I got about 300 miles out of my Sram XX1 30T chainring before it started “grinding”. The grinding got gradually worse and at 500 miles it’s enough to make me want to change it (though funcationally it’s fine). I don’t know about Sram cranks but on the Hollowgram spider, you can flip the chainring over to double the life (chainline is unaffected). 1000 miles out of a chainring doesn’t seem like much to me but I’ll put up with it for the simplicity of 1×10 with no front mech. I really like 1x…can’t imagine riding a double or triple again.

Njee’s chainring size comment makes perfect sense: The SRAM cassettes are pretty tough cromoly and should last well if you change the chains regularly and use that 42 for a bailout gear only. If you’re using that 42 enough to wear it down fast then your front chainring is probably too big.

OP: If you’re diligent at maintenance it might be worth buying 3 or 4 chains and rotate them every 500 miles. Since chains are much cheaper than cassettes (about £30 for an XX1 chain, £200ish for the cassette) I think that will give you the best cassette life.

Yup, downs are drying out really fast atm. It rained on Tues but it was already dry in Stanmer (Brighton) last night. Unless it actually rains during I don’t think it will make much difference (greasy chalk excepted) Agree on the wind – that’s the biggest factor IMO and why there isn’t so much of a “leaderboard” on the one-way times. If you are flexible I’d go when the wind is most favourable and maybe W-E daytime (with the prevailing wind) and return E-W at night (when the wind is likely to drop)

Hope you are fast at gates – 200 of them in your way! I don’t see any problem riding at the same time as BHF. They will likely be quite spread out and give you a good oppurtunity to chat or targets to help winch you along as you ride. SDW is almost all double track so I don’t think you’d be held up much.

Will be very impressed if you can beat Rob Dean’s record: 18:41 = 10.7 mph average. Probably doesn’t sound fast to some people but that’s a very quick pace to keep up over 6600m of climbing.

Watch out for the Hooksway and chanctonbury junctions – easy to overshoot on those as the track appears to go straight on downhill but the SDW turns off.

Good luck!

bigjim: Cool. I can give you a shout when they’re available if you like – just send me your email (my email is in m’ profile). No worries if you change your mind later. They quoted me 10 days for manufacture of the XC’s so I’m guessing about a month by the time they clear customs.

On the tubs side I am quite intrigued. 320g is insanely light and it seems like a flat rim bed ought to have a lot of advantages. Schwalbe list some 2.2 tub 29ers here: http://www.schwalbetires.com/bike_tires/off-road_tires/racing_ralph_425

I keep seeing Nino flatting on them, though (suspect he is a slightly faster over the rocks than me however…)

Those purple hubs / nips are beautiful! but agree, the balance of acid yellow to purple is a delicate one – it looks great but you’re on a Llewelyn-Bowen knife edge there!

btw: I decided my new 29er 35mm hookless are more than I need for my lightweight XC riding, so if anyone wants a hardly used pair, I’ll be selling them in a month or so (as soon as the new Light Bicycle 27mm’s XC versions I just ordered arrive).

Can’t imagine anything like that happening around our way – most of the dogs and dog owners have far too much filling and scattering of poo bags to be getting on with. 😀

I see LB have some crazy light 29er XC rims up there. (320g +/- 15g) 27mm. Has anyone tried those?

http://www.light-bicycle.com/tubular-mtb-rim-carbon-mountain-29er-XC-super-lightweight-27mm-wide.html#.U7pRKD9MRXM

Just built up some 35mm hookless 29er LB rims. I’m really impressed at how good LB were to deal with and how solid and well finished the rims are. They were also the easiest wheels I’ve ever built (even with revs)as they are so stiff they’re actually quite hard to get out of true! The hookless design seemed to work fine with 1 wrap of wide Stans tape – they went up very easily with a trackpump.

I’m using them for XC (they’re actually only 50g per wheel heavier than the Crests they replaced) Only had two rides so far but they’re certainly very nice to ride. Incredibly solid feeling for the weight. I’m not sure yet if I actually miss a bit of the flex of my old Crests but the solidity they add when riding over rocks / roots is really nice I must say. For XC I probably would go with the narrower rims, as suggested above. but the 35’s aren’t too much heavier if you fancy something wider / beefier. I don’t think you can go wrong with LB though, will have to see in the long term but so far I’d say they’re pretty sweet rims for what they cost.

The spoke tension thing came up before. It is counter intuitive but from everything I’ve read about wheel building, spoke tension does not affect wheel stiffness.

I think it’s a shame about the Enves breaking. Clearly they really want to make the best wheels they can. If you look at them in detail they are not the same as the cheaper carbon rims. The spoke holes, for example are moulded with the fibres flowing around them rather than drilled through the fibres as LB etc do. Whether that kind of attention to detail is worth 6x as much is up to you – its the law of diminishing returns as always.

You might enjoy James Holland’s WW2 novels about sergeant Jack Tanner. They are exactly like the Commando stories… A tad unrealistic at times (“biceps the size of Bournemouth” etc.) but good fun for all that.

Unless we’re saving or spending overseas then as far as I can see they get ALL of our money in tax eventually anyway. Why make the initial percentage so high on VAT and salaries?

Daffy: One girl weeing on another in the Nidd Gorge. The one who was doing the weeing branded me a pervert as I rode past. Words completely failed me, so no witty retort.

Perhaps those people were caught short?…

I found tubeless a right faff at first but you get used to all the tricks after a while and it gets a lot easier to set up. The Stans Injector thing is really good if you want to reuse the gunk when swapping tyres, almost zero wastage.

The problem round our way is thorns which kill tubes and flints which cut tyres which tubeless gunk won’t heal. Got some Snakeskin RoRo’s now though, so we’ll see if those help.

I always thought there was only a *slight* difference in ride quality between tubes / tubeless. However, I recently fixed a front wheel flat half way down a steady bumpy hill and was quite surprised with a direct comparison on how much worse the small bump absorbtion is with a tube.

The real villain of this story is not the mountain bikers jumping over horses heads or the horse riders with their trails of poo (or even the ramblers and their pointless walking poles). It’s the media.

They seem to prefer to trot out* these Day Today “It’s WAR!!!” style featurettes designed to stir up both sides and create more antagonism amongst users of the countryside than print something that might actually help the situation.

*soz

I was looking through the options on a plane and mistakenly thought Pacific Rim was that Michael Palin documentary.

It was a long flight so I did give it 25 minutes….

Utter bilge.

Not sure they still do them?

Create a new email address then join their mailing list and they’ll send you a £5 off £60 voucher. Use Topcashback too and that’ll get you a further 3%.

Bike upside down ( 😯 )

Driveside: Press bit of cloth over finger onto jockey wheels, turn pedals backwards.

For non-drive side, Press bit of cloth over finger through spokes onto jockey wheels, turn pedals backwards. More at stake on this side as rotating pedals wrong way will hurt your finger!

Disclaimer: Screwdriver IS more fun 😆

Manufacturers: We don’t ride in showrooms. Stop designing jockey wheels with holes in. It saves bugger all weight and they just fill up with mud / dust anyway and are harder to clean.

Ping

Had an email from Katrin saying my 35mm’s will be shipped this week. I’m not expecting them anytime soon though – it sounds like Coventry customs are up to their necks in Light Bicycle rims atm 😀

Fancy tonearm pillar clamp?

BigJim: If you look at Joe Friel’s blog (link below) he has a lot of info on this and usually quotes and links to relevant scientific studies in his footnotes at the bottom.

I’ll just paste direct from one of his posts because it’s a pretty good explanation (http://www.trainingbible.com/joesblog/2008/09/hydration-and-exercise-part-2.html )

During exercise, as fluid is lost through sweating and in other ways, the concentration of sodium in the body actually increases. The reason is because much more fluid is lost than sodium. One might lose around a liter of water during exercise but only lose a small amount of sodium in sweat. Normal body sodium levels are about 140 millimoles per liter (mmol/l) of water while sweat is about 20 to 60mmol/l.

So let’s say an average-sized human body contains 40 liters of water when at rest and normally hydrated. That means it has stored away something like 5600mmol of sodium (40 x 140 = 5600). If one liter of fluid is lost during exercise and with that 60mm of sodium are excreted (the high end, or “salty” sweater) then the new sodium concentration is about 142mmol/l (5600 – 60 = 5540 / 39 = 142.05). The concentration of sodium has risen, not declined. Guess what happens next after a sufficiently large rise in sodium concentration occurs – your thirst mechanism kicks in and you drink water to dilute the sodium bringing it back down to something closer to 140mmol/l. One study found that a rise of about 2-3% of plasma sodium concentration evoked a strong desire to drink [7].

So your sodium becomes more concentrated during exercise as you sweat, not less as we’ve been led to believe. In other words, you don’t need to replace lost sodium during exercise because the loss is inconsequential while the volume of water lost is significant. But even if you did, the sodium content of most sports drinks is 10-25mmol/l, not enough to replace the loss (unless you overhydrate which raises the specter of hyponatremia – more on that shortly). More than about 25mmol/L of sodium makes the drink unpalatable. The extracellular fluid in your body, where much of the sodium is stored, is about the concentration of sea water. If you’ve ever swallowed sea water you know how bad that would be to drink.

Using electrolyte tablets to maintain the body’s water / salt concentration doesn’t work. If you want to do that you’d need a ridiculously high concentration – about the same as seawater.

Tim Noakes reckons the reason salt is on your clothing after heavy excercise is because your diet is likely too high in salt and sweating is an easy way for your body to get rid of the excess. I have no idea if this is true but he’s done a lot of testing on excercise in the heat, so he probably has a better idea than most.

I use Nuun tablets because they’re a convenient way of flavouring water or home made sports drink. From everything I’ve read they make no difference to salt balance or cramps. However, in my own experience, a pint of water with a Nuun tab does feel like it fixes that thirsty feeling faster than pure water alone, so who knows…

Far too much money spent on trying to find one person.

Hora: I’d rather they spent a billion to catch the person than ‘well we could spend it on a new computer system for the NHS’.

That’s rather Daily Mail reactionary for STW! – You’re not seriously suggesting that because governments are often wasteful they shouldn’t worry about where they allocate ANY of their spending are you?

Far too much money spent on trying to find one person.

Went with MTB Kerala in Jan this year and it was bloody fantastic.

Do contact Mike if you have any questions – he’s a mega helpful and resourceful bloke and I’m sure he can sort out whatever you need and advise you on the riding. Really can’t recommend that trip enough (we booked another one with Mike as soon as we got back!)

Here’s the thread I posted on it – bit more info there:- http://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/fantastic-mtb-trip-to-india-with-mountain-bike-kerala

Many pics from our trip here: http://www.jimification.com/Kerala-India/

Unless you’re getting paid for it, it doesn’t matter. What matters is whether you had fun or not. 10KG off is amazing – that’s more than my MTB!

Pawsy_Bear – Member

“It’s still going strong. I mean how could you wear out a chain on one race? Common. Brake pads maybe but not a drive chain”.

End of lap 1… 😀

Actually this didn’t wear out the drivetrain, though I doubt it did it much good.

Horrible for the drivetrain but you can see, in thick mud it would be much better without a front mech, especially on a 29er, where the front mech is effectively a mud scraper for the rear tyre.

The other thing with XX1 is, from user reports, it looks like the Sram front rings wear pretty fast and they are £50+ each.

With the uneven bolt circle, Sram have made it impossible to either rotate the ring by 1 hole to spread the wear or run it backwards flipped around to reuse. I have one mounted on a Leonardi (Hollowgram) spider and, whilst it’s possible to mount it on backwards, the chainline will be quite off and the tabs don’t sit nicely.

What would be really nice is if someone came out with a “reverse spider” which would allow you to run all of your worn chainrings backwards. 😀

Northwind: I agree completely. However, as least the cassette is steel (bar the 42) and I’ve read quite a few reports of people getting very good life from it by rotating 3 or 4 chains every 500 miles and restricting the aluminium 42 to bailout duties only.

If you were really careful, maybe you could get it to last 3x as long as an XT cassette and that makes it look a lot more reasonable. Bloody hard to compete with the older stuff atm though – an XT 11-36 is now £34 on CRC!

It started already and Absalon Won both races so far.

I SAY!!!

Impossible task but someone said Physical Graffiti and don’t think I could argue with that.

I use Smugmug and am very happy with it. Never thought I’d pay for photo hosting but I looked at a LOT of photo hosting sites and decided I don’t mind paying a small fee when the service is that good.

…Ratboy is my new favourite athlete 😆

I’d say stainless steel – one of the beauties of SS is you’ve only got one ring each end so can afford to make it a bit more weighty…and when it finally does wear out you can run it the other way around!

We’ve got one just because the oven happened to have it (Ikea), used the pyro function once. 500c for an hour or something…seems like a huge waste of money and resources to me. Maybe if you really save up several years worth of sausage grease and then fire it up it’s worth it but personally I wouldn’t bother with it again.

The real reason to get one is that at 500c you can almost do a proper pizza. You need to find a way to override the door lock though, or you’ll be helplessly watching your doughy creation burn to a crisp.

Yup – 240! Lighter, brilliantly simple freehub design that’s dead easy to service and the bearings wear very well. As per another thread on here, Hope Pro II bearings just don’t seem to last.

Only downside I can see is you need a special tool to get at the inner bearings on the 240.

Dan: Ha ha, Yes, I can imagine people getting a bit over zealous with it. I’ve not adjusted the clutch on mine since fitting it new last year, though…If anything it’s got pretty loose and could do with a bit of a tighten. Have you XX1 guys had any problems with the XX1 mech / cassette creaking? – I’ve seen complaints about that (though might be confined to the earlier stuff)

Thanks for all the responses, chaps. It’s very helpful to hear some different opinions and experiences. I’m still undecided which way to go, though riding last night I decided I’m not as wedded to XTR shifting as I thought…my mental impression of it is pre-clutch mech and actually, it’s not quite as smooth / slick with the clutch mech engaged (though the clutch is certainly worth the trade off)

Tricky decision but great to have all these options now.

Just listened to a Podcast interview with one of the Enve guys and he goes into quite a bit of detail on their design and manufacturing process…they do a lot of things that make for a better / stronger rim. Things like recessing the nipples so that the hole in the rim surface only has to be the diameter of the spoke and weaving the carbon around the spoke / valve holes instead of drilling them. As far as I can see, they do things the “right” way instead of compromising for cost.

Personally, I just ordered a set of LB rims but if budget allowed, I would go with the Enve’s. No doubt they are very well engineered.

PS: I don’t know if they do the new XC graphics but these guys do all colours of Enve stickers: http://www.slikgraphics.com/collections/rim-decals/products/enve-dh-style-rim-decals

Feedback Pro Ultralight. Expensive but aluminium and very well made. Small / light enough to stick in the back of the car for races etc. It also folds / unfolds quick enough that it’s not a pain to store it folded up even if you use it every day.