The ‘Musings’ Archive
A day of confirmation
Posted in Musings |
After a long wait, today we got back an answer from Australia’s Ausindustry, the peak government body set up to help develop and grow business in this country.
We expected no better, only because I know for fact that government bodies here have a habit of handing out cash to con men, charlatans, minorities and projects that never had the chance to go anywhere. Maybe they like a tall tale? Who knows. This has been a bone of contention with me for many years and today is the day that confirms what I have always thought, after I read through the list of applications that received wads of cash to do (for many) what they should be able to do without holding out their hands. Fuck knows we have.
We are very proud to do what we do in Australia. The people we work with to do it too are very proud. What’s more all know we are in the minority, in a country that seems determined to think that it can get by selling either dirt or its limited services to the world; it has yet to figure out that it can’t. I also know that we (as in the collective we) do what we do in spite of the so called government, not with its aid.
A set back? No. I honestly never expected anything when we put in the application, because I (quite rightly it seems) already predicted the types of applications they’d be sucked in by (and they were). In some ways it’s only more fuel on the fire. Pissed off? Sure.
Tags: ausindustry, australia, govenment
Bend Over Please
Posted in Musings |
Over the years I have written numerous bits about the (lack) of service from bike shops. It’s not a pet peeve but it does get my back up, after having spent the past 10 odd years selling to the ‘cycling community’ and now being on the front line, steering a mountain bike marquee. So that I am writing about it again, in a sad sort of way, tells me that for some of the ‘bike shops’ out there, how they view their customers could be similar to the way I view their so called customer service.
It was time to buy the Lad his first real bike. The past year or so in his ‘like-a-bike’ proved time well spent as his sense of balance grew to the point that he needed something more to do than push. Now I know buying a ‘kid’s bike’ is fraught with all sorts of dangers, mostly to do with the total crap they pass off as kid’s bikes these days. So rather than going to some big box store and picking one up cheap, I decided to the the ‘right thing’ and go to my local bike shop… LBS. Now where I live in Sydney I have several choices. Towards the city, down Oxford Street, is the well executed store that’s bang on the demographic for the areas it’s in. They have kid’s bikes but based on my past experiences with them, their ‘too cool for school’ attitude, means you basically have a target painted on you the minute you walk in (read paying them $100 service charge for shortening brake hoses), so there was little chance I was going back. The other option was the smaller, much less cool shop in the opposite direction up in Bondi Junction, where I bought the ‘like-a-bike’ in the first place. They seemed OK then, so why not again?
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Staus Quo
I was in the shower and the thought crashed out of the sky on me – “did we allow for sag in the head angle?” (we all have moments like these in the shower, don’t we?). Over to Skype to call up Mr. X and a conversation something like this ensued (rather abridged):
Me: “Did we adjust for sag at the head angle?”
X: “No, we don’t really allow for that.”
Me: “Well, that means when we say 70 degrees, it’s not, it’s 70 less whatever it slackens by whatever when the shock allows for sag.”
X: “It’s not a problem, because everyone does it. To change that would mean that that the buyer has no benchmark ie. your 70 will be different from everyone else’s.”
Me:”OK, I can see that…”
And I did. But when I thought about it some more, accepting this status quo is even more wrong than when I first thought about it.
OK, so what am I talking about?
Back in the days when there was no rear suspension, when you claimed that your bike had a 71 degree head tube, that’s what it had because the rear end did not sag when you sat on the bike. Today though, with full suspension bikes, when you sit on the bike the rear end (on a well designed bike) will sag X amount to create what is called negative travel. Negative travel is critical for suspension as it allows the wheel to stay in contact with the ground by loading the rear wheel. A side effect of this is that the head angle slackens by an amount and our 71 degrees slackens off to maybe 69, maybe less. See the issue?
The argument that was proposed to me was that because no one allows for this and states the head angle for FS bikes in the ‘unloaded’ state, there is no point stating the factual angle as it will confuse people when they try different bikes – a true 71 will be different to a ‘claimed’ 71. That’s a fair enough argument and if every bike on the market was a full suspension frame, then it would not be an issue. It occurred to me though that hardtails still account for many bike sales, so therefore the angles stated for FS bikes can not be used to compare against handling characteristics of hardtails.
Right, I’m hearing you saying “so what?”.
Well, that’s a fair question but as I spoke about in my last piece, MTB Misinformation, discrepancies like this only add to confuse and make it difficult to make fair and baseline comparisons between bikes of various brands. Like trying to ‘factualise’ numerous claims made by marketing departments in regards to suspension designs, I think there needs to be a more open and clear way to compare the various design and performance characteristics. ‘Reach and Stack’ is one such attempt to sort out sizing between all manufacturers of mountain bikes, initiated by Turner and transition Bikes. ISIS previously and BB30 now are attempts to standardise bottom brackets and while for a period there was some harmony, it’s on for young and old again as ‘the boys’ are at it with their respective 10 speed systems – which are also tied to BB shell specifications. It’s become such a mess now that manufacturers themselves are in the dark with some electing to design and allow for one and forget about the other, as by allowing for one, you can’t easily allow for the other. To make matters worse, a particular 2×10 engineering spec goes so far as to make designing an effective FS bike for it increasingly difficult making life difficult for their key customers, the OEM companies!
Madness!
From where I sit, I’d like to be able to line three bikes up and look at the specs for each and get a solid feeling for how they are actually going to perform before I get on them. Right now, I can grab a hard tail and know it will perform in a particular manner just by looking at the numbers, making comparing hardtails easy. If I hop on a FS with similar geometry though, the way it will behave will be guess work until ride time. This makes the task of buying difficult as I either have to guess and hope for the best, spend a lot of time riding a lot of different bikes, which is very difficult, or buy something and hope there is not something closer to my liking. Personal experience tells me that looking at the current claims of figures for most bikes tells me very little about how the bike will feel or ride.
I might be alone in this, I might not be. Judging from some of the comments made by various people I work with, I think there is a feeling for a factual comparison system and less of the deeply seeded marketing hype one that surrounds the industry currently. I personally don’t feel accepting the accepting the status quo is a good enough reason to stay with something, especially if it is counter to what should be best practice, or to the detriment of the end buyer.
Tags: bike design, headangle
Must be something in the age
To those who know me, you’ll know that for quite some time there was a definite lull in my getting on a bike. Almost like trying to get a clapped out Vespa going, over the past few years it was a bit cough, splutter, cough, wheeze… stall.
For some reason though, while up in Queensland last Christmas, I decided out of the blue to get up early and go for a ride on Christmas morning; it probably had something to do with the impending Christmas onslaught and bizzare lack of daylight saving, meaning at 5am it was light and already 20 odd degrees. That first ride, which had me discovering off-road track right next to the famous Gold Coast beach line was like a total engine rebuild and I ended up getting out pretty much every day afterward up on the Sunshine coast, rain or not.
Since then, other than a few weeks around the time I went over to the Taipei Cycle Show, I have been turning the wheels and been good about going to the gym on a regular basis. Now that it’s become cold, that motivation has definitely waned and I have not been out on the bike for a few weeks. This is not to say the legs are not turning, they are, just indoors on the bike at the gym. I am damned sure riding one of those things for 45-50 minutes is harder than riding an actual bike, because there is no ‘coast time’, it’s just pedal, pedal, pedal….. maybe that’s the attraction to single speeding? None the less, if it has not been the bike or the gym, then out the door and walking, so that 4-5 days a week, something has been happening.
But why the sudden burst that’s now in its sixth month? Well, I am beginning to think that age has something to do with it and after moving past a ‘certain age’, you suddenly realise that waiting another few months to get back on the wagon only makes it that much harder physically and worse, mentally. I have seen it before in people that I know, when that age came along it was as if a rocket was lit under their arse. For some it lasted, for others it fizzled. None the less it happened and I am wondering if that’s happening to me? A plus too I have found in all of this is that after all those years you know what your body is doing and when something goes wrong, rather than trying to fight it and make it worse, you have a more sane view and realise the faster road is to back off and let get better rather than fight it.
What’s more, that damned donut you ate takes three times the effort to loose… and who wants to give up donuts?
Next month I take delivery of the first production sample Mountain Cycle. Not a full susser but a carbon hardtail which I’ll be running with a rigid carbon fork and 2×10 as an urban menace. I have a feeling that this will be a turning point in my riding because I have not had an officially light bike for years – maybe 5? Pushing a big 6″ bike around with 1×9 gearing might get you fit but it’s as engaging on the road as watching paint dry and while I have a little section of singletrack worked out in the local park, after a few weeks it gets a little old. The idea of getting back on a bike that’s fast I am finding intoxicating and in a childish sort of way, July for me is almost like Christmas when you’re a child; I’m thinking that I might actually get back to riding some of the old road loops I used to years back.
Bike aside, I am thinking I am on the wagon once again. After six months, it’s got to the point that if I don’t do something each day, I’ll go a little potty and it gets worse… if I have not spun the legs for a few days, I start loosing the plot and that’s the sure sign of being back on board. Most importantly though is that the bike is fun again, not a pain, and riding up the hills around here does not leave me thinking I’m about to expire but rather wondering where that strength has come from. It’s even got me thinking about events later in the year, and that is something I have not done for a very long time.
So is there a morale to this blurb? Maybe. If there is it’s that maybe getting older has its advantages… maybe.