My latest update:
I didn’t get to ride last weekend, with the weather anything but ideal plus work to catch up on. On Wednesday I got out on the patio for an hour or so, just pedaling forward and backward along the wall. I understand that it’s not so great to keep depending on a support like that for too long, but I feel like I’m still getting a lot out of it, developing my fore-aft (pitch axis) equilibrium and finding out where in the pedal cycle I need to weight the pedals and where I shouldn’t be doing that.
On Thursday I didn’t try to ride, but I was excited to get the Maxxis Hookworm tire I’d ordered for my 26" muni. (Still nowhere near ready to try that one yet but it’s fun having it to look to forward to.) I also went ahead and switched the tire out on the 20" Avenir I’ve been riding.
Commenting in Uni Lateral’s journal topic, I mentioned that I thought the stock 1.75" wide tire might just not have enough air volume for a grown man riding on anything other than a perfectly smooth hard surface. It seemed like there was a very small range in pressure between enough to keep the rim off the ground and so much that every crack and bump just about stopped it.
I had a pair of 20" IRC Flatlander tires sitting in the shed that I’d bought for a bike project that wound up not happening and I gave some reasons why I hadn’t tried swapping one of those on yet. But in the process of writing I realized that it was probably as good a time as any to switch. And I’m glad I did. The 1.95" IRC tire is about 1/2" bigger in overall diameter and it measures out with the calipers at 1.85" actual width versus 1.60" for the stock Duro. (Photo below.) The profiles are pretty different but I’m guessing it’s about 25-30% more total volume. And it really does feel smoother and a lot less twitchy to ride, much better at handling the surfaces I’m trying to ride on.
(There’s some frosty white stuff on it that resulted from being stored through a couple of summers in a shed where it gets pretty warm. I believe it’s a kind of wax that’s compounded into the rubber, that’s supposed to migrate to the surface to protect it from UV sunlight damage. I scrubbed some of it off with citrus cleaner but it didn’t scrub very well. Nearly all of what was left came off when I rode it though, after taking the photo and re-installing the wheel.)
This evening (Friday) I rode for well over two hours and it went pretty well. After warming up on the familiar patio, I moved to the driveway, where I’d had no success at all on my first outing three weeks ago. This time I had many well controlled rides, some beyond 25 feet. I also found that getting mounted up had become much less of a touchy business. Basically I brace myself on whatever’s handy, get my feet on the pedals, push off, and sort it out once I’m rolling. It feels like I’m still a long way from free mounting but that’s gotta be a step in the right direction.
After that I went back to the patio and worked for a long time on riding off the edge and continuing across the lawn–now that I’m using a tire that’s wide enough to handle a little bit of rough terrain. I experienced some pretty spectacular wipe-outs but my pads and helmet did their job, and at best I was able to cover three or four full crank turns on the grass several times.
All in all, it was a good evening of practice and I’m really happy with the bigger tire. I’ll never know how much of the improvement was due to the tire and how much due to being a couple of days more experienced, but the tire seems to suit what I’m trying to do a lot better, and the switch-over never set back my progress at all. I’m definitely feeling the after-effects of a long hard practice session about now but I’m eager to get out and try it again some more this weekend.
The support on here is just Great !
