How’s your OS Map reading?

You’re in a really great county for fast MTB rides on brilliant singletrack. The Chilterns are *FULL* of bridleways, it’s a real mesh. It’s really worth getting out and exploring, especially if you’re building confidence and fitness to start out on group rides (and once you do that, the fitness and confidence comes even quicker).

I’d really, strongly recommend getting out and exploring, particularly through the spring and summer when conditions should be great. In Winter it can get *very* muddy round here, but that’s a thought for another day (you’ll get to know different mud tyres pretty well!). OS Maps are a wonderful asset, and now you can get them on smartphones with apps like ViewRanger (which I think is great for just getting out and exploring).

Oh, next month the bluebells will be out. Don’t miss.

Well last time I voted Lib Dem. For the last time.

The Thames path out of Pangbourne was either built by an MTBer or the best bit of accidental man made singletrack ever

Oh yes.

But theres some great XC singletrack around elsewhere, for sure. And I keep finding more of it even though I’ve been riding round here for over a decade.

I live in Reading and the hills just outside Reading are my local riding spot. Swinley’s damn good but don’t overlook what’s on your doorstep.

Cool. What are their delivery times like?

Blimey, how are Rose Bikes so cheap?

Thanks! Sorted. The mallet tip was particularly useful 🙂

The correct answer to that, Alex, would have been “no, I had nothing to do with *those* jumps”.

Keep’em guessing.

Thank goodness for that. All those logs blocking that nice smooth trail

9foot = Penhydd. It was just a change/end of sponsorship

34-18 on a 29er.
Used to run 34-16 on a 26er back in the day.

That’s in the Chilterns.

I can see how that’d happen… but in this case the valve was seated straight and still had the little collar bolt on it, screwed down firmishly to the rim. (ETA – and the snap was half a centimetre above)

It went down so fast I thought I must have put a seriously big flint through the tyre. In fact that was the first thing I went looking for.

Some advice on the photography front (I’m no professional, but I’m self taught and I’ve earned some fairly reasonable money doing stuff around my own area of interest which is primarily football crowds).

There are many ways to learn but here’s what worked really well for me: Buy a cheap digital SLR from a manufacturer with really good backward compatibility with old lenses. I went for Pentax. You can get a good Pentax DSLR seconhand for not much – the *istDL2 isn’t a high-megapixel camera by today’s standards but it’s a great little camera and a really good learning tool.

Then go onto ebay and get some old manual lenses. 50mm prime, 28mm prime, they should be your first point of call. With Pentax you can get a really brilliant old lens – the 50mm SMC-M f1.7 – for about 30-40 quid.

Turn the camera onto the manual setting. Don’t go near the auto settings if you’re trying to learn. Learn how to use it in manual.

Then, buy a book, and read a bit about apeture settings and how they affect depth of field and the amount of light coming into the camera. It’s not rocket science, and with a DSLR you can experiment to your heart’s content. To me, a good object (rather than landscape) photo should have deliberate depth, whether it’s picking out a single person in a crowd, or at the other end of the scale, bringing everything into focus. Play, experiment, learn.

Oh, and one thing that really glares out at me on the wedding photos is the wonky backgrounds, particularly the altar shot. Take photos with straight backgrounds. If they’re not straight, get Photoshop or GIMP (which is free, and great, and to my mind negates the need to pay for photoshop) and correct them.

Aaah, thanks. I had no idea such perversity existed on my own doorstep. 🙂

For me it’s about five stops, just to stretch my legs, eat some food, put the bike in the shed, shower, and get about ten hours sleep.

Just ticking off three cliques in one.

I had to scrape off the mud and have a look, and it’s a M525. Given that they’re only a bit over 20 quid on CRC, seems pointless to buy a spare freehub body alone. Have bought the whole lot and therefore get bearings, axle, bolts, spacers and a skewer too. And a desk tidy.

TandemJeremy

Sea eagles on Mull. Just huge. Beautiful birds

This. Saw a pair of them hunting from the trees on the hill above the loch on the way into the Talisker distillery on Syke. Amazing.

that’ll be it then. you can build any bike to be twitchy but a larger wheel will – everything else being equal – be less twitchy.

Indeed, but what I can’t imagine is that there’d be any need to make my 29″er any more twitchy and nimble. As I say, my 26″ wheeled bike is custom, and I asked them to build it for what I like, which is the Chilterns. I ride lots of ewok-chase forest fast bendy singletrack, and the 26″er is brilliant in it, but the Karate Monkey is pretty much as good. So much so that I wish I’d built the custom bike as a 29er.

Okay, one important disclaimer is that I’m 6’7″ so to be honest, my 29″ wheels are the same as a non-mutant-freak’s 26″ wheels anyway.

Swinley’s a great place for a beginner. There are plenty of fire roads for riding around on to start with, and a lot of very simple singletrack particularly on the lower elevation areas.

If you like open riding then 29 makes sense but for twisty, technical rooty stuff the smaller wheel seems to be more nimble.

All other things being equal, I guess they would be, but as I said above my 29er runs with a much shorter stem… just feels like there’s more inherent stability in the bigger wheel so I can run a very short stem for nimbleness without it feeling twitchy and uncontrolled. It’s just a stock Karate Monkey but 80% of the off road riding I do is on pretty twisty stuff, and there’s not much to separate it in the singletrack from my IF 26″ wheeler, which I had custom built with the instruction to make it nimble.

Apparently a lot of the ones in Reading don’t live in the town. They fly in from the southern Chilterns. The university had a project going where they were observing them with scopes from the roof of the Oracle shopping centre multi-storey (in fact I’ve seen it myself, towards dusk on an autumn evening… they were flying back from Tilehurst, over Waitrose and the railway line, towards the woods on the other side of the river).

I guess they fly in for pickings from gardens, takeaway shop bins, etc. Classy 🙂 But at least it explains how they might be sustaining near places like Wycombe. Dawdle around in the air doing big circles for a while, then when they get a bit peckish, off to McDonalds to nick discarded chips.

The thing that really interests me now is that there’s been such a steady growth for about a decade. Today really brought it home… they were everywhere.

I’d far, far rather see a car with regular services at a good, well-reviewed independent garage. That way you’re getting a proud owner-mechanic with perhaps 20+ years of experience and a reputation to preserve, rather than a YTS trainee at twice the price.

I’ve been lied to on too many occasions by main dealers. The final straw was a Vauxhall garage telling me that my brake pads were “marginal” when they were almost brand new. Always makes me wonder what other corners get cut to make their numbers.

There’s nothing much un-nimble about my 29″ Karate Monkey compared with my 26″ hardtail. With a short stem it just feels like a very decent hardtail. I don’t notice a lot of difference between it and my 26″ hardtail, other than that the latter looks sillier because it’s got small wheels on a huge frame.

Couple of very large Indy Fabs 🙂

Road gate:

Off-road gate:

I like the depth of field on the iphone 4’s little camera

All chains will stretch a bit, but given that a singlespeed chain is probably a lot burlier than a flexy geared-bike chain, I doubt it’d stretch enough to matter. I’ve certainly never noticed it happening much with the SRAM shopper-bike chains I tend to use.

I speak from recent experience. My chain was falling off my singlespeed, repeatedly. Faffed around for ages before I noticed that my chainring bolt was loose.

And by loose, I mean about half a mile down the trail, lost forever.

Do you happen to have a loose chainring bolt?

(and I probably wouldn’t clear all the checkpoints if I rode the event three times). I’m still very proud of finishing something like 11th out of 52 in a Trailbreak event.

Fantastic, just the ticket, thanks.

This almost certainly has quite a lot of 853 in it. Indy Fab tended to mix and match 853 and Columbus stuff at the time. In my case they had to because the bike is big enough to exceed Reynold’s monthly production. But no 853 sticker.

I used to own one of these (not this exact one). It was amazing.

Oh, and tried viewranger for the first time on my iPhone, wrist mounted for navigation. Holy hell it’s good.

Nice day. Went to check out a load of trails around Buckleberry in Berkshire which I’ve never ridden despite living in Reading. Very muddy in parts (obviously) and a lot of 4×4 and motocross damage in others, but still found a lot of nice singletrack that will be great in the spring. Kicking myself for not heading out that way before. But hey, better late than never

I’ve emailed asking for a refund. I can’t see this working for me at all.

I wanted to map a straight-line out-and-back section from my house to the trails. I guess I’ve got to draw that bit in each direction?

Okay, I’ve been giving that a go. Erm. Anyone want to buy a copy of Memory Map with a bunch of Chilterns map? It’s a horrible way to work with a big mesh of bridleways.

Ye gods.