Sheldon Brown on crank length

Seatpost? Hope QRs can cause a clicking, and Thomson seat posts have a rep for clicking too. It’d help if you can better describe the sound though.

A shimano 10 speed triple set up as Shimano intended should be plenty to get you to the top of anything. After that it’s down to your fitness. If you aren’t getting to the top in one go then get off and push and try again in a couple of days, but make sure you’re spinning at close to 70 rpm+. Don’t be tempted to honk or strain on the cranks. You’ll tear cartilage in no time and that’ll be you for the next couple of years. Another tip is to run shorter cranks. Dropping 5mm makes a difference.

Shimano aren’t the only ones out there of course. Middleburn have been busy:

Middleburn external BB cranks

10 speed of course!

I’m beginning to sound like a broken record but the new on one Ti456 Evo isn’t stupidly heavy and makes even an incompetent MTBer like me look like I know what I’m doing downhill. It’s one of those bikes that make you realise what you were missing out on. Fits your check list too.

Titanium… mmmmmm

There is a difference between this seasons XT and SLX in both materials and performance. I was never really happy with the way my SLX crankset shifted. Switching to XT made all those niggles go away. The SLX chainrings are pressed out of steel, whereas the XTs are milled out of aluminium. The visual difference is pretty stark, with XT jumping out as higher-end and SLX looking mass produced. The crank arms on the SLX are nicely shaped, but have a printed shading towards the bottom bracket. This fading is achieved with a 70’s comic style dot gradient. To my eyes it makes an otherwise elegant crank arm look ‘budget’. Others may like the effect of course!

One final point. I rode with SLX in the morning before fitting the XT in the afternoon and heading out on the same loop. If you value looks over performance, then go for the SLX. Otherwise, the XT is better in every way. Incidentally I’m running a full SLX groupset. The rear clutch derailleur, brakes and gears are all excellent. The front mech is good but not great. I’d say the general performance (other than the crankset), is in the region of 2006ish XT.

woah mangatank! got enough seatpost there?

But it isn’t really that much is it, though? Not compared to, say…almost every other bike on this thread. The frame geometry exaggerates things a bit, granted.

if you did the same ride on differnt bikes with the same amount of milk in your camelbak, a simple butterometer would tell you how good your suspension is working. Poor suspension would then be given the a adjective – “buttery”

Quite! 😆

Anyway, isn’t this the sort of thing Genghis Khan used to do? You could use the milk/butter/yoghurt/cheese (select option based on terrain grade and trail ambient temperature), to wash down your mid-ride snack of your saddle made of beef jerky.

Milk…

My 2006 Scandal was the first bike to get it spot on for me. I don’t have any pictures to hand, but as my Ti456evo fits in exactly the same way, I’ll have to roll it out again 😉

I think a dropper post needs a mudguard rather than a boot. Anything in contact with the surface, even without mud, will start to wear away because of the constant vibration passing through the frame. Mud and grit makes this much worse. You could use an inner tube tied to the saddle and the clamp area, but it’s only going to reduce some of the spray, not eliminate it, and doesn’t have any additional benefits such as keeping your shorts dry!

Wow.

Different issue, but I had nothing but problems with mine. I was recalibrating my brakes after every ride until I went back to standard steel discs. The brakes have been fine since then.

I’m now running a Thomson. I took it for it’s first ride yesterday, and indeed this was my first ride with a dropper seatpost. It was an interesting experience!

The back story is that I returned to the sort of hardtail frame that encourages more confident downhill lines. I started to drop my saddle via the QR, but a slipping seatpost (a Thomson,) meant that the saddle started to drop during rides. I fixed this (with a Thomson seat clamp), but realised that the slipped saddle was providing such a positive benefit on the downhill sections that a dropper post suddenly made a lot of sense.

Anyway, I didn’t want to get into a returns and warranty cycle that seems to typify a lot of dropper posts on the market, or live with any sort of distracting post wobbles. It was so nearly a Reverb I went for, but it was Thomson’s heavy duty internals and promise that they’d engineered-out the saddle-play issue that tipped the balance. The price was painful though; I really took a haircut on that one. The Elite’s not far off the cost of a good pair of forks but thankfully, the quality is very apparent on every element of the post. There’s even an amusing Thomson reference to MTB ‘extremeness’ etched into the post’s shaft…

Fitting the post was easy. Fitting the control and routing the cable however, was a protracted and handlebar-gnawingly tricky experience, something Thomson themselves acknowledge in their fitting instructions. I placed the control on the left with the front gear pod and this helped with cable routing.The cable is shorter than it should be. It fits my 16″ Ti456e perfectly, but to me that suggests that Thomson should have specced a longer cable.

Out on the trail, operation is very straightforward. The dropping action is completely smooth, and the return speed is easy to modulate via the handlebar control. The bar control is surprisingly nice. The Elite comes in for a lot of flak because of the cable-based operation of the post, but the mechanical action is absolutely gorgeous. The post felt completely rock solid too. Thank God!

Being able to slam the saddle right down is something I’m totally unfamiliar with, and it was fairly unsettling at times. By the end of the ride though, I was hanging right off the rear of the bike on steep forest steps and short, stony banks. Even being able to drop the saddle an inch or two for long sloping drove road sections allowed for a quicker, more controlled ride.

I think a mudguard is probably essential with a dropper. I don’t like them, but I’d like to keep the worst of the mud off such an expensive item. Forks can take it, but the Elite is a bit of an unknown quantity. Using a cover would work to an extent, but could result in the sort of rubbing and wear that I’m trying to prevent. I’ve seen that before.

So no instant failures and some new riding experiences on a first test. And it’s very handsome too. That’s a few ticks in the box then.

I’ll update this in a couple of weeks and let you know how it’s faring.

Running Cobalt 2 wheelset (2012) and they’ve seen off some hammerings without complaint. Also back on an old pair of Eggbeaters I bought when they were first released. Never maintained them in any way and they still function well.

They score, scratch and mark with some ease I’m afraid. They function quite well, but I’ve just changed out this season’s SLX for this season’s XT in silver, partly for the looks but also because there’s a noticeable difference in performance. The current SLX crankset is gopping though. The older versions are much less offensive.

It can be slightly glitchy sometimes but my last recorded ride on the 18th was near-perfectly recorded. When I run it on Google Earth, the marker tracks the road and trail very closely. For a sweeping bend, I’d say it was using at least 4 points.

It’s a great app though. Nobody crows about it but I think it’s a big selling point for Android.

infested with biting insects and full of racists that you can barely understand.

Your name is Nigel Farage and I claim my £10 😛

Chalk it up to experience. It’s never easy to swallow that sort of thing though. Clearly a ‘tarmak your drive for £100 Guv’ moment. 😐

That unicycle footage is funkin’ mental!!

More like a couple of effing buskers. All they need are jester hats and some balls to juggle while they’re doing it. 🙄

Neither. Get a good dropper seatpost.

Ritchey P-Team

Yum.

I am remembering it as steep with rock drops dropping onto large jagged rocks (Repeat for 20m) and then onto the scee.

You remember correctly. It’s like the Morgul Steps. Put a wheel slightly wrong or lose your nerve even for a second and you’ll be eating your meals through a straw and getting relatives to post ‘I’m in traction/paralysed so show me your bikes’ threads on the forum 😯

The forum has spoken: Lets kick-start fund a helicopter camera crew and a crate of GoPro’s for the big day! We can assemble on Robinson to watch the fun 🙂

Vive la difference

Not if you’re under 5’10” and end up buying into years of bodged frame geometry that has to accommodate the wheels first and frame dynamics second. That’s what the non-solution 650b is supposed to remedy. There’s going to be a lot of frame mis-selling over the next couple of years.

Yes, as above. The shifters have a small switch to select gearing type.

I’ve been surprised at how grippy the 2.1 LUST HRers are. They size up on the smaller size, but still perform well on steep stuff. Running 60a I think, though they seem very sure footed for a harder compound, and at 30psi. The 2.3s would be even better I reckon. As the name suggests, their quick rolling speed is noticeable.

Of the tyres I’ve tried over the last 4 years, these are, (right now), my favourites.

+1 On One Ultralight. Lovely object.

Specs look more or less the same as the 2012 version. Much nicer graphics however!

I don’t think anything in the excellent 2012 versions needed a fix, so this looks like a basic refresh.

Never fails to surprise me how light velvets are. In terms of performance and build quality, they’re on a par with Rock Shox and Magura Et al.

+1 for the Mountain cafe. Their kiwi pancakes are legendary.

I mean really, who can afford a £3699 bike that’s essentially a toy? I’ve not owned a car worth more than that.

What’s your name? Vladimir Lenin? 😉

Tricky. It is a bit odd to not break the bike up for a sale, but how would you sell a boardman frame for anything other than pennies?

Still, there is something a little off there.

Wasabi!

Not sure it’d be mountain biking, more some sort of mountaineering-lite with a bike over your shoulder most of the time. The descents from Red Pike are not for the faint hearted…or the quite brave…or indeed the remotely sane. It’d be hard enough man-handling a bike down let alone riding it.

If you do go up, please film it! I’d love to see the adventure 😀

Currently 6, of which 5 are rideable. Ideally I’d like to get it down to two: one for the trail and one for the road. Having too many always feels like the start of a syndrome of some sort 😯

My old On One ScandAl, with its scandium main frame and aluminium rear triangle made for a superb bike. Scary light. Felt like almost like a carbon or ti frame.

Hardtail-only again. And it’s 26″! Can’t see myself going back to full suss.

Without ‘the industry’ – you wouldn’t have bikes & kit.

😆

You definitely need an in-line. It’ll make a big difference to your ride.

Wiggle, Chain or On One will have one cheap.

A dropper post – something I hadn’t even considered on an XC rig

Nor I, until I fixed a slipping seatpost problem I’d been having. The post would gradually slip on the flat and up, and be as much as an inch or two lower on the descent. It was so effective I delayed fixing it! As soo as I had, I railed around a berm and instead of dropping behind the saddle to tackle the drop, ended up giving myself a saddle-wedgie before exploring the limits of the frame’s stand over height.

Thomson dropper in the post!

This is what puts me off tubeless.

Don’t let it put you off. Get a pair of fairly cheap Crank Bros Cobalt 2 wheels and you’ll experience an instant improvement.

Yep. And it’s overlooked stuff like stand over. A lot of people will tell you it’s not that important, but it absolutely is. With even slightly high SO, you’ll be subconsciously holding back on stuff.