Charlie dis 7:53 if I recall correclty. Dry day, with a tailwind and a great ride
Ian did the SDD in 18:03 and made the turn in just over 8:07 with several punctures (overnight, with a big bag of kit)
When I did the SDD (19:59) I got to Eastbourne in 8:54 (overnight, with a big bag of kit)

These times are not normal!

A good target time for the SDW is 12hrs I'd say. It's hard! But a great day out in the saddle.

More about my ride for Morvelo HERE ON THIS LINK and, yes, the great Morvelo kit made me faster ;-)

I'm sorry to say I think you're to blame here. Most places charge extra for masking, and I would expect a non-bike focussed place to just coat it as you give it to them. If you want it masked do it yourself before you hand it over, or specify, very clearly, what you want masked as you hand it to them if you're getting them to blast the existing paint off first.

If they'd masked the wrong areas you'd be even more annoyed, as at least everywhere you want covering, is covered.

Any good bike shop will have a BB tap and BB, disc brake tabs & headtube reaming/facing tools necessary to clean this up. In fact that's probably a better option than ruining the frame with a bad masking job and not cleaning it up and getting part jammed in the bike.

1g per lean kg of bodyweight per hr, rougly

Looks hilly all the way along to me!

As I said, measured data (not rider perception) has the climbing pretty constant throughout, with a slightly smoother first 10km out of Winchester, with just the one significant climb. In fact the most climbing per mile is in miles 22-34!

Miles Ascent Avg. Ascent/mile
—————————————-
Win to Pet 21.6 2223 103
Pet to Cok 12.8 1891 148
Cok to Amb 11.6 1584 137
Amb to Pye 20.1 2808 140
Pye to Soe 14.5 2054 142
SoE to EaB 14.7 2138 145

Tiger6791, yes sometimes one or other isn't working, but there's so many that you can do without half of them and still make it just fine. 11 taps in 100miles, plus the ability to drinking at the start and finish from a shop, is an average of one every 7.8miles while you're on the trail (yes, I know in reality they're not evenly spaced), which seems like enough to me ;-)

squeekybrakes, no, read my earlier post, the last section is not the hilliest, the climbing is evenly spaced in terms of feet of climbing per miles ridden in actual fact (GPS verified). I believe the reason people say the end is the hilliest is that they're attempting the final climbs with 80-odd miles in their legs!

For water, there's taps along the way, have a look at southdownsdoubke.net to see more details. They are at:

QECP visitor centre
Cocking by farm/road crossing
Amberley
A24 crossing/Washington
Adur crossing
Truleigh Hill Youth Hostel
Saddllescombe Farm
A27 crossing
Seaford Station/Farm
Alfriston (shops)
Jevington Church

Basically, there's plenty of water en route. Not much scope for buying food though, just QECP very near Winchester, an ice cream van and Ditchling Beacon (there 12 months of the year) and shops in Alfriston, very near Eastbourne. You'll need to start with most of the food you want on you.

There's actually as much per mile in the eastern 50miles as in the western 50 miles according my, and other people's GPS files, so there's no benefit in starting in Eastbourrne to "get the climbing over with", to make it as easy as possible it is much more important to have a tail wind as there's a lot of time exposed on the ridge. The last 30miles to Eastbourne only feels like the worst as you've got 70miles in your legs by that point ;-)

FWIW, in my experience the worst climb on the SDW is heading west, towards Winchester, climbing up Butser Hill out of QECP

As stated above, Winchester to Eastbourne has the tailwind most days so this is the normal way to do the SDW when doing it one way, and avoids this climb.

And, as for hitting a wall, for a ride of that length it'll happen not long after the time when you forget to keep eating and drinking regularly as you're not hungry/thirsty.

Oh, and I didn't run, or swim, or spin, or do any other form of (non-scientific) "cross training". Why would you if you feel you're struggling to get enough hrs in on the bike? It's not a triathlon, it's a bike race!

I like riding my bike, a lot, so to prepare for a long ride, I rode my bike, and I loved doing it!

Little and often is the key I found, rides that is, not necessarily "training". Sounds like you're doing the best you can, and if you keep it up you'll be just fine. I did make an effort to get 3-4 >50mile MTB rides in in the preceding months. I also got used to eating regularly when on the bike.

You'll need a damn stubborn head and the determination that, when it all stops being any fun for a moment at 16hrs (which it will at some point) and you feel like you can't possibly carry on and possibly you feel a bit sick too, that you're just going to keep moving, slow down and eat your way out of it.

Someone in the pits to put you back on the bike and just make you keep going round, no matter how hard you protest, is a very good thing, they must be prepared to be be sworn at in the early hours of the morning and can expect to be thanked profusely during sunrise and at the finish line!

I absolutely disagree with the advice that off road mileage doesn't help you that mush, you'll be spending a long time in a mtb riding position, with your body taking a battering from the terrain, you'll need to get used to that. Sure, get the hrs in on the road to to mix it up, but long steady rides can be done on a geared mtb too – that's what gears are for.

FWIW I entered my first ever 24 solo last year (SITS) following that advice that was passed to me by several experienced and successful endurance racers – and I won!

That thread is what got me started on super capacitors

The "super" capacitor is 20mm diameter and 7mm deep. It weighs less than 1g. It's rated at 5.5V 1.5F, I charge mine across two LEDs using a diode to both control the discharge through one LED and to drop the 6.4V from the Vf of two LEDs down towards the 5.5V rating.

I wish people would stop making assumptions about capacitor charging and discharging and saying thins will go pop and keep telling me it won't work, without trying it, when it quite clearly works very well indeed. I've been running this for a week or so (>20hrs of riding, lots of charge discharge cycles) and nothing has gone pop. The capacitor charge is controlled as described above. Discharge is controlled with the very simple technique of a current control resistor as it's only a backup and I'm not so concerned about efficiency. I'd rather use a 2p resistor and an extra capacitor than one less £2 capacitor and a TaskLED controller board!!! The post was started to ask people who had tried it, or considered it, advice about how to make my solution THAT WORKS about how to make it better. Stop telling me it won;'t work people!

Coffeeking, my original post described the capacitor voltage control technique.

I'm using an alfine dynamo disc hub. It quite happily drives 4 LEDs just fine without any modifcation. It has neither capacitor backup (no hubs have this that I[m aware of, normally this is in the lamps, what hub are you thinking of?). I've also not come across a hub with a zenetr diode voltage limiter in, although this is talked about on other forums from time to time.

People seem obsessed with the size of the super caps. They're tiny, much smaller than a single AA, let alone the charge and discharge controlling required to make a battery solution work.

Erm. That'll do for now. Any actual advice? Although Luminous has raised a few genuine questions, that I hope I've helped to answer.

"You may have ambitions of glory in a 24Hr race, but that isn't a reality for me now."

Erm, I won SITS solo last year. Oh, and I did the SDD in <20hrs, about an hour faster than Rob Lee. That's ambition more than harboured ;-)

While I agree unsuspended mass is important, and why we no-one runs URT full suspension designs anymore, I thing we can agree that the extra weight of a dyno hub, over a normal hub, really is not significant on the front of a MTB. I work in the automtive industry too, F1 teams also spend ages calculating damping factors and tuning spring weights, which I'm sure non of us do on our forks. Also, as the weight is in the centre of the wheel, as stated above this is not a real difference to rotating weight as the radius it acts at is almost zero, and half the weight does not rotate in the centre of the hub anyhow.

Yes, it dos need a "custom" wheel, but most lots of people have "custom" wheels here. The dynamo hubs cost around £60-£80 from Shimano, compared to say £55 for a Hope ProII front hub, and you can always lace the dynamo into your existing rim. So the costs are not that great, even to switch rather than when looking at building a new wheel with or without a dynamo.

I didn't mean to come across aggressively/over defensively, I just got a bit frustrated when posting looking for advice, having got what I considered a nice bright light working for a zero weight penalty, that people who hadn't even tried a dynamo light with power LEDs, let alone tried making one, or perhaps hadn't even set eyes on such a thing, were guessing at supposed negatives, without anyone guessing at supposed positives!

I posted about my DIY/homebrew battery powered LEDs back in 2003 (the monster thread that got shut as it slowed the site down, that actually got trout started off) and got a similar set of negative reactions from people that had never tried or even set eyes on the technology.

It happens that I commute off road for >1hr every morning, 30mins home and ride at least one evening with friends so always have at least one light on charge at all times, and find myself flicking between high and med on my MaXx-D constantly (great light BTW) to get good light and eek out battery life, where as the dynamo is about half way between the two power levels, is brighter as these DX lights everyone is riding at the moment, and is there, all the time, all week every week.

To answer another question, the super capacitor weighs less than 1g (not 1kg) and is 20mm in diameter and 5mm thick, not the size of a water bottle. It's a 5,5V memory back up capacitor normally, I'm using two of them and, and the stanndlight power I'm running, it lasts about 2mins 30seconds and will then dim rapidly unless I start moving again. But I have a joystick on my head too.

So, has anyone on here actually tried making one yet?

Luminous – whether 400g of weight is mounted on the frame, or in the centre of the wheel (essentially bolted to the fork), compared to the weight of a rider and bike is utterly irrelevant. It's also worth noting that hub weight will have zero effect on steering as it's not "rotating weight" like a rim or tyre so will not affect steering/handling in any way what so ever. In fact, it could be argued that adding the weight of a battery higher up, like on a stem or top tube will have a greater negative effect of lifting the CofG compared to it being low down on the fork (but again, the 400g is such a small amount of the total weight that the real world effect is zero). I'm not sure how, if at all, this shows through as "obvious" consequences for braking???

The drag is simple, it's the power draw from the light, which is a paltry 7W. Thsi wasn't enough to slow Bart Bretjens down when he and his team won the 24hrs or the Nurburgring using dynamo lights.

Any more questions? :P

What people are missing here is that, using XPG LEDs, I can run a whopping 700lumens all night, when battery lights will be switching to lower light outputs to eek out battery life, or carrying round extra battery packs that add significant extra weight to the light setup, and have to be swapped on and off the bike. What's more I can use the bike to get to and from work the day of a ride, and again the next day, without worrying about removing the battery to charge it inbetween.

Photos, yes, but not at my desk at work….

"The thing will start to dim from the moment you stop, due to falling drive voltage"

NO! – the capacitor will drive the LED at full brightness for the time I've calculated. I know as I've made a little tset circuit with different value componentsd

thisisnotaspoon – NO! Dyno hub wieghs 600g, the MCE light I've made weighs 42g, that's the normal light with the supercaps on the scales. Assuming 200g for a front hub that's 442g heavier than no light at all. Now go and weigh your barrety light, with battery. And how much burn time do you get for 580lumens? I get, erm… all night!

I also never have to chareg my lights, don't need to worry about the batteries screwing up in cold weather. Plus I do a good few endurance races so not having to swap batteries on and off all the time is a huge boon. I did the SDD last year and this set up would have offered me way more light for significantly less weight than my battery setuop, running at a mid power setting with a second set of batteries.

Like this? CLICKY

yesterday morning it wasn't passable by MTB without walking through the (many) drifts – so I'd guess at "no"

My Morvelo team mates covered their bikes in the great looking and crazy light KCNC kit: bars, posts, cranks, bar ends. They hammered them around race courses all year and clocked up big trail mileage in between and had zero issues except an insanely light bike!

oh, and I'm doing it

ton, in fact, if you look at the results of the "big 3" 24hr races, almost everyone outside the top 10 stops for a kip for 1-2hrs in the night, most people have a single down time stint of about 4hrs it would seem.

If you're thinking about doing s 24, this is THE one to do, the first solo only race, should be fantastic and a proper good spirit out on the course as everybody will be in it together, none of these aggro team racers flying by.

Go on, you know you want to

of course, you noted the meter reading around the time that you moved in?

looks like one piston seal is knackered, holding one piston, and needs replacing. I'd replace both while you're at out, should be a cheap and quick job, just a bit of air to bleed out once you've topped the brake back up again

24 HOURS OF EXPOSURE[/url] in May is surely ideal preparation. Similar terrain, no cut off for this one, just get around, taking a rest/stretch/breather when you need it. Similar vibe in that it's only soloists trying to survive, no silly team racers blasting out a full throttle lap and getting aggro.

Put on with members from the teams that did the Kielder and the BigDog last year, so should be a cracking early season ride out.

Oh, and good and fun other events to do would be:

Brighton Big Dog
Kielder 100
MaXx Exposure
Dusk 'Till Dawn

In between the Exposure Lights Big Night Out weekends that coincide with the 100 Marathon to make massive Welsh weekends are great events

PRESS RELEASE HERE[/url]

If you're going to do a 24 this year, surely the one to do is the 24 Hours Of Exposure[/url]

ENTRIES HERE

You only have to look at the entry list to see it's the 24 solo must do of the year. Organisers include the guys at SIP that did last year's Kielder 100 as well as support from Exposure and Morvelo who brought the Brighton BigDog so should be a great atmosphere. The lack of teams of 4 flying past at 3am will help to create a much more enjoyable experience too!

petesgaff "SS though, so you'll have to be patient with me…" is that as you'll be forced to stand up and stomp the climbs? If not, why don't you ride gears! :-P

Not sure I can make this, but good to see the South Downs getting some STW love.

Several REAL solutions available, here's a couple:

Strap On Bosses

Saddle Rail Mounted

Mayhem = 7 laps (7th Male Sport Team)
TwentyFour12 = 9 laps (2nd Male Open Team & 1st Male Masters Team)
SITS = 26 laps!!! (1st Male Solo)
D2D = 7 laps (3rd Men's Pairs) yes, D2D is only 12hrs, but will just included it
SDD = 1 "lap" (but it was 19hrs 59mins long and 202 miles!)

So, at roughly 8miles a lap that's 42laps (or 49 inc D2D) and 336miles (392 inc D2D, 592 inc SDD too). I think terrahawk did way more though with good solo results at SITS & Mayhem. So, disappointingly, it turns out that the mileage total's not that much for the huge amount of pain that was involved in earning those miles!

He's right, they don't stretch, it is the rollers and pins wearing, just like it says up there.

There's no such thing as a "moment of torque" you can have torque, or you can have a moment.

Your explanation is completely incorrect too. The "load" carried by both sprockets (not "drivewheels") is the same, this is the tension in the chain, which must, necessarily be the same. at the interface between the front and rear sprockets. ref. newton's 3rd law of motion.

The rear sprocket will see a greater contact pressure between the sprocket teeth and the chain due to the reduced contact area offered by the lower number of teeth in contact with the chain. This makes the rear sprocket more prone to wear. the rear sporcket is NORMALLY (not always) made of steel, which is harder than the aluminium used for the front sprocket, so will wear less when used with a steel chain in this application.

The converse is true for the front sprocket, more teeth, so less contact pressure (although the tension in the chain is the same), but normally made from a softer aluminium allow, so tends to wear more quickly.

Also, you should make the more important point that, with an 8, 9 or 10 speed cassette the rider will normally spend a lot less time in each of the rear sprockets than he will in his front sprockets where he will have, typically, 2 or 3. This is probably the greatest driver for middle ring wear as most riders with a triple chainset may spend >75% of their time in the middle ring. Hence the middle ring will wear first. This was nicely demonstrated when I lived in the Peak a steel middle ring would always wear faster than my cassette in winter for this reason. An aluminium granny ring would last longest as it was used, but not nearly as much as the middle ring.

Your diagram is wrong too, the radius of the rear wheel, that you have highlighted, has nothing to do with drivetrain wear forces, these remain the same no matter what the wheel size, assuming you are pedalling with the same effort. Wheel size merely effects the gearing between your pedalling and the speed of the bike. i.e. double the wheel diameter and pedal just as hard (same amount of energy output) and you will percieve the identical effort, but your cadence will be half, the drivetrain forces and wear rates will remain the same, but the wheel, and your cranks, will be going at half the speed for the same force, given the same resistance from the bike i.e. headwind, gradient etc.

Another vote for Morvélo t-shirts here, have had a few compliments strolling around at events in mine, always good to add a strut to one's stride :-)

I luuuuurve the race kit too – I've had a few "nice kit" shouts whilst racing around in it this year too. Team kit in non-flouro and without clashing colours shocker!

it can be done for free! see below:

take off the shifters

at the front remove front mech + cable, granny ring + bolts and big ring. get some washers to space out your chainring bolts to fasten a single ring in place (alternately use a bash ring where the outer went or some single ring bolts)

at the back remove the cassette and rear mech cable, take the 16T sprocket and slide that onto the cassette body. at this point you'll need spacers, either the plastic spacers from a couple of old cassettes (from you box of stuff or from you LBS) or external BB spacers are also the rigt size, or bits of plastic pipe or spend £20 on a spacer kit!

you'll need to shorten your chain

for a tensioner you can just use the rear mech you have, rather than spent £20 on a rear mech. put the cable inner into the mech and pull it right through until the metal nipple stops inside the barrel adjuster, put the mech roughly in line with the 16T sprocket and tighten up the cable, you'll end up cutting the cable to about 4cm. you can then fine tune the position of the mech with thr barrel adjuster.

hey presto – free SS conversion using your lightweight 9s bits not heavy 1 1/8" parts and an expensive tensioner and spacer kit.

hope that is helpful and makes sense

rob

Wow, no-one on line sells seals for the old Pace forks and the "new" DT Swiss forks – bonkers. Particularly when you can get parts for all the other forks both original equipment and other companies "enduro" seals.

Cheers for the tip, I'll email Tim. Fingers crossed.

190cm x 75cm x 65cm is plenty to get a dismantled bike into so yes, you can take bikes in bike bags or boxes. I've a bike box in the loft that I know my bike fits into that is smaller than this

Men's pairs here too.

Race ya' njee20 ;-)

32:18 on a 29er is roughly equivalent (within tyre size difference) to 32:16 on a 26" wheeled bike, so 32:18 is a good place to start.

Shimano discs? You mean centre lock? Just buy a converter to 6-bolt for £6 from the woolyhatshop

I don't understand why the front hub would have to change, the rear wheel/disc/hub is toally unconnected to the front hub or brake?

Rear tensioner is good, means you can run it on a full sus with change in chainline and gives excellent chain wrap and easy rear wheel removal. If you don't like it a singleator will be just bas good

Steve Heading of Whyte bikes did it first, TWICE! 21:39 too the second time I believe. SEE HERE

Steve also did the SDD in 20:36. He's pretty quick over long distances!

Both amazing achievements. I'm hoping to try the PBW double next year if I can get the navigation practice in over the winter. Looks like a tough but great day out :-D

I'd say it's as much who you ride with and what the dynamic of the group is. I've lived and ridden in the North East, the Peak, The North Downs and now (for the second time) Brighton and the South Downs. I'm really lucky in that the group I ride with now is full of both technically good and just plain old fashioned fit & strong riders. Riding with these guys and trying to follow their back wheels has made me a whole world faster.

It doesn't really matter how hard/easy the terrain is. If the terrain is "easier" a strong and good rider will just go faster until they reach the same limit of their skill. This is all within reason of course, a fire road drag won't tax anyone.

Within the group it seems to be self perpetuating as we all try and stay with, compete with and beat each other but always making sure the back of the group never spits people out and regular re-groups at gates and lots of chatting are also the norm.

Just my tow penneth, and something no-one has mentioned

Are you running those Bonty's in these current dry conditions? Thought you'd have gone for something a little faster rolling?

Don't listen to him! I get the same comment all the time, but I used the very same tyres to do a sub-20hr South Downs Double on the hottest day of the year, come 2nd at D2D in the rain, come 2nd at TwentyFour12 in the dry and win a dry-ish SITS solo a few weeks ago. There's not many lighter 29er tyres out there (only Stans I think?) unless you go super skinny, they work in the mud and they seem to roll more than fast enough ;-)

In my opinion, the only course to appraoch the technical interest and challenge of the BrightonBigDog course was the ones held at Lea Quarry, and that was over a 15min lap, at a trail centre with purpose built trails! To maintain that level of interest and difficulty, over a 40min lap, with a huge amount of variety thrown in too was an awesome job by the course designers. There always seemed to be good opportunities for passing off line too.

Big "thank you"s and congratulations to the organisers