Well that was a bit of a surprise when moving bikes about as the Session bottom bracket on the NDS is completely dead. I’m sure it was fine, but it’s really really not now.

To make it worse it’s a DUB and apparently it seems the DUB tool is a different size to my BB tools.. GRRRR.

I’ve borrowed one and ordered a new BB from Biketart, so it’ll be easily sorted and replaced.

Ah, annoying . Have you tried a strap wrench?

Yeah you do need the right tool, but a burly strap wrench can often shift it if desperate. Thin ones will snap though.

Nah, mate round the corner had a tool so i’ve stolen his for the day and got one on way from Biketart along with a BB.

He’s not riding the Session this weekend anyway so no biggy there

So the BB was replaced, along with a bit of extra marine grease in the jockey wheel bearings and the Session is spinning as lovely as it can be, the bottom and top idler wheels were checked and are smooth and nice too. So it spins lovely and sweet.

The boy has fitted (well i did, he’s using/testing) the seat, grips, pedals from DMR (still waiting on new bars to come in on a big boat).
I’m pleased to report that he’s getting on well with the pedals, which are different click/release to the CrankBrothers pedals, so i was a little worried he’d struggle with them. They’ll get more testing this weekend as we’re at Antur Stiniog on Sat and then straight to Dyfi on Sunday, where they’ll get fully tested in anger.
[url=https://flic.kr/p/2pBKFVU]IMG_20240305_165342[/url] by Steve Weeks, on Flickr
We’re off to Rotec Cycles today as the very very kind people from Oxford Products are dropping off a load of their cleaning/lubing products for us today… Which considering the rain at the moment, should come in pretty handy for the weekend.

After that it’s mostly gym/golf (yeah he likes a bit of golf to unwind) and then back up for Dyfi/Llangollen/Antur before the racing starts in the first weekend of April. He’s got multiple days out with Katy as well to try and work on some details and hopefully get up to speed. It’s straight in with Rheola on the 6/7 and then the weekend after is the Nationals at Rheola as well.
Rheola last year was somewhat challenging in terms of weather
[url=https://flic.kr/p/2otocpu]2023-04-15_02-14-43[/url] by Steve Weeks, on Flickr

[url=https://flic.kr/p/2otkHEb]2023-04-14_08-05-36[/url] by Steve Weeks, on Flickr

I’m really hoping we get better weather this year, both for his sake and my sanity.. 😀

We’ve gone for airbnb this year for Rheola due to the parking/camping situation there, which does add in a level of expense but last year was pretty hard on us, so we’re trying to learn from some of the things from 2023 and take us forward into 2024.

Those muddy roots………. Jeepers!

Those muddy roots………. Jeepers!

It’s got such a typical camera/goPro effect there too as it’s quite steep in reality as well, one of the drops is about 5-6′ vertical, into more wet roots.. I honestly was impressed every time ANY rider came down to the bottom safely.

Tomorrow then brings the start of the busy. I know it may seem like we’ve been busy, but it gets crazy now.

We’re away from tomorrow till Sunday with Antur and Dyfi.
The weekend after 2 days at FoD and a midweek away at somewhere
The weekend after that is Ponty and Dyfi, with a midweek trip to Llangollen and BPW
Then it’s Fri to Sun at Rheola
Then it’s Fri to Sun at Rheola again.

The bike, kit, wallet are all going to take a hammering as there’s quite a few hotels, meals out, likely parts, spares, pads, tyres and of course gallon upon gallon of diesel.

It’ll be fun though spending time with the boy

I’ll have to say hello this weekend, I’m also at Antur and Dyfi on Saturday and Sunday!

Love this story weeksy. No interest in DH and have no kids, its just a great journey. Thanks!

Ah nice one mate.

I’m flying solo on Saturday so if you want company on the red and maybe black powder I’ll be up for it.
If you want to hit race track faster, I can loan you the lad.

Sunday I’m not booked on Dyfi, just him as it was a team mates day out. (Hasn’t quite worked fully)

Love this story weeksy. No interest in DH and have no kids, its just a great journey. Thanks

Thank you. Sometimes I write it for me, sometimes I write it for people, sort of.

Mostly I write it to laugh at just how bonkers my life is at times.
As you can imagine, being away for the next 5 weekends is something slightly nuts. But it seems to work for me and Mrs Weeksy, especially as it’s Easter so a 4 day weekend and we’re only away for 2.

I’m very much looking forward to this year, there’s plenty of other crazy that’s in the pipeline that’ll come out soon enough.

I’m flying solo on Saturday so if you want company on the red and maybe black powder I’ll be up for it.

I’ll be there with my brother too, so you’re very welcome to join us. I’m sure we’ll be doing a mix of the reds and blacks. And thanks for the loan of the lad, however I suspect the chance of me being able to keep him in sight is small…!

We’ll chat tomorrow mate 🙂 thanks for the offer… I suspect the chance of me staying with you and your brother is about the same 😀 😀

First time there and having only seen the race track when walking (half drunk), i was quite intimidated by some bits.. So i’m half looking forward to it… half, well, maybe not so much 😀

The boy hates it when I do these as apparently he looks rubbish on the ebike. But we had a couple of hours spare and he can just smash lap after lap.

That was some route the Sat Nav brought us up on. The A494 was like worlds most dangerous roads after we passed Revs.

Beers and food time

Trying to add a bit more of a human element to the trips, I only seem to post the riding but the trips are way more than just that.
All today’s footage is on the GoPro so will come off there on Monday.
We both had an epic time, him playing with Nathan and Ruben from Trailrippers, we out with RikkLegge from her and his Bro.

After riding and the clean up we headed to a pizza place I’d found in dolgellau

He was flagging!!

Superb sourdough pizza sorted him out

It was then off to random farm house near Dyfi and chilling while watching Bond. Neither of us have the energy to head to town..

The Sunday was equally epic for him, arguably more so, but as always not without some trials and tribulations.

We met up with a few racing mates, them and the lad have raced a fair few times in the last 18 months, so had seen them about, but as is often the way, i was more familiar with the parents than he was with the kids. But they all spent the day together, laughing, joking, hitting trails, facing the rain and wind. Sometimes my lad was forced into leading which pushed him on, sometimes he was chasing.. but either way, they all came down laughing and joking 🙂 Awesome and exactly what i wanted from the weekend.

He did have an excursion into the floor sadly, he was riding Race Track and as he came over a crest, there was someone in the track walking their bike up the middle of the track !!!! He was flying on that run and had 2 simple choices, plough straight into them or avoid and take a big tumble…. he chose the latter. Cuts and bruises a plenty, but nothing more than that happily.

We got back about 8.15pm which made it a very long but very enjoyable weekend. It was then onto the ‘sorting’ for me after a quick bit of food.

1. Sat morning we found he only had the 1 pair of shoes in the van. Arrggggg. He thought i’d but the shoes with DMR cleats in, i thought he had. We’ve been running the DMRs for a few weeks and he’s really happy with them, but not tested fully in anger yet at a big-boy place. So we though, “ok, we’ll put the cleats on from his spare pedals”… Well that didn’t go as planned. 1 of the bolts was proper seized in the shoe and no amount of effort was getting it off.
So he had to run the C-B pedals all weekend as i wasn’t risking breaking the shoes and screing up the weekend.
Sunday i battled and had to cut the cleats off
[url=https://flic.kr/p/2pDReK9]IMG_20240317_214534[/url] by Steve Weeks, on Flickr

2. The other issue we’ve been having is the shifting…. Considering he’s running X01 mech and shifter, it’s really not as crisp as i’d like it to be. Sunday he ended up with 6 gears instead of 7 as i simply wasn’t getting them all in the car park. But the 6 he was getting were decently indexed, so we went with it. It was only 1 time apparently that he had a gear selection issue on the trail, between 2 jumps it didn’t change… but we were mostly OK.
So last night i pulled the inner, which was tougher than i’d have liked, so i’m pretty sure the inner needs replacing, but possibly the outer too. I think it may have been kinked when fitting through the chainstay. However, it was a NIGHTMARE job, so i think i’ll give to ROTEC as he’s got the double ended barb to attach the 2 outers together and do the outer.

Apart from that, it was a brilliant weekend and lots of riding, progress, chatting, laughs and smiles (oh, and a smashed iPhone). I met up with RikkLegge from here again and even though i wasn’t riding Sunday, we still had plenty of chats with him and Rob, i must say, both are properly nice (sorry if i bored you with my ramblings.. i do that).

Videos, footage and clips are still pending approval from the media team (him and wife) so they’re not ready yet.

Onwards to the next adventure 🙂

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C4tHalVMGKk/?igsh=Y3h1MXQ0Zno3dm9v

being a semi-pro mechanic I assume cleat bolts were greased…… and yet?

People scoff, but

Seized cleat disaster

It didn’t seize in the thread but at the head in the spacer as far as I can tell.

We’ll learn our lesson and whip them out every month or two, but not a lot we can do now on it.

Mistakes happen, we will learn and move on

What make cleats are you using with the DMR pedals

We have multiple, the DMR pedals come with their own, but I also have some Shimano SH56 in the box

We stopped using the DMR ones as Abigale was having problems with them.  Went to Shimano SH 51s and never had a problem since.

Yeah he’s ok with them but we’ve got multiple pairs of shoes so if needed we’ll fit the SH.

Out of interest, what sort of issues was she having?

Looking at the pedals, they a lovely thing. I think he wants a pair in gold for August lol

We have a few sets that she didn’t take with her, red, blue, orange and black.

Inconsistencies with them clipping in and out randomly. Could never get the adjustments to make any difference. Had the cleats in different pairs of identical  shoes, Kestrel  Boas, which made it worse.

Went to Shimano and never let her down.

I don’t think the DMR ones were made to the same tolerance as Shimano

Very interesting. Will lob the Shimano genuine ones in tomorrows shoes as he’s out playing.

Thanks for the tips

Sometimes i think i need my own personal mechanic at times.

It’s been a few weeks since the boy rode the Privateer, but he’s out on it this evening along with a full days riding with Katy on the weekend. So i thought i’d pull it down from it’s place and get it ready. I assumed that’d only involve fitting the DMR pedals from the spares box and giving the chain a wipe/lube.

However, when i put in the stand i noticed the headset was properly seized… well, it loosened off once i rotated it… but it wasn’t perfect. So pulled it apart and found, yup it was WELL past it’s best… We’ve all seen old knackered headsets that explode into 5 pieces when you go to take them out 😀

So a new upper and lower bearing is now in there, along with a clean and greasing of it all, the multitool is back in and it’s all torqued up.

Bit poor from me really… but we do have a lot going on at the moment. Lucky i checked really, although i expect he’d have just taken the Orbea out anyway.

geneuine question, what are you using to clean the bikes/how are you cleaning them as the number of seized bearings doesn’t correlate with the use unless you are using shit bearings?

The number of riders who ride as hard or harder than your lad in the same sort of conditions that i see on a weekly basis who do very little to look after their bikes and have far fewer bearing issues

@weeksy I can recommend the Bike Yoke Shifty,

it’s one of those products which you think makes no difference but it helped clean up the shifting on my GX DH derailleur.

another bearing to be killed

geneuine question, what are you using to clean the bikes/how are you cleaning them as the number of seized bearings doesn’t correlate with the use unless you are using shit bearings?

I’m guessing (due to the amount of posts I see of riding lots in the horrible conditions we’ve had for the past 6 months) the bikes are getting a pretty hard life of constant gritty mud soakings and jet washing.  If I’ve done a day of uplift in the wet and then washed my bike (using a Worx which is not a high power jetwash) trying to be careful, I dread the next time I get it out wondering what state it’s going to be in once fully dry.

All the bikes are washed after a day yeah. They’re done with either a hose or the Mobi which is slightly more powerful than the hose.
They then dried and blown with a pet blower to get most of the water off/out, dried with a cloth/micrfiber and then chain etc lubed and put away in garage.

The headset is the one that came in the Privateer from new 16 months ago, so in truth, i don’t think we can complain too much, 16 months is pretty decent for a headset and as said above, conditions have been somewhat terrible over that time. Unlike some riders we can’t pick and choose when we go out, we book things and we ride, if it’s horrible, it’s horrible. That’s just how it is. But yeah arguably i need to do a bit more upkeep at times on certain bikes…

It is kinda tricky to know where we are with stuff and that’s why i have such a massive box of spares sitting waiting, i had 3 sets of headset bearings ready to go, so it was literally just a case of getting it out and lobbing the new one in.

“I can recommend the Bike Yoke Shifty,” I have no idea what one of these is, but i can go take a look later.
The shifting now we’ve thrown a new inner in there is pretty good again and he’s happy. I’m putting it down to the inner being a bit crap and having got wet a fair bit over winter.
I may need to look into some better inners/outers that are a bit less susceptible to getting crappy inside or maybe a coating of ‘something’ on them when i put the inners in. But again, it really does kinda come down to ‘that’s just how it is’

In the past 6 months, we’ve barely seen a dry day, plus they get hammered with dirt on the uplifts.

I’m not saying other people do less than we do or the boy rides harder than anyone else as that’s clearly not the case.. So don’t lets get into that hey 🙂 but in our defence… he does go hard and they get ridden in every condition possible.

Just catching up on this thread again.

Do you keep a spreadsheet of the costs involved ? Is it about £10k a year ?

It might be useful for me to show Mrs FD when she gets upset me spending £200 on new football boots for Jnr FD every 3-6 months !

Hey Dunc i think i’d better reply to that via PM matey..

Almost every photo and post for months has been bikes covered in filth due to the weather this winter. I reckon it’s par for the course that bearings die – although I rarely change a top headset bearing  – it’s usually the lower one that takes a hammering.

But I go through suspension bearings reasonably quickly and I don’t ride anywhere near as much as your lad does.

It’s more that they are ok on one ride and then dead on the next. If the privateer bearings in the headset are the quality of the ones in hunt MTB freehubs/hubs then it’s no surprise

What might be sensible is speaking to kinetic or similar and asking them to put together a bespoke bearing kit of better/best quality bearings for each of James’s bikes. That way you know that they are ready and waiting, not shit, and less time is spent on faffing/reporting back on the internet

Also maybe track mileage/runs from each component

“What might be sensible is speaking to kinetic or similar and asking them to put together a bespoke bearing kit of better/best quality bearings for each of James’s bikes. That way you know that they are ready and waiting, not shit, and less time is spent on faffing/reporting back on the internet”

I have every bearing/spacer/wheel bearing/headset bearing for the Session all in a little compartment marked ‘session’ in the van. When i say every bearing i honestly do mean it…
Along with that i’ve got at least 120 other bearings from jockey wheels, to pivot bearings from all manufacturers, all labelled up with their individual bearing code and in separate clear bags.
There’s no waiting, faffing… but yes there was reporting… but that’s kinda the point of the thread.

I have another which has ‘headsets’ one which has ‘brakes’ and one for ‘chain/gearing’

The only time we got caught out slightly was the BB which was a minor mistake as i have multiple BBs in the box, just not a DUB one.

Clearly they’re not going from ‘perfect to dead’ in 1 outing, but sometimes it does feel that way.. I feel 15-16 months for the headset is pretty decent in truth, chatting to his ex-team-mate he went through 2 headsets in a shorter time on his Privateer..

Tracking mileage, not sure that’s really significant, we’ve all seen BBs that last a month, or 3 years.. so when is it changed ? I don’t have the answer in truth. I do get your point, but i’m just not sure with many years of MTB stuff that miles is the factor that’ll kill components/bearings.

In simple terms, it’s too many bikes, too many days out and more a case of ‘waiting’ than being 100% pro-active. As i say, you look at any bearing that’s been in for 3 months and it looks from the outside view, pretty worn…. but if it moves, how do you know how good/bad. The headset felt fine last time as far as i know, although my mate rode it at Dyfi not the lad.

Blasting any bearing with water and then blow drying a bike is surely going to force that water further into the gaps/bearing/frame.

Not washed my bike properly after a whole summer of riding bike parks in the alps, admittedly only two wet days, but nothing has seized. Just wipe down the forks, shock and seat post and squirt the chain.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C43VJT0s3yP/?igsh=eW43dGZxeXJibnM1

First day for the boy today as not a rider, but a trainee coach. Something he’s working on at the moment is becoming a proper MTB coach as well as a racer, so it was an experiment with Katy and him to see if the concept matched the reality. He did 2x3hr shifts and learned a lot of valuable lessons, both in terms of teaching and what the role of being a coach entails.

He’ll be repeating the exercise again soon.

New bars came in stock with DMR and were shipped out to us.

[url=https://flic.kr/p/2pEAiA7]IMG_20240321_080550[/url] by Steve Weeks, on Flickr