@identitizombie – I understand that this is probably a seasonal thing, i.e. once the racing season is over the front page returns to more generalist subjects. Just felt that over the past 2 or 3 weeks it’s been one racing story after another. Singletrack seems to be in a good place at the moment with some great features and personally I would like to see more articles advocating the issues around our recreational riding which is what the majority of MTB’ers do. That doesn’t mean any less articles around the racing scene, just place them under a separate tab with only the major stories hitting the front page.

@IdleJon – As said above I don’t mean less racing stories, just not all splashed on the front page pushing other articles (like Missadventures) way down the page. There are 6 Red Bull Hardline articles in the first 15 or so features on the home page, which to me is too many. Like you I don’t want to read about “normal rider rides” all the time, but I do want to read about the issues and stories (good or bad) around MTB’ing that the bulk of us “normal riders” have.

My mate Rich taking a break after the ball breaking climb up White Hill above Abbotsbury (Dorset) on Saturday in the 30c+ midday sun. Mad dogs and Englishmen and all that ……….

@jonostevens – see my comments re Dunkery earlier in the thread, well worth it I think. If the weather forecast is correct the views from the top will be stunning this weekend.

@Drac – Yeah, it was earlier in the year before all the “staycationistas” had arrived and trampled the plants flat. These are Solstice stones near Hardy’s Monument in Dorset, if you are there on the summer and winter solstice’s the windows in the columns line up with the sunrise and sunset. I was there on the right day in June, but it was heavy cloud and fog :-(

Needed a pic to test loading a picture imbedded in a post, something which I have failed miserably at previously. Postimages.ORG seems to work well although with a dodgy looking URL below the pic!

Dunkery Beacon is a must do. We left the cars in the free car park at Exford and there is a trail straight out of the village centre (heading north) and then after about a 1km of road you turn right and follow the track up to the beacon (about a 4 mile climb I think). The views are stunning in all directions north across the Severn estuary to Wales, east to the Quantock Hills, south across Exmoor and west to Dartmoor. The decent to Brockwell was brilliant very technical until you the get into the woods near the end. We then returned to the top via Fairgarden Farm and did the decent (the climb we did at the start) back into Exford. It’s about 15 miles and 2000ft of climbing. The White Horse Inn in Exford does excellent food and beer.

Had two claims a few years ago now, both paid in full eventually. The second one, 3 bikes and a rack taken off of the back of my car, Aviva did quibble about and wouldn’t pay out the full amount, but Barclays Bank who sold me the House Insurance under which they were covered did make up the difference. Currently have all our bikes named and covered (new for old) on our house contents policy. Looking at the thread I think you shouldn’t skimp on cost when insuring your bike and go with a named or specialist company, not just Joe’s Insurance on Confused.com because they are the cheapest. Of all your possessions a bike probably has the most chance of going walkabout, apart from maybe a phone.

Had something similar on my 310xt, there are a button combinations to do “factory” resets.

Soft reset – lap and mode buttons
Hard reset – mode and power buttons
master reset – lap and power buttons

you need to press them at the same time for a few seconds
Might be different for yours, google it.

@jimmy748 – mate where are your top two pics from? I live in Broadmayne know the local tracks very well and I didn’t recognise that trail?

@nixie yep that’s the one

@rhorn
GHF – look at it as testing and/or improving your MTB skills and possible your underwater riding skills
or
GHE – my bearings will all be f***** and I will have wet feet for the rest of the ride
:-)

Cornish Mining do a very good trail leaflet with 60km of trails, some of it is covered in the issue 129 ride. It’s called (unsurprisingly!) Mining Trails and comes from http://www.cornishmining.org.uk. A mate sent it to me when we were thinking of riding down there. It also has lots of info about the trails, things to see and local attractions.

Get the map out and look west of Winchester plenty of quiet lanes, BW’s and BOAT’s. There is also the cycle trail (the Test Way) that runs south from Salisbury alongside the River Test. Re muddy trails, if you’re a mountain biker, it’s what we do! :-)

@thols2 –
I should been more specific, the 3-7 years life span was quoted for e-bike batteries. My wife’s e-bike battery failed after 5 years of reasonably low usage.

The Audi 8 years or 160,000km guaranteed is just a guarantee that they will cover any shortfall if it doesn’t reach those milestones. It also says “it should last the lifetime of the vehicle”, surely the vehicle itself should last much much longer than 8 years. My wife and myself both have vehicles (not electric) which are over 10 years old with a lot less than 100k miles on the clock, I would expect e-cars to last a lot longer, with battery changes, than todays petrol/diesel vehicles.

While we all joke about N+1 culture Antony de Heveningham’s piece in issue 136 is worth reading and makes some very good points about our consumer culture. The bike industry seems to keep coming up with new “bikes” and then telling us this is what we need, sadly a lot of people say “yeah I always wanted that”. Gravel bikes are a prime example, aren’t they just HT MTB’s with skinny tyres or road bikes with fatter tyres? And as for Gravel Bike specific accessories and clothing don’t get me started! Not having a go at you @twonks because you seem to have come to the same point (an epiphany some would say) albeit by buying a bike you now realise that you don’t actually need.

“The cycling industry is continuously promoting the newest, latest, fastest innovations and models. And in general, we as consumers still buy into that with our N+1 gospel. The next decades will need to see a change in fast consumerism.” – Antony de Heveningham (issue 136)

@mjsmke – Best answer of the day by miles :-)

@aide, thanks for that, I was really confused when reading Dean’s article in the magazine last night as I had this serious and very real Deja Vu moment and assumed I must have read it online. Now it all makes sense, sort of! Mind you not surprised there are mistakes when asking a printer to print half the magazine upside down! :-)

Recommend the Tennyson Way (BOAT) which runs from Carisbrooke (nr Newport) to Freshwater Bay across the rolling downs of the south west part of the island. Your are either going up or down, not much flat! Its not far from the MTB centre. It also goes thru Brighstone Forest and there are other BW options for the return journey depending on where you are staying. Loads of bridleways on the island, get yourself an OS map and do some exploring, much more fun than just loading someone else’s .GPX file into your Garmin. Remember “bad decisions make great stories”, STW 2020.

I would check that they are the correct ones for your bike/crank set and that have been installed correctly, they shouldn’t be creaking from new. If they are old and creaking its probably because they need changing. I change my own now it’s not a difficult job if you can make or buy a press tool.

@superficial – “If everyone moved en-masse to eBikes then your group rides might indeed be further/faster/longer with the same high intensity of exercise”

I don’t think this would be true. The same guys that get to the top of the hill on normal bikes would still get there first on an e-bike. Some would need Turbo to get up a hill and others Eco, then battery and motor performance come into play, e.g. an unfit rider on a full powered e-bike would probably beat a fit rider on a lite e-bike. While the playing field might be level in that they all have e-bikes within that field there can be significant tech differences.

Also would rides be faster/further/longer? Faster means using more power which means less distance unless you want to peddle that heavy bike home unassisted. The three points of a triangle consisting of Speed/Time/Distance are intrinsically connected, affect one and you affect the others, e.g. more speed = less time/distance. A fit friend of mine who has gone totally over to riding his e-bike reckons the limiting factor for him is the amount of climbing on a ride. Anything over 3000ft and he is likely to get “battery anxiety” (the fear of peddling home unassisted), the distance doesn’t really matter.

Had to resort to eBay for a 2nd hand SRAM front mech, unable to get a new one! :-( It’s always worth a look, plenty of folk breaking a bike and selling the components individually.

“You want to calm your language down with your mum in the car”
“That’s my girlfriend”
“Oh, oops”
Thanks @mcnultycop, made me lol and almost choke on my morning coffee.
Must remember that one.

@tthew, apostrophe corrected :-)

Is it possible to post pics from Instagram here? Tried putting the link in via the IMG tag, but the pic isn’t showing :-(

@tomhoward, @intheborders, @z1ppy, Mine was more of a general point about weight reduction not specifically about the OP and I must have missed the post where the OP mentioned health issues. Reducing weight isn’t easy or cheap and even if you take 2kg off of a 25kg bike I doubt you would notice much difference when lifting it. As others have mentioned e-bikes are heavy for a reason and adding very lightweight components could I guess actually affect the integrity and safety of the bike. Until someone comes along with lightweight batteries and motors, probably 10-20 years away, e-bikes will be heavy, if you enjoy the easy uplift don’t complain about how they perform on the way down.

Just replaced my BB bearings and had the rear hub replaced all due to the very wet winters we now seem to be having, replacing them is becoming a regular post winter chore. Made me wonder, I don’t have to do this my car wheel bearings, so what’s the difference? Are they sealed better, more robust or covered in some way to keep them dry?
While some bearings are cheap mine are SRAM PF30 at £40 a pop and I would much rather repair than replace, but like others have mentioned here renovated bearings don’t last very long. We should be making every attempt we can to get away from this “throw away” society.

don’t take this the wrong way, but ….. I have listened to many people over the years trying to reduce weight on various bikes (this is not an e-bike specific issue) and most of them could have gone a diet for a month and dropped far more weight than they could ever remove from their respective bikes! Just saying …………….

If you don’t want the absolute latest kit Sportspursuit.com have some good deals on the Fenix 5x watches and you can get an extra 10% off with the STW discount code.
https://www.sportpursuit.com/products?bid=95&predictive=1

My mates Levo has been in and out of dealers quite a few times, for a 1 year old bike, with “motor” issues. After getting a Christmas tree’s worth of lights going off they found moisture and dirt in the compartment where the circuit board was housed. All replaced and repaired under warranty, but to be honest with how we (the MTB community in general) ride our bikes and the UK weather we shouldn’t be surprised at the number of this type of problem. Add to that hose pipe cleaning, or god forbid a pressure washer (!), and water ingress is inevitable I think.

@hopefiendboy –
What do you call reasonably priced?
I bought a Race Face NW 30t 104bcd for £38 last week, choice of 6 colours. It is aluminium though.

https://www.chainreactioncycles.com/race-face-narrow-wide-mtb-single-chainring/rp-prod109723?utm_source=CRM&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=OrderConfirmation&utm_content=GB

@FB-ATB, have a read of Conan-Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, Holmes and Watson are ejaculating all the time.

On the “selfie” pics, when I’m riding with mates we have enough trouble getting a decent in focus shot when someone is holding the camera/phone, god knows how we would get a good selfie riding off into the sunset. No wonder some of these solo rides are “epic”, must add hours to a ride trying to get the right photos, for every pic we see in the magazine there must dozens (hundreds?) that don’t come up to the required standard. Or these riders are so skilful (and lucky!) that they get it right most of the time.

Thanks for all the help and advice guys. For me weight isn’t a massive issue, as I said earlier in the thread shedding weight off of my body would be a far better and far cheaper exercise :-) However it is a nice by product of simplifying and cleaning up the bike’s looks a little. I now have a second hand front mech installed, but think I will still go to a 1×10 set up, after all I can always go back to 2×10 if I don’t like it. Cheers

@damascus – cheers, that was my thinking as well. Although a swift diet after all the lock down eating would probably save a lot more! :-)

@thols2 – I spoke to the chaps at Specsh UK and apparently the front mech was specially (no pun intended) made by SRAM to mount on the “Taco Blade”, but only for Specsh bikes and is not an official SRAM part. The chaps at Specsh are trying to find one, but I don’t hold out much hope. In 2017 they went to 1x on their bikes so SRAM stopped making that particular front mech for them.

mech photo
rear of the mech photo
broken part of the mech photo

Photos of the mech

@SSSIMON – Thanks I have e-mailed you some pics, unfortunately I don’t subscribe to any of the Instagram type services to allow me to put the pics up here.
Cheers

Thanks @allanoleary, I wondered about the Shimano option, its a strange set up (to me anyway) SRAM front mech, SRAM chain and a Shimano XT rear mech. The mount might be the constraint as it is a single bolt into the “Taco Blade”. I think I will take it into the LBS where I bought the bike and ask their opinion as well, they used to be a Specsh dealer and are still servicing a lot of their bikes.

At the top of Kiln Hill, above Abbotsbury (Dorset), yesterday. Wonderful ride in the surprisingly warm sunshine.

Put a link to the photo on my blog page via the IMG icon, but the post doesn’t seem to recognise it. How do you get images into posts?

Bike Park Aachen is south west of the town, check out Trailforks or Komoot, lots of trails. There also seems to be a bike park near Aywaille, south west of Spa just over the border in Belgium. A friend of mine who live in Liege regularly rides in the Ardennes Forest in the Spa/Stavelot/Malmedy area, loads of trails there. Just looking at the Trailforks map there is another bike park, Ferme Libert, just north of Malmedy. Basically there are loads of trails within an hours drive so you should be well sorted and far healthier than visiting the covid ridden flesh pots of The Dam :-)
https://www.trailforks.com/region/bikepark-aachen/?activitytype=1&z=9.2&lat=50.52303&lon=6.00133

Had the same side wall leakage problem with an 2 year old Specsh Purgatory, replaced it with a new one and the problem was worse! Complained to Specsh and they sent me a new one for free. Have left it on the shelf and replaced both tyres (had a Butcher on the front which only leaked a little!) with Maxxis Ardent, leak problem gone.