aerius

We got about 10 inches dumped on us, with about 12-18" in the snowdrifts. It was fairly light fluffy stuff so shoveling it wasn't all that bad except for the end of the driveway where the snowplows piled up a massive ridge of compacted icy snow.

And don't forget to calculate your Jens Factor number. The Jens Factor has become a competition among some of our local riders, they try to see who can get the most rides in the worst conditions.

Cripes! I haven't seen a stem that long since the late 90's. Definitely shorten that sucker up, the only bikes with stems that long these days are pro XC race bikes or bikes ridden by guys who are 6'5". Most modern mountain bikes work best with a stem in the 60-90mm range, my personal bike for instance has an 80mm stem. You might also want to consider a setback seatpost, I notice that your seat is pretty far back on the rails and a setback post will give you more room to play around with reach and stem lengths to find a good position and balance point on your bike. There's actually a couple reasons for short stems, handlebars have gotten a lot wider in the past dozen years and toptubes are a bit longer as well. Wider bars give you a more stable base on the bike along with more leverage to crank out power when standing on steep climbs. Wider bars will slow down the steering and bring your body more forward on the bike so stems got shorter to balance it out. Dropper posts are pretty darn useful, only thing is you need to stay on top of the maintenance or else they get crunchy and develop play real fast. I'm lazy and hate working on my bike so I don't have one. As for remote lockouts, what fork do you have and how the fuck does a remote lockout kit cost $450? I have a Manitou Minute Pro and the kit for my fork costs about $40 and takes 15 minutes to install.

They're pretty good as far as I know, back in my shop days we never had any issues with Rocky Mountain's frames when dealing with warranty replacements. If it was a legitimate warranty frame failure it was taken care of promptly. I have heard of a manufacturing defect in a couple of their models during the mid 2000's that resulted in widespread failures, it was bad enough that Rocky ran out of replacement frames so some people had to wait several months to get their frames replaced. Those bikes are long discontinued and as far as I know none of their current bikes have any such issues.

I don't think warranties have any real relation to how long a bike will last. Trek has a lifetime warranty on its aluminum frames yet I've broken mine twice in the last 10 years and had it replaced free of charge. Specialized also has the same warranty and one of my friends has gone through 6 or 7 warranty frames in the past 15 years or so. Kona and Norco also have lifetime warranties on the bike models that I own, the Norco was the only one I managed to break and that was by slamming it head-on into a tree at high speed when I botched the landing off a big drop. BTW, don't look up "cracked Cervelo" on the 'net...but if it makes you feel better, my Kona is known for snapping at the drive side dropout. It was a known flaw which is why the '97 & later models have a different dropout design.

Gave the hikers a couple days to pack down the trails a bit, then went out for a snow ride today. The bike went sideways a bunch of times and I got a lot of practice at counter steering and drifting. The best part? My wheels & tires are finally clean.

It came up in a dinner conversation with Damon Rinard, he coaches my friend's cycling team and he's also the composites engineer at Cervelo. I brought up aerospace applications and why it works just fine there, as he explained it, and I probably missed a few things, it has to do with the epoxies and stabilizers along with the layup, and also they build with larger safety factors on planes. I had no idea it happened on bikes, I knew it happened on hockey sticks since they get massively flexed and take huge impacts on slapshots, but apparently it happens on bikes too, it just takes a lot longer. There were some other fun things such as BB stiffness being highly overrated and that you could break the seatstays on an R3 and it'll still ride just fine.

Carbon fiber frames have a limited lifespan, or rather, a limited mileage after which they start to go soft. For a pro it's about 1-2 years of racing & training, for the average enthusiast cyclist it's around 5-6 years. The bike doesn't fall to pieces, it just gradually loses its stiffness as microcracks form in the epoxy and the fibers start to debond. It's the same thing that happens to my carbon fiber hockey sticks, except the sticks go soft faster since they're abused more. A titanium frame on the other hand lasts forever and stays good as new unless it's crashed hard or run over by a car.

1) Commit on corners better, I need to trust the tires more and just lean the bike way the fuck over. I couldn't do this consistently this year and lost too much speed from being a wuss. 2) Take a trip to Quebec and spend a week riding the world cup DH course and other trails at Mont Sainte Anne. 3) Get more airtime on jumps & drops. Do bigger jumps and drops.

See if you can sneak in a quick ride tomorrow to work the stiffness out of your legs, even a half hour spin around the block will help. Tomorrow, I'm going to get my ass kicked in mountain biking by a former world champion. My goal is not to get hospitalized since there's a big ride I'm going to on Friday.

Dmitri Hvorostovsky - Kalinka: Russian Folk Songs The last track is full of awesome.

For gloves, it depends on how narrow and/or overgrown the trails are in your area, how hot & humid it is, and how often you fall on your ass. My local trails are pretty narrow and get badly overgrown in the summer so full finger gloves are essential, without them my hands would get ripped to shreds. Shorts is whatever you feel like wearing. Some people will rock the roadie tights on the trails, others go shorts on top of tights, and some choose MTB specific shorts with liners. There's no right choice, ride whatever feels good.

On the other hand, we now have "fat bikes" with big balloon tires that let you ride on snow. There's a bunch of guys a couple hours north of me who ride their fat bikes in the snow all winter, and several XC ski areas have opened their trails to bikes this winter. Check it out https://plus.google.com/photos/113125576961447749127/albums?banner=pwa&gpsrc=pwrd1#photos/113125576961447749127/albums/5696187796353128385

At least you still have ridable trails where you live. Everything in my area is super sticky ankle deep mud thanks to all the rain we got over the past couple weeks. Riding season is pretty much done until it gets cold enough to freeze the trails solid. Hooray for indoor ice rinks, otherwise I'd probably go postal from lack of activity.

Oh man, Avid turkey gobble taken to the next level. It sounds like a cat getting fed through a meat grinder.

True enough. A lot of people I know just get a new set on clearout or warranty every year. I hate fixing or replacing parts on my bike so I always go for the most durable and reliable parts I can buy.

The root cause of Crank Bros. pedal failures is loose tolerances in production along with some questionable design choices. If you happen to luck out and get a pedal where the tolerances for all the parts are right in the middle of the spec it'll last just fine, problem is the good ones are few & far between since the tolerances are so wide. Going by the riding groups in my area, somewhere around 10-20% of their pedals are good for the long run, the rest of them wear out prematurely or suffer catastrophic failure. You might luck out and get a good one, but the odds aren't good. Friend of mine was lucky and got a good set on her first purchase, they worked and she liked them so she bought more for the rest of her bikes. The later buys all failed in less than a year.

People love Eggbeaters for cross since they're super light and they clear mud, snow, and ice very well, which is worth the risk of a DNF if the pedals crap out during the race. But for mountain biking they're too fragile and unreliable, and even better, if you get a pedal strike it'll unclip your foot from the pedal. I've seen a bunch of people hit their Eggbeaters on a rock or log and have their foot go flying off the pedal, followed by a crash.

Do NOT get anything from Crank Brothers. Period. Unless you want your leg impaled by a broken pedal spindle. When I go on a group rides, it's almost guaranteed that someone will break a Crank Bros. pedal. Anything from Shimano is good, but my preference is for Times since they're simpler and require zero maintenance, plus they work better in mud & snow. I run Time ATAC Carbon Ti's on my bike, had'em for 12 years, still running like new. They've outlasted everything on my bike except my Chris King headset and 4-piston XT disc brakes. As for clipless vs. platforms it depends on what kind of trails you ride and how often you need to bail off your bike in a hurry. For instance if I'm riding a bunch of skinny bridges, teeter-totters, and other stunts I want platform pedals for sure, for everything else I prefer clipless. A lot of it comes down to personal preference as well, some people like platforms more because it matches better with their riding style, same thing with clipless.

Get ready for the infamous Avid turkey gobble. Most Avid brakes come down with it either right away or as soon as the pads are bedded in, it's just a matter of how bad the noise is and how hard it is to fix.

1996 and 2006 Kona Explosifs. There's just something special about the feel of these frames, maybe it's the fancy steel tubing, maybe it's Kona's special sauce for frame geometry, probably both. They're so fun to ride.

Put a bottle cage on the seat tube mounts and see if it sits straight. There's a batch of R3's and possibly some R5's as well that left the factory with crooked bottle mounts, when you put a bottle cage on them it tilts to the right by nearly an inch and besides looking stupid it may rub on your legs. One of my local shops got several bad R3's with that issue, it's not too big a deal if you use a metal bottle cage since you can rebend it to make it sit straight, but if you're using a plastic or carbon cage then you have a problem.

Finished building it up today and took it for a nice spin this afternoon. Had some fun playing around with the sliding dropouts to see how different chainstay lengths affected handling, ended up with the sliders set to the exact same length as my old Explosif. Rides just the way a Kona should, it's like I've had the bike my whole life.

The Twinkie lives on, at least here in Canada. I can't say I've seen any on display shelves recently, but I'd guess Walmart has millions of them for sale. http://www.theglobea...article5548529/

Thanks! It was much the same with me, I started mountain biking in the early 90's and I always wanted a Kona Explosif, and later on the Ibis Mojo Ti. Yeah, good luck affording either one of those when I was still in HS. I eventually got my hands on a 96 Explosif a few year ago and now I also have a 2006. 10 years apart, and funny enough they're the 2 runs that use shaped Italian tubing; Columbus on the 96 and Dedacciai on the 2006. Friend of mine used to race for the Kona factory team, I rode her Kona Hot once and it was just incredible, it was like my Explosif but better in every way. She also had a titanium Hei Hei which was painted to look like the Hot, I never got to ride that one and I'm not sure if she still has it. The mid to late 90's were a golden era for those bikes, never again will we see that kind of high-end steel and titanium goodness from mass production bikes.