31st May 2008: More Bike Mods
After a handful of wet rides I was already getting irritated by
the mud collecting in the linkage system on my SOLID Mission 9.
This doesn't require an essay, just to say that five euros
for a generic plastic mudguard, a few minutes with a stanley knife and
three zip-ties and no more mud in my linkage.
29th May 2008: Trigger Happy
Having
a website to update has made
me get the camera out a lot more than I've done for a long time and I'm
starting to get into it. Yesterday I did another run of the
secret "Sweat Forest" with Peter "Pedro" Ballin and we stopped a fair
bit to take pictures most of the good ones can be seen on the Facebook group gallery.
There's a short road section that links up the proper bits and
I decided to try to get some shots while we were
rolling
along.
The one we were going for was a shot of Pedro doing a manual
taken over my shoulder. What I've learnt now is that I needed
a fish-eye lens to get the effect that I was really looking for but we
didn't have one so I just kept mashing away at the trigger and hoped to
get lucky! I didn't. So I ended up blending a load of
the shots together on photoshop and I think the end result is pretty
different....
28th May 2008: Silent Running
Did a little mod
to the bike last
weekend and have been testing it this week. After reading the
articles on Sam Hills bike and specifically the mods his mechanic Jacy
has made to dampen the noise made by the cables and chain rattling, I
felt inspired enough to have a go at something similar. I
needed to do something as the standard cable routing on the SOLID
Mission 9 takes the paint off a couple of places as the cables move 
and
they generally looked a bit exposed to me. So my aim was to
eliminate unwanted cable movement and try to tuck the gear cable
and rear brake hose somewhere a bit safer. After a couple of
false starts I decided to run everything under the suspension linkage
and then along the chainstays, protecting the gear cable outer with
plastic piping to stop the chain smashing it up. If
you decide to do something similar I recommend removing the
shock and linkage as its so much easier to get fix the cables securely.
The other point to remember when using plastic piping like
this is to not do the zip-ties up too tight, I made sure that the cable
outer could slide inside the piping.
The results are that the bike is virtually silent and that the gear cable and brake house are no longer damaging the paintwork and are tucked safely away inboard.
25th
May 2008: New discoveries and old favourites:
It feels like I'm well into MTB season already, the first
World Cup has been and gone and a fair
few miles have
passed under my wheels (both in the van and on the bike!).
Morzine is undergoing it's yearly transformation as the snow
melts and the trails emerge, the ski shops start filling up with tyres
and brake pads and the winter seasonaires go home to their summer
hangovers.
As the lifts in the Portes du Soliel don't open for a few more weeks its time to explore some of the other options in the vicinity. With a bit of research it is possible to put your bike on a lift somewhere in the Alps all year round, the myth that the season is only a few months long is fast being dispelled. ..
A healthy crew of us headed to one such place on tuesday, just over the border into Switzerland. Dorenaz is already ear-marked for one of The Search's regular venues, a perfect place for a daytrip visit. Its a real backwater that has an old telepherique that until now the locals used to commute up and down the steep sides of the valley. The forward thinking operators have now installed a rack that will take six bikes (hung under the cabin!) and riders (inside, thankfully!), that give you access to one purpose built DH track with multi-line options, so plenty of variety and a couple of natural 'walking path' style runs. This sort of natural terrain, with enough gradient to keep your speed is a favourite of mine so I had a ball, especially on the loose shale sections where you are all over the bike to keep it on the straight and narrow!
Wednesday
afternoon we drove to the
top of a trail I had heard
so much about but never ridden. It turns out I'd done
something similar with The Search Team rider James Mcknight a year or
so ago on what has become known as 'The Big Freeride Adventure'
(another story, but some of the pictures from this ride are used in the
main website). I'm sworn to secrecy on the location of the
'Sweat Forest' so no details there I'm afraid, just to say we did it in
an hour, there's a few ups but nothing to get you scared and it
contains
one of the sweetest natural berm sections ever. Thats right,
berms that have never seen a shovel, one after another for a minute or
so.
By thursday
everyone was getting
a bit tired of driving, me especially so we decided to stay local and
shuttle Pleney in Morzine. There's something about the course
on Pleney, it hasn't changed fundamentally for over ten years and is
scarcely maintained yet everyone loves it. A few keen beans
have already been busy cutting new singletracks and unearthing old ones
but the main line was in good shape after its winter break, safely
sealed beneath the snow. The steep switchback section to the
left of the 10% was in the best condition I've ever seen although there
might be rut forming now because I rode it every run, all day day long!
Nick
20th May 2008: Nearly forgot the story of the Tortoise and the Hare:
Dunno how I forgot this as it was one of the strangest things I've seen on a bike, funniest as well. Bad Wildbad has a little Bikepark at the top of the mountain, slightly removed from the main trails and very quiet and idyllic with a few dirt jumps a 4X track and a Dual track. I should mention the drag lift at this point too, it's a t-bar style skiing drag lift. You hook the T-bar behind your saddle and off you go, kind of. It's hilarious, this thing will make the most seasoned world cup racer look like an absolute muppet!
Well into the evening after the drag lift had closed, Aston and I decided to end our days riding with a couple of cheeky runs of the 4X and Dual tracks. The 4X is really good fun on a DH bike (although it would be super fast on a hardtail), the berms are that perfect radius and the jumps easy to clear, its a 'no worries' kind of thing that you can just have fun on without really thinking. About a third of the way into a run, I'm nosing in after a jump and this brown blur shoots under the bike! I watch in disbelief as all of a sudden I'm racing a hare! The hare stayed on the track the whole length of the course and I swear it was drifting the insides of the corners! Aston and I could barely see through tears of laughter as the hare stayed in the race before finally peeling off into the grass after the last jump!
Someone should track that creature down and offer it a sponsorship deal, it'll be in the rainbow jersey at the end of the season!
20th May 2008: No rest for the wicked....
Arrived back in the mountains after spending 24+ hours in the van driving down to Morzine. Some fools tried getting into the van while I was sleeping at a rest area but didn't realise I was kipping on the back seat under a pile of bikes, there was one hell of a comedy moment when I sat up dracula style and these two idiots pretended to casually walk back to their car and wheelspin away!!
I got back to Morzine at 8am on friday, had a shower and a cuppa and was back in the van on the way to Germany by 10am with the Astonator for a visit to Solid Bikes HQ in Freudenstatd. We must have set a bike building record as we threw together my new bike and hopped back in the van for the short blast to Bad Wildbad, home of gnarly rock sections and octogenarians.
Saturday morning was spent bouncing off all the rocks and wincing as mechs and bashguards took the hits in the boulder fields before meeting the Dirt Magazine crew just before lunchtime. We rode for a bit with them, giving Victor Lucas his valuable time on the bike before he resumed his role as photographer and started snapping. It was pretty cool getting involved in making the images you look forward to seeing every month in the magazine. Watching the Astonator, Rowan Sorrell and Ralph Jones storming through the rocks for the camera was impressive to say the least and hopefully Victor got some cool shots in the bag. I did a few runs in front of the lens too, making sure I got my 15 minutes and all that!
Sunday
dawned promising not to be a day of rest. Aston and I were
back
in the van and
off to Todtnau, leaving Rowan, Ralph and Victor contemplating their
brekky, and trying to stay ahead of the weather the whole way down
the autobahn.
We didn't get far trying to blag lift passes as
bonafide internet moguls unsurprisingly, so we stumped up the readies
and
hit the trails. We didn't even reach our quota of paid for
runs
before
the rain came down in sheets and we sheltered in the wagon watching
various poor sodden souls riding home. At the time the plan
was
to sleep in the van that night so we pussy'd out of riding in the 
wet,
anyone with experience of sleeping in confined spaces with a pile of
muddy kit and bikes will know that this was the right move, so we
packed up again and headed for home. The nearer we got to the
Swiss border the chirpier the weather seemed to be getting and before
long the wipers were off and the road was dry again and our motivation
returned causing us to roll into Bien/Bielle in Switzerland and a
bike friendly funicular railway that stays open until the pubs close.
We got a good few runs in there before the weather caught us
out. Badly miss-timed it this time. But once you're wet,
you're
wet.....so we ran up the stairs and got on the train once more.
That was enough, everything we had on was soaked and
splattered
with mud and a night in the van was looking less than attractive.
So we probably broke a dozen or so Swiss laws getting
changed in the
car park and aimed the Vito for Morzine....
Rest day Monday and then back into the action today, but I'll save that for the next time....
Nick