Paul Ruinaard

Haha Cool Heat have been cr@p forever and dont give a rats arse. Just shop internationally. THis thread gets revived every couple of years and its the same drama.

Any silicon spray does this. Just dont get it near brake pads as its a lubricant and designed to make things slip easier so your first attempt to stop may be quote dramantic. It also protects and restores any plastic or carbon and makes it easier to clean MTBs as mud wont stick to the tubes - bit like spray and cook used to be used for muddy races. After you wash the bike you spray it down - all the rubber, saddle, hoods etc - makes them gleam nicely and also easier to clean. You can buy it at Builders or any car store dont get hoodwinked in to bike specific brands.

Electronics fail. IMO you continually need to upgrade them as the costs and complexity of replacing batteries and buttons that wear is just too high especially if you arent tooled to do it. And the tools are costly and the likelihood of successful repair is low, so just bin it, offer a trae in and then send out. anew uniot. So the local distribution just gets warrnmaty replacement stocks from Garmin and swaps them out. Preserves your invesmants as it always has a trade in value and then you get the latest tech every couple of years. Nobody opens them up and the factories unlikely to do it as well. Everybody needs to understand electronics fail. Take them out in to harsh environmnets and then shake them around and wet them and put them in sun and they normally fail a lot more than what we see. When they fail you cant repair them - you throw them away. Hard drives etc - you only need to be in tech to know this. You may think they are expensive but they are minor miracles when you think of what they do all the time and you take it for granted. ANY technology item from ANY vendor fails. And its accepted in tech. If you get something back when the tech fails you are doing well. Perosnally Garmin has IMO done a great job and is so ubiquitous that its visible because everyone uses it. It used to be Polar and Suunto etc but everyone uses gramin - watches, head units, power pedals, back and front lights etc. I have used many different brands over the years and have concluded that garmin is without doubt the simplest ecosystem becasue the softwrae integrates with so many other sites and vendors and is so well known and deployed. Take a breather on this. like i said if you dela in tech you know it fails and it is impossible to rpeair . When you stikc in one ecosystem you simplify a lot of it and you get some investment protection. Its a good place to be. Mosy other vendors wouldnt bother.

what are some brands of ebike chains or how do you recognize them.

put it down to school fees and throw it away - i did similar when i just started out except it was a 250km road trip and i turned a tyre in to charcoal and bent a rim. As the man said be thanful those were alloy rims casue that would hev been a much uglier day.

yep agreed a world in which search engines are free and you can get better searches on things lie ractecs CTCT results the inability of their search to slice and dice the results and look for the answers you want is somethwat of an own goal IMO. Just seems amateur. FWIW i was involved in a project (which i think died in teh pandemic) to do all the data like they do on UCI tours - IOT sensors tracking data is not rocket science. Time for the Epic to modernize...

Yeah the app isnt too onerous its the tracker on the website that was written by a grade 8 kid doing a softwrae project

My 2 cents worth : whichever web development company did the Cape Epic website and its results search engine needs to be shot. Its a very amateur job and totally useless to search and track people on. Not sure what has happened but previous years were much better.

Agreed on this - every year I am fat and unfit the weather is fantastic. Without a doubt the October 2021 race was the best ever - I had a good ride in 2020 just prior to pandemic but my track record of being fit in the face of cycle tours and then the 11th hour things change, goes back to the detour and OuKaapse weg which was just a cr@p route - best ever was 3:19 on that - hated that route. I was strong in 2009 - Cape of Storms day, then in 2018 cancelled after it blew gales - also on the shortened route and last year was my 21st so it was not optional and i rode in a flood. this year is Covid that has put paid to me so i am using discretion rather than valour. Enjoy and have fun to all doing it - it is truly one of the greatest if not the greatest race on the calendar and a wonderful experience. I wish i could still have all the butterflies i had on my first one again and that sense of achievement when you eventually start getitng better seedings and work for 3 to 4 months just for this event and the time and the chance of a sub three.

My pet hate was support cars behind in Jhb in the cradle. Always at this time of the year with CTCT in the offing and noobs who are doing longer rides. I have been flamed mightily about this from indignant follow car advocates in these aliases. I get it for the bigger clubs but its the mom and pop situations where they do this with limited experience and much hand waving.

Lots of threads about this but the thing is its neither fish nor fowl. Its not a road bike or an off road bike. So if you are serious as a roadie it will frustrate you and unless you are on smooth dirt roads off-road an MTB is better. How old are you, how fit and how serious are you. I still think you need to take a gravel bike out on a rutted dirt road and hit that at speed and see how it feels - it isn't good. then you will start to see that its operating window is not as an MTB nor as a road race bike. Its in-between. FUN maybe and depending on how fit and serious you are its a nice thing to have cause your fitness and strength can overcome the downsides. Right now i have 2 sets of wheels for my Roubaix - one with a set of 38 mm gravel tires on it that allows me to get on the gravel shoulder on tight roads but i wouldn't ride it seriously down dirt roads. I also have a small ally hardtail 1 x MTB which is much better off road than the Roubaix. And MTBs and ebikes and have done all of it - CX bike, Gravel Bike etc. Depends what you are looking to do - but its neither fish nor fowl rather something with a broad use case that allows some flexibility - however if you push it too far on either end of the spectrum it starts to show its failings

what the man said, Varia and lights = visibility and warning

yep so was mine. Sorry i wasn't aware of the font change and but was also having some fun however clearly i am tone deaf to the subtleties of the bike hub. I stand corrected. FWIW and IMNSHO - Bikes and cars are yours- not the manufacturers. You don't sign a right to use agreement within a certain use case like you see on leases on some cars. You own it. Do with it what you want and use common sense. But 250kmh on a vehicle is not comparable to 25 kmh on an ebike. I dont think anyone survived an accident by only going at 250 kmh rather than 320kmh. FWIW - anything above 140 kmh on a public road is a little crazy so whats the point of 250kmh as a limit - its just window dressing, certainly not safety concerns cause that caused them to limit them but some big ass accidents which found their way on to social media. You will be a big jam splot if you hit anything at above 160kmh in most cases. The limits are window dressing which are put there by the anti lobbies - anti fun brigade IMO and Nazis but i was told calling someone a Nazi is now politically incorrect. I am old and tone deal in many respects 🙂 Ride the bike - have some fun, tweak it - go a bit faster on the ride and feel good about yourself and climb like a young man again on your ebike. Personally i have fun playing with the software and finding out about the tuning of it all and whats in there, bit like a game.

No chip needed just use the software provided on the bike. You know the old story about print speed on IBM printers - when you paid for the upgrade the IBM technician came on site and just changed the geared belt to the bigger gear, which doubled your print speed and at the same time also massively impacted IBMs margins because the printer was built to run at high speed, just made to run slower for a lower priced segment. Do you really think the motor in the 190kw 3l Diesel Amarok is any different to the 165kw predecessor? All they did is change the code a bit. So all we are doing is liberating the functionality that already exists in the bikes 🙂

Garmin uses GPS so will be more accurate but TBH so does Mission Control use the phone GPS and not the wheel circumference to track you so no it wont make a difference. Garmin is more accurate sometimes than phone - long story about how phone GPS receivers work. TBH BLEVO is the simplest and easiest way to get past all this. I never use Mission control unless for diagnostics. But if you are riding an ebike on the road the 25 kph limit is a complete pain in the arse with a 20 kg plus bike. I tested an e road bike - a Basso. It was actually completely useless as you easily exceed 25 kph most of the time.

worst klap i got at school was when a matric asked me why i had my hands in my pocket and I told him i was playing pocket billiards and the left pocket just scored a goal. He didn't like my sense of humour much

aah sorry mate I put 32 mm on the back of my bike and 28mm on the front - rides really nicely - but its a Roubaix frame so have some clearance. I thought 28mm were good until I tried the 32. It looks cool and rides smooth and comfortable as hell.

download an app called Blevo if you are running a Specialized Turbo Levo - it lets you change a lot of these parameters. https://powunity.com/en/blevo-app-how-good-is-the-alternative-to-mission-control Just read the manuals as well. You need to restart the bike once you have done the changes. I once did it all on my wife's bike and we did a whole ride with her complaining about no assistance and me scoffing at her cause i had done all this trickery to gte it to go faster.

https://www.takealot.com/pirelli-cinturato-32c-tubeless-cycling-tyre/PLID55548193 don't know of the 28mm but heres the 32 mm on takealot for R 889.

Hey thats maybe his bank balance. Just like Jacob Zuma is bankrupt and has no money to pay for anything, you need to look through the veil - none of these guys ever hold assets in their name. Not saying he isn't a good guy BTW but you dont start the biggest bicycle company in the world and run it for so many years to end up with a net worth of $ 2m. But we know you are a fan boy my son 🙂

Ed Zackery. I was also going to post that one - from Evobikes. Now they are of course the new GP 5000 TL with Black Chilee compound so hey what do I know maybe hand bonded and rolled on the thighs of virgins in exotic places to achieve the smoothness they do. So the input costs must be really high.... FWIW, I used to complain when buying GP 3000 for R 300 per tyre which eventually went to R 599. Then GP 5000 TL comes out was now R 999. Then R 1299. Now R 2k. Even the gator used to be R 160 per tyre seems to have gone crazy. So going on previous posts i see rubber prices have gone insane so maybe thats what we are seeing. But a 4 x 4 tyre for an amarok is R 4,5k. So I just don't get it cause theres a lot more rubber in a single 4 x 4 tyre than in say 2,5 Cont GP 5000s. Go figure. Again do you see on Takealot you can get the Pirelli for R 899. Maybe a bike dealer would like to put up their costings and show where the margin is being added. BTW Exchange rates have recovered to R 16,89 - even fuel price is going down. And yes i get the input costs are locked in to the current production batch when they were made but then prices will fall as the new costs filter through - however that never happens.

https://cyclingfly.com/are-specialized-bikes-so-expensive/ So after copious ramblings its all really in this article in one way or another. BTW rough maths on Mike Sinyard's net worth is $ 989 million US $. FWIW Mike is the founder and ex CEO of our favourite love Specialized. So I think that answers where all the margin is going for at least Specialized.

Yeah i get what you are saying and agree as you clearly state the actuals but maybe we are just looking at it from different terms - I am using a longer term than prior to Covvid and asking why has a bike that cost R 35k gone to R 270k, the groupset from R 35k to R 75k. The 12 speed cluster is now R 15k. Wheels can be R 25k to R 50k. Its not all input costs. Over a period that goes from say 10 years i.e. 2013 to 2023 - the prices just went skywards for all the major top brands..... 2020 onwards is and was a complete abberation that IMO kicked what was already happening in to overdrive.

Strava is a good place to start using heatmaps etc for trail discovery, but it honestly depends what you are trying to do - navigation or trail discovery? Any form of GPS watch or head unit can give you turn by turn guidance . Apps like Trail Forks etc have lots of detailed trails on them. Strava is also good for the local heatmaps etc to see where people ride. Are you trying to find new trails or get an app thta has turn by turn guidance to a destination? You can run Strava for example on your phone (assuming its a smart phone). Can you be more specific as to what you are trying to do?

Hmm, all components benefit from volume of production. WRT technology - you heard of a thing called Moores law? Technology falls in price not goes up. Processors memory hard drives screens etc. This isn't my theory, its whats driven the whole tech bubble. Its why your phone has an OLED screen which was super rare 5 years ago but is now commodity owing to volume and advancement in production. Also carbon fab which 20 years ago was ridiculously expensive and and bespoke is now run of the mill in manufacturing and simple enough to do. 99% of frames come from Taiwan from a number of volume contract manufacturers. Yes even your high end Specialized etc. they turn them out cheap as chips and in huge volumes compared to how rare they were when they firts came to market. And they are so much better and so many more options base don types of layup, types of carbon used whereas previously there was only one version. Carbon was super rare and expnsive now its cheap as chips and available off Alibaba SO FWIW from where I amd sitting everything seems to show me the cost of making anything like frames or group sets has fallen massively. Especially things like Di 2 where the battery tech has improved massively and carbon frames etc. The first ones were stupidly expensive and complex. Now electronic shifting has filtered down to 105 and SLX which is really workmanlike. But the prices of an XTR or Dura Ace DI 2 12 speed groupo went to R 75k? When the previous price was R 35k and lesser. A 12 speed gold anodised cluster fro Sram for R 15k? You are pulling the piss. the price bears no relation to input costs. On another topic " Agreed marginal gains are important for pros just like hybrid turbo formula 1 cars with slick tyres and aerodynamics are important to win the Formula 1 world championship and the tech eventually blooded in racing filters down but the tech used in high tech fields like racing is really light years away from what Joe cyclist needs to get him up a hill quicker locally. Your average dude needs less rigid carbon layup than the top end pros cause he isn't as fit and as flexible and doesn't need every ounce of power, rather he needs to arrive feeling a little fresher to do it all again the next day. Whats good for a pro isn't good for 95% of cyclists - its like your average experienced racing driver couldn't even do a lap in a Formula 1 (i know its a little different but the example proves the point. ) What you race is so fine line Specializeds and pros are so stupidly fit and strong the average dude doesn't come close. Greg Minaars Santa Cruz V10 is likely unrideable for 95% of the cycling populace. So to summarise - prices of making the stuff has definitely come down lots and the manufacturing volumes have gone up massively so the costs per unit have fallen. But the price of bikes has risen, cause the cost inputs aren't what matters anymore. And on the other topic i replied already - supply chain collaboration is about as open as it gets in cycling. You think all the pieces on the bike come from one factory ? Maybe we are discussing apples and pears but i think i am 100% seeing things you are saying from the opposite side, so agree to differ.