muldman profile

I look at a Shimano IceTech rotor and just think that central 6-spoke could be integrated into the hub, leaving you with just a smaller replaceable steel rotor. Yeah, the hub gets heavier but the rotor gets lighter by the same amount?

This area of bikes has been a standard for far too long. Surely someone is looking to change it in the name of progress :-)

At what point does the 6-bolt rotor mounting standard change? A massive 220mm rotor bolted to the hub with 6 too-closely-spaced bolts doesn't seem to make a lot of sense. Moving the mounting bolts closer to the braking surface seems to make armchair-engineering sense. Should be stiffer. Should reduce rotor warpage. Might mean simpler, less expensive rotors?

They stopped including the quick link breaker in the multi tool. I spent an hour watching videos and trying to figure out how it works before mailing them and finding out they changed the design!

Every time I have strapped a bare tube to my frame, I end up with a ruined tube within 5 rides. Grit gets in there and just seems to destroy the tube in a short amount of time. Anyone have a decent solution to keep the tube covered? Am I the only one who wrecks tubes this way, or is everyone else just not testing their tubes once in a while? :-)

There is a company in Alberta turning waste plastic into diesel fuel.

https://globalnews.ca/news/5485698/alberta-refinery-waste-to-biodiesel/

Check out the site & book Drawdown. 

https://www.drawdown.org/solutions-summary-by-rank

"Family Planning" is in the top-10 overall solutions as listed.

"Securing women’s right to voluntary, high-quality family planning around the world would have powerful positive impacts on the health, welfare, and life expectancy of both women and their children. It also can affect greenhouse gas emissions.

225 million women in lower-income countries say they want the ability to choose whether and when to become pregnant but lack the necessary access to contraception. The need persists in some high-income countries as well, including the United States where 45 percent of pregnancies are unintended. Currently, the world faces a $5.3 billion funding shortfall for providing the access to reproductive healthcare that women say they want to have."

I carry a minimal first-aid kit:

• A couple of LARGE bandaids (10cm x 10cm)
• A couple tabs of Ibuprofen
• A small roll of gauze
• A bit of moleskin
• Some antiseptic wipes and small packet of polysporin (there is a LOT of cow shit on the local trails this time of year…)
• Gorilla tape (also part of the tool kit)

This all packs up into a very small, very light package. The bandaids are the largest thing in there.

Slings, etc. can be fashioned out of backpack straps and tubes when need be. Larger bandages can be fashioned out of jerseys, etc. (If you need something more than the basic kit, sacrificing some riding clothes will be the least of your worries!)

I've used this more than once this year…

The larger first aid kit stays in the vehicle, but this minimal kit gets you back to the trail head.

Fezzari lets you swap out absolutely anything on the bike (start with one of the 2 or 3 off-the-shelf specs, then modify away.) I think they can do this as every bike is built as the order arrives. No idea if it would scale to a larger operation…

Fezzari.

A couple of comments on this:

First, "you can’t tell how good a bike is from the computer screen." True. It would be ideal to see the bike, take it for a test ride, and be able to make a decision that way. Except that the last 2 bikes I have purchased at the LBS I needed to pre-order several months in advance sight-unseen, hope my decision was correct, and not have any idea of when the bike would actually show up. All I could go by was online reviews and the details on the manufacturers website. So not much different from a pure "online" bike company.

Second, it appears that most of the new direct-to-consumer companies are not shipping you a bike that needs assembly, like the majority of brands do when they ship to the LBS. They are doing full builds of the bikes just like your LBS would, then taking off the wheels and handlebars and shipping it to you. There is less assembly involved in one of these bikes than there is when you pack your bike to ship it on vacation.

Third, if a component craps out under warranty, I would expect the direct-to- consumer company to deal with it. Yes, I have bought a bike like this in the past. A shifter died. I send them a photo, they FedEx'd me a new one and offered to refund the cost of having it replaced at a bike shop if I couldn't do it myself. I doubt all companies have that level of service, but it's not an insurmountable problem. (I don't know if they would have been as accommodating if it was a shock that died, but it couldn't have been worse than the 4+ weeks it took to get it repaired through my LBS and distributor when it happened at the start of the season…)

I absolutely, 100% want to buy my bikes from my LBS. I want them to be there when I need service. I want them to be a part of my community. But the direct- to-consumer guys are making it so easy to stray…