Happy New Year!
We've decided to reactivate our blog to let you in on some of the interesting things that happen in the shop, rides, bike builds, things like that. This week none of us have been doing much riding beyond the occasional commute, but I managed a quick evening thrash on Saturday to test my snow bike.
I fitted some Schwalbe Marathon Winter tyres to a singlespeed GT Timberline that a friend of the shop gave me. No one else wanted his weird retro drop-bar 1 gear bike, but I like doing bad things to old GTs! The tyres grip ice fantastically well, turning sheet ice into a surface you can carve and lean into. Kinda surreal. They work well in shallow snow, cutting through the snow and spiking into frozen ground underneath like mini crampons. In the few steeper drifts I encountered there was no advantage to a non-spiked tyre but the grip on ice and frozen hard ground was fantastic.
Riding on Mars' dark snowy surface on laser tyres! Pew Pew!
I bumped into a rider on a Surly Pugsley just as I was leaving my house. Here's a pic contrasting the prints left by our tyres. After we split, I headed towards Broxburn Bing, where I found his 4” wide tracks and followed them around the singletrack of the lower Bing, then up the shute to the top. Descending on a rigid drop bar bike with cantilever brakes was exciting!
On Sunday I went for a short wander around the snowy Pentlands, it feels so good to get some sunshine at this time of year.
I'm almost finished building a frame for Steve, one of the mechanics here at Eastside. Here is a pic of a headtube fillet braze, still hot from the torch. The gooey mess all over the joint is flux which is essential for brazing. When I'm finished the frame I'll make some posts about its design and fabrication
