The versatile Soma Juice- gravel mode

As I mentioned in my last entry, I recently sold my Soma Double Cross Disc not because it was not a terrific bike, but because it didn't do anything that my mountain bike could not. Selling it gave me some extra cash to put into new parts for my Juice. Here's a bit of what I have been doing with that cash lately.

"Mountain bike" means a lot of different things to different people, and many just buy one bike and accept its limitations or buy several bikes that do some things well at the expense of others. As a matter of personal budget, I don't have a lot of disposable income to spend on bicycle paraphernalia, and I would rather have one really nice bike than two or three mediocre bikes. More importantly, I have a fairly utilitarian perspective on my personal belongings. I strive to have as little as possible in my life cluttering my endeavors and I have to make a conscious effort to keep from being a packrat with bicycle gear.

The Juice allows me to build a rowdy trial ripper and a fast gravel grinder by just changing a few things between rides. Yes, it would be easier to own two bicycles, but it would cost a lot more and I would have to find storage for another bicycle. Here is what I have been riding on some non-technical trails and more technical trails than I intended.

I have a little over a month before the Texas Chainring Massacre, which I am riding 100k, and a few months to the 100k Castell Grind. I have ridden these events before on a cyclocross bike with 32, 35, and 42mm tires. Every time I participate in a gravel event on a CX bike, I start to think halfway through, "this would be a lot more fun on a bike with bigger tires!" Now is the time to test that theory.

I bought a Salsa Chromoto Grande fork used for a great deal. This fork has a tapered steerer tube and a 15mm thru axle just like my Reba suspension fork, but it's considerably lighter and more responsive.

The handlebar is a flat Answer bar that I got online for $10 and cut down to about 26", which is 4" narrower than the normal riser bars I use for trails. To make up for the narrower handlebar, I have a 100mm stem, 40mm longer than the 60mm stem I also use for trail riding. I finished the cockpit with some Ergon bars ends. I removed these ends from some Ergon wingy grips. I have no use for the flappy bits on Ergons, but the bar ends will clamp onto a handlebar on their own.

I have been experimenting with single-speed gear ratios for trail riding. 32/20 seems to work for any sort of chunk and climbing, but I have found that I am hack it 90% of the time with a 32/18 ratio as well and go faster on the flat areas. For gravel grinders though, I know that most of the terrain will be flat or at least in a straight line. For this reason, I bought a 38t Raceface front ring and I am experimenting with 18, 19 and 20 cogs on the rear. So far, 38/18 is working just fine. I set a personal record on a long climb with this setup just the other day.

Finally, nothing changes the ride of a bike like a change of tires. I have not ridden them yet, but I just acquired some 29x2.1 Schwalbe Thunder Burt tires. These tires are well under 600 grams each, unlike the 800+ gram trail tires I normally ride, and the minimal center tread should roll much faster on hardpack and gravel roads as a result.

CX on singletrack- followup

I wrote a year ago about riding my Soma Double Cross Disc everywhere, including "mountain bike" trails. While it was a fun experiment, it ended a few months ago. The DCD was a great bike for roads, easy trails, commuting, and gravel races, but it ceased to be sufficiently useful to me after a while.

This bike served to do all the things that I thought my mountain bike would do poorly- commute, roads, gravel, occasional single track. As it turns out, my Some Juice mountain bike does everything I need it to do, hence the DCD becoming redundant.

My current job requires a 20-mile commute each way, so by bike, it would add about 3 hours or more to my work day. While I commend the bike warriors who would make such a commitment to pedaling that much, it's not for me. My wife would be constantly worried about me in traffic, especially in the dark and there's no shower at work to wash off 90 minutes worth of sweat from the Texas sun. At this point in my life, commuting by bike to work is just not practical. Maybe someday things will be different and I will start riding to work again, but I'll get a commuter bike at that time.

Road riding is something I wish I could do sometimes, but I have found that riding a mountain bike on roads can be fun-er! I had signed up for a nighttime gravel race and intended to do it on my mountain bike. I have done several gravel races in the past and always did them on a CX bike (more on that in a minute) but decided that I would have more fun on a hardtail MTB this time around. The race ended up being cancelled due to heavy rains, so I ended up doing a mixed-surface, 4-hour ride in the pouring rain with a friend. We mashed just short of 50 miles and riding mountain bikes made us fearless to hop curbs, ride through the soggy grass, and smash through some ditches.

bar ends, frame bag, and DIY fenders all seemed necessary!

I rode the 62-mile Castell Grind  this spring on the DCD. I had a ton of fun crushing 100 kilometers of remote central Texas country roads. The weather was perfect, my recently-installed WTB Cross Boss tubeless tires performed wonderfully, and the course was challenging. I found that having skinny tires floated over the hard-packed parts of the roads swiftly, but this course, like most of the gravel courses I have ridden, has just enough soggy sand pits and stretches of washboard surfaces that it really took a lot out of me. It left me thinking "wouldn't this be more fun with a flat handlebar, balloon tires, and a squishy fork?" The answer is probably yes.

The only real hill on my 100K Castell Grind.

Singletrack where I live is pretty darn chunky. Even the flat "easy" sections are peppered with exposed rock and boulders that keep me on my toes. While riding the CX bike on singletrack was a fun new challenge, it was a bridge too far. I would frequently have to slow down so much to tackle the terrain that my front tire would catch the toe of my shoes, something that never happens on my mountain bike. Toe overlap was never a problem on my mountain bike, but ratcheting over and around rocks on my CX bike was disastrous for the tips of my shoes. As fun and fast as it could be, I realized that all of it would be a lot more fun on my mountain bike.

After all that consideration and looking at the deteriorating condition of my mountain bike, I concluded that I would rather have a few hundred bucks in my pocket to spend than a bike that doesn't offer the maximum number of grins per hour. A nice local gal bought my DCD and is commuting around town on it now. I hope she loves that bike as much as I did.

A good day to stick to the roads.

back from the real world!

I have not been sleeping well lately. Last night I woke up at 2 a.m., like most nights in the last few weeks, and could not shut off my brain. I was thinking about bicycles, of course. I spun in bed like a stuck pig in a blanket with a lot of ideas boiling in my head. "You should blog this stuff, bro," my conscious intoned. I considered the phrase "my conscious intoned" and decided to time-stamp that gem. 3:49 a.m. My eyes are burning under their lids, but still no asleep!

You can't will yourself to sleep. I find that if I am fixated on something, that persistent jerk in my head won't let go. (Who is that guy, anyway? Get out!) I finally got some sleep, but not before I outlined some objectives to write about to get this blog rolling again. Hopefully my findings will be of some help to other riders and mechanics.

To bring readers (all 4 of you) up to speed, I was working at an independent bike shop about this time last year. The general state of disarray of that shop was my inspiration for this blog. I combined my past experiences of what was good about past bike shops and juxtaposed it to all things that were wrong and unfixable with that shop and started writing.

I worked at that shop for one month and it was a letdown on several fronts. Providence smiled on me a few weeks in when someone from a newspaper company called me about a job. I had been working in bicycle shops for the past six years (minus a 6-month foray as an apprentice commercial electrician, which was a hoot!) after being laid off from a magazine gig at the beginning of the "great recession" in early 2009. I loved the bike shop jobs, but, as I have written, it's generally a low-paying career choice and I wanted my Journalism degree to count for something. For the past year, I have done some writing and proofreading for publications.

This is a trajectory for my career that makes sense, pays more (but not much), and gives me weekends off and enough time in the mornings to squeeze in a short bike ride. It's not as fun a wrenching on bikes, and I don't have ready access to deeply-discounted bike parts like I did, but it all comes out in the wash. Nitpicking newspaper pages is actually very satisfying to me.

I was not surprised to learn that, less than a year after I left my previous bike shop for the newspaper gig, that bike shop went out of business. It's sad to see another independent bicycle shop go, but I saw a lot of issues there that I knew would have that result. Those issued inspired me to write in the first place, so we have that. I hope everyone previously involved in that shop is doing well.

I have a few ideas in the hopper so stay tuned. Coming soon:

• review of the Soma Double Cross Disc and the limits of cyclocross bikes
• review of the Soma Juice I have been riding
• more retrogrouch ranting
• thought experiments (and actual ones, hopefully) in mountain bike fit and geometry