cycling ⁽³⁷⁾

Patrick November 27, 2018

Offtrail Riding

Sometimes a bike comes along that totally changes the way you have been going about things. I started mountain biking in the mid-80s and have been practicing that sport very much the same way ever since. Sure, bikes got better, gained suspension and more gears, then in my case lost both while living in California. In 2006, 26" David was kicked off the trails by 29" Goliath, but none of that dramatically changed how and where I was riding.

In 2012 I decided that I wanted a fat-bike. I had been riding my 29er single-speed bikes in the winter and carried them a lot through deep snow. A fat bike would have me carry the bike a little less, so was my thinking. Most of the time I jump into a new bike category by buying an affordable big-brand production bike first. Not this time. I had Kris Henry of 44 Bikes build me a rigid steel fat bike. Construction started in the fall of 2012 and my first ride on my all-blue Big Boy happened at the beginning of March 2013.

Patrick November 9, 2018

Making Tools For A Bearing Swap

When the rear HED Big Deal carbon rim on my BigBoy got damaged while riding due to the pilot not being careful, I unlaced both wheels. Those Big Deal rims are not designed for trail riding and I knew it. Since trail and off-trail riding is the future of BigBoy, the broken rim was an opportunity to build a burlier set of wheels. It was also just the right time to treat the Industry Nine Classic Torch hubs with new bearings.

Patrick November 5, 2018

A Look Back At Some Home-Brew Hubs

Once in a while, you run across something that throws you back to your good old mountain biking days. Such was the case when Kris Henry posted a picture of bike hubs he built while being a student at PSU. In the last year of my apprenticeship, I designed my own set of what later generally came to be called V-brakes. Years before Shimano and Avid brought low-profile V-brakes to the everyday mountain biker, Grafton, MRC and a few others made this style of brake. For a very long period of time, I ran my own set of MTB brakes.

While in college for mechanical engineering I no longer had ready access to lathes and mills, but new ideas were always on my mind. Ideas that were often put on mechanical drawings, were ready to be made whenever the opportunity arose to let chips fly. Memory is already a little fuzzy about the exact timeline, but around 1994-1996 I designed and machined a set of hubs for my Merlin mountain bike. I first machined a front hub and about a year later completed the project by making a matching rear hub.

Patrick October 17, 2018

Gravel Grinding

Back in 2011, I bought a Focus Mares CX2.0 cross bike to do gravel rides when I didn't feel like mountain biking. A few years later, in October 2014, I replaced it with a Focus Mares CX 0.0. This was Focus' top-of-the-line carbon cross bike with SRAM Force CX1 groupset. Somehow though, the bike lacked soul and didn't excite me. I sold it a year later in December 2015.

I had my red Volagi RD road bike already at the time, so I bought a second frameset in all black to build it up with SRAM Force CX1 and a set of Enve/Chris King wheels I had retired from my 29er. In comparison to the two Focus cross bikes, the Viaje had room for much wider tires. I found my preferred tire width at 40-41mm. This bike got ridden until the end of July 2018.

Patrick September 3, 2018

AllRoad Cycling

I got into cycling in the mid-80s on a steel Muddy Fox Explorer mountain bike equipped with an 18-speed Suntour groupset. A couple of friends and I had just finished high school and we all had started to earn a small paycheck doing an apprenticeship when mountain bikes began to get popular. Obviously, we had to have one too. First, just as a means to commute to work and get around on weekends, but soon enough we started taking them to the trails. I was hooked from the very moment.