Forum Replies Created
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Oof! Now you’re asking!
Oof! Now you’re asking!
Probably 75% road riding, but on manky winter backroads with all the associated potholes and field run-off, 25% gravel rides (i.e. when my Garmin leads me down a farm track I thought was a road when plotting the route!).
Terrain would ideally be hilly as I can make it, and distance could be anything between 50km and 150km I guess, which is why I’m looking for something with gears as experience has taught me I’m not quite man enough for 150km of hills on my singlespeed.
I guess actually speed isn’t so important, it’s more for winter miles and I’ve been perfectly happy on my 10kg commuter, perhaps I should be considering touring bikes again…
Pretty well wedded to rim brakes. I know exactly what you mean about the world of possibilities but there seems to be some wierd quirk in my riding style, weight, speed or something which renders most disc brakes a high maintenance, noisy and largely underwhelming prospect on my bikes. I actually own a disc brake bike at the moment and will only take it out when I really have to, and it’s guaranteed to be dry. Meanwhile my rim braked commuter just keeps on trucking along.
I’m sure with a lot of experimentation and money I could find a set of disc brakes that works the way I want them to (i.e. silently) but it just seems easier to find the perfect rim braked frame!
Yes, loads, plus I’ve plotted
Yes, loads, plus I’ve plotted a few routes recently either using Google Map or Strava where what appeared to be a road turned out to be farm track of some sort. Thankfully it’s been winter so I’ve been on my ‘gravel’ bike (my singlespeed drop bar commuter with 38c tyres) and it’s been a fun diversion off the tarmac.
Problem is I don’t want to use my singlespeed for the sort of long hilly routes I’ve planned for the summer, makes me wish I could fit bigger than 25mm tyres on my road bike, next bike will definitely be ‘gravel’!
Do yourself a favour and get
Do yourself a favour and get some PDWs, they’re so much neater to install and quieter in use than any SKSs I’ve used.
Nice! Very jealous, it’ll be
Nice! Very jealous, it’ll be a couple of years before I can justify spending new bike money, but guards and big tyres are top of the brief.
In the meantime I’l have to make do with the Rose. Quietly pleased with how neat the mudguards went on, benefits of chainstay mounted brakes I guess, and once they fail I can justify getting some PDWs which should be even neater.
Is the lack of clearance at
Is the lack of clearance at the chainstay bridge for the tyres only, or tyres and guards? i.e. could you just stop the guard before the chainstay bridge?
Am embarking on fitting full length guards to my Rose Xeon tonight, cautiously optimistic but 25s are my max and the guards will need to stop at the fork crown and the chainstay bridge, much dremelling!
p.s. did you check out the Holdsworth Competition? I ended up not buying one because I didn’t think I had the time to do my own build, possibly regretting that decision now…
Anecdotally it can take 28s with room to spare. You would need those little mudguard eyelets that sit on your QR axle but they’re cheap enough.
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Have a shit before you go out, that must be worth a half kilo weight save.Seriously, who are these perverts/masochists who go out for a ride with a half kilo package in the tubes? In fact, does anyone NOT take a poo before going for a ride? It’s not a weight saving if you would be doing it anyway.
Anyway, is this a new thing, to pretend we don’t care about the weight of our road bikes? Is half the industry not dedicated to making things lighter?
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If all the bikes are coming out plus 500g it seems less plausible to quote a plus or minus range and appears to be more the norm.I had this issue with some lightweight hiking gear (Mountain Hardwear sleeping bags…).
Quoting a plus or minus range is the most dishonest/inaccurate part of this scenario I think, does anyone really believe that there are bikes out there that are 730g LIGHTER than stated?
Apart from Pinnarello of course, who just took the lightest 10% and marketed them as extra-light and charged extra
p.s. re: ‘just have a poo’ comments, does anyone NOT take a poo before they go for a ride? (recent Giro winners excluded of course)
Haha, sorry Cyclisto, I’m
Haha, sorry Cyclisto, I’m just grumpy because all the bikes I like are disc only now and I’m anti-disc.I do forget the issue with mini-vs and pad clearance, I have the little Campag style quick release buttons on my levers so I can run the levers further from the bars. Means I need big hands to reach the levers, but also means lots of pad clearance
Yeah, funnily enough I had
Yeah, funnily enough I had the cold over christmas, and the weather was rotten!
But looking at the miles I did manage to squeeze in it was a significant spike compared to the mileages I had been doing in the run-up to Christmas, followed up by a pretty solid week of commuting in the New Year.
I have no idea though if it’s purely distance, for instance I also ride a singlespeed and one of my Christmas rides turned out to be rather hillier than I’d realised. However I have been doing a lot of reading into position recently and I’m as sure as I can be that my position is OK. Distance just seems like the most obvious culprit.
Am taking two weeks off and will focus on rebuilding hours in the saddle slowly once I’m back, I’ve also shoehorned some mudguards into the (brand new) race bike. Once I’m sure the worst of the grit and ice is off the roads I’ll take that out, give the knees a wee break on the hills.
I got some quite varied
I got some quite varied feedback on the Equilibrium, think I’d only be confident trying to fit 25s with guards.
Was disappointed to hear that the Allez could only realistically take 25s with guards, was sure Specialized were marketting it as being able to take 28s.
That Layhams is gorgeous though!
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Cantis have reasons to be forgotten and calipers with such clearance will flex like spaghetti. The sensible option is disks, but if you are a vintage guy buy an outdated (and probably at a bargain price) cx frame with mini-brakes. But if you want to avoid disks, are you ready to build a bike that will be obsolete at its first ride?Wow, drank the disc brake Koolaid much?
Mini-vs are an excellent alternative to discs, stick some decent pads in them and enjoy simple, cheap, reliable and SILENT braking in all weathers. My New Year’s day ride was 5 hours in sleet, snow and streaming field run off on the Scottish central belt’s finest farm roads, my Tektro Mini-vs with Swisstop blue pads didn’t miss a beat. By comparison my CX bike with TRP Spyres with Shimano pads been a screaming, howling embarassment (and yes, the brakes are clean, well adjusted, etc. etc.).
By all accounts, high end long drop brakes such as the TRP 957s are excellent and easily match the performance of decent standard callipers, which in themselves are perfectly good.
I’m in the same boat as you kil0ran but unfortunately there isn’t much left on the market. The Holdsworth Competition apparently takes 28s easily, but doesn’t take long drop brakes so not sure about the mudguard clearance. I think it’s pretty light as steel frames go.
The other options I’d found were the Van Nicholas Amazon (but it’s more of a fast tourer than a racer) or a Gunnar Crosshair (again, more Gravel than Race).
The Kinesis looks like your best bet?
The way I’ve always
The way I’ve always understood it is that wind/air resistance punishes the lighter rider more, something to do with the F=ma equation when F is the force caused by the air pushing on your body, m is your mass and a is the (backwards) acceleration caused by the wind.60km around Fife, didn’t have
60km around Fife, didn’t have the time for a decent long ride and not really focussed on building pace yet, plus it was too bloody cold and icey to be pushing it!
Just cruised around on the singlespeed winter bike filling in some more blanks on my Veloviewer heat map. I’m loving using this as a motivational tool, rides appeal to me so much more when I’m exploring new roads.
I had the same issue and
I had the same issue and emailed the admin team (thanks for the reply Tony).
For what it’s worth, the ad that kept grabbing my screening and preventing me reading threads or responding to them (probably for the best…) seemed to be for Renault? It kept getting as far as talking about fuel injectors or something that were the thickness of a human hair, blah blah blah.
All seems good today thoughD’OH! Literally as I was typing this reply, my screen gets grabbed by an advert for some Intel nonsense…The Private Eye has a fairly regular feature on how online advertising is getting mis-sold to advertisers (e.g. an advert is classed as having been ‘viewed’ if 50% of the pixels are visible on a screen for a surprisingly short amount of time…). Makes for interesting reading but unfortunately without them we all end up paying for the sites we’re pathetically addicted to…
Another vote for the
Another vote for the Cannondale Synapse tape, can’t vouch for durability (have only ridden about 100km on it) but it tapes up well, has a silicon strip on the back instead of the double sided sticky tape on my Specialized BG Phat tape (I don’t like double sided tape as I inevitably take a couple of goes to get my tape just right…) and looks good.
Alpine Bikes seemed to be carrying it cheap when I bought it last.
