Mountain Bru

Or you could needlessly go ballztothewall in a zwift race.... Not much gets the blood pumping as well as getting in a full on battle royale with some random American up Alpe de Zwift.

This makes a lot of sense: If you mount the mudguard in the "optimum purple zone", you can theoretically eliminate the red zone. But if you mount it higher up like you'd have to do on a rigid fork, you're actually not impacting the "red zone" much. It would actually probably work better if you mounted it backwards on a rigid fork so the longer end faced forward, but okes would tune you and think you're a moron.

Here's a piece of art to show why they work, and why they don't need to be bigger: Science tells us that whatever mud/water/cow poop/stone is flung off the tyre while it spins will fly off mostly tangentially to the rotation of the tyre (black arrows). (I know this isn't 100% true due to centrifugal force, but lets pretend it is because this isn't engineering class, and the concept is the same) The stuff in the green zone will hit the frame/fork crown, and possibly build up there, but not hit you in the face assuming your wheel is straight. If your wheel is turned, good chance it flies past you and your face remains cow poop and mud free. There probably wont be too much stuff flung off in the blue zone as most things would have already been flung off. In any case, this stuff will just land in front of you or hit your head tube/tyre as you move forward. Red zone is the problem zone. Remember you're travelling forward (lets say at a constant speed), but the stuff that's been flung up is decelerating and not moving forward as fast anymore. You're therefore gonna hit that red zone with your face / body and end up with face full of poop or whatever you just rode through. If you're a new parent, maybe this is normal, but I prefer to keep my face poop free. But from my super detailed artwork, you can see that the only stuff you really need to worry about is the red zone stuff, and so your mudguard only really needs to block this stuff and therefore doesn't have to be that long to keep the majority of the crud your tyre picks up out of your teeth and off your stanchions.

I get what you mean, but your understanding of the relationship between power and crank arm length is slightly off. 250w is 250w regardless of crank length. However.... Power=Torque x Angular Velocity (Angular Velocity would be cadence in our world) And Torque = Force x radius (Radius here would be crank arm length, Force is how hard you're pushing the pedal around the BB) So if power is the same, cadence is the same, and you reduce the crank arm length from 175mm to 165mm, that's roughly a 6% reduction, so you'll need roughly 6% more force on the pedals to produce the same power (not exactly, but roughly). That's the science behind the power, but many other things are at play. Remember, if you shorten the crank by 10mm, your saddle fore/aft and height needs to change too to keep your front knee over the pedal spindle at "3 o'clock-9'clock" (ie: horizontal cranks) and also you've effectively increased the angle your knee is bending at the bottom of the pedal stroke by shortening the saddle to pedal length. Not sure if you set your bike up according to your "normal seat height" and "normal saddle tip to bar" measurements, but I'd guess one of these is probably to blame for your injury, especially if you're really used to 175mm cranks. I mean it's not like you've never pushed higher watts before.

For you taller guys.... Good to keep in mind that most tents aren't waterproof if you're touching the sides, so making sure the tent is long enough is pretty important. (specifically talking about pushing the inner mesh onto the flysheet)

If it rains, and you open the door, it'll rain straight into you tent. Personally, I wouldn't consider a tent without some kind of vestibule system that prevents that happening. If you've ever camped in the rain, or tried to cook in a tent in the rain, you'll know how important this is. But this tent is a win for no-wind, no-rain camping where you basically just want some warmth and privacy.

Is that a form of meditation?

@J Wakefield Is it confirmed that Pogacar isn't riding the Vuelta? Any inside scoop on if this was a chance of plan, or if he was never planning on doing it, and the reasons around the decision?

Yes, F6 is probably overkill. But the good kind of overkill. But at the moment, the vivo 4 is R5000 on takelot, the Venu 2 is R7700, and a few days ago the F6 was R6500. At that price, it's by far the best of them all just for the battery life, and it's also a far more robust design. I could never justify buying a vivo 4 or venu 2 if the F6 is R6500. The price on takealot is R8500 at the moment though, but it'll probably be on sale again soon as the F7 is rumored to launch soon. In terms of smart watch vs garmin/"sports watch" - Not sure how much more than viewing messages, seeing who's calling, and seeing calendar events I really want on my watch. Garmin does all of that, and you don't have to charge it every night.

Have you tried the woolies ones? Everything tastes better if it comes from woolies. Otherwise here's a recipe for banana bread that might tickle your fancy: https://www.myturnforus.com/boozy-banana-nut-bread/

Someone can correct me on this, but I think it's all about carb intake for endurance sport, and the goal (even for us weekend warriors) is 60g to 80g of carbs an hour, depending on your body. You can't absorb more than that in an hour, and it might actually start making you feel miff if you eat more while training. The carb energy drink I use is 63g per 750ml, and I aim to finish it in around 90 minutes, and then get another 20g to 30g of carbs from gels/food every hour. A far bar is 60g of carbs though, so I assume your date balls are similar, so 1 per hour is probably spot on. As said earlier, fluid carbs are much easier to take in than solids, especially at high intensity or when you're buggered though.

That's cool.... But it doesn't count because it wasn't on a bicycle. No need to look pro and smash gels if you've given up on life and resorted to running (unless you're Froome on Ventoux). ???? But man, that is seriously impressive. I don't think my body could do that. I can feel my stomach eating itself if I don't eat on anything longer than 90 minutes.... And after full on bonking once and semi-passing out on a trail, I know I never want to go there again.

Agreed. Although I'm surprised no one has really praised nature's energy bar yet.... The humble banana. Comes in it's own bio-degradable gel-wrapper. Easy to chew/eat Cheap Vegan friendly No preservatives Makes a great energy drink if you smoosh it up in your bottle......

It sounds like the thing you actually have that's valuable is shipping space, not an amazing deal with a bicycle manufacturer. So bicycles fit in that shipping space, but so does anything else. Even if it takes 3 weeks to deliver, I'd happily wait that long to have something delivered if it means avoiding the SAPO (which could take 3 months). As an example, I was looking at stages power meters in the US.... $375 for the power meter (around R5400), but then shipping was a ludicrous $149 (around R2000) (on Competitive Cyclist). Needless to say, I didn't buy the power meter and will probably end up using Aramex global shopper if I do. That'll cost me around R400, which I could just as easily pay to you. It sounds like if I got it from the EU, it would cost you zero rand to get it in SA, and you could make R400 clean profit. There's enough guys importing stuff from overseas every week for those risk free R400s to add up if they use your "shipping service", especially seen as it would mean getting around geo-blocked components, like shimano stuff, which is probably a big percentage of what guys want to import in any case. There will be a lot more admin with more orders, customs will be an interesting challenge, and you'll have to do some aramex/postnet shipping once the stuff is here, but it would be risk free randelas in your pocket with no warranty issues. Basically, I would say, if you want to make profit off your extra shipping space, you should sell the shipping space, not bicycles.

Pretty jelly that you live in NZ, so I'm rather gonna talk you into making bad decisions. You'll never know how useful the features are until you actually have them. Like cruise control in a car.... it might seem unnecessary, until you've had it and used it on a long trip. After that, you'll never buy a car without it. Buy the F6 figure out if its unnecessary later.

How much did Roglic pay for this?

Yup. Probably closer to second hand too seen as you need to overcome the "R5000 more for local support and warranty from a shop I can take it back to" thinking. Having said that though, some bike brands do carry an appeal that adds value for some (like illogical value). Some people don't want to ride a spez, drive a fortuner/hilux, and blindly buy whatever iphone is on sale, even if they're all arguably the best products on the market (or at least right up there). For some people, there's an appeal to owning a google pixel phone just cos no one else has one, driving a lifted VW transporter because then you can tell everyone why it's better than everything else on the road in every circumstance, and owning an obscure bike brand that only real purists have ever heard of. If the mystery bike brand is one of those, there might be a market for it amongst that kind of person. Like someone mentioned Pole earlier, or Nukeproof, YT etc. But typically if you're that kind of person, you're by nature a bit different, and probably a bit obsessive, and don't need too much help getting your hands on your eccentric choices. But if the mystery brand is the equivalent of a chev trailblazer, you're gonna have to sell it cheap to sway people away from their beloved fortuners.

Dude I'm gonna start importing cars. Will you pay R700 000 for them? Promise they're good. Other people drive them in other countries, some even race with them. They have Michelin tyres, and leather seats. Promise they're worth R1.4mil if you compare them with cars that cost R1.4mil. Are you starting to see how pointless this discussion is without knowing the brand? If it's a Ferrari I'm selling, absolute win. If it's a wang chong fui with ferrrary stickers on it, not so much.

Yup. Those guys are legends. Its rare to say this, but it's a pleasure to give them money when you see how good their customer service is.

And seen as it's almost Friday ????..... All you guys that don't eat or eat all kinds of picnic snacks and 3 course home cooked meals and just drink water on rides out of your 1 bottle obviously aren't riding very hard. During a hard ride when the heart is pumping at full gas and the legs are screaming, I can barely get anything down, and have to force myself to keep eating and drinking so I don't bonk out while my bike does a sub 3 argus/947. So for me, carb drink is a huge win cos it's much easier to get fluids in than solids at high intensity. I think the goal is 60g - 80g of carbs an hour, which is a million times easier if it's a fluid. I'm also a big fan of the SiS isotonic gels - they seem to just go down easily, and I think that isotonic thing means you don't have to down loads of water with every gel. Far bars are also good for me, but chewing at full gas leaves me out of breathe. Good luck shoveling peanuts and raisins into your mouth at full speed... Guaranteed you leave most of them on the road. Good luck chewing biltong at 190bpm heartrate.... I think you might actually pass out. Don't even get me started on how long it takes to chew a PVM energy bar - those things are 1 part sugar, 1 par rubber. And if you're stopping at cafe's during a race, you're literally de-valuing your bike cos there's 0% chance of being able to advertise it as a "sub-3 argust" bike after that.

I used to cramp easily when riding, but now I can't remember the last time I even felt the twitch of a cramp. Lots has changed, but I think one of the big changes is that I used to ride with energade/powerade in my bidons, but now use a carb drink (biogen carbogen) that has more than just sugar in it. I probably also got better at drinking and eating consistently while riding. Not sure if correlation is causation in this case though.

Related to this topic, does anyone know of a place in Pretoria that can powder coat a frame?

I think this is probably the most important consideration in this whole discussion though. The stickers on the frame really matter in terms of desirability, and therefore what I'm willing to pay. For example.... The same spec Giant and Spez will have wildly different prices in the classifieds , let alone if Spez decided to save money on stickers and just write S-Works on it. There's a S-Works stumpy HT for R45k for sale at the moment. Would your brand have enough street cred to overcome the S-Works delusion? I know the classifieds is the 2nd hand market though, but also probably the place where you'll be advertising your bikes, so you've gotta picture your bike alongside all the other stuff in the classifieds and ask yourself if you have a product that really distinguishes itself from the competition based on "brand-love" or price. Personally, I don't think the hardtail at R40k will sell much. It's too close to dual sus money, and you have the problem that if someone is willing to drop R40k on a new bike, they can probably scratch a bit more together and buy a dual sus. Or otherwise they'll be happy with a R20k hard tail. Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think the market for high-end/expensive hardtails is that big in SA. You didn't mention the frame material either? For R50k, you can almost get a carbon dual sus here.... So I assume you're importing carbon frames too? But again, throwing R50k at the classifieds can get you a really nice bike second hand, so you'll have to hope that almost on on "brand loyalty" alone, you're able to win customers. Even though your bikes would be new, without a dealer network and support etc, it's very similar to buying second hand. But if I was you, my business model for this would be to advertise the bikes with a 1 month lead time, require a deposit (maybe using bikehubpay so there's no risk), not try to make too much per bike, and then only order bikes once the buyer has paid the deposit. That way, you'll basically eliminate the risk of sitting with stock you can't sell. You might loose a sale or 2 due to the lead time, but if the brand is desirable, I think there will be guys who won't mind waiting if they're getting a good deal. I mean people order stuff from overseas and use the post office for delivery, and then you're not even guaranteed you're gonna get the stuff, so I don't think waiting 3 or 4 weeks for a bike you love is a problem. But if the brand isn't desirable, none of this matters because no-one is gonna overlook the "main brands" to buy an obscure brand at R40k - R50k

While we're talking about this, I want to service my freehub, which is also on a Lyne JB01, so I expect it's the same even though it's a microspline one. What lube would you guys recommend once everything is nice and clean? (looking for a brand/product, not just "lightweight grease")

Does this count?