mack_turtle

Get the helmet that fits your head the best. To date, nothing but Giro helmets fit the shape of my head. I tried a few of the Bell, Kali, and TLD helmets that other people like and all of them fit awkwardly. That's because people who like those helmets have skulls that are shaped differently from my skull. Asking for recommendations online is a pointless exercise. You need to go to a shop and strap some to your head until you find one that fits.

yeah, that's a problem. I will pay more attention next time I drive past it because the satellite images on Google are out of date and the city does not seem to have it marked anywhere. it seems to just start at the airport.

interesting development. Pinion gear boxes have always intrigued me. I guess a few small companies have made one (Ghost comes to mind), but it's not gone mainstream yet. Domahidy did a pretty good job of shaking up the industry with Niner, so maybe he can do it again. no derailleurs to fiddle with, just change the oil in it every year/ 6,000 miles. the handlebar/stem is interesting too. http://www.viral.bike/

shortly after I got married at the tender age of 22, I noticed that my priorities shifted. I was big into the punk/ hardcore music scene in Indianapolis. all my college friends were in bands and not a week passed when I was not at some show any night of the week sweating my face off in a mosh pit. I look back on that fondly, but after I moved to San Antonio and got married, I had little interest for involvement in "youth culture." I had a social life, but it quickly became smaller. I went to one punk show in my seven years in San Antonio (and that was to see Gorilla Biscuits, and "old school" band), instead of the constant stream of shows I can't count in high school and college. I rode BMX exclusively and despite riding quite a lot (SA has a great BMX scene and endless fun ditches to ride), I never really became a part of that culture. I was always on the outside. that's part of the reason I lost interest in it and started mountain biking- I could do that alone and have a lot more fun, I was not trying to prove anything to anyone, and it was generally a more mature crowd when I did do anything social on a mountain bike. I think mountain biking is become more popular among a younger (read: more youthful) crowd, and what the author describes is evidence of that. that's is a good thing and a bad one. it's bringing new energy, a lust for experience that most of the old farts (I'll round 40 in a few quick years) don't have. think of what you were like when you were 15-25 years old. many of us were frenetic balls of energy that had to constantly move to keep from dying of boredom. that's the new breed of mountain bikers- not because they are bad people, but because they are young, just like all of us were at one time. with that comes loud shitty music, flat-billed hats, cans of Redbull spilling out of dually trucks, enduro bro brapping culture that we see today in some places. I predict that most of them will chill out shortly and then they'll be the ones complaining about the whippersnappers behind them and whatever cultural milieu it represents. it's a cycle. I don't know if we see as much of that in Austin though. I don't think the terrain here is conducive to "shredding" the way bros see it on Pinkbike videos, so it might be delayed at least. Can anyone chime in about what they see when they leave the state, say ColoRADo, like the cool kids spell it?

has anyone ridden the bike path that goes out past the airport along 71? it goes pretty far from the city and ends up at Southeast Metro Park, from what I can see on the map. the bike path is not marked or labeled on the map at all, but you can see it clearly on the satellite picture. I am all for riding pavement for the sake of exploring and I always find ways to include dirt in those routes.

I run SATN trails off and on. sometimes I don't feel like fooling around with bike gear. lace up shoes, grab a water bottle, and go. I have a CX bike that gets ridden on gravel races and around the city, especially when it's wet outside. it's gotten a lot of miles these past few weeks! my office has a gym that I visit for about 30 minutes most days. I suffered lower back pain about a year ago and found that core work like planks, russian twists, lunges, squats, bridges, etc help a TON to stabilize your body. that makes you a better rider all around and helps with endurance, not to mention mitigates back pain.

I love working on my bike and sometimes mess around unnecessarily. this leads to bad things like rounding off bolts and losing small parts. the struggle is real.

There are not enough real gravel roads to really do that in Austin, but you can link together Walnut Creek South, Ladybird Lake Hike n Bike, MOPAC service Road, Shoal Creek, some VCT, Circle C, the Veloway, etc with low-traffic roads if you plan carefully. I have done a few in-town 50 milers that way.

I would think that with a bike that new developing problems, they would take care of it with no drama. A three month old bike should not have any substantial wear or issues unless you've ridden it across the continent and back already.

Square taper cranks require a special, but inexpensive tool. I doubt that that interface is the problem, but those bolts should have been torqued to about 29 ft-lbs. It could be the pedals or the BB. After building dozens of new bikes, I have found that bottom brackets are frequently installed incorrectly and bike shops rarely check for that. Where do you store you're bike? Has it been exposed to rain and wet conditions?

I would ask the shop to take a look at it, assuming there would be no charge for a follow-up tune on such a new bike. Check that the pedals are tight first. I've encountered lots of noisy bikes that just had loose pedals. If not a shop, I, and probably lots of other people on here, have the tools and skills to sort you out at home. I am in Southwest Austin and have a garage full of tools gathering dust.

Does any part of SATN have trail stewards?

I've noticed a few spots and local trails that are low and get muddy. When and how should I protect a low muddy spot by dredging up rocks out of the nearby Creek bed to armor it? Is anyone going to be pissed if I start doing this on my own? Does this count as cross-fitting?

I have a heavy, sharp machete that wanta to work. What part of SATN needs it the most?

here's a super high-tech rendering of what I need to do: drill/ tap a third hole in the sliding dropout about 10 mm in from where it is, then remove the additional material from the mounting tab. I need to at least drill and tap that hole with enough precision to get the bolt in straight. I am basically trying to shorten the mounting tab so that I can slide my axle forward enough to remove a link from the chain. (cue long debate about chain stay length. spoiler: I want mine shorter, because.) you can see that the Paragon equivalent (blue background) has a much shorter tab, so it should be fine. my frame has room for 3" tires, and I am running 2.25-2.3's, so there's plenty of room in the frame. if needed, I can shave some material off the axle mounting area to clear the dropout part as well.

anyone have access to equipment to modify a small aluminum part?

is that actually a 31.9 seatpost or 30.9?

RIP chairlift.

damn, my '80s/'90s parents would have spent most of their lives in jail for the way they let me roam around. I didn't get into (much) trouble and they always had an idea of where I was and with whom I was hanging out, but they trusted me and our neighbors to be relatively safe. on the other hand, I knew some kids who. it seemed, had parents who didn't much care where their kids were and what they were doing. I think that thirst for exploration is what led me to mountain biking. I never tire of finding new places. in fact, the technical skills of mountain biking are just a fringe benefit to the satisfaction I get from exploring and covering long distances.

if you're board games, the downtown library has an extensive collection of rad board games that you can borrow. the games cannot leave the building though, so you need to bring some friends, find a room or a quiet table, and play while you're there. they have a lot of the "expensive," complex games like Pandemic and Settlers of Catan that are tons of fun but you might want to try them out once before buying them. the library also has a cafe with a bar downstairs now, so it's a great way to spend an afternoon with friends. I don't think many of my adult friends play a lot of video games but opening a bottle or two of wine for a late-night session of Dominion is a blast.

Trail Work n Drank nite this week? I'll bring my rubber boots.

A lot of people my age are parents with kids who are not allowed to leave their driveway at an age when I had a range of about five miles. That's sad that parents are so paranoid.

I met some guys in Circle C park the other day who had gathered to fly drones. They had VR headsets and the drones had cameras. Way cooler than any video game, plus you have to run out into the weeds to fetch your drone when you crash it. They said you could get everything to start out for under $1k. That's a lot of money for most families but it is a better investment than video games IMO. I think there's more value to video games than many of us think. Some of them require a lot of communication, cooperation and strategic thinking, problem solving, etc. A lot of those games involve design and world-builidng. They need to be used in moderation of course, but it's not all mindless. I am not certain that spending hours alone with one's nose in a book is objectively better. When I was a kid, I spent endless hours alone indoors building with Lego and Construx. I watched science fiction movies and built badass robots and cars with missle launchers on them. Mad Max stuff. It instilled in me a powerful sense of space and geometry, as well as manual dexterity that I needed to learn to use tools on bikes and around the house. I have met grown men my age who literally don't understand how a screwdriver works. I had a train set too. Being an '80s kid, parents and grandparents bought trains set stuff for kids of my generation but no one played with them. Sorry, trains just are not fun!

good times. rode the 50k at a pace that challenged me but wasn't very fast. 32/35mm tires and a 39/16 was just fine. my seatpost slipped down so slowly that I didn't notice. I knew the ride was getting harder, but i thought that was because I was getting hungry. I had to look at a photo of my bike to confirm that my seat was over an inch lower than when I started. d'oh!

I was born in 1982, so that puts me at the far-old end of the "millenials." video games were a constant threat to me. i am very addicted to video games when i get my hands on a good one, which is why I don't own a gaming console at my house. If I had an Xbox or whatever the kids are playing these days, I would never leave the house. I had a ton of Atari 2600 games growing up. all the other kids had Sega or Nintendo or whatever was new at the time, but my parents wouldn't buy me any of those systems because of some combination of stinginess (we could have afforded new games, but all of my games were from garage sales) and wise forethought. Atari games were never something you could do for hours on end. it was a fun distraction for an hour at best. the games were just so lackluster, slow, and short. That was good for me because I spent countless hours building trails, treeforts, pedaling everywhere, catching frogs, and exploring the woods. this was in the Midwest, where it's quite cold and foul for a good chunk of the year with snow/ice and mud for weeks when the snow melts. my mom took my brother and me to parks for hiking, sometimes in tall rubber boots, across frozen creeks, searching for interesting icicles and animal tracks. for a few years, I lived in a house that backed up to a farm field, so I spent hours shooting a pellet gun and arrows at targets. when i got bored with that, I rode my scavenged BMX bike on a 5-6 mile look around my rural neighborhood, looking for ledges to jump off of and pretending that my route didn't take me past the house of a girl I liked. middle school! in high school I moved to Indianapolis to a neighborhood that was home to, by sheer coincidence, the only three kids in my enormous high school who also rode BMX. we rode all the places we were not wanted in the nearby office complex, terrorized downtown, built a dirt jump course that rivals Ninth Street in a vacant lot, and initiated the building of Indy's first public skatepark (which is still next to Major Taylor Velodrome and the BMX race track). I did the same in college and for years prior to getting a mountain bike. all old BMX guys become mountain bikers eventually. that was a good trip down Memory Lane. suffice it to say that, if it had not been for pulling a BMX bike out of the trash when I was about 13, I would have spent most of my youth playing video games. yeah, the new games are better and more immersive, but I managed to spend hours and hours playing Super Mario Brothers, which came out over 30 years ago. I cringe when I see the kids with the portable games that are as immersive as they are though. I spend too much time looking down at my phone as it is, but kids with bent necks from a young age who never look up and engage the world around them is pretty grim. I don't have kids, but I have a hard time holding my tongue around parents who spend thousands of dollars on video games for their kids that remove them from reality, not just at home, but everywhere they go. that's going to come back to bite us all one day- socially, medically, emotionally. I don't have kids A few years ago, I was working at REI and some corporate bigwig came through to give us a pep talk. she asked who REI's competition is, and people named Academy Sports, Whole Earth Provisions, bike shops, Bass Pro Shop, etc. she replied that the real competition to the outdoor recreation retailers are stores like Best Buy, which sell people things that allow them to pass the time without going outside at all.