Hoops

I recently decided that I'd like to own and ride a set of carbon rimmed wheels. Rims? Made of carbon? Madness I hear you cry.. Well I thought the same thing a couple of years ago and it was only really until Ibis brought out their version of the carbon rim that I kind of sat up and took notice.
 

The thing is, I've always liked the concept of super light wheels, but as I'm a heavier rider (I'm usually hovering around 84kg), add to that a desire to plummet down and through rock strewn and root riddled descents as fast as I can, I have been known to bend the odd wheel. So how is carbon going to stop that? Well it's all about strength to weight ratio really. Carbon allows us to build a similar strength rim for much less weight, or looking at it differently, a much stronger rim for the same weight..
 

Now I firmly belong to the second camp on this, mainly because as I mentioned I'm not light, but also because I can't afford to buy two sets, one for race day and one for training and general mucking around. And I want to ride them all the time too. So, I've ended up buying a pair of rims that have a whopping great 38mm footprint and weigh only a few grams more than my much skinnier NoTubes Arch EX alloy rims at around 24.6mm. The Arch EX has been an excellent rim and looked at in comparison to other rims made of the same stuff it holds it's own very well. It's light, strong and dare I say it, relatively cheap (thus exploding the engineer's myth of strong, light, cheap, pick two..)..Well ok, not quite. Because there are lighter, cheaper and stronger rims out there but probably not all in the same wheel. I have given them a fair bit of abuse too, from racing to poorly chosen lines through tasty rock gardens and they have come out reasonably well. I say reasonably because they are not totally free of collateral damage, slightly wobbly now and looking a little sad and dejected..
 

So back to Ibis. What a cool company. Innovative, passionate and producers of beautiful bikes, and now purveyors of choice wheels too. Their own design of the carbon rim has I suspect led to many reversed engineered designs, one of which I bought (light-bicycle). The reason I chose them over Ibis is for a couple of reasons, 1- they are way cheaper, and 2- Ibis do exactly the same thing, get a rim made in China because it's cheaper and then sell it for a profit. I'm just kind of cutting out the middle man, in this case Ibis. So sorry Ibis.

Although being that I'm about to pay $4100 AU for an Ibis Ripley 29er LS in Tang, I don't think I'll lose sleep over it.. and I'm sure they won't either (http://www.ibiscycles.com/bikes/ripley_29/).

 

I'm also currently looking into having wheel builder supremo, Adrian from Melody Wheels in Fremantle, lace a Powertap G3 hub to the rims so I can train with power on the Ripley, and any other 29er I choose to add to the stable at a later date (http://melodywheels.com/).

 

So once these wheels are built and rolling on the Ibis I'll report back with an update.

29er rims 28 hole (38mm width)
Hope Evo2 hubs (probably)
Sapim x-ray spokes
All black

Whyte E5

My MTB weapon of choice in the UK for the last 4 years. The Whyte E5 has been an excellent bike for many reasons, but mainly because it just kept going no matter what I threw at it. And I threw stuff at it. From 70kph descents through dense forest, multi-day epics across Wales, sweet flowing Trail Centre singletrack, to some truly scary technical descents in the Lakes. It hasn't really missed a beat. Apart from that time I broke the frame. And the carbon swingarm. Apart from those two minor faults, it has been a bloody belter.

The frame didn't really break anyway, it just developed a stress-fracture to one of the welds on a lower shock mount. It was one of the first releases of the E5, and may just have been a manufacturing/design defect from the day it was made. The swingarm was my fault. I incorrectly assembled the washers for the pivots and as I tightened the bolts to the rear shock a large rending sound was heard....a difficult moment.

However, Whyte were good with the warranty and sent me out a brand spanking new frame. I did have to wait a while for the Vietnamese to knock up a new production run as there was a backlog of warranty frame required apparently. Clearly other people broke their E5's at the same time.

It's a different bike to the Stealth Black, XC/Marathon bike I bought in 06'. It's evolved quite a lot over those 4 years, different fork, brakes and shifters/mech and new hoops too. A few parts survived though, Easton ML bars (god knows why...), XT chainset (M760), Easton EA90 post (with the single bolt underneath, horrible). Until it's become a slightly confused bike now. For example I have Roval's insanely good Traversee 'all-mountain' wheels (1580gms) with a Pike 454 Air U-turn up front sporting a 20mm axle? Wrong, I know. Worse are the Maxxis Minion tyres i'm running front and rear. Although in my defence they are the 2.35" single ply version and I run two front tyres for a bit more rolling speed. 

When I was in the 'research phase' for the E5 back in 2006 there was a new breed of lightweight medium-travel bikes emerging on the scene. I'd been riding with around 120mm travel for a few years or so and liked where that compromise was at with pedalling efficiency and bump-eating ability. However, I felt like my bike at the time (Scott Genius MC-10 04') was a little sluggish (not to mention too tall, too steep, too short, too complex to set-up, crap pivots etc) and so was keen to try some of the next of generation of bikes, as that's really how I saw it.

Enter the Mountain Mayhem 24hr race set in the Malverns. Or more specifically, the demo programme and short demo course they made available for the 2006 event that year. I had booked 7 bikes on-line prior to the event, bikes as diverse as Yeti 575 ASR right through to the new carbon Scott Ransom. I had an idea that I would like the E5 so I left that until the end of the day. Needless to say as soon a I jumped on it I could tell it just pedalled better than anything else out there at the time. Jon Whyte's Quad-link system (now revised to give a more linear shock stroke) was efficient and gave a real feeling of real zip and energy, something previous bikes had lacked.

So it was decided. I bought an E5 as soon as I could afford it and I was set. At the time I was living in Bracknell, so my local haunt was The Lookout at Bracknell forest. Mainly singletrack with some nice man-made trails built around the place. Could get pretty choppy there through winter, wet off-camber roots covered with the South's slippier-than-butter chalky clay. From these humble beginnings I took the E5 pretty much around the UK for some truly mint riding, from racing around Cwmcarn (Wales), to bike hiking escapades up 900m of the mighty Helvellyn and High Street in the Lakes.

The Maverick SC-32 forks were swapped out after a couple of years. I'd spent literally hour after hour stripping them down, messing with oil weights and shim stacks trying to find that elusive perfect damping, and in the meantime become accustomed to the torsional flex and the funny stares from other riders. Still, no one likes to admit they just spent £2800 on a bike with crap forks. The Hope hubs/Mavic 717 rims were ok, but they did flex and were way too skinny for any rubber bigger then 2.1". Hope Mono Mini's disc brakes? Well they were just shit.

So the time has come to usher in a new breed of mountain bike. One that is stiffer and stronger, lighter and plusher, with an easier maintenance schedule too. A bike that is designed for a new breed of rider too; the all-mountain/XC pretender category. Which bike is it then? Well that would be the next blog topic then wouldn't it...

Friends

Why do we keep souvenirs from trips we have made or holidays taken? Or perhaps a seemingly random piece of childhood memorabilia as a memento of a childhood long since past? Or in my sister's case the ear and tattered skin of a fluffy cuddly cow (affectionately known as Cow)? The answer of course is obvious to us all, it's because it gives us a link to the past. A physical link that connects us directly to that event, place, time or person, or possibly all of these things. Often these items get shelved or dumped in a box, buried not seeing the light again for years; sometime decades, archived. Forsaken? Never.

So when we stumble across these trinkets, bits of paper or old toys it can give us a jolt, a blast from the past, if you will. A reminder of who we were or who we wanted to be. I have some such treasured items in storage. Well, actually floating somewhere on the Indian Ocean en-route to Perth WA, whereupon they will be reunited with their owner. Items such as a 20-odd year old Mongoose BMX jersey, which may just be the coolest biking garment to have ever been made. A genuine leather American Football given to me by an Aunt Jenny for my 13th birthday. Several letters sent back and forth to Saudi Arabia by a young boy to his best friend after his parents re-located there. And a bottle top.

Yes a bottle top. Just your garden-vareity draught beer bottle top. But it's got special properties this bottle top. I know this because every time I touch it, it takes me directly up 842 metres to the top of the infamous High Street on a windy Saturday morning in October, towering above Ullswater and beyond in the Lake District, North West England. Whereupon after an epic ascent of High Street I produced two bottles of God's finest to my riding buddy, training partner, workmate and friend for life Nick Brewster, and we toasted to our friendship, rides done, rides nearly done (bailed/bonked/mechanicals) and rides pending.

So maybe it's time to venture in to the loft, and take a look at some of those hidden items, you never know where they may take you.