Seconding the Hope option — I’ve never had problems with them and they’re super easy to convert

I haven’t tried this yet, but I’m surprised more people aren’t running bigger tyres upfront on gravel bikes.

Half fat, or half plus MTBs aren’t uncommon, so a gravel bike with a 30/35 out back and 40/45 up front makes sense to me. Think I’m going to use my girlfriends Genesis as a guinea pig.

I agree mattyfez, but surely that should apply to MTB and road bikes too, so the weight difference would remain the same?

And joat, I certainly agree that 2kg is a big difference, and that tyres would change everything.  The reason I started this thread though is that pretty much all of that 2kg seems to melt away once you make an XC MTB rigid with skinny tyres.

And I suppose that question came up as I’ve been wondering if I really need a road bike.

It seems like a nice light rigid MTB, with a 650b at the back and 29er up front, and perhaps some Jones loop bars or something with lots of hand positions, would be pretty capable of road (I only ride a rigid 29er now anyway), but a quick change to 700c wheels would make it a pretty fast road bike too

The front end would drop with the 700c wheels, with them being the same size. The back end could be pretty short, like 420mm, so about the same as an endurance road bike. The real problem is gearing I guess.

That looks great lowey, and quite winterproof (at least the pictured bit)

A map would be very nice…

1 – Are you a vegan?
2 – Are you interested in vegan food/lifestyle?
3 – Do you feel vegans are adequately provided for in the highlands?
4 – Would you entertain eating in a vegan restaurant or cafe based in one of the popular highland destinations

1) No, but I rarely eat meat or dairy, mostly only when it would make others’ lives too difficult or my friends have salvaged it from the Waitrose bins

2) Yes, I was vegan for a couple of years, but eventually concluded is was far easier — and far less alienating for others, like half of those that have replied so far — to go 95%of the way there rather than 100% vegan

3) I can only guess. I very much doubt it.

4) It would be my preference if I was there, but I’m flexible enough to eat fish and chips if I have to (and sometimes happy to do to be honest)

Perhaps what others have suggested makes sense, i.e. offering a good range of vegan options, but other veggie and meat options too.

may be do the opposite of a pub? They often have an overadvertised sh**ty token vegan meal, saying something like ‘vegans rejoice, we have COUS COUS, and it comes with RAISINS!!’

The equivalent would be something like having a nice range of vegan meals, with chicken nuggets for the omnivorous

Fair enough about the Mavic rims. They have significantly widened most of their stuff this year though (or perhaps it was last year, I don’t know). The Open Pro is 19mm now I think. Not sure why they left that Cxp down at 15mm though.

As for the Specialised, I only really looked at one (the Epic) before whitestone brought theirs up. To be honest though, I still find the Canyon weight you mention there a bit surprising. I don’t feel like 1.5 kg is much extra weight considering it gets you big wheels and suspension.

What ampthill says make a lot of sense to me. And perhaps that’s basically what you meant before, ghostly, when you said beyond forks and wheels everything — tech and materials — gets somewhat similar?

That crazy 2.7kg bike is another creature though. Is there a comparable hill-climbing mountain bike that’s been made?

Looking at a 2017 Spesh Roubaix for just over £3000, that comes in at over 8kg, so the same weight as the rigid Focus:

http://road.cc/content/review/214587-specialized-roubaix-expert-2017

Similar for a Cannondale Synapse — that’s just under £3000 grand and 7.5kg.

In both cases you get a bike pretty much the same weight as a rigid 29er of the same price, once you take tyres out of the equation.

So I guess I’m surprised the frame, much longer rigid forks, rims, cranks, handlebars, seatpost, seat, all those things that take far more of a beating (even) on an XC bike than a road bike, don’t give you a load more of a weight difference weight

BTW, I don’t think Cxp Pro are CX rims… internal width is only 15mm, and they don’t rate them for tyres above 28mm

Open Pro’s may not be racing rims but they aren’t touring rims either.  Something like the Mavic A719 is and then the weight does jump up, to nearly 600g.

You could also take the Mavic CXP Pro for comparison, definitely meant to be a fast road rim, and that’s 470g, about the same as mid-range Mavic XC rims. But it’s aero so that explains that.

I’m aware that a good road bike weights a fair bit less than a Genesis Zero, but the Genesis Mantel I was comparing it with is hardly top end either — it’s still running XT gears, not electronic stuff. So it seems a fair comparison.

I think a good comparison would be something like this Focus Raven rigid thing to a nice £3000 disc-brake road bike. I don’t imagine there would be much in it weight wise.

That would explain the top end stuff, but not Mavic or Genesis weights…?

It’s a Soma Odin bar, 15deg sweep, 720mm wide, I think.

With the massive Wolftooth grips that make ESI Extra Chunky look feeble

Thanks :-)

Yep, The Coal Road was damn steep, and the steep bit basically unridable with all that snow.

I certainly did a lot of pushing, mostly around pics 3 and 4 (climbing up to and traversing Cam High Road). Some of the other very deep bits were short enough that if you got your speed up you could plough through it, given a bit of luck.

I was hiking up there a couple of weeks back and was certainly glad not to be biking through the slushy boggy mess…

I have a feeling that won’t work…

This thread suggest you may get away with a 11sp road shifter with a 10sp dynasys mech, but I didn’t read it all:

http://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/is-11spd-shimano-road-and-mtb-kit-compatible/

Thanks :-)

I guess I should just go and ride it…

As for the tape, I don’t think that’s the problem. The first layer I put on was quite narrow, just covering the spoke holes. The second was wider but still didn’t quite make it all the way across the full internal rim width, perhaps a millimeter gap at either side. At first I figured that may have been the problem, but the LBS said it should be fine.

They suggested to pop it back up to 60 psi to make sure it was fully seated, which I’m certain it is. In reality I’ll be running more like 35 psi I guess, it’s a fairly skinny tyre.

As for the sealant, yep it’s Stans

Genius

Thanks, really useful

Sounds like they aren’t going to solve all my problems. Perhaps some with 15-20deg sweep that shorten the reach a little would help at least a little though.

Techique… that’s the big question. I’ve never been particularly good at manualling, but I did used to play on the local BMX track a bit and with a little practice could always make it across the biggest doubles on a back wheel.

At some point I ended up on a Charge Blender — a proper short chainstay play bike — and it all got much easier

In my experience, any question along the lines of ‘do have the right to eat meat’ just ends up polarised, such that half the people go away assuming that it is perfectly natural to go away and continue eating eat meat 10-15 times a week

Daniel Quinn’s book, Ishmael, poses I more interesting way to look at this, I think

What gives us the right to go out and systematically kill (1) any animals that want to eat the same animals we want to eat, (2) any animals that wish to eat the same food source that the animals we want to eat eat themselves?

In other words, it may be perfectly reasonable for a human to eat a sheep, but it’s probably not very nice for us to go out killing foxes just because they also like sheep, or killing rabbits because they like the crops that we are growing to feed our sheep.

https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Law_of_Limited_Competition
http://greathinkings.blogspot.co.uk/2007/11/law-of-limited-competition.html

If we stopped doing all that, sure, we could go on eating meat, but it would be a much rarer occasion, as it generally was 1000s of years ago

Wow, brilliant — I didn’t expect such a mountain of good advice :-)

I’ll get my map out and start drawing these things out

Thanks :-)

I’ve looked into this a lot this year

Loads of things if you’re going secondhand, some obvious ones:

Genesis CDF, Kona Rove, Pinnacle Arkose, Specialised Sequoia…

and some (slightly) less obvious:

Surly Straggler, Cotic Escapade, Jamis Renagade

The Marin Gestalt 3 isn’t so bad either…

Thanks for the tips :-)

Swaledale and Pennine Bridleway look particularly attractive — especially the option of a train and A to B ride with the latter

If the snow comes back this is temporarily solved anyway, as even my doorstep rides become fabulous :-)

I recently tried this. Went for a gravel bike and couldn’t get on with it offroad when the going got remotely tough, so now I’m on a Rigid 29er. (Not quite: I have a 27+ tyre up front at the moment, and still have a 29er wheel when I want to go quicker on smoother trails.)

I certainly was starting to think one bike to do it all is just a constant annoyance, but… I’m starting to think a do-it-all bike is a lot more feasible than I thought, you just have to go more towards the MTB end: an MTB with road wheels will ride a lot better on-road than a road bike with MTB wheels will ride off-road. Especially as you can’t even get the tyres in the latter.

So if I was going to trim down to one bike from my current two, I’d go for a rigid MTB and two sets of wheels, but I’d add two things:

1) I’d get a front MTB wheel that’s bigger than the back. Potentially a 29 or 27+ at the back, and 29+ at the front. Or perhaps better, a 27 at the back, and 27+ or big (but not ‘+’) 29 at the front. That way not only would I get away with rigid forks, but when I changed to road wheels the front end would drop down without having to adjust stem height or something, which would be annoying.

2) I’d stick with flat bars (not super wide) as drops off-road are too much of a compromise IMO. To get back multiple hand positions and long day comfort, I’d just have Ergon Gp2 grips or something instead.

I think enough people above have said they don’t think that 12 sessions is very much, but I’ll add myself to that list…

I’ve been through 10 sessions of NHS counselling and felt is was useful but only really got things started. Unfortunately, due to the massive NHS waiting period, for me those 10 weeks actually coincided with a period in which I’d been feeling the best I had for years. Some months afterwards I plummeted down rather far again.

I think another thing to remember is to try not to imagine there is some required amount of therapy given how much a person has been through on paper.

By that I mean that, for myself, because I’ve never really been through anything you would find on a conventional list of traumatic experiences, it would be (and often is) easy to imagine that my persistent struggles with life are therefore mostly my own fault and something to deal with alone. But I’m getting better at not beating myself up so much for that and trying to avoid blaming anyone — particularly myself — and remembering that the worlds just a very strange and confusing place nowadays

Seems a bit of a leap.

Here are some other hypothetical suggestions that don’t involve extreme sexism:

She was drunk/high/threatening/abusive/armed.
She was known to the jogger and had attacked him before.
Jogger was in a world of his own, just didn’t see her and then ran off like a coward.
Jogger is just an arsehole.

OK, I should say I was only following one line of reasoning there (that is was deliberate and she didn’t know him). I’m aware other possibilities are reasonable.

I’ve watched that video on a large screen many times, and my feelings are:

(1) It looks likely to be a deliberate move by the jogger to floor her (he swerves quite abruptly; from his head movements he doesn’t seem distracted; and given that his trajectory is barely effected by the collision I would guess he was prepared for it)

(2) She certainly doesn’t seem to make any obvious physical provocation, although she could have said something of course. She just looks to be busily on her way to work in the middle of the day

(3) If she reported to the media that she tried to talk to him as he passed again and was ignored, either she didn’t know him, or she held that info back, or the media thought it irrelevant to ask or report on that point. The last is pretty much impossible, the second unlikely.

So I’d guess it’s most likely that he barged through her as he didn’t like the look of her (why I suggested sexism), next likely, it was an accident and he is just an massive arse, or less likely, she’s holding something back from the media

If she tried to talk to him on his way back past and he refused it seems likely that she didn’t know him I guess?

That would suggest he had something against her purely on first impressions. Then I can think of nothing else but extreme sexism…

I quit due to the faff of fixing stuff, cleaning stuff and travelling to get to decent places

Then I took up mountain and trail running — it was fabulous, had everything I got from MTB and more without the faff, and much of the time (if the trails were tech enough) it wasn’t even much slower on average

Then I ended up in a cycle of injuries for 6 years…

So I took up road biking — figured I would have less maintenance and travelling to do than with MTB. That proved true

Road cycling has actually, at least at times, been much better than I expected. Being able to circle almost the entire Yorkshire Dales in a day from my doorstep in Leeds is quite wonderful. And if I go far enough I barely see anyone (less then when MTB often)

But I’ve slowly slipped back to MTB and now summer is here I’m remembering how good it is :-)

I was looking into this a while back

I pulled out these, which looked great but I couldn’t find them in the Uk so may not be much help:
http://veetireco.com/listings/mountain-rail/
http://veetireco.com/listings/cxgr-xcx/

Otherwise Continental Race King’s looked another option, but are a bit fatter

Hmm, 420mm is a little long I think, need to stick to 400mm

There are a couple of things out there but they are rare. Soma’s do some that look great: they take a 2.1 29er inch tyre and still have an a-c less than 400mm!
http://grit.cx/reviews/review-soma-wolverine

I picked up some salsa cromoto’s in the end, tapered and 15mm

Haven’t ridden them yet, but they look nice and aren’t really that much heavier than the cheap carbon Exotics they replaced

Hmm, yea good point about the Jones fork, although perhaps that is largely due to the massive front tyres people run with those — with a standard 29er wheel I wonder if that stiffness is quite so nice…

Great, thanks :-)

It sounds like a shallow-flared-dropbar is worth trying. And good to hear someone else has gone from a 29er to a Rove for exactly the reason I have, so perhaps I should stick with it.

The other thing that attracts me is something like the Titec H-bar… that seems to give a more stretched aero position as well as a wider, flatter mtb stance

As for the wheels, I actually have a 650b on the front of it, but the 2016 Rove has rather strange tyre clearance so at the back I’m restricted to a 722 – 40mm (there’s still bags of clearance at the seatstays, but it’s tight at the chainstays and going 650b wouldn’t help this)

Yep, you may be right, I’m not sure. I’m perhaps seeking a do-it-all bike that doesn’t exist.

The loops I want to do on the Rove are 100-120km, starting from my doorstep — perhaps half road, half non-technical moorland stuff. But having been out at the weekend, I realise even the non-tech stuff is scary in the drops, once I’m coming downhill at speed with snow on the ground…

Perhaps a rigid 29er with fairly skinny tyres would be a better bet, but if I built up one of those I may immediately be regretting the long road slogs between my house and the moors…

Now just a handful of tickets left for the frame:

http://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/charity-fundraiser-genesis-altitude-frame-tickets-5-each-1

Thanks :-)

Any more takers for the frame?

Link is in the classifieds here

OK, all tickets for the wheels and 10sp stuff now gone.

Any more takers for the frame? Perhaps it’d be more realistic for me to go for 12 tickets instead of 15…

Final ticket just sold for the wheels!

Well, no replies here but another 11 tickets have been bought over the weekend :-)

So, as it stands now:
– Genesis frame: 8 tickets left
– Superstars wheelset: 1 ticket left
– Shimano Zee 10sp set up: tickets all sold :D

Hi baz, YGM

That should be absolutely fine, thanks :-)

Great – thanks, that’s exactly right :-)

I was afraid I’d not been too clear…

Proof of donation not essential though as I trust no one will try a scam with this…

No more takers?

I’ve sold about a third of the tickets, so plenty left…

Thanks for all the replies everyone.

So, it’s definitely not a caliper misalignment or an incorrect mount – the rotor is a few mm out of true so it’s just not possible to stop the pads rubbing. I’m also fairly certain the rotor can’t have been bent before I installed it as it arrived in an oversized ChainReaction box.

I reckon the bolt hole surfaces could be a problem, though I did clean and inspect them and they seemed OK.

But, I may well have tightened the bolts in the wrong order… That is some advice I’ve never come across before so thanks :-)

Also, you could drop the Revs to 120mm and run a long-travel 650b hardtail as a 79er… Loads of options then.