Fat Tire Fest 11 this Saturday!

Wow, 10 years have already gone by and we're ready for another. What started as our housewarming party with friends and bike rides has turned into an annual event. An event that I really look forward to every year, an event that, to me, really signifies the start of the Spring/Summer season. Lyons Fat Tire Fest 11 is upon us.

I also look forward to the recon missions every year. That's when I get to ride a lot of the route at my pace, by myself. This year, though, I had my trusty companion, Bella, along for the ride. She says you're going to love it.

Fortunately, on our big Saturday ride, you'll get to avoid this road.
And you'll miss this view.

But you'll get this. You'll come up thru it. This gate is about 1/2 way on a 45 minute long hike a bike. You heard that correctly. 45 minute rock scramble. It's not mountain biking unless you're hiking, right?

Same route as last year, too. That means we'll have at least one more mandatory hike a bike. I'm still tossing around ideas to make it harder, too. Because of this:

The USFS has graded the shit out of the road. It used to be a relatively modest novice+ jeep road, but it's been graded enough for a logging truck to pass. That's ok, though, it'll be a good long rest section.

Oh, and don't forget, we're going to throw in quite a bit of singletrack, too. Stuff that most folks don't know about or haven't ridden. Not because it's super secret or anything, it's just out there. Way out there.

Couple of last disclaimers:
We'll be doing a lot of hiking.
Probably hiking thru some snow.
We'll probably get rained on.
The absolute steepest and most technical riding is at the very end. When you're tired.
Pretty much everyone blew sky high last year 90% into the ride.
If at least a couple people aren't using my name in vain by the end of the ride, the ride wasn't hard enough.

We'll have a B ride option for those of you wise enough not to partake in an all day sufferfest. Both rides meet at the shop at 8:30am on Saturday. The B ride option will be a point to point, so it'd help quite a bit if a few folks could bring vehicles that'll make shuttling easier. thanks!

Yep, that about covers it.

Multimodal in Denver with Bcycle

I've been hearing a lot about the Bcycle program that's in Denver and Boulder. Enough that I wanted to try it out but since I try to avoid Denver and Boulder I figured it might be a while. I got my opportunity on Saturday night, though. The goal? U2 in Denver with as little of a driving headache as possible. And believe me, I've been a mountain man long enough that I despise driving in downtown Denver and super heavy I25 traffic. Mostly because I don't know where the hell I'm going so I tend to just blunder around.

I cruised to D town in the Jeep and got off I25 not far from downtown, pretty much exited the interstate as soon as traffic got too heavy. Within minutes, I had parked at the Pepsi Center and was ready to roll. I know, I know, Pepsi Center is a close walk to Mile High, but I had to go to LoDo first. Perfect for Bcycle. The Bcycle program works perfectly. It's $6 to buy in for a 24 hour bike share. Put your credit card in and you're charged $6 to take the bike. The $6 will get you as many 30 minute or less trips around town that you can fit in a day. Take the bike for more than 30 minutes and you pay extra. That's not sharing, Bcycle says. Bcycle has several stations located all over though, that you can ride from Point A to Point B, ditch the bike at another station, run errands by foot, then pick up another Bcycle at another station. Pretty slick.


Here's a shot of my pimpin' ride for the next 29 minutes. Trek makes the bikes for Bcycle. They are overbuilt and stout, and they have plastic or metal covering up all of the barrel adjusters and other things. Fortunately, riders cannot make adjustments to the bike.







They all come equipped with 3 speed drum brake Shimano hubs. Drum brake fronts as well. I guess you could really bang up a wheel then, eh?

I trolled around for 20 minutes or so enjoying the ride. I successfully checked into my next stop. Check in was easy, just park the bike in the stand til it clicks and give you a blinky green light. You are good to go.

After walking to LoDo from the bike stop, we walked to the light rail station where we took the train to Mile High stadium. Walking from the train was the most congested and difficult time of my multimodal experience. Way too many people and not enough room.

The payoff was good, though.

After all that, back on the trail, back to the car, and back on I25. All in all a big success. I avoided my phobia of heavily trafficked downtown streets, got to ride a bike, AND got to ride the train. Good stuff and highly recommended!

Intense Tracer 2 in the house!

Finally got our new Intense Tracer 2 in the house.

Had to stick with Formulas "The One" brakes. My favorite brake ever. Note also the replaceable dropouts. I'll eventually be rebuilding the wheel with a hub that can take a 142x12 thru axle :)

And I've been lusting after the Chromag Lynx saddle as well. Done.

There's extra beef on this years Tracer 2. Great tire clearance as well. And holy cow how 'bout those beautiful handmade in the USA welds.

Adjustable 5.5 or 6" of travel. I decided to try out this whole 2x10 thing as well.

Yep, pretty good. Ride report soon!

Lyons Fat Tire Fest 11!

This year is going to be pretty low key. Saturday of Memorial Day weekend. 8:30 at the bike shop. We'll be doing the same 2 rides we did last year. Big ol ride and a not so big ol ride.

Last year, our big ride was a giant loop, about 35-40 miles and around 7000' of climbing. Lots of hike a bike and lots of technical descending. The shorter ride gets almost all of the good descending and is mostly hike free. It's a point to point that'll be around 3-4 hours.

Here's more info and a signup on Facebook. Hope to see you out!
http://www.facebook.com/redstonecyclery#!/event.php?eid=211159215584707

Turner Demo Time!

Howdy Folks. We've got some Turner demo bikes that will be here til Friday. The Demo Trailer will be picking these bikes back up on Friday and heading to the next demo day in Eagle. Don't know what time on Friday they will disappear, so first come first serve. Here's what we've got:

Flux, medium
Sultan - L, XL, XXL
Spot SM, XL

If you want to check out a size that we don't have, the rest of the fleet is currently living at Pedal Pushers down in Golden. Give them a shout, they're a good crew and will be happy to take care of you.

18 Hours of Fruita Done Gone

18 Hours of Fruita. I will definitely attend this race again. Getting ready to head out from the Oskar Blues Brewery in Longmont.

Not long on the road and we've got to take a break, OB style. Park the RV on the side of the road and play catch in the ditch.

Arrived at Highline State Park and getting all fired up to race. Racing starts at 12 midnight and goes thru 6pm on Saturday.
The course had 2 major "climbs." This is one of them. I still was able to push a 32x16 all around the course without having to walk.
The Scenery wasn't too bad. Highline St. Park is a true oasis in the desert.

In an 18 hour race, rehydration and recovery are important. Old Chub makes good trail food.
Camp was great

Chef Rog at the top. Last climb, last lap. Time for a beer.
Cycling IS dope.

A thing of beauty. LOTS of 29er singlespeeds. Sweet.


Oh, and happy birthday Chad. How about a light up spinning plastic flower?

Post race was time for 18 road. We wanted something fun, easy, and SS friendly.

Mmmm, good.


What a wonderful day. My, oh, my.




Chad on Zippety. My favorite shot of the weekend.

We weren't the only ones out having fun. The family that rides together stays together.

Over and out. Time for a luxurious ride home in the DPARV.

my bike is creaking

We get a lot of folks in here at Redstone that are annoyed by creaky bikes. I'm not going to write an entire tech article about it - there's lots of websites out there that explain tech stuff better than I - but here's a few things to look for.

9 times out of 10, creaks are caused by dirt. A clean bike is a happy bike. Rarely is something creaking because it needs to be lubed. Generally speaking, the opposite is true. Follow this logic - most bikes have sealed bearings in suspension pivots, etc. The lube is in the bearings, not the pivot bolts. Bolts and metal/metal interfaces must be clean and tight for the thing to work properly. Lube attracts dirt. Dirt makes things creak. If you put lube on a suspension pivot, it will be a dirt magnet. Remember, dirt makes things creak. If you can isolate a creak to a suspension pivot or link, take it apart, clean it thoroughly, and put it back together dry.

Here's a few others. This bike was creaky under power and the bb has been pulled relatively recently. When I decreak a drivetrain, I almost always start by pulling the bottom bracket, cleaning, regreasing (yes, use LOTS of grease on the bb threads) and re-assembling. If it still creaks, keep exploring. Some out of the stand testing revealed that a creak was coming somewhere from the top of the bike. We pulled the post out of the frame and pulled the seat collar off to find lots of gritty sand particles. We cleaned everything up, including the binder bolt, and put 'er all back together (yes, grease your seatpost, too). The creak was less, but still there. Look at what we found on the saddle clamp...

Once we got that back together, the creaking seems to have been silenced. But there was still creaking in the front end. Simple disassembly of the stem/bar interface showed this:

Putting it back together, again, made things better but not 100%. From that point, we pulled the stem and headset spacers, even took the fork out. EVERYTHING had this gritty sand in it so we pulled the hs bearings from their cups and cleaned absolutely everything spotless. Guess what? Creaks are gone!

Creaks can be hard to diagnose and even harder to solve but hopefully some of this will help you on your way to decreaking your bike.

Tomac Flint 29er SS

New bike day is always a good day. Today I said goodbye to my old friend, the GT Peace 9er. It was steel, real, heavy, and rode great. I traded it for a 2011 Tomac Flint 29er. I also put on an Easton EC90 carbon post and Truvativ Stylo 1.1 GXP cranks. The new parts and the new frame saved me about 3lbs. I do believe that'll be noticeable, and hopefully, the ride of this aluminum frame will be as comfortable as I'd like. Fingers crossed.

The Flint uses AN6 aluminum and has a custom butted main triangle to save weight and to yeild a more supple ride.

It also comes with 3 bottle mounts. Better yet, is that the large frame gives me enough clearance that I can go back to running my flask!
The sweet Bushnell bottom bracket lets me use this sucker as a geared or single speed. SS please.
I'm looking forward to getting out on it. Too bad for my bum ankle, though, as I'm more excited about the new SS than my cankle!

Redstone shirts are in!

And... We didn't forget about the ladies this time!

Couple of Trailwork Opportunities this Weekend

First off, BMA has been partnering with Boulder County Open Space to do some touch ups on the Wapiti Trail at Heil Ranch. It's coming along nicely - busting ruts, armoring historically problematic wet areas, etc. They're looking for more help this coming Sat, 4/16. Start off around 8 or so, ending time is a few hours past that. More info here if you're interested.

In other exciting, news, the gracious hosts at Glacier View Ranch, outside of Ward, are working on building 7+ miles of singletrack that circumnavigates their land. They are looking for help and it will be open to the public. Now here's the really cool part. You want all day long mega epic rides? This area ties in directly to Raymond, Miller Rock, Cerain St Vrain, and all of those parts just east of the Peak to Peak. More info is here. The Maintenance Ranger, Austen, is organizing trail days this Sunday at 8ish as well as the following Sunday. We're trying to get a crew rallied to go up there this Sunday. Interested? Let me know!

News is news

Longmont bike night is this week, with movies both on Thursday and Friday!

http://longmontbikenight.blogspot.com/

They'll be showing Ride the Divide at the Dickens Opera House on Thurs. Bicycle Dreams will be shown Friday at the Vance Brand auditorium. Dickens Opera house is a pub and Vance Brand is a school, so you can, uh, guess what that means. Help these boys out, proceeds go to Bicycle Longmont goodness.

How's this sound like for a fun race, Crusher in the Tushar. Damn that looks fun. And hard. Could be good preperations for Gravel Worlds 2011, if you're into that kind of gravel grinding pain.

Tuesday ride is coming up. How about a little of this?

Bike shop at 5:30 and we'll drive from there. Bring lights, it's going to get dark.

Pro Downhill Bike Bling, aka Sam's new ride!

In case you haven't heard, our very own Sam Powers has got himself a sweet new PRO sponsorship! The Marzocchi Go Pro Team is 3 young fellas that just graduated out of the junior world to learn a few things and eventually kill it on the pro downhill tour.

Being sponsored by Intense/Marzocchi/Shimano doesn't suck either. Definitely no suckage here. Check Sam's sweet new Intense M9. DAyum!

Good luck in your first pro year Sam. And thanks for letting us drool over your badass new Intense M9 :)

adjustable dropouts

super pimpy and light downhill air shock from Marzocchi

Can't be pro without your own name on a sticker