Tyres no, I’m pretty content with Terreno Dry on the gravel bike and GP5000 on the road bike. I could probably go lighter or more supple than the Terreno but I imagine that would just result in more punctures, I’m heavy on my tyres!

Part of it is if you don’t try it all, how do you know you’ve currently got the best setup?

This is exactly the trap I’ve fallen into with saddles! I thought I had found my perfect saddle (Fizik Antares) but then took a few months off the bike and it’s all change again, now on Terra Argo on the gravel bike which is a fundamentally different sort of saddle, and experimenting with an Aliante on the road bike. I shudder to think how much I might have spent on saddles in the last couple of years, but at least can recoup 60-70% of cost second hand…

c) Save your money and avoid being scammed.

I get a text message like that every month or two, crushing disappointment once I realise I haven’t received an unexpected package or forgotten Sigma Sports order…

That’s a shame, really enjoyed this years with my lad. He’s five and really enjoyed a lads and dad weekend biking, watching biking, camping and gondolas. He’s been buzzing about going back next year.

Yep, gutted for our wee man (7 now) as we had a brilliant World Champs weekend staying at Glen Nevis, sessioning the new pump track and watching the racing (from the Gondola, mummy vetoed a full track-walk as being too much for little legs).

Really wanted to take him back and walk down the track with him. Hoping a round of the SDA or similar will still cut it.

Neither he nor I can really be bothered with any televised DH footage though.

I would have argued but they looked like they had just been on a shoot.

Funnily enough Facebook has recently been feeding me a few propaganda posts from the shooting lobby about their ‘responsible management practices’ (aka setting fire to them) on the grouse moors. Wonder what that does for the soil…

You’ll need to get some big rides on. It’s not just your legs but your whole body that needs to get through.

That has been my general focus anyway as have some big ambitions for next year, I had a big weekend in Aviemore recently and finished strong and comfortable so happy with that. Will be kicking off April with 180km mixed tarmac/cobbles and gravel as a sort of ‘Hell of the North’ and then have two months to fit in 2 or 3 more big rides if my 9 day working fortnight plans come to fruition.

There is quite a lot of climbing, so it’s is quite a day.

I had a look at the profile but I think it’s a bit compressed to show the whole distance, it’s pretty jagged though! Seems to be endless ‘little’ climbs e.g 50-75m elevation, and 4 or 5 bigger climbs, 3 of which come right towards the end?

TrainerRoad has gravel plans but they don’t look much different to road century or general FTP increase plans.

Yeah, I watched a GCN video with Connor Dunne training for Unbound. Basically endurance and raising FTP.

I’ve got a rather ambitious plan for the next five months, Nov/Dec/Jan building endurance with one long sweetspot workout per week, one fasted morning ride midweek and a longer (fuelled) ride at the weekend which will be either Z2 road or muddy winter gravel. Will be prioritising strength work also so 2 weight sessions a week although I’m still not moving big weights, mostly functional stuff.

Then I’ll hopefully step up the intensity on the turbo Feb/Mar/April until I can move the training outside hopefully! Should be able to fit in one or two proper big gravel rides before the event.

That’s the principle at least, somehow doubt I’ll stick it all the way through…

I’ve mucked around with shims over the years but particularly for off road use the practicalities weren’t great.

I was certain I had a leg length discrepancy and a saddle pressure map at a bike fitters confirmed that one side of my pelvis sits further back than the other, but shimming the more forward side made no difference, the problem lies in the hip muscles being imbalanced and not firing correctly, which pulls my hips out of alignment.

Do you have any aches and pains other than the back of your knee?

Surely it’s because they have a vested interest in continuing to sell you replacement ‘consumables’.

Possibly, I was thinking about this from the perspective of general sustainability and it’s pretty horrendous how wasteful it is throwing away steel and aluminium cassettes and chains because of a millimetre or two’s wear.

But this is just going the direction of multiple gearbox threads. We should follow the Honda DH bike example of encasing the drivetrain in a carbon fibre box or something.

I’d just like to say that, other than on this forum, I’ve never, ever heard of anyone in my world hot waxing their chain. I’ve come to believe it must be a STW thing.

Well then this forum is clearly sustaining a small industry including (off the top of my head) at least four manufacturers of hot wax, several dedicated products, two or three dedicated online stores, countless podcasts/YouTube vids and of course some world tour professional teams and riders.

Good job STW! (winky/smiley emojji etc. etc.)

Use brass nipples!

My alloy Sapim nipples have outlasted a set of rims, 2 snapped (Sapim) spokes and 6500km of often muddy wet Scottish gravel.

I think aluminium nipples have moved on from the days of seizing and crumbling, and most importantly they come in lots of pretty anodised colours!

 I recall you were going to try the Silca Synergetic ? How did you get on with it ?

That’s the ‘wet lube’ that I intend to use once I’ve finished up the Fenwicks.

I don’t know whether to run a Fenwick’s chain through a chain cleaner or not, I get the impression the Fenwick’s accumulates over multiple applications, but don’t know if it’s also accumulating grit and contamination!

I feel like I’m going full circle and returning to wet lubes for durability and ease of re-application, but with regular chain baths to try and flush out contamination and extend chain life.

I’ll finish off my bottle of Fenwick’s Professional first, it certainly seems to outlast hot wax treatment in mixed gravel conditions but still needs to dry overnight. If I thought I could get up to 200km out of an application (the single longest gravel ride I’m likely to ever do) then I’ll maybe stick with it.

A much better bet would be to pay to see a bike fit expert. They will analyse your knee, hip, other angles whilst you pedal.

Hmm, I have less faith in bike fitters than I used to, between two of them, both well thought off in the Scottish central belt, I ended up with a saddle height of 780mm (well, 779mm…) but over time I’ve gradually lowered it to 760mm and feel faster and more comfortable than ever.

I wouldn’t even trust inseam measurements other than as a starter for 10, I doubt they tell you anything about e.g. tight hip flexors or piriformis or tight/weak low back muscles.

If in doubt, drop it 10mm!

Forced me to start using Komoot route planner for a change. Must admit, apart from lack of heat map it’s pretty good (unfortunately the lack of heatmap us a deal breaker for me though).

Ok thanks, doesn’t sound like I need the regions then although could possibly be useful as a backup navigation tool…

Was using my Park ‘bladed spoke holder’ tool for the first time today, and it looks like the perfect big plastic coated lever to de-stress spokes with, almost as if Park unofficially designed it that way : )

Wonder what sort of pace and terrain they’ll be doing. I like trying to ride gravel fast (i.e. I’m a roadie-graveller) but the thought of racing it just sounds brutal!

I can build a boring, regular type wheel that’s probably 95% as good as the best wheel you can buy and tbf that is not very hard, but, it takes me like 2 hours.

Same! I still like to ‘think’ I’m good at building wheels but I don’t get quite enough practice so every time I build one now there’s a couple of false starts and some head scratching.

Currently building up a DCR road rim which seems to be doing all the hard work for me, dished and true with barely any tension on the spokes, so only I can mess this one up now lol!

This is relevant to my interests, just rebuilding a rear wheel.

I never do the ‘hub on the ground, pushing the sides of the rim’ method any more after I accidentally folded a cheap road rim, plus as I understand it this isn’t de-stressing the spokes, it’s just releasing any wind up.

I was planning on using a rolling pin between the spokes to ‘lever’ the spokes apart a bit. Somehow just grabbing and squeezing doesn’t seem very scientific lol!

I’ve been through a few recently!

Fizik Antares Open (more just a hole than a channel), Selle Italia Flite Boost Superflow (channel), Specialized Power Arc, and now trying a Fizik Terra Argo on the gravel bike (huge cut-out and a rubber spray guard underneath).

The Terra Argo is working well so far, first saddle I could genuinely relax into for a long day out without any discomfort.

I did some big days on the Power Arc and it was ‘OK’ but I think the general shape was too curved for me, the kicked up tail was forcing my weight forward on to the nose. No doubt I could have persevered with adjustments.

I have a new Fizik Vento Argo on the winter road bike, am hoping it’s similar to the Terra Argo i.e. suitable for plonking down on for long miles.

All that being said, I’ve been gradually lowering saddle more than I thought sensible but it has improved comfort no end, I’m down to 750mm from BB centre from 780mm! I think that should always be your first check?

Phew, with any luck we can just stick our AI e-bikes on Zwift and finally get on with our lives without all this tedious ‘cycling’ getting in the way <laughing emoji>

Might not apply to you Ian but it’s worth thining about trying to build up some core strength so you can ride with elbows flexed and loose

Don’t know which Ian you were talking to but I was consciously working on core but at the same time quite able to do the whole superman/playing the piano on the bars type thing whilst riding along, I would just slip into bad habits and ‘dump’ all my weight on the bars, I think that’s where the banana handlebars trick worked so well.

I can’t offer much advice on setup, but I was having similar doubts for a while as I rarely made it past 50km on the gravel bike without starting to get quite uncomfortable hands and arms.

I did all the usual stuff with position (shorter, more upright, saddle lower) and contact points (fancy Lauf Smoothie bars, gel pads etc.) but nothing really solved it until I read ‘one weird trick’ on the Trainerroad forum which is to imagine the handlebars as two bananas.

It’s obviously just a good mental cue to relax grip and shoulders, suddenly I found I was comfortable after 135km of relatively rough gravel.

Maybe worth a try?

Sorry Ian, we’re rather detracting from your thread here :-)

No no, you’re arresting its gradual descent down the board AND providing some interesting insite, I think I crossed the A9 three times over the weekend while following old military roads, each crossing was a ball-ache. I imagine it must be worse for horse riders.

Maybe that was the track I was expecting, broader and rootier? The western track I rode was skinnier, twistier and rockier, plus a stream running down half of it! Still good, just required a commitment of energy that I didn’t quite have…

Our 11 year old diesel Honda did this several times, replacing a pressure sensor on the fuel rail and the fuel filter resolved it (I’m not a car mechanic, just quoting what the mechanic told me!)

@13thfloormonk is that the Rourke cx that you had built?

Wash your mouth out! The Rourke is going from strength to strength, think I’ve got the contract points and position dialled for the sort of big days it’s really designed for.

Splitting and selling the Kinesis CX1 that it replaced which was a great wee bike but needs various monies spent on it that I can’t really afford.

The downside with rim brakes for me is the tyre clearance.

Agreed, and I guess I haven’t checked tyre clearance of a lot of the bikes I’m seeing going cheap. My Basso has (true sized) 28mm GP5000s on it right now and I’ve got 30mm GP5000s waiting to go on, that’s through a set of current generation Ultegra callipers.

I’m genuinely astonished that people have swallowed the kool-aid so badly to be giving away some of the rim brake road bikes and components I’m seeing right now, it’s not like any of them look like the sorts of bikes you’d ride through the winter anyway so I guess it’s either serial bike swappers, or people so dedicated to aero gains that they must have the latest breed of disc only aero wheels?

Just wish I could capitalise but I don’t have the ready cash, saw some glorious DT shallow section carbon wheels on 240 hubs, my dream wheelset right there I reckon!

Also doesn’t bode well for the rim-braked franken-CX bike I’m probably going to sell, someone will be getting a ridiculous bargain!

Are the nipples corroded from road salt?

Not that I can tell, in order to get the wheel spinning through the frame whilst out on the trail I had to tighten and loosen a whole bunch of spokes, all nipples turned smoothly enough. I applied copper grease to the threads during the last build for this reason, wonder if there’s some sort of reaction between the stainless steel spoke and the copper grease? You’d think the nipples would fail first!

Is it a 135mm hub with a 700c/29 rim?

A 130mm DT350 with a 135mm end cap, so arguably marginally less dish than standard as the wheel centre is slightly more towards the non-drive side.

I wonder if that means the drive side spokes ARE too short as per lesshaste’s suggestion, as I probably calculated length based on a standard 350 hub without the reduced dish…

Both snapped at the thread.

I used a tensionmeter but a cheap one, so just used it as a guide to even tension, didn’t trust the actual figures but I got as close to the maximum tension of the rim as I was comfortable doing (obviously driveside, non-drive was slacker).

Spokes came from RyanBuildsWheels (now BristolSpokeCo), they certainly weren’t any cheaper than RRP so hopefully not knock-offs!

I’ll admit I’ve maybe not taken de-stressing as seriously as I could in the past, just squeezing paired spokes as hard as possible with my hands wrapped in a dish towel or something, but would lack of de-stressing not have manifest itself a lot earlier?

That’s good to know about 2x or 3x though, ta.

Might start another post just to share routes, but mucho exploring in the Cairngorms at the weekend, I could well imagine those might be the best conditions I’ll ever ride in Scotland!

Burma Road followed by a section alongside the Findhorn and back via Dava Moor

And just a couple from the longer loop the next day picking off some old military roads between Kingussie and Newtonmore, back to Tromie Bridge then over to Glen Feshie

What chain? Seems some kmc tin and dlc chains prove difficult for any lube to adhere to

Not sure if that was in response to me, but originally a gold YBN, but more recently 11spd Ultegra.

I’m curious myself as to why I seem to get worse results than some, but life’s too short to keep experimenting!

I can’t seem to get much more than 100km out of one application of any lube on the gravel bike! Fenwick’s Professional has been the best so far and I include two different brands of hot wax in that.

Even Fenwick’s is no good for applying on the trail though so I’m going Silca Synergetic next which can be applied and go. Just give it a wipe down once applied I guess to avoid gunking.

Oh and definitely check ahead with the Skiing Doo, when we were there they were only doing a very limited menu…

When are you going to be there Spin?

We might need to coordinate as we’re visiting as a biggish group at the weekend and will be looking for an evening meal : )

Current cabling is reasonably fresh SP41 with the blue tinted inner cable (i.e. not polymer coated).

The bars are Lauf Smoothie which do actually have quite a tight knuckle on them, could be forcing a tighter bend in the outer.

I guess also with a full length outer I can allow a less tight bend at the BB.

Tomorrow night’s job then!

The red line on your map is reasonably well proven gravel, in as much as it features in Ed Shoote’s Gravel Rides Scotland book.

I think the verdict was that it was a tough climb (steep or long or a combo of both) and at least one very tall, locked deer fence. Descent loose and rough, I think he says suitable for confident or experienced riders on a gravel bike.

I’m looking forward to trying it next year at some point.

That’s really good!

Just for scientific purposes, what’s your bike setup? 1x? Mudguards?

Were there any prolonged sections where you were pedalling through puddles for any distance (you mentioned stream crossings but would the chain have been subjected to much spray from wheel?).

I’m back on Fenwick’s Stealth. It feels smooth and is generally quiet although I was getting some chain noise after a relatively dry 60km yesterday, but that may well have been due to all the crap wrapped around sprockets and jockey wheels!

No issues with mine on Pacenti and Kinlin rims.

For an easy life installing them tubeless I tend to inflate and seat with an inner tube first, but actually getting them on and off rims is a tool free job unless I’m being lazy.

Sounds like bad luck with the rim and tyre combo, hopefully they’ll slacken off with use.

I had always understood that the PDW guards should be quieter/more stable in use as the stays are thicker, and thus stiffer.

Not sure if that stands up to proper engineering but I do know that my PDWs have been very sturdy and trouble free over the years, I don’t tend to look elsewhere any more.