whotookit profile

Welcome to the land of really weird tire dynamics! Take a look at the bottom two graphs below and that may explain some of the feelings you're running into, notably the tendency of a fat tire to not just flop but dive into the direction of turn once it's initiated.

Is that Marquette/Ishpeming?

None that I'm aware of sadly. There are certainly local talented riders (Patrick Smage being the standout for fun content) and the occasional touring youtuber doing a local trail featurette. Past that it's down to race reports, word of mouth, and trailforks/mtb project/strava heatmaps to see what's what in the area.

As a preface, I LOVE the content that NSMB puts out. However, living in Wisconsin and having the vast majority of mountain bike opinions and articles come from the PNW gives a very skewed vision of what is "necessary" and "good" for mountain bike riding.

I'm digging this ride quite a bit! One fun note: as of last year (?) the larger airlines in the US (United, American, Delta at least) now treat bikes as simple $30 checked bags, no matter whether they're broken down, in a cardboard bike box, or in a proper bike box. The only bit of concern is that the 50 pound weight limit still applies, so make sure to throw your setup on the scale before heading out.

A possible correction, as this sentence was throwing me for a loop: "The bearing configuration is similar here, but the INboard bearing on the LOAM version is too large in diameter to fit inside the pedal body so it's NEXT TO THE PLATFORM, pressed up against the crank arm."

And from replacing pins on the RF Chesters, they're almost assuredly standard M3 socket cap screws and nuts. The only trick of these style designs is that, when you do inevitably bend a "pin", you've bend the screw threads after the nut, so you have to dremel off the bent bit to unthread/replace the screw. Given a bag of a hundred M3 screws is $10 on McMaster, it's a fair trade.