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chiefgrooveguru
Free Member

“I think though that you have to almost treat them as two different disciplines”

I’ve never found that at all – but if I recall correctly you’re about 20 years older than me and I’m fairly strong when it comes to both manhandling a heavy bike and pedalling a heavy bike without the electrics turned on.

I meant as in I actively seek out technical climbs on an e-bike that I’ve never considered on a conventional bike because they’re just too much for the power that I’m capable of generating (and were twenty years ago too, for that matter) while trying to hold a line, feel for traction…
I’m willing to admit that at nearly seventy there’s stuff that’s beyond me if I’m relying purely on my own power, even though I don’t have a reputation of riding like an old woman.

When I started riding singlespeeds getting on for twenty years ago I credited it with keeping me riding mtbs when otherwise I’d have probably just packed it in – don’t ask me why but it just seemed to suit me, loping uphill rather than spinning high cadences.
For years that was all I rode and that, I think, is the secret to becoming the best that you can be at it. Much like playing fretless bass – just play fretless bass…(which for years was all I played too).
However, now that I’m as near as dammit seventy, I’m finding it hard to motivate myself to suffer on the tough climbs as much – especially as now I’m mostly riding alone and have nobody to “perform” to (‘cos it’s amazing what a difference an audience makes, whether it’s riding mates or spectators at a race) ;-)

At the minute I’m actually running six gears on my singlespeed (a la Jeff Jones) but I reckon it’ll be getting returned to how it should be soon…

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thisisnotaspoon
Full Member

If anything, over time I’ve gotten lower. You can keep learning to spin quicker which gives you a greater range of speeds but you can’t go down lower.

Same here, although maybe it’s also because I’m quite a lot older than when I started with this singlespeed bollocks….

I ride my normal bikes as well as riding my e-bike. I think though that you have to almost treat them as two different disciplines – there are steep uphill technical sections that I’ve discovered since owning an e-bike that I would never have considered if I hadn’t had one, just because they wouldn’t be possible, even if I was as fit and strong as I was thirty years ago..
You just have to be realistic and re-define what is possible and what isn’t when you switch between the two. As long as you can do that then I think you can live with both.

If you’re using the e-mtb to ride stuff that was previously impossible for you, due to steepness/number of repeat runs/whatever, then if that’s all you can envisage yourself doing in future I don’t think that you’d miss a “normal” bike. I don’t think that you’d lose much (if any) fitness either.

But if you’re just riding where and how you previously did then maybe the novelty will wear off and you’ll be looking for a bit of honesty again.
I think that you get the most out of an e-mtb when you look at it as almost a separate discipline – like riding a trials bike for example.
Look at Chris Akrigg if you need inspiration…

gil@thecycleshed

, i enjoy using my normal bike, it is better down hills and through techy stuff,

Unfortunately, I’m finding the opposite – I’m of the opinion now that my RM Altitude Powerplay is at least the equal of my Liteville 301 for pretty much everything, other than stuff that needs lots of endo turns, which I’m struggling with on the RM. The lower CoG and better sprung/unsprung weight ratio is, I suspect, what makes the difference.
I make a point of riding normal bikes at least as much as e-bikes because I’ve got them and I still like them as much as I ever did.
The Altitude feels almost like something different altogether – like taking a trials bike out for the day, for example.

I replaced mine with an SLX mech, after it self-destructed. Works fine with the Sram shifter and isn’t as bulky and in the way. Shifting is better too, imho.

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proutster
Full Member

Shimano SLX 12-speed rear mech works perfectly with SRAM GX Eagle 12-speed shifter, it’s what I now have on both bikes and I’m happy to see the back of SRAM GX rear mechs 🙂 🙂

I completely agree .

I’ve got a 210mm One Up dropper on my Liteville 301 and that’s completely slammed in the frame. It doesn’t seem to bother it but maybe it’s more tolerant being 34.9mm diameter?

To be fair, the Rimpact inserts do seem very reasonably priced – I’ve ordered a couple to try anyway…..

What I can never understand is why all these tyre inserts are obscenely expensive, for what they actually are.

when its time to put the hammer down.

Isn’t this the exact opposite of when you’d need good brakes? ;-)

that fishy smelling familiar old friend…

What’s that saying? “There’s only two things that smell like fish and one’s fish…”

I like the smell of new tyres – in fact, it would be my idea of heaven to have an infinite range of new tyres to try out whenever I felt like a change.

Rub some gritty, grindy mud over the discs and then do some hard stops. That’s what I usually do with any brakes.

Oh well – obviously I’m talking through my ass as usual then…
It’s funny though how some of the comments here completely miss the point of what I was originally saying, re. value for money.

And I was a fairly decent trials rider and never felt the the need to spend a shed load of money to make a stock bike competitive – in 99% of cases the rider is the limiting factor – you learn that very quickly.

Are there any other, totally unrelated things we can compare the most expensive ebikes to? Horses? A season of karting?

It’s not a totally unrelated thing though, is it? It’s an off-road machine, with two wheels and an engine/motor.

I have seen trials bikes carried in cars, actually – but, more realistically, you could carry it on a towbar mounted carrier (like plenty of people do with mtb’s)…It would certainly fit in my van, like my bikes do.
No, you couldn’t ride it on the road without tax and insurance, not legally at least, but that’s a whole different matter and who cares if it weighs three times as much as an e-mtb? You’ve got a real engine to power it and it’d get you places (if you have the skills) that no e-mtb on earth will.

But I wasn’t really comparing the virtues of one versus the other, rather what you or I actually get for our money.
And I stand by which I think is the better value.

If you have a Hope (or CK) singlespeed hub you can run six or seven gears on that. The lowest six sprockets from an XT 9 speed cassette (so 17-34t) will fit if you machine a few mm off the inside of the aluminium carrier and if you take the outside of 5he carrier down flush with the 17t sprocket you can also fit 14t sprocket for a cruising gear.
I’m using this on my Hummingbird at the minute – Zee 10 speed mech and Sram X9 shifter. All works perfectly…

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doomanic
Full Member

According to my mate who rides trials, the Vertigo is the Levo of trials bikes; style over reliability.

Probably a fair comparison, I suppose – I just used it as a comparison because I was idly browsing t’interwebs (as you do) and couldn’t help comparing the price to that of the 2021 Levo.
There are some nice details with the Vertigo though – airbox where it’s furthest away from water, fuel tank low down to drop the COG – probably too much technology though (fuel injection).
I’d still give one houseroom though.

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tomhoward
Full Member

Can you ride that at trail centres or on the road to the trails?

How much does it weigh?

How much per year does it cost to run?

I’d be willing to bet (a lot) that the running costs would be considerably less than an e-mtb. How much does it weigh? 68kgs, which is not a lot. And yes, I could ride it on the road -it’s a trials bike so, that’s not an issue.
The issue is that these days there are fewer and fewer venues available for practice and for competitions and more and more people only too happy to report “illegal” riding, unlike thirty or forty years ago when I, and everyone else, rode trials bikes everywhere that we now are restricted to bicycles.
The irony isn’t lost on me as I was out today on my e-mtb and half of that was on “illegal” trails – there are no trail centres here, btw, and I probably wouldn’t be frequenting them if there were.

Anyway, enough of this – what I was comparing is quality of the hardware and technology versus the retail price/value for money. I know which is the winner in my book – if I lived in my virtual utopia (although the Isle of Man forty years ago would do) I know that I wouldn’t be bothering with e-mtbs of questionable reliability and robustness.
But then once a trials rider, always a trials rider, I suppose.

I just use Lucas Red ‘n Tacky grease for everything, apart obviously from suspension, when I use Molykote 33.

Thomson do 120mm drop in 27.2mm, external routing. A very nice dropper post it is too. I thoroughly recommend it.
I don’t think that anything exists with more than 120mm drop, due to length/diameter constraints.

idiotdogbrain
Free Member

designers hadn’t really figured out the geometry of 29ers properly – now that most 29ers come with shorter offset forks,

Longer offset, surely? To cancel out the increased trail that the larger wheel will give you.

Makes me glad that I don’t live in the UK – or at least where you are….

It’s inspired me to go out this afternoon and look for some unlikely steep lines. Obviously they’ll be nothing like those (because I don’t have that amount of skill and talent and I’m old) but sometimes it’s good to find new places to scare yourself shitless.

Yeah, right. But only 15 seconds slower (6%) on a 4 min lap than a 250cc motorcross bike.

I’m going to call bullshit on this – I’ve briefly ridden one of these Sur-ron things and, even with me on board, there’d be far more than 15 seconds difference round a one mile track compared to a 250 KTM. The proper bike would out accelerate it, out brake it, out handle it, beat it on top end speed – there’s no question about any of this.

Are they actually usable in the same way an MX bike is or are they to heavy?

They’re a lot lighter than a motocross or enduro bike but of course they don’t have the power, suspension, brakes or handling – I reckon that if you’ve ever ridden a decent off-road bike you’ll be pretty disappointed with one of these things.
Mind you, that guy in the video blathering on about his RM250 didn’t exactly look in peak competition shape either….

If I wanted something to razz around on illegal trails I’d buy myself a 280 Gas Gas TXT Pro or something decent like that – not one of these heaps of shit. At least it would be far more capable than I am now (or ever was, come to that).

A friend of mine bought two of these last year (one each for him and his wife). He’s spent some time trying to convince me that they’re great but, from the short razz around in his field that I had, I’m unconvinced. Ride nothing like an enduro/mx bike or a trials bike, pretty crap brakes, no clutch, – underwhelming in an understatement.
I did ask him where he plans to use them, since it’s a mile up the road to the nearest forestry (so illegal there then) and illegal once he’s in the forest too, although he did say that he met a forestry guy who didn’t give him any hassle and was just interested in what it was. This was probably just someone who couldn’t give a monkey’s though…
I’m sure that if some member of the public informed the law then they’d be far more than interested “and how did you get it to here anyway sir? Oh, up this here road?

No, I can’t be too “holier than thou” because bitd I rode trials bikes pretty much everywhere, legal or not, as did most of us.
But at least they were (mostly) road legalish,and insured.

It’ll move the crank outboard, at the expense of a similar amount of engagement lost, of course. It worked for me on my singlespeed, but I was only looking to gain maybe .060” clearance (1/16”).

Couldn’t you shim the taper to get more clearance – make a shim out out of something like .002” shim stock?
I’ve done that in the past with Middleburn cranks/SKF BB.

I always use a Coke bottle (I read somewhere that they are rated to 10bar) and wrap it in duct tape.
I’m also careful that it doesn’t get scratched or dented and I replace it maybe once a year. I never pump it up to above 4 bar anyway.

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jameso
Full Member

PS easy answer, rake is a term we don’t need as it always comes up for debate. There’s HTA, fork offset and trail. Easy.

My understanding is that “rake”, meaning offset, stems from bicycles having at one time curved fork legs, which could be described that way, I suppose.

I often fancied a Fortitude but never actually bought one, because I was (still am) a bit of a Singular Hummingbird fan.
All I’d like to say is that, in my world anyway, there’ll always be a place for simple, classic steel (or Ti) bikes. They’re capable of more than most people seem to think and I’ll always own one – in fact, my Ti Hummingbird will be the last bike that I’ll ever part with. It’s an ideal companion for this all too rapidly aging man because everyone needs some reliable simplicity in their lives.
Not everyone talks as much shit as me, mind.

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roverpig
Full Member

We’re all different though and I guess it comes down to your attitude to ebikes.

Personally I just can’t understand why anybody who doesn’t need one would want one.

Having fairly recently dipped a toe into this e-bike game I do still mainly go along with this – once I’d got over the novelty of mastering ludicrous technical climbs and razzing around everywhere faster than I’ve done in years I found myself wanting to go back to riding my “normal” bikes as much (or more) than previously.
One of the greatest advantages of the e-bike has been trail finding and work/maintenance – I can just get more done and go further. That I do like…

If you shoot over to Performance line the only motor they don’t touch is the Shimano one.

No, they don’t do anything for the Dyname (Rocky Mountain) motor either.

bcfse 1 I’ve sent you a message….

I’ve got a pair of 26” wheels – Shimano XT hubs, silver Mavic 717 rims, DT Swiss DB spokes in excellent condition.
They’re just sitting around in my workshop and I think hard of just chucking them out….

dyna-ti
Free Member

And some people want to release wolves into Scotland… 😕

Having spent a bit of time around wolves, they don’t actually have a reputation for unprovoked attacks on humans. They don’t see them as a prey species (for some reason) and the only time you’d likely be at serious risk is if you tried something like taking cubs from the den – then you’d be asking for whatever you got anyway.

Far more unpredictable are wolf/dog hybrids, which can inherit whatever neuroses the domestic dog had, which combined with the strength and power of the wolf makes them (potentially) very dangerous.

Mind you, a wolf or two would soon sort a couple of bad-tempered Border collies out ;-)

I honestly don’t know how these guys do it (and that’s an understatement…).
I mean, I used to be a motorcycle trials rider, however at least there we have engines for drive and impulsion but it just beggars belief what is possible on a bicycle.
Just the fitness and strength alone, never mind all the rest of it.
It really is incredible, no matter how many times I see stuff like this.

I’ve never enjoyed biking as much as I did back in those early days. Everything was new

Same here, plus I was young(ish) and race fit.