Okay, so I’m mixed up (ask my GP who prescribes my medication) but right at the moment I find myself in a very odd place. Half way between “weight weenie” and “steel-framed, high-mass luddite”.

You see… Waaaay back in the day I first began singlespeeding because I viewed it as a simple way to dump a kilo or so off my bike. Think about it for a second: No derailleur (200g at least), no heavy cassette (300g or so), no shifters (another 200), no front mech (another 150) no triple chainrings, no cables… Bingo, 1kg straight off the top! I was riding a light weight alloy frame (Yeti ARC) and with some carbon bars, a Ti seatpost and a kevlar/carbon saddle that nearly cut my butt in half (before it broke) I was in (fairly) low mass heaven.

Okay, so the SS bit was good, and after a dalliance with shifty stuff again, I’ve gone back there. However, I decided that light but uncomfortable was not for me. I ditched my custom tweaked air sprung fork for 100mm of plush Fox Vanilla steel spring, I binned the Kevlar saddle for a 500g Brooks B17, the ally frame is gone and replaced by a steel On One Inbred, my SPD pedals are gone and replaced with flats so I can dab a foot without thinking about it…

So far so good until last weekend when I was out riding and a buddy said “Hey, can I have a shot on your SS?”. Happy to spread the word I was only too pleased to let him hop aboard, while I rode his Anthem for a while. Nice bike, really quick, but the fork had so much pressure in it, it was basically like riding a rigid front end…

Okay, so the only downside to my SS is weight and I don’t want to give up the Brooks, and yet Niner make a carbon rigid fork that at 550g weights nearly a kilo and a half less than my Fox Vanilla… (You can see where this is going can’t you?)

Yes, having foresworn the dark side of weight weenieness, I now find myself awaiting the arrival of a rigid fork (albeit a very nice rigid fork) to pop on the front of my steel framed “heavy” bike.

Watch this space (for a bloke in his late thirties bitching about how much his back and arms hurt).

EDIT: Update

Back, arms wrists etc are fine, a decent puffy tyre up front (2.35 Lopes Bling Bling or 2.4 Conti Mtn King) and you don’t even remember that you’re not on a squishy fork for most terrain.  Handling is great, bike doesn’t feel unbalanced.  I’m sold.

Today I did something I haven’t done in years.  I took a totally inappropriate bike to ride a section of track and crashed.

This morning I had an appointment to meet a rider to show them some plans for a dirt jump project.  Turns out that he was meeting a group of locals to do some runs prior to a downhill race tomorrow.  ”Hey, come up to the track and check it out.”  ”Sure…”  So, we all trudged up the hill, to one of the highest sections of the forest that I haven’t set foot in ever, and started climbing up the track…

Now some DH tracks are technical, full of rock gardens with rocks the size of milk crates and drop offs that have an alarming similarity to the edge of railway platforms.  This was, fortunately, not one of those tracks, it was simply corners carved into the side of a steep hill.  As we trudged upwards, for some reason I stopped thinking about this as a DH track and started pondering coming back down.  I hadn’t been invited out to hit up the DH track, they just asked me to take a look.  There was no pressure or expectation that I should try, no-one to impress (no matter what, I was going to look like an utter gumbie attempting to negotiate this on my XC bike).  Still, for some reason I really wanted to give it a shot.

In a way, this kind of riding takes me back to my MTB roots.  Back in 99 or thereabouts, on a steel XC hardtail with a cheap 20mm travel fork I went with friends to the Nationals DH track out of Canberra at Blue Range and we gingerly and unimpressively picked our way down to the bottom looking like utter novices who had no idea, no skills and no place being there.  I recall feeling scared, out of my depth and not having much fun.  Today was different for some reason.

So, there I was this morning, out on a muddy hillside on my XC singlespeed with it’s skinny, shallow-tread, low rolling-resistance tyres, saddle (Brooks) dropped nearly as far as it would go trying to make it down the track.  It doesn’t take much slope or mud to overcome the grip limits of many XC tryes and this was certainly the case for me, so I picked my way down, mostly with the rear wheel locked up, front wheel on the verge of doing the same and trying to stay mainly vertical and not dabbing a foot.  Until, (as was inevitable), the back end let go during a traverse and I fell over on my side.

All I did was laugh, grin and start riding again.  Minor graze, some mud on my leg and having a blast of a time looking like an idiot.  The lower sections of the track were great, less steep, more rocks and of the type that most folks can ride down, it’s simply hard to do it fast.  I had a hoot the whole way down and we left the DH folks behind to do their training and sort out their lines and returned to noodling around the XC singletrack…

I’m generally fairly risk averse, I don’t enjoy crashing and I have a mortgage to pay, family to help support and all that jazz, so I don’t hit up dangerous stuff at all.  Today wasn’t dangerous, it was just not suited to what I was riding, and so, I crashed and looked stupid doing it.  I haven’t had so much fun on a bike as I had in those 5 minutes in years.

Why do we grow up?

“We re-thought everything two-wheeled, with simplicity in mind,”

…”but overall it would be made up of 29″ rims, huge big apple tires, a rear hub (planetary internal freewheeling, unicycle through axle) and a single front disc brake.”

Oh, those crazy guys who work in design studios…

[jruiter.com]

If you’ve been riding for a while, and especially if you’ve crashed your new bike, you’ll know the feeling. Something nice and shiny (and probably expensive) is no longer that way. If you’re lucky it’s a couple of scratches that give your bike character, but sometimes it’s really broken. Read the rest of this entry »

Single speed riders tend to get a bad rap. They’re often viewed as the more fundamentalist type mountain bike riders in a world of touchy feely democracy. If you tell people you ride a single speed the first and only question from them is usually “what’s a single speed”? After you carefully explain the principles involved they generally back away slowly looking at you as if you’re crazy.

So what makes up a single speed? Well, that depends a bit. A few years ago Keith Bontrager wrote an article about how to make a single speed on the cheap using the bike you already have. Read the rest of this entry »