|
Date:
4th October 2008 It's a chilly 6°C as we meet at 8-30am in Hurtwood Control Car Park 2 for a spin round the Surrey Hills. Warren, a Swinley regular rider has bought along his South African bru's and cuzzies for an introduction into some serious mountain biking. Although Byron is an xc racer in S.A. and is a pretty experienced rider, Tarryn and Shaun are complete novices but they hurl themselves into everything as we tackle all the normal trails. A great ride and the forecast rain holds off, with the sun making a brief appearance to warm us up to around 13 °C by the end of the ride. The trails are full today and I bump into Mark LH, Mark, Jim and Dave who I haven't seen for years who are on a leisurely ride as well as Tony and his mate who are hanging onto the back of a Nirvana Saturday elite group ride (you know it's gonna be a fast group if Tony is struggling to stay with them!). Unfortunately, due to a logistics cock up I didn't have my Canon Powershot A550 with me and I had to use the old Olympus Mju hence the blurred pictures.
Date:
12th October 2008 Cas chose to take us on a road ride to Hastings this week. Well, when I say us, there were four of us to start but only I made it to Hastings. Rob is a new dad and turned round early to get back to the family, Tony is a new rider (fourth time ever on his bike) and stopped at Buxted to jump on the train and Cas finished in Battle to watch the re-enactment of 1066 and all that. So that was one in the eye for me (admit it, you saw that one coming didn't you? Well, Harald didn't!) and I pushed on alone, the last six miles to Hastings. Well, it was actually more like nine or ten miles as the seafront in Hastings is bloody difficult to find and I ended up retracing my steps a number of times. See my video diary for a better idea of how the ride went but despite a 2 a.m. finish at a Champagne reception the night before I felt really, really strong until just after Buxted when I had to fight to avoid bonking (yes I had been eating and drinking regularly) and limped the rest of the way to the coast. Check out the route as mapped by Cas on the excellent bikely dot com. Elsewhere this week, and back to MTB's cos I know some of you can't stand this road stuff, I also serviced my Fox Vanilla 130R's which were looking decidedly shonky and leaking filthy oil all down the stanchion and onto the disc brake. See the Fox Vanilla 130R service page for details of how I did it.
Date:
18th October 2008 A Saturday afternoon spin around the singletrack on Holmbury and Pitch Hill's today. After servicing my Fox Vanilla 130R forks last weekend, the only oil I could find late in the day was 10 wt. rather thant he desired 7.5 wt. This left the forks feeling as though they were packing down as the rebound was painfully slow. But after about 30 minutes I got used to the feeling and coped with most of the trails pretty well. Darren is fairly new to mountain-biking and has bought two mates along for the ride. All three of them manged to keep pretty close to my rear wheel all day and certainly weren't lacking in fitness or enthusiasm although Sam and Darren were pretty close to 'the bonk' by the time we made it to Winterfold Woods and we headed back to Peaslake to raid Peaslake stores of a few thousand calories. Yet more winter sun and dry trails gave perfect conditions for the ride.
Date: 19th October 2008 I can't even remember the last time I renewed my drivetrain so I splashed out on a box of goodies from Wiggle (isn't it always a great feeling when a box from Wiggle or Chain Reaction lands on your doorstep?). So it was off with the Hollowtech II cranks before replacing the middle and inner chainring (I hardly ever use the large ring so I didn't bother replacing this). Next I removed the Shimano LX rear mech. There is nothing wrong with this aside from the jockey rings being so worn down they look like chines death stars but I took the opportunity to upgrade to a Shimano XT M771 rear mech which are a good price now that they are being replaced by the 'shadow' rear mech also known as the lastest in marketing bullshit. Whilst the mech was off I removed the gear cable and ran this along one of the wife's tea candles. This is a cheap way of enabling smoother shifting as the candle wax will act as a lubricant inside the gear outer. Next up was replacing the cassette. Again, I upgraded from the existing LX cassette to an XT M770 9 speed cassette. Remove the existing cassette with a chain whip and shimano tool and while the cassette was off I decided to service the rear Hope XC hub as it was looking in need of attention. It's a simple job that i have covered before; Rear Hope XC hub service details here. Finally on with the SRAM PC951 chain, trim it to length using a chain tool and then tune the rear mech, followed by the front mech which has been playing up recently. I always use the large paper instructions that Shimano provide and always tear off and bin the foreign language versions. Do this and you are left with a piece of paper a quarter of the original size which is far easier to follow. Incidentally, why do Shimano have H (High) and L (Low) on their mechs but refer to them as Top and Bottom in the written instructions? Very confusing.
Date:
25th October 2008 A big group of 14 riders today as we meet up with Alison who has driven down from Birmingham for us to show her around the local trails. The weather is still fine and the trails are mainly dry as we head up Pilgrim's Way before climbing onto Ranmore Common and then descending via Abba Zabba, Blind Terror I & II and Numbskull to the A25. Across the road, up The Rookery and onto Leith Hill to play around on the Windy Willow trail and steep roll-in before heading off to Deliverance and Summer Lightning before finally descending via The Rookery and back to The Green at Westcott to finish. We all had great fun out on the trails, egging each other on as we came up to the challenging, technical trails. There were a few thrills and spills but nothing serious. Thanks to Simon and Dave for submitting a few pictures each. They retain the copyright on their shots. Finally, Colin made me laugh when he referred to the 'anxious 24 hour wait' that the regulars usually have, waiting to see what pictures will be posted in the report and whether any of them will feature someone being captured mid-fall or worse with gurning or frightened faces. Looks like you are all safe for this week anyway. After a ride like this I often ask 'why weren't YOU there?' but it seemed like most of you were there today.
and here's the video for you to get more of a flavour of the ride
|
December
2011
| |||||||
|
all
photos and content copyright of Richard Sear 1999 to 2012 | ||||||||
