Fist test says...

...Ronnie's 29+ will have loads of room for big tires.

And yes, my fist is bigger than a Chupacabra. I do use real tools to measure as well...

72.5cm effective toptube...

Not much to give it context here, but this is going to be one BIG bike...29+ is a godsend for those really big folks out there! Upward curved toptube? Standover's not a problem when you have a 94cm saddle height and ~40" inseam!

Just to get the bars high enough, this will use a 150mm travel MRP stage fork!

PSA: Get paid to build and maintain trails!

http://www.losalamosnm.us/jobs/Pages/OpenSpaceSpecialist.aspx

It's not too often that this kind of job opens up and Los Alamos is a very, very cool place. They even have a brewery now, to go with their 100+ miles of trails (all in a 100 square mile county!)

Followup to the Jamboree!

Nekkid!

Spring Cleaning Part Deux

Updated: price drop!

I built this fatbike for Miguel several years ago. In the intervening time, it's been ridden all over the world, put on planes, raced, and generally beaten on. And fatbike technology has moved on some.

Then he decided he wanted a slacker seat angle so I built him a new frame and took this one back to serve as my fatbike for the year. So now it's got 2 people worth of abuse on it. Powdercoat  (Red Baron) is in mediocre shape at best with several scratches that go through to bare metal (these can be touched up with nail polish, or just ignored - they're not a functional problem, but they're ugly).

But it doesn't really fit me, and I'm lusting after something more modern (it's 170 spacing, longish chainstays, no tapered steerer for Bluto-fun, etc). So I'm selling it cheap! $800 $700 takes this nice package:
-WW fat frame with lots of nicks and scratches but no dents or structural damage.
-Cane Creek 1 1/8 40 series headset.
-Thomson layback post.
-SRAM X9 175mm fatbike cranks/BB with 28t MRP Bling Ring, all in good functional shape.

I'm also happy to sell you a full build kit if you want more parts at my usual smoking prices.

Now, details on the frame geometry:
-70 HTA (with a 450mm fork), 73 STA
-61cm/24" effective toptube, about 67.5 cm front center (will vary some based on fork offset)
-49cm/19" seat tube (center to top)
-160mm/6.25" head tube
-Upward curved toptube - limited standover (~32") unless you are long-legged!
-45cm chainstays, plenty of clearance for a 4.5" tire. You will run out of chain clearance with anything bigger.
-~300mm/12" BB height with 4.5" tires, lower with smaller ones, a bit higher with 29+ tires.
-Plenty of room for B+/27.5+ or 29+ tires, pretty much any wheel/tire configuration you want will work.
-170mm symmetrical rear spacing, 100mm BB shell, designed for ~62-65mm chainline
-Downtube cable routing for full length housing, Paragon low mount dropouts. Takes a 27.2 seatpost.
-Will work fine with 80-100mm travel 29er forks or anything in the 440-480mm axle to crown range, but no tapered steerers.

This frame IMO would be best built up as a summertime dirt trails and packed snow cruiser. If you're going adventuring in deep snow the upward curved toptube and lack of 5" tires is going to be a bummer. Ideal candidate is 6'-6'3" or so with long legs and short arms/torso. It's built pretty beefy (Miguel had a kid seat mounted for a while) so up to 220# riders are fine.

Questions? Drop me a line!

Aspens poppin!

Moose Hollow trail - aka "out the door from WW World HQ".

Tuesday Rant: Down With the Metric System!

Seriously, weight weenies, listen up. I was once one of you. Your brains are being tricked by the evil metric system.

You weigh something like 80,000 grams, plus or minus 20,000 or so. If you're really big or really small you might be outside that range, but you're probably not.

If you have a nice, light (mountain) bike, it weighs something like 10,000 grams.

To make the math easy, let's say that when you've got a couple water bottles, clothes, and some tools, you and your bike are 100,000 grams.

If you know what these are, you have a problem

So a crazy light, say, stem, that saves you 50 grams, is 5/10,000 of your total vehicle weight. That's 1/20 of 1%. To even hit a 1% savings, you need 1000g of lighter parts/frame. You can certainly pull that off, but it'll cost you multiple thousands of dollars to do in most cases.

Worst of all, it won't actually make you 1% faster, since there are lots of things that aren't affected much by weight at all (air resistance, drivetrain losses, etc).

And yet, weight weenies, you spend countless hours weighing parts (and your bikes). You obsess over the weight of everything and the first thing you do when you see a nice bike is pick it up to see how light it feels.

Yet mostly, you've never really spent time testing, say, tires back to back on the same course to see which one makes you faster. Or hired a coach, or gotten a good bike fit. Or made sure to get multiple preride laps in on a race course. Or tried a dropper post to see if it helps you go faster and save energy on the descents (it's an extra 250g, you know...) You break and wear out stuff all the time or have to make do with sub-par suspension or brakes or tires because you buy parts based on weight.

You don't care about being *faster* (or having more fun), you care about how light your bike is. And that's crazy.

Here's what I think the problem is: grams are crazy small units. But they're *discrete* units. You can weigh and count and measure them and quantitatively compare them. There is no uncertainty about whether or not one stem cap is lighter than another. You can add up the grams in your head as you fall asleep at night (no joke, I used to do this as an exercise to help fall asleep!)

In other words, grams are a terrible trap for your geeky brain. They lure you with their hard numerical precision and you start to enjoy adding them up (and even more, subtracting them). But they don't really matter. It's like spending your time counting pennies to figure out your net worth.

So as an exercise, try this: think of your bike weight in pounds. Period. Round up or down if needed. So maybe you have a 22 pound bike. If it's 21.8, that still counts as 22, because for all practical purposes that .2 pounds doesn't matter. Never think about grams again. Because grams don't matter. Then go buy a really nice suspension fork and some decent tires and go kick some ass.

Dust it off...

Don't call it a comeback, I've been in the basement for years.

Pulled Sarah's first (ok, only... she's a hardtail gal) FS frame out of the basement today to get it ready for a trip to NM in May (these FS frames are great for travel because you can unbolt the whole rear end and pack them up in an S&S case super easily). First time it's been out in... maybe 6 or 7 years?

Funny to look at it now - no tapered steerer, no through axle, front derailleur mount (this was one of the first direct-mount front derailleur frames on earth, I think), 27.2 non-dropper seatpost... things have certainly moved on.

But in many ways it was ahead of it's time. 69 degree HTA (now sort of the norm for XC bikes), 43cm chainstays. The geometry is still totally appropriate for all-around XC. It'll be fun to see what Sarah thinks of it after all these years.

And by "fun" I mean that Sarah will probably hate the fact that the rear suspension functions at all and have me pump the shock up to 300psi. Sigh.

Joe's Geometry Jamboree

By popular (ok, one person) request!

Executive summary: short and semi-slack racey bike for attacking the twisties in TX.

New bandsaw says, "I am not impressed"

-69.5 HTA and 90mm trail, designed for a Niner carbon rigid fork or 80-100mm travel suspension

-60.5cm ETT, 66.9cm front center, 107.8cm wheelbase. 

-42cm chainstays, plenty of room for a 2.3 and a 34t oval chainring (lotsa runout on those bad boys - I had to have Joe send me the crank and ring to double check clearances)

-295mm BB height. Just a smidge on the low side if you were running suspension but with a rigid fork you can go a hair lower and Joe likes low.

-Curved seat tube for tire clearance. Joe took it easy on me and let me use straight tubes for the rest of the front end. 

-Built for a nice normal 27.2 post and using nice skinny-ish 35mm/28.6mm down and toptubes for a steel-is-real ride with a little give. Joe is not a huge dude either, so fat tubes were never on the radar.

-Paragon rockers for SS fun if needed, plus chainstay length adjustability.

Let the Wild Rumpus Begin!

29+ front, 27.5+ rear? Why not, says Paul. It's the Beast of Wasatch, or something. Note rare-ass WW EBB. Paul is very persuasive.

The number of freaky wheel and tire combinations possible now sort of scares me.

Trail Blazer really doesn't look like a 2.8 to me. Paul says it's about 60mm wide on a P35.

Quite the color explosion here. Nice chain.

AZ trail, yo!

Thanks to Adam for the amazing photos.

Beard seems more appropriate for a cooler-weather sort of event...

Wow.

Voted least likely to be practical but most awesome

The Green Monster in Action!

Thanks to Matt for the photos!

Chupacabras are the ultimate mountain tandem tire

Round Valley is all dry. Scary dry.

Pikes Peak!

Some manner of velocipede in the foreground. Curious.

Randy and Mike... different takes on bikes for dirt roads!

Gotta love the diversity of stuff that you can do with a drop-bar bike with decent tire clearance.

Exhibit A: go play chicken with your lactate threshold like Randy.

19 pounds, not bad! Someone forgot to tell Randy to cut his steerer tube, and that front derailleurs and 1 1/8 aren't cool anymore...

Or, load up and go to Africa like Mike...

Probably more than 19#. More like 60? Steerer appropriately cut, though, bonus points!

Another nail in the coffin?

As I've said before, I'm not much of a fan of Shimano's business practices.

But now it's hard for me to see how Shimano is going to recover in the mountain bike market. There is just not much to complain about other than cost when it comes to the SRAM 1x11 system(s) - and I should know, I own several sets and I must have sold a hundred kits by now. Nobody goes back. Shimano has had several years now to come up with a response and so far... nothing.

At <$300 (at retail, though if you don't have the correct hub driver that will add a few bucks) it's basically a no-brainer for even the biggest cheapskate. Those folks who were (justifiably) waiting for XT 11 speed to convert at this sort of pricepoint? There are probably some Shimano diehards who will still do it but most folks will just grab the SRAM GX and go.

OEs will be on it like flies on you-know-what, too. It's plausible that you'll see <$800 bikes with 1x11 drivetrains this summer.

And yes, as always, I'll have these parts available when they come out. Expect cost to be in the range of 50% of retail if you're a frame customer.