&M's lights they
have served me well on tours, club rides and some mostly unlit rural
commutes. From my first halogen fuelled Oval to my current LED Oval+
with my trusty Seculite or D-Toplight depending on the bike, I'm now
a kid in a sweetshop genuinely unsure what to replace the Oval with.
You
only have to visit a cycling forum to discover a variety of differing
opinions on what light to have. The trouble is once you get past,
“It says 300 million lumens and only cost me a tenner” what do
you actually know? So in the second of a number of blogs on
terminology today's subject is;
Lumen
The
Lumen is the SI unit of luminous flux, ie how much visible light is emitted by a source. Note visible and emitted it is what's pumped out
not what we get back. In simple terms it is to light sources what
pints are to beer, but like beer all outputs are not the same. While
a pint of beer seems black and white without the ABV it is not as
helpful as you might think. The same with lumen. It's not how big
it's what you're doing with it that counts. 100 lumen, bomb burst
across the sky is less use to us as cyclists from our cycle light
than 100 lumen focused where we want it. It is an objective measure
of effective luminous output from a light. We need to know how big
the area and how far from the light that is.
As
with the candela the lumen as an indication of your light needs
definition. We don't know how or where it affects our vision merely
what there is coming out of the source. We do not know its colour
spectrum or useful spread.
The
relationship 'twixt lumen and candela can be seen on last weeks
diagram as, here comes a difficult sum AmbaTechGuy will fail to
answer but expects to see on tee shirts soon:
1 cd·4π sr = 4π cd·sr ≈ 12.57 lumens
Put
into simpler terms: Luminous flux (in lumens) is a measure of the
total amount of light a lamp puts out. The luminous intensity (in
candelas) is a measure of how bright the beam is. If a lamp has a one lumen bulb and the optics of the lamp are set up to focus the light
evenly into a one steradian beam, then the beam would have a luminous
intensity of 1 candela. If the optics were changed to concentrate the
beam into 1/2 steradian then the source would have a luminous
intensity of two candela. The resulting beam is narrower and brighter.
Confused?
It's just physics but it's beginning to show the limitations of the
information on the box and we're not quite half way through my peripatetic ramblings yet. Meanwhile a picture is worth a word or
twenty,
Wednesday, 19 February 2014
On Bicycle Lighting
The first in a number of items vainly intended to clarify the muddy waters of bicycle lighting terminology.
If you have a basic physics grounding
and/or have researched buying a bike light lately you are probably a
mite confused right now. All the manufacturers seem to rate their
lights with different methods whether that is watts, candela, lumen
or lux and it just muddies the water for the punter on the street.
To clarify my stance early on, I work
for Amba-Marketing, the UK distributor for Busch & Muller and
Supernova. I bought my first B&M light in the late 1990s (Thank
you SJS Cycles) nearly a decade before I left the military and
entered the bike world . Over the last 20 years I have used lights
from B&M, Smart, Axa, BLT and Cateye for both battery and dynamo.
I was given a B&M Ixon IQ by Amba the first winter they were on
the market as a sales bonus/trial. I will not hide my respect of
B&M's lights they have served me well on tours, club rides and
some mostly unlit rural commutes. From my first halogen fuelled Oval
to my current LED Oval+ with my trusty Seculite or D-Toplight
depending on the bike, I'm now a kid in a sweetshop genuinely unsure
what to replace the Oval with. I do not put myself up as an expert and the text has evolved from a number of sources not just a C&P from Wiki.
You only have to visit a
cycling forum to discover a variety of differing opinions on what
light to have. The trouble is once you get past, “It says 300
million lumens and only cost me a tenner” what do you actually
know? So in the first of a number of blogs on terminology todays
subject is;
Candella
Scrubbing past the history, the current definition of Candella is,
The
luminous intensity, in a given direction, of a source that emits
monochromatic radiation of frequency 540 x 1012
hertz
and that has a radiant intensity in that direction of 1/683 watt per
steradian.
Piece
of cake? OK those Hertz and Watt figures. They give you a colour and
intensity, which
is roughly yellowish-green and is a color that the human eye is
highly sensitive to.
Candella
is a measurement of light at source, but neither it or Candlepower
tells us how powerful the light is some distance away from the
source. Instead, we measure the amount of light illuminating a
surface area, which is called, naturally enough, the illuminance. The
result is measured in lumens, with 1 lumen = 1 candela x steradian.
For our purposes here we can think of the the latter term as an area,
as the following example illustrates:
Imagine
a transparent 1 metre
radius
sphere surrounding a candle. Its surface area will be given by 4 pi
r2,
so the surface area of our sphere is:
4
pi 12
=
12.57 m2
The
amount of energy passing through 1 square metre of the transparent
sphere is 1 lumen, and so it follows that 1 candlepower is 12.57
lumens.
So in our bike light scenario the buyer has no idea where the candella has been measured or which direction the light is going or for that matter how many directions. So for our intents and purposes candella is fairly useless as it is a measurement of emitted luminous intensity and without knowledge of the emission cone meaningless.
Calm,
there are more of these to come and much will become clear in time.
Labels:
bicycle lighting,
Busch & Muller,
commuting,
physics
Location:
Wantage, Oxfordshire OX12, UK
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