Bare hands! How tough frostbitten are you.

Middleburn are now making an axle that allows you to use their ISIS cranks with an external BB.

Looks like I’m the odd one out here. On my summer hardtail I run a 2.1 Nobby Nic on the front and a 2.2 Wild GripR on a wider rim at the back.

Thin(ish) tyre on the front for light weight and speed. Fat tyre on the back for comfort and climbing traction. Wider rim at the back because I once rolled the tyre off the old 717 in a corner.

Fat tyres both ends for the fully rigid winter bike.

Congratulations to you, although to be honest I was expecting this to be a thread about one of the recently banned members having registered under a different name.

So if both forks are equally twangy on the brakes the carbon forks could be up to 3 or 4 times as stiff on compression then and the steeper head angle of the 29er will make the bumps want to compress the forks more and bend them less than the 26er.

Talking to friends in Canada, their nine year old plays hockey on the local lake in the winter. Matches are only cancelled if the temperature drops below -25C.

Personally, I won’t ride road any more than necessary below 0 as I find it hard to keep circulation to fingers and toes (and often another part of me that suffers from wind chill) but off road I’ve been comfortable down to -6.

We had -25 on a trip to Lapland and after 3 hours at the activity centre I found myself struggling to breath at all deeply. I’d been very warm playing on the ice scooters. I’m not sure I’d want to ride a bike very far in the fur lined romper suits they gave us to wear.

When I ordered my custom Ti 5 years ago we were doing relatively well financially. 6 months later when it arrived things had changed quite drastically and I thought myself lucky to get away with just a 24hr sulk for not considering the future.
A couple of years later I did overhear her bragging to one of her mates “you do know he had his bike custom made for him”.

The biggest mistake I ever made was trying badly to explain that Sundays with the family are just as important to me as Thursday night rides with the lads. That’s been twisted and thrown back at me a number of times when we’ve had a ‘disagreement’ over something.

Firestarter, are those wheels 26inch rims with big fat DH tyres in a 29er frame?
It looks good but how does it ride?

Blimey, you lot are making me feel really proud of myself.
Wifey gets undies from me every year (it’s become a tradition) and I’d say my success rate for her wearing them regularly is maybe 75% 😀

so for balance: what kind of underwear do the men on here wear

Loose boxers, can’t get on with anything close fitting round the top of the thigh.

Alfine was designed for a shopping bike not to win World Cup MTB races and costs accordingly.

Er, I won a race once with my Alfine. It was the 2008 Guernsey Autumn XC (Veterans class). The only race I’ve ever done with a figure of eight course. All very gentlemanly at the crossover.
Also 7th Male Pair in the 2008 Dusk til Dawn on the Alfine.

Mace Cryogens at £25ish are very nice.

Thanks Clink, the Nimble 9 looks interesting in SM. At 1055mm the wheelbase is only 15mm longer than my two 26ers and a riding position biased a little further towards the rear should be possible.

29er = smoother ride but more effort to accelerate and wheelie.
26er = more playful and skippy

I’ve tried a 29er but didn’t get on with it because it wasn’t so good as a 26er at the trialsy bits of the rides

Nice read Stu. I sort of like my Alfine but I’ve got a singlespeed wheel in it’s place most of the time.

Yes you get courier services cheaper, but behind the scenes there is no real structure to the company, so when anything goes wrong, your left in the lurch

Ie they’re the courier equivalent of an Argos Dual Suspension Disc Equipped MTB. Of course we all ride those to save money , don’t we?

Anyone see Mark Dolan’s investigation into what really goes into wine in ‘Britain’s Really Disgusting Drinks’? I’m steering well clear of the cheap stuff after that.

As an interim measure get hold of some silicon spray, Fenwicks and Muc-off both sell it. Magura use a low volume of oil in their forks and the seals can dry out fairly easily so a little extra lubrication can make a big difference.

Frozen maybe?
Any way you look at it it’s time for a service.

50mpg for Wifey’s 10 year old Micra when we drove it from Southampton to Belfast for a short break last month. 40ish round town.

75mpg for my Jap import VTZ250 and it’s just quick enough to be interesting.

Riding the Hampshire coast path near Barton on Sea on a sunny evening in the mid 90s. I came over a rise and saw a man in T shirt and shorts striding purposefully along the cliff tops playing a set of bagpipes.

A few months ago in some local woodland at night I disturbed a badger which ran off over a little ridge and then turned and popped it’s head back up over the ridge to see what I was all about.

Following an owl through overgrown singletrack last summer.

No problems with high BBs here. I like to have the clearance.

A lot depends on how far away your placements are. Commuting on a motorbike in the current run of weather will leave you very cold unless you’ve spent A LOT on riding kit. A small and cheap to run bike will be fine around town but leave you very vulnerable on motorways. You’ll have no acceleration for overtaking and will be blown about easily by cross winds and the bow wave of anything passing you at speed. The effects of wind chill increase sharply once you get out on open roads.
Bangernomics sounds the best bet. Bikes are great to ride when the conditions are right but can be horrible when they’re wrong.

EDIT: Bikes aren’t all that cheap either. Budget £1000 plus for something that hasn’t been hammered and never serviced. You would get a far better car for that money.
I’m not trying to put you off bikes, honest.

Couriers struggling with the demand in the last 10 days before Christmas? Well there’s a shocker.

Yeah because I’ll bet you’re cranked over enough to strike pedals all the time

Not all the time but when the roads and cycle paths I ride on are dry pedal strikes would definitely be a problem in places. I’ve spent many years riding motorbikes on the road and corners are a large part of the fun of that.

Probably 10ish miles home from wherever Mrs Balanced drops me and the boy in the New Forest. Xmas dinner should be ready not too long after we get back.

I wouldn’t ride fixed on the road because I like going round corners.
Not all road corners have banking.

I think you’re correct to say that Simon Pavey is Australian, however he has been resident in the UK for some years and has been associated with Trail Bike And Enduro magazine for most of it’s life.

I haven’t bought that magazine for a few years now since they ran an interview with Charley Boorman by some stuck up posh woman who saw it as her mission to berate Charley for going down the big budget fully supported route on his ventures and who described the charitable work he and Ewan McGregor undertook as “boring”. Unforgivable.

Turbo trainers are a bit boring though.

Some years ago, a friend of mine had a french girl lodging who was into triathlons. He used to sit in the living room pretending to watch all manner of crap on the telly while she turbo-trained in skimpy kit in the same room.

Maybe talk with a few radiographers on the placement, you might prefer one of the more specialist areas of work. Mum mainly does mamography.

Tell me that’s not a dream job for a 19 year old male………..

It took me until I was 40 to find out what I really wanted to do.
In my twenties I turned down a place at uni and ended up in a succession of jobs that I ended up hating or didn’t pay enough for me not to feel permanently skint. I found out in that time that A-levels (good or bad, I had B C C) are worth diddly squat in the job market. They are just a passport to a degree course.
At 30 I went to uni as a mature student and afterwards still ended up in jobs I didn’t particularly like. The difference was that they paid enough to allow me to set myself up in self-employment by the time I was 40.

The message here is that if you stick with your uni course for now you will VASTLY increase your options afterwards. As you learn more about what you are doing you will become more confident which will help.

Lanzarote to Fuerteventura is a 45 minute ferry trip if you want to see two Islands but it’s a long drive from the south of Fuetre to the north.

If I was really that bothered about having ‘something different’ I’d go for a custom build as I did for one of my bikes.

Same here as Cynic-Al. Exactly the same, spookily.

Commuter bike

Winter bike

Summer bike

29er curious bike

If ‘proper journalism’ is an in-depth investigation of Isis bottom brackets, you can keep it.

I used ISIS as an example of how stuff that has been proven not to work gets brushed under the carpet in favour of the ‘hey wow isn’t this great’ gushing over ‘the latest big thing’. It seems that all too often it’s Joe Public that gets to do the long term product development and has to pay for the privilige. I’ve worked as an engineer and have seen first hand that many so called advances are really patent avoidance ploys. What I’d like to see the magazines doing more efectively is sorting the good from the bad.

While I’m in the mood for a rant, I have yet to see any of the MTB press make a feature of the ISIS/External bottom bracket debacle ie how with either of those systems you have to spend the best part of £100 on a BB to get one that lasts anywhere near as long as even a budget square taper item.

Surely such flawed technology should be worthy of journalistic interest?

There are no truly bad products out there now

Maybe not in terms of function when new but journalists rarely keep hold of anything long enough to learn too much about long term reliability, which can be shockingly different from one brand to another.
Just ask anyone who has spent a couple of years in a LBS and they’ll tell you which bikes come in for linkage bearing replacement most often, which brakes are a pig to get bled, which high end cranks wear their splines at the slightest provocation etc etc.

Slightly off topic question for the Brechfa crowd:

Do the trails EVER dry out?
I’ve been up a couple of times in January and July this year and by Jove did I miss the Crud Catcher and Race Guard I keep on my winter singlespeed. If anything July was worst. Was I just unlucky?

Nice vid Coastkid. As I’m running the radio through the pc I ditched the Coldplay soundtrack and watched (most of) it to Elvis’ Viva Las Vegas which sort of worked.

Can’t see how I’d be able to keep my fingers and toes warm for more than a couple of miles in that. Fair play to you for doing it, I’d choose to walk in those temps.