Two common mistakes one sees in younger cyclists are too high a cadence and too much force on the pedals. This places strain on the body and equipment leading to damage and expense, not to mention the increased danger from higher speeds. Have you ever paused to consider those low cadence riders you are passing? Probably injury-free and riding the same bike that has been in the shed with little or no maintenance for the past decade.

Food for thought.

You can get qr ready hollow axles – basically just rod threaded at each end with a hole through the middle. Take the hub apart first to check it is just a straight-through threaded rod type of axle arrangement. Rear would be 10mm dia, front might be 9mm. QR skewer hole is always 5mm AFAIK.

scotia – Member

for an mtb forum, you are incredible… from not knowing the term pretzled, to soft-tail..

But seriously the comment about lycra?! They are not doing a couple of loops of the forest and then popping in for tea & cake..

And as for the course being easy, wow i take my hat off to the keyboard warriors..try one loop at that speed. love the comments about mincing down the logs..
Since when has saying a course looks easy equated to saying it looks easy to ride it at a particular pace. I venture to suggest that it is so evidently impossible (not just hard, impossible) for almost all forum members to ride that course at Olympian speeds that, for most of us, it goes without saying.

Best QRs I have had are Mavic ones, a little more solid feeling than Shimano.

Thanks. Racing – so I guess on a recumbent “aero” means horizontal, but for biomechanical efficiency there has to be enough bend at the hip, but the trade-off would lead to it being only just enough. (That is reading a bit into your comment about racing bike seat-back angles and bb height.) On upright bikes it is the other way round, aero means all scrunched up with the hips rotated forward as far as possible (particularly bearing in mind UCI rules about saddle nose position etc). If comfortable pedalling was your goal, that would probably get you to similar body angles whether recumbent or upright, just rotated.

bencooper – Member

I assume that a recumbent position is different to a rotated upright position?

It’s the same for leg length, but apart from that recumbents don’t have any hard and fast rules – basically because recumbents are much better for you biomechanically, so there’s no conflict between comfort and speed. Just adjust the bars for reach and a comfortable angle, adjust the seat for the same, and you’re done.
Interesting, I’ve only ridden a recumbent for 2 minutes. When pedalling hard on a recumbent, what do you push against? Is it your back/bottom on the seat, or do you also tug on the handlebars?

As an aside is a chain guide really needed on a 1x setup ? I thought part of the benefit was better chain tension / retention ?

Depends, many people do without, but I still get occasional chain drops on chattery fast/rocky stuff especially when the chain & rings are a bit worn. Less so on the hardtail than the FS though.
I find I get drops *sometimes* when in 9th or 10th and going over rocky stuff. I guess the combination of a non-straight chainline and chain tension at a minimum is what does it. That is with a fat thin chainring and a clutch mech. Nowhere near as much of a problem as when running 2x though.

I am hoping a minimal guide will do enough to stop this and I won’t need a massive dh style roller jobbie.

ETA probably exacerbated by my use of silly small chainrings, no doubt if I was to man up and run a 36t then I would be in a straighter chainline more of the time.

One-up do a combined chainguide and bash protector, and it works down to 28t (Superstar says theirs’ go down to 32t). The cost starts to look not so silly if you compare it with two devices. Though the recent exchange rate movement hasn’t helped.

http://int.oneupcomponents.com/collections/all-products/products/bashguide-iscg05

Just ordered one, so can’t say if it is any good yet.

So we’ll see it first on electric bikes then.

Energy-storage braking would make sense on an e-bike, I guess it must be difficult to do or it would already be there. It would also make sense on other bikes, for example filling an air canister for adjustable tyre pressure and tubeless reflating etc.

I’ve got an original 29er and the bb is plenty high enough with a 100mm fork, wouldn’t fancy a bigger one.

I had trouble fitting a fat 2.25″ (or thereabouts) tyre and a front mech, this was easily solved by dishing the rear wheel over a few mm, there was plenty or room on the non-drive side for the tyre nobbles. Didn’t notice any effect, not even having to lean a bit when riding hands-free. (Now gone oneby.)

Frame still forms a great basis for an XC bike in my view, with the versatility to go more cx or touring mode (though I haven’t really explored that.)

ETA my front mech was a top or bottom pull one and I had to hacksaw off the arm for bottom pull to provide tyre clearance.

104 is just a bit big for the chainring sizes some people want with their one-bys. With 98 mm five-arm (old style 5 arm compact) you can go down to a 28t but only with spacers. So a new bolt standard was needed. But there already is the SRAM 94 mm one, which accommodates down to a 28t though that is four bolt. Which Wolf Tooth already make rings for, and direct mount ones.

So what I don’t understand is why they didn’t take the SRAM 94mm four bolt standard and make spiders for that in varying offsets.

Haven’t seen what the bcd is for CAMO though.

ETA somewhat ninja’d by STATO there.

My experience of putting 100mm forks on an 80mm fork bike is that it works, once you dial in the extra sag of the fork not much difference. But what you are proposing would put the BB way high even with sag, you’d notice that.

Pivot has moved towards to bb on 2017 models – should be more active than ever.

OTOH might make them more like any other single pivot and less Orangey.

So they have moved the main pivot backwards to a more conventional position. Was that this year or earlier (I haven’t been keeping up with Oranges.)

I’ve found both Gorilla and Stans come unglued at the overlap after time, though the valve keeps it all in place. And I have had Gorilla tape slip on re-fitting a tyre without renewing the tape. Currently experimenting with home-made rim strips made of washable tablecloth vinyl held down with Copydex. Which don’t appear to be doing any worse.

Always better to tap with a fat bastard hammer than have to swing at it with a little one.

Try painting latex solution on the inside of the tyres?

This worked for me way back in the days of tubeless conversion kits and XC tyres with pinholes galore in the sidewalls. Well, when I say worked, it worked so far as leaky sidewalls were concerned, I wouldnt say it ever worked as an overall solution so I went back to tubes until things got better with UST and tubeless ready stuff.

An important factor in low-speed stability is how the centre of gravity falls/rises as the bike flops over and the steering turns. The bike will stabilise at a steering angle where the cg is lowest (you can see this by looking at how a the steering of a static bike changes as you lean it over). This “cg lowering as the steering turns to correct the lean” effect depends on having some trail, unless you make an extreme design where the cg does funny things like these guys did[/url]. (They are far too dismissive of #David Jones[/url] work there I think.)

The problem with a head angle at >90 degrees may be that the cg lowering effect is not limited. My dodgy mental geometry imagination indicates that for any angle of lean, the cg would be lowest if the wheel turned a full 90 degree, but it would take some proper geometry to confirm that. With a <90 head angle, there is an minimum cg height point dependent on a combination of trail and head angle.

I’d go for “twinglespeeding” (2 at the front, one at the back) simply because there must be so many part-used 2x parts lying around. I tried a thringlespeed once.

alextemper – Member

Compress and then unweight using body/hips and draw legs up as the bike gets light.

There should be no conscious effort of pulling the bike up to initiate the movement off the lip, especially from the bars. Bar pull can cause pulling one side more then the other and will result in the whole bike turning in the air. Unlike a whip where the back end of the bike steps out but the front generally stays pointed in the direction of travel.
That is what I do, and is not what that guy in the video ^^^ is doing – and he is getting way more height for his speed than I would. I find with short ramps (a wheelbase or less) my technique results in effectively squashing the jump and getting no height. The unweighting has to happen before your front wheel leaves the lip, which is before your rear wheel has started to take off. To get height off that type of jump you would have to lean back and essentially go up the ramp on your rear wheel. I am not able to do this at the moment, but then I am crap at bunnyhopping as well.

That’s what I use, the measuring scoop comes with it. Still probably a massive mark-up there for some basic chemicals I guess, if that matters to you.

I have found I am more prone to cramping on longer rides since I took to a low(er) sodium diet, and having electolyte in my drink appears to have helped with this. Then again since I took to a “not eating like a pig” diet I also need to take much more care over fuelling for rides and add carbohydrate as well. A side effect of this is that I drink more during a ride because sweet slightly salty drink is more palatable. As I used not to drink enough fluid, this has been a good thing.

If you are against buying a proper electrolyte mix, add in some low sodium salt as that has potassium in it, which you need to keep in balance with the sodium.

[There is evidence that very keen athletes who sweat several hours a day can become calcium-deficient, so that needs dealing with somehow.]

The Codeine is “similar to” the Transition Bandit 29. The Smuggler is an appreciably different beast (I have the Bandit and a mate has a Smuggler).

Also , when negotiating tight turns your outer hand goes further forward.

My early noughties hooligan bike was an Azonic Saber. With old Pike coils on the front it weighed 36lbs, though I did race it downhill with Z150 Bombers for a bit, that would have been a couple of pounds heavier I guess. I’ve still got it (the orinal Romic shock long since bit the dust) and it is still a hoot. But I have a Transition Bandit 29er for all mountain fun now.

Nice use of the word “tron” in the name though.

Bugger me I’d forgotten what utter tosh bike manufacturers talk about suspension design – the Felt page about equilink. Just as well people don’t spout drivel like that about important issues of the day…

Then again… the hoop stress would change as you deformed the tyre (lower I think) which would make the narrow tyre even softerer.

That was it! Thanks swanny.

Ah you’re talking about thumb-poking not riding. Doh. I stand by my post in relation to riding feel though (ok if we’re being pedantic, riding on flat surfaces). What matters is the rate of change of contact patch area with distance of squash. Hoop stress might be relevant to the feeling of a small (in relation to the size of the contact patch) lump in the trail, I am not sure. There would be reductions in the force contributed by other parts of the contact patch to take account of.

Although that is not relevant to the thumb-poke test, hoop stress is not the only factor there. The angle at which the tyre forms a well around your thumb will also affect the force your thumb feels and that will be different for a given movement with a fat tyre. I would tentatively suggest that this effect will mitigate somewhat the effect of increased hoop stress.

The “main pivot” moves in an arc that is dependent solely on the position of the suspension in its travel. It is like a “two short links rotating in the same direction” four bar (eg some Marins, Giants dw-links etc.) but with a more complicated method of controlling the movement of the lower short link (and so many more pivots).

The linkages in front of the seat tube do not only control the shock. They are what defines the movement of the main pivot, and are why (despite being a five-bar) the axle path is fixed.

For fixed axle paths it is the axle path that defines (along with the chain angle) how chain tension affects suspension movement. This design will provide a very sharp initial movement of the lower short link, which would equate to a high momentary virtual pivot point.

The avoidance of patents may have had something to do with the design. I remember a few years ago a manufacturer doing something similar – it looked like a Horst but there was an extra short link at the front of the “chainstay” whose movement was controlled by a (red coloured) link coming down from the rocker arm. So a five-bar as well. I can’t remember who the manufacturer was though -anyone?

Neat possibly, hardly simple – it has three more pivot points than a simple four bar and some bits that look like they need to be made quite chunky. You’d need a clear performance gain to make that extra complexity and weight worth it.

So change in force for a unit squash ~ change in area (which was the question). Possibly a fat tyre will expand its footprint both longitudinally and laterally, so this marginal change will be greater. And if you have a fat tyre at the same pressure you would put in a thinner one, then it would not be optimally squashed and might not be using the full width of the treads until squashed a bit. You might not notice the effect as much at pressures that were optimal for the fat tyre, too low for the thin one.

It is a fixed axle-path design, but with a rather extreme shape (and spring-rate curve to match).

Scotland preparing for another referendum now. “highly likely” was Sturgeons words.

I can see NI going too.
But where? That is an issue that would appear to stand approximately a 0% chance of not becoming quite sectarian.

Interesting comment Joe. What about the future for completely machine-made composites? (That is, with fibres running from end to end and so on.) Tiny robots weaving them perhaps? Genetically modified spiders spinning their webs in a co-ordinated way?

For me, that’s not what it is about at all.

My first four attempts one took an hour and the other 3 took 15 mins each, on both bikes I’ve had a tyre go flat but just pumped it back up and squirted in a bit more liquid

Then I got some hope enduro wheels and racing Ralph,
I’ve now spent well over 10 hours and I just cannot get them to stay up, I bought an airshot and can get them to seat but air just flows out, I have left an inner tube in for a week and still no success
Could it be the folded tyres, is it worth getting in touch with Merlin to discuss the tyres..

Well fecked off
If there is a leak that you cannot fathom, it may be to do with the rim/tape/valve. Have you tried re-doing that lot?

I rode one then and didn’t think it was good. Too high and steep for steep stuff, felt unnervingly “over the front” at all times. For the same reason, I didn’t like Marins of the time, of which I rode a few (never owned any).

The design was logical up to a point – long travel to soak up the bumps, high bb so you can carry on pedalling through rocks where shorter travel bikes would be too bumpy for it. But really, it just proved that was not overall a good thing, as on the downs it was compromised. It really was a 6″ travel XC bike with geometry to match and possibly people couldn’t get t heir heads completely round that and had expectations it would do the sort of things one (then) expected 6″ travel bikes to do. Which is didn’t.

pretty sure my last rear wheel build was something like 285mm ds, 286mm nds so obviously used 286 all round. Different hubs flanges, offset rims etc etc

I’ve never had any issue with DT spoke calculator but I want to upgrade some unusual straight pull hubs, no idea how to work it out for that sort of thing.
Well I’ve never done straight-pull, but…

It appears from the internets that straight-pull spokes are measured from where the bulb on the end starts (ie the end of the straight bit). Though I haven’t found a manufacturer’s drawing of this. If that is true, you need to measure your hubs accordingly, ie measure the flange hole circle diameter with reference to the outer end of the surface against which the spoke butts (and don’t correct for the diameter of the hole itself). If you were being picky, you would do two calculations, one for the inner spokes and one for the outer spokes (different flange offsets) though splitting the difference would probably do fine.

Well that’s how I’d do it.