oldmanbike profile

The Kali Strike pads are similar too. I've happily worn them on all but the hottest rides for the past year or two. They have velcro on top which I rarely adjust but I'm glad is there for wearing over longjohns in the cold. I very much prefer the subtler branding of the Kali pads vs these Leatt pads, but to each their own.

I liked the Minion SS exo ride-wise but gave up after a few flats from cuts in the tread casing. Just not tough enough for my blundering in East coast rocks. Very happy with the Aggressor DD.

"Various incantations" is evocative but maybe you meant iterations?

Yes, agree on personal preference, just giving another data point. Different princesses = different peas.

The Brisker gloves seem like a good design, but how do they fit the entire billboard on them?

I picked up a pair of the WXB gloves a couple years ago based on Cam's glowing 2014 review. I like but don't love them. I wear them around freezing, too cold for regular gloves but not cold enough for big insulated gloves, and don't use them in the wet much. They do the job and have held up pretty well, and I have no plans to replace them. But, unlike Cam, I find the layers between fingers and between palm and bar to impart enough of a sloppy feeling to keep me from loving them. (Also, the wrist velcro never worked well and now barely works at all, which is annoying but only on the coldest days.) Maybe this is the minimum glove that's effective in the cold wet, but a little bulkier than necessary for cold dry, so the fact that you're using it for conditions closer to what it was designed for may explain why you love it and I merely like it.

Very interested in learning what companies sign it.

The unintentional a-hole problem is something I think we don't emphasize to each other enough. What feels to us like a moderate-speed pass with plenty of room can be alarming for the hiker. Slowing down in plenty of time can seem like last-second panic-stopping to them. Even riders perceive speed and space differently when we're off the bike. Not saying any of this self-righteously, I'm just as guilty as everyone else. Maybe including hikers-eye-view drills in clinics, etc, would help increase our awareness of it.

See, I always knew you guys were just hacks who wrote puff pieces to juice ad sales and land marketing-flack gigs.

It was bizarre to me too. Only bad customer service experience I've had in the bike industry. The guys on the phone were friendly, but how it got handled was way frustrating.

I had such a bad customer-service experience with my old Turbine dropper that I'd never consider buying anything mechanical from Raceface again. (It was the 9point8 clone, not this one, so I'm not commenting on the dropper, only their customer service.) Send the defective dropper to Raceface, receive the defective dropper back from Raceface, rinse and repeat. Never again.