aerius

If you're headed over to Montreal, you need to get your ass to Bromont for some serious downhill riding. It's less than hour east of Montreal and has the best developed DH trail system in Canada outside of BC. They used to host world cup DH races there until about 4 years ago when the UCI got pissy and reshuffled the venues.

First offroad ride of the year from a couple weeks ago. I'm the one wearing shorts on a green hardtail.

I think Dura-Ace is the right choice for your bike. Shimano parts aren't as light as SRAM but their smoothness & quietness is more in keeping with the character of your bike. To me, Dura-Ace just feels nicer and more polished than SRAM Red, and it has a more classic old school look whereas Red has a high-tech and rather gaudy look. And also, congrats on your weight loss, good luck on your continued recovery, and congrats again on your new bike!

The pedals you have are just fine. Ride them for a couple months while you get used to your new bike and get the suspension and everything else dialed in. At the end of that time, think about what you like or don't like about the pedals (and everything else) and what you need for your bike to do what you want. Swapping parts on a bike which you've barely ridden around the block is just throwing money away.

Decided that I wanted more braking power on my bike. Stuffed a set of Shimano Saints on the front. Quad ceramic piston caliper with radiator finned brake pads. Totally overkill, but as they say, you don't know what's enough until you know what's too much.

Dude, those are riser bars, not mustache bars. When viewed from the front, the straight outer half of the bar should be level or slope slightly upwards, and the brake levers & shifters should slope downwards by 30-45 degrees when viewed from the side. Couple pictures for reference https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-iivXavJa8q4/TPqQNzYrfPI/AAAAAAAACa8/qG7nryLXIrk/s800/IMG_0791.jpg https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-dxRKSll5tTI/Tt7e0T392mI/AAAAAAAADCQ/ugUcEsgFnr8/s800/IMG_2345.jpg

See if you can find some Specialized Armadillo tires somewhere. They're heavy, they don't have the greatest ride by any means, but they're seriously tough. The shop I used to work for sold a ton of them to commuters and we rarely ever saw a flat on one of them. Continental Gatorskins work too but the sidewalls on them aren't as tough, they are lighter and ride nicer though so that's the tradeoff between them.

Just be aware that Superflys are notorious for cracking apart at the chainstays. Trek has allegedly fixed this issue for 2013, but they've been saying that since 2008 if not earlier. Trek will take care of you if the frame cracks apart, but that's something I'd rather not deal with in the first place.

Just curious, did anyone turn their door into a beer fridge?

We got about 10 inches dumped on us, with about 12-18" in the snowdrifts. It was fairly light fluffy stuff so shoveling it wasn't all that bad except for the end of the driveway where the snowplows piled up a massive ridge of compacted icy snow.

And don't forget to calculate your Jens Factor number. The Jens Factor has become a competition among some of our local riders, they try to see who can get the most rides in the worst conditions.

Cripes! I haven't seen a stem that long since the late 90's. Definitely shorten that sucker up, the only bikes with stems that long these days are pro XC race bikes or bikes ridden by guys who are 6'5". Most modern mountain bikes work best with a stem in the 60-90mm range, my personal bike for instance has an 80mm stem. You might also want to consider a setback seatpost, I notice that your seat is pretty far back on the rails and a setback post will give you more room to play around with reach and stem lengths to find a good position and balance point on your bike. There's actually a couple reasons for short stems, handlebars have gotten a lot wider in the past dozen years and toptubes are a bit longer as well. Wider bars give you a more stable base on the bike along with more leverage to crank out power when standing on steep climbs. Wider bars will slow down the steering and bring your body more forward on the bike so stems got shorter to balance it out. Dropper posts are pretty darn useful, only thing is you need to stay on top of the maintenance or else they get crunchy and develop play real fast. I'm lazy and hate working on my bike so I don't have one. As for remote lockouts, what fork do you have and how the fuck does a remote lockout kit cost $450? I have a Manitou Minute Pro and the kit for my fork costs about $40 and takes 15 minutes to install.

They're pretty good as far as I know, back in my shop days we never had any issues with Rocky Mountain's frames when dealing with warranty replacements. If it was a legitimate warranty frame failure it was taken care of promptly. I have heard of a manufacturing defect in a couple of their models during the mid 2000's that resulted in widespread failures, it was bad enough that Rocky ran out of replacement frames so some people had to wait several months to get their frames replaced. Those bikes are long discontinued and as far as I know none of their current bikes have any such issues.

I don't think warranties have any real relation to how long a bike will last. Trek has a lifetime warranty on its aluminum frames yet I've broken mine twice in the last 10 years and had it replaced free of charge. Specialized also has the same warranty and one of my friends has gone through 6 or 7 warranty frames in the past 15 years or so. Kona and Norco also have lifetime warranties on the bike models that I own, the Norco was the only one I managed to break and that was by slamming it head-on into a tree at high speed when I botched the landing off a big drop. BTW, don't look up "cracked Cervelo" on the 'net...but if it makes you feel better, my Kona is known for snapping at the drive side dropout. It was a known flaw which is why the '97 & later models have a different dropout design.

Gave the hikers a couple days to pack down the trails a bit, then went out for a snow ride today. The bike went sideways a bunch of times and I got a lot of practice at counter steering and drifting. The best part? My wheels & tires are finally clean.

It came up in a dinner conversation with Damon Rinard, he coaches my friend's cycling team and he's also the composites engineer at Cervelo. I brought up aerospace applications and why it works just fine there, as he explained it, and I probably missed a few things, it has to do with the epoxies and stabilizers along with the layup, and also they build with larger safety factors on planes. I had no idea it happened on bikes, I knew it happened on hockey sticks since they get massively flexed and take huge impacts on slapshots, but apparently it happens on bikes too, it just takes a lot longer. There were some other fun things such as BB stiffness being highly overrated and that you could break the seatstays on an R3 and it'll still ride just fine.

Carbon fiber frames have a limited lifespan, or rather, a limited mileage after which they start to go soft. For a pro it's about 1-2 years of racing & training, for the average enthusiast cyclist it's around 5-6 years. The bike doesn't fall to pieces, it just gradually loses its stiffness as microcracks form in the epoxy and the fibers start to debond. It's the same thing that happens to my carbon fiber hockey sticks, except the sticks go soft faster since they're abused more. A titanium frame on the other hand lasts forever and stays good as new unless it's crashed hard or run over by a car.

1) Commit on corners better, I need to trust the tires more and just lean the bike way the fuck over. I couldn't do this consistently this year and lost too much speed from being a wuss. 2) Take a trip to Quebec and spend a week riding the world cup DH course and other trails at Mont Sainte Anne. 3) Get more airtime on jumps & drops. Do bigger jumps and drops.

See if you can sneak in a quick ride tomorrow to work the stiffness out of your legs, even a half hour spin around the block will help. Tomorrow, I'm going to get my ass kicked in mountain biking by a former world champion. My goal is not to get hospitalized since there's a big ride I'm going to on Friday.

Dmitri Hvorostovsky - Kalinka: Russian Folk Songs The last track is full of awesome.

For gloves, it depends on how narrow and/or overgrown the trails are in your area, how hot & humid it is, and how often you fall on your ass. My local trails are pretty narrow and get badly overgrown in the summer so full finger gloves are essential, without them my hands would get ripped to shreds. Shorts is whatever you feel like wearing. Some people will rock the roadie tights on the trails, others go shorts on top of tights, and some choose MTB specific shorts with liners. There's no right choice, ride whatever feels good.

On the other hand, we now have "fat bikes" with big balloon tires that let you ride on snow. There's a bunch of guys a couple hours north of me who ride their fat bikes in the snow all winter, and several XC ski areas have opened their trails to bikes this winter. Check it out https://plus.google.com/photos/113125576961447749127/albums?banner=pwa&gpsrc=pwrd1#photos/113125576961447749127/albums/5696187796353128385

At least you still have ridable trails where you live. Everything in my area is super sticky ankle deep mud thanks to all the rain we got over the past couple weeks. Riding season is pretty much done until it gets cold enough to freeze the trails solid. Hooray for indoor ice rinks, otherwise I'd probably go postal from lack of activity.

Oh man, Avid turkey gobble taken to the next level. It sounds like a cat getting fed through a meat grinder.

True enough. A lot of people I know just get a new set on clearout or warranty every year. I hate fixing or replacing parts on my bike so I always go for the most durable and reliable parts I can buy.