Yin
Crazy busy this past week, so I've only been on two rides, and they couldn't have been more different.
First I went for a new local loop: from Absarokee downstream two miles, then up to Huntley Butte, over the square of state land, and onto Jack Stone Road, down the Stillwater, back home on 420. It started so well, with a surprisingly sustained climb from the Stillwater River up around Huntley Butte. Found the State Land, and it was all going well, with classic Beartooth Front views:
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| View back south, over the Stillwater valley, to the Beartooths. |
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| Looking West, over the Yellowstone Valley, to the Crazies. |
Then, the State land was a tangle of overgrazed and abused land. It was getting late, so I tried to cross it, because going forward was way shorter than going back at this point in the loop. After a kilometer or so, I started to hear a terrible sound: the telltale crunch of cacti under tires. I stopped. This area is so overgrazed, by the time I stopped, it was tough to find a safe spot to stand, much less ride. Cacti have absolutely dislodged the native grasses as the dominant plant.
Kip didn't have any trouble at all, so that was good. But I had one flat already, and nowhere to go. Nearby, a fenceline provided a point of reference, and the cattle pacing the line had worn a track through the cacti. I got off the state land, and changed my tube. Probably two dozen punctures.
I carefully cleaned my rim and tire, and put in a Surly Toob, the gigantic 26"x3.8" tube. Now, why the *&^% Surly makes these w/o slime I don't know. Probably because they are already 450grams + w/o the slime, but still. A tube for a bike with this intended application needs slime. It's that simple.
Sure enough, I had missed one little cactus thorn when cleaning the rim, and this new $20 tube never did inflate. I removed it, found the leak, patched it, and inflated the tire. It inflated this time, and lasted all of 100 meters or so before completely deflating. Worst tubes ever. Dunked it in a creek nearby and inflated the tire, there were quite a few little teeny leaks, including two a the junction of the nipple and the tube. Very disappointed in Surly Toobs.
Ended up being a 20 mile ride, followed by a five mile hike-a-bike in the dark.
Yang
Good news from that ride: it came at the same time as my new Hed Big Deal carbon fat rims arrived.
Installing them was a six hour ordeal. Seriously. They are meant to be tubeless, but the tubeless system they use relies on the tire sitting just right in this channel during the inflation process. Surly Knards 3.8" do not sit there. Not at all. Hed's solution is a gigantic rubber band. They give you four of them. I used all four on one wheel, and needed every one of them. In fact, I needed four bands, tons of luck, persistence, and two different air compressors to finally get it to work.
That left me with the second wheel, and no bands. Mind you, this wheelset was almost two thousand dollars, and they gave me four rubber bands. I could see somebody using eight on one wheel. For 2k, they should have thrown about 20 of them in there. Make it $2005, and give me fifty of them. Just in case.
Anyway, I ended up slicing 1cm wide strips out of a 20" BMX tube, folding them in half and securing them with Gorilla Tape. This left me with the opposite problem as the first wheel: wouldn't seat because it was too tight, not too loose. And you can't use tire levers on these rims. Lots of elbow grease and creative Yoga positions got the tire on the rim, and this one did make the loud "BAM" when seating, as advertised.
After four hours of sleep, I was at Phipps Park trailhead in Billings. The bike dropped almost three pounds, about 1.5lbs from each wheel. It's now about 29.5lbs. So even taking the bike out of the car, it feels so much faster with the Hed wheels.
On the trail, it feels like cheating. I did almost 25 miles (24.999 miles), all of it on classic, fairly technical desert singletrack. I cleaned two sections of the trail I hadn't cleaned in dozens of previous attempts. Not only does the light weight make them super fast, the stiffness is off the charts compared to the Holy Rolling Darryls. Fast corners, hard braking, technical off camber sections, all of these type of situations the improvement to the bike's handling is pronounced.
So, apart from the name (still working on it), the bike is now just the way I want it, a true dream bike. Eventually, I could upgrade the brakes to drop some weight, but there is not much else I'd ever want to do to the bike. It's perfect! See you out there. . . . .
