G's latest spweings from twitter...
MTB Misinformation
June 9th, 2010 | No Comments »I am a little chuffed today as a project that has taken us something in the vicinity of 8 months or so now moves to the next stage, as the factory prepares to quote for the production of two of the key 2011 Mountain Cycle frames.
It’s been a lot of work, a lot of money but the end results, or those so far, are pretty damn cool; at least everyone so far seems to think so. But what is a little saddening is that despite the fact that the head engineer is responsible for some of the most renowned bikes on the market today, we all know that people will question what we have done, not because they know different but because they have consistently been fed a load misinformation, masked thinly as fact, by marketing departments over the years. So thorough has this information been that I would hazard a guess that that an entire swag of today’s mountain bikers don’t actually understand why their bike stays upright, or at least not in a real world sense.
As part of the line launch, a new site is being designed for Mountain Cycle and a key component of this will be a section dedicated to explaining the dynamics and structure of bicycles, or pretty much any two wheeled vehicle. Putting the section together has been a re-education for me, as I have not studied these texts in detail for quite a few years, so creating it has been a refresher course in dynamics – something I have not looked at since my days obsessing over motos in Italy. The end goal though is to create a completely neutral presentation of the information, distilled from a number of texts and keeping to the ‘real’ physics, not some imagined ‘marketing dynamics’. I’ll give all the sources and associated ISBN’s so people can go look it up for themselves.
After I completed the first draft, I handed it over to Mr. X, our engineer just to make sure I was not off the mark and luckily I have not been. What is most striking though is how it belittles so many of the claims touted as fact in order to sell new bikes. As I switched between texts and broke the, often complex, information down into something that is easy to read, it became very clear that claims made by some as ‘fact’ is nothing more than sham. It’s not that I have found some holy grail, far from it, it’s more that the claims made by some that seemingly now have become ‘lore’ simply defy the laws of physics. It reminds me of a conversation I had with an ‘informed’ and oten published mountain biker years back, who point blank refused to accept the principle of counter steer, the most basic of the physics forces that affect a bike. He had been told otherwise by someone in the ‘industry’, so how could I be right? I have an equation somewhere that says why but that’s not the point. Marketing hype overruled the laws of physics.
It’s all a little alarming.
I am not going to ‘publish’ the info I’ve compiled just yet, that’s due in September. But the next time you read an advert that makes claims about suspension, braking, whatever, have a good long think about it – if what they are telling you sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
How many parts in BT shorts?
June 9th, 2010 | No Comments »Was what I wondered today, after I got another set of Lab-Gear Bomb Truck sorts out the door.
So how many? How about 53 + 20 odd pattern parts, 4 different materials, an hour of cutting and an hour or more of sewing.
Yep, that’s madness from a production sense but they are so worth it and I love every pair that go out.
My day in a graphic
June 4th, 2010 | No Comments »Here is my day on my iMac…. as represented by my mouse movements. The circles are where I have stopped and the bigger the circle, the longer it was in the same spot.
Cool!
Dirty Hands
June 4th, 2010 | No Comments »“Ease of maintenance and longer maintenance intervals, had a lot to do with motorcycles like the Honda CB750 pushing the old British and American bikes to the side as they took over the market. Who would ever want to spend time cleaning and adjusting instead of just riding? Well, there’s a point where maintenance can be overwhelming, but the now normal lack of almost any need to touch anything produces riders dependent on the appliance motorcycle to get them anywhere. It changes what it means to be a motorcycle owner, opening the experience to everyone, reducing the exclusivity, it’s no longer special.
Learning all about the mechanical needs of your new ride meant you respected it and took care of it, it wasn’t a throwaway. If you put it to hard use, you had to clean, repair and adjust things so you could use it again. If you had to fix it, you might be less apt to blow it up, abuse it or crash it.
There are probably more riders who prefer the current state of affairs because riding is what they’re after, not working with their hands, and in that case, I guess we’ve progressed, but the attitude of treating your motorcycle like a throwaway appliance is common to so many other things now, it seems all pervasive. Why take care of anything? Just toss it, get another, but sooner or later, you lose all of the skills, the self reliance, the feeling of satisfaction of doing the work and knowing you can. I think you also lose a lot more than the ability to maintain your bike, I think it changes the way you look at everything. You lose self confidence and the pride that comes from a job well done and those are things lots of folks might want to feel again or more often. Isn’t it funny how something as mundane as motorcycle maintenance can affect us in so many ways?” http://thekneeslider.com/
I can apply this same though to mountain bikers I have known in the past as well. They were so hands off, on the trail they could not even fix a chain if is broke. Funny enough these same riders also fit the bill for being disposable in their life. A new bike every six months, new this, new that. Nothing ever more than a year or two old. Yet from the stand point of being able to get themselves out of a hole, there was a level of incompetence that was fully scary.
Monster Bike!
June 4th, 2010 | No Comments »Perhaps the funniest bit are the amount of people who seemingly take no notice…