R O T H A R . C O M

I’m off out to Switzerland on Sunday. There’s still some snow out there apparently so Snowboarding should definitely be an option. It’s been over two years since I went boarding in Andorra and I’m looking forward to getting back out on the slopes and getting some late season sunshine.

It’s been a while since I’ve had a chance to read some other sites and see what’s been happening on t’internet. I notice that Dave has had a bit of a rethink about his site over here, all that lovely photography isn’t there at the moment, but I’m sure some of it will be back soon.

This is a new site, bearbackbiking, that I found on Singletrackworld not so long ago. It comes highly recommended by Jed because the person behind it also has a passion for trying to fit mountain bikes into cars that really were not ever designed with transporting anything other than a driver and possibly a passenger in mind.

Going down under, it seems that 26inches are still going strong. They have some summaries of the latest news as reported else where, but have done a tidy job of putting it all together in a fairly neat and tidy package. They seem to be tied in fairly tightly with those purveyors of fine bike apparel, Lab-Gear.

Moving back into the Northern hemisphere and not too far from here, the site redesign and improvement concept has led to Rob Lewis and all over at BETD to launch a new site some time since I last visited. It’s a fine looking setup and all the old stuff still seems to be on there, plus lots of new bits and pieces.

There’s more on the new RockShox over at the Bike magazine website and those crazy fixed geared offroaders have made a seasonal adjustment to the 63XC site. I don’t know if it was tied into the equinox or anythin, but it’s all good. A bit like Corty now being in Canada. I’m now the only one of the three Chris’ still in the UK. And if I include our recent export to Norway (how’s it going out there?) I’m feeling even more left out.

Now the road bike project is still in a fairly infantile stage. I’ve sorted a saddle out now, so I’m only a complete groupset and a pair of wheels away from a bike. Then I’ll find out if the frame fits. In the mean time Lance is wondering yet again how long he can be bothered to race the big events, when he seems to get such a buzz at just rocking up at small town events and mixing it up with the locals. I suppose that it’s unlikely he’ll be seen on a Cannondale anytime soon.

Over and out.

I’ve finally transferred all the old content over to this new site format and added in a lot of stuff that wasn’t on here before. I’m pretty please with the results – there’s been a lot of work involved.

Despite the removal of what was considered the most dangerous section of cobbles on the Paris-Roubaix parcours – the dreaded Forêt d’Arenberg – the lead rider for French team Cofidis, Stuart O’Grady, believes Sunday’s epic race could actually be harder without the famously-brutal section.

“Before you could feel the race would chill out a bit (after Arenberg), as the race would then enter good sections of asphalt, they would take in some food and drinks and then prepare for the next section. But now, they’ve replaced it with absolute goat-tracks, it’s constantly twisting left and right; there just no place to recover,” he said. “It’s just going to be full-on.” (Cyclingnews)

Boonen won the Paris-Roubaix, just beating Hincapie, which is a good result. There’s been some interesting kit setup for this event including soft-tail OCLV Treks and dodgy drilled stems.

Finally I don’t follow football too closely, but I did find this result very amusing. Good effort from the Norfolk boys.

The muddy gritstone of the north has claimed another set of brake pads, the only issue is this only became apparent as I was assembling the bike out of the car at the beginning of last nights ride. It doesn’t inspire much confidence to know the only thing slowing you down is metal on metal where there should be disc composite. Front wheel braking was used more than normal which was interesting given the riding was on the wet and slippery side where you don’t really want the front wheel getting squirrelly on the descents.

Glass. Metal. Ceramic. Stone. Look how it get’s this penny: Good as new! This Cillit Bang remix made it onto Radio 1 this morning – for someone that’s fairly good publicity. I hadn’t heard the E-Sure remix either – calm down dear – it’s surely a winner. The otherone still doing the rounds albeit now in dubbed version is the annoying sound…

I’ve been looking for some ways to do things on the web recently and came across the SlayerOffice site. There’s some really neat solutions on there and I’m thinking of what I can build in and where.

Finally this is a bit cheeky and this is bad news for the Macclesfield Forest Downhill Course. And this is a bit Intense.

Friday night was the long awaited cheeky velodrome session. A load of mountain bikers, many with singlespeed riding experience, some with fixed riding experience and a few that had ridden the track before. It was good three hour session with a bit of racing, a bit of falling off and probably too much baggy clothing and too many peaked helmets to be aerodynamically efficient, but that wasn’t really the main objective…

More photos here and here

April Fools was disappointing really. I think I read something about the EU banning right hand drive cars in Europe in the near future, but I though this novelty fondue set was probably more likely to catch people out.

Recent research has revealed just how important your ranking in google and other top search engine is to actually getting people visiting your site. The higher the rank and therefore the higher up the page you are, recent research has now demonstrated, really does affect the likelihood that your site will be favoured over those results lower down the page.

Check out these vintage wool jerseys. Some classics that are now being reproduced in high quality merino, the Alfa Romeo top look great. Finally there’s some great work on the preloaded site – check out the heart attack link for a clever redesign of an arcade classic and shooting stars.

I’ve added quite a lot more from the old site back into the new version. There’s more to come over the next few weeks.

Today’s is going to be a none bike related post. I’ve been having a lot of problems with the site guestbook since I relaunched the site. It’s the fourth piece of guetbook software I’ve tried over the years and I’m currently using Matt Wright’s simple guestbook. The problem is that this seems to be a known favourite with spammers, which has meant that over the last few weeks a number of spammers or spam robots have made entries.

Now these have tended to be adverts for drugs and given this is a cycling website, that might not be so out of place, but as it’s now reached irritating proportions a fix was needed. This has come in the shape of Junkeater, a tidy little PHP utility that filters entries for spam origins and also includes a nice little javascript confirmation utility. First impressions are that it seems to do work, so I’ll have to see if it solves the problem over the next few days.

Photos from yesterdays Langsett ride are now up here. The weather wasn’t great and so the pictures are tinged with that grey overcast tone, that I think is the reason that British weather has received unfavourable stereotypes with foreign visitors. It was warm for the time of year and the moisture just ended up being trapped as low cloud.

Rock Shox have launched their new forks in the wake of Manitou‘s not particularly inspiring new line up previewed last week. It looks like Rock Shox is going to claw back some sales with the new additions, but this will be no simple task with recent market share increases for Fox and Marzocchi. I think they have a good chance of regaining ground in the XC and Freeride (as opposed to all mountain) markets, to the detriment of Marzocchi and Manitou, manufacturers who seem to have become associated with other aspects of the market in the last two years.

This is the current Trek Fuel OCLV Carbon XC race bike, probably one of the most materially advanced full suspension bikes on the market.

The choice today was either to head over to North Wales and ride some man made trails or to stay local and try and tackle a new route in the Peaks. The peaks option won through and I ended up heading up to Langsett and doing a big ride around the reservoirs in that area. I took the singlespeed out again and it’s the first time I’ve chosen it for a big ride in the Peaks.

I’m still running 34:16 from Thetford, which if you get enough weight behind, is okay for most of the riding on offer. There were a couple of highlights like riding the Snow track that runs to the Summit of the Woodhead Pass and a few other well constructed tracks. The rest of the ride was a mudbath, traversing poorly drained moorland and bog.

The winter boots proved their worth once again, but there were a couple of times the front wheel sank up to it’s axle and pitched me into the mud over the bars. In all there was enough good riding to make it a worthwhile route, but I don’t think I’ll be going back there until we get summer drought conditions for a month. Most of the trails just seem to double up as wet weather streams. Photos will be added soon.

Went local today looking for some new riding spots. I hooked up wit the Fallowfield Loopline and headed east and took the trail as far as it currently goes, ending up at Debdale Park. Whilst it isn’t a mind blowing place to go there’s enough varied riding to make it a suitable alternative to the Trans Pennine Trail along the Mersey, with singletrack riding around the reservoirs and out by the golf course.

I even found a jump spot, carved out of a bit of waste land by some motocrossers, that with a bit of playing about on demonstrated another great characteristic property of the Deluxe Singlespeed – it’s a great bike in the air, almost like a 26inch BMX. After finding an alternate way back, through the Park I tried to link up with the Trans Pennine Trail by riding into Reddish Vale and looking for the Country Park.

Despite riding around for 30 minutes, I couldn’t find it and ended up going home the way I had arrived, but later consultation of the map showed I had only been one street away from finding the road that leads down to the Cafe. In future there’s now a way of linking in some interesting additional riding to the normal river run.

I found a link to this Singlespeed website earlier in the week. It’s the first time I’ve visited the site and it looks like there is some interesting stuff on there. Might be worth taking a look.

Last night saw nightriding by moonlight up on the moors above Oxenhope with some friends. Chris is back from the US for a week and Mike Ferrentino is over at the moment doing some research. It was a great night for riding and there were a few beers along the way too.

I’ve updated the site with the Zermatt pictures. I’ve relected the best and resized them a bit bigger than before, there’s going to be some more stuff added to the escapism part of the site soon.

The new Howies catalogue is out now. You can find most of the new stuff on the website now.

Not been feeling too clever recently. I think ‘work’ is catching up with me, which may mean if I keep on at full tilt I’ll be okay, but I reckon there’s a fairly good chance that now it knows I’m feeling the pressure and I have to keep looking over my shoulder I’ll probably end up getting ill, which is a bit crap.

So I’ve spent the weekend cleaning bikes and building wheels, including the new singlespeed wheels. They’re great. Wasp noises now accompany every freewheeling moment. There are some new pics up here including the drilled Phil Wood bottom bracket shell. I haven’t built a pair of wheels from scratch in a few years and there was some kind of zen moment over the weekend doing the truing when I rememebered why I used to like it. So I’ve got a minoura wheel jig for now, but in the long term I still want one of these – these are the daddy’s of all wheel truing jigs, the dogs bollocks and the last time I checked were about £500. They also weigh about as much as a Fiat 126.

Time Outdoors seems to be a new website which I haven’t heard discussed anywhere. Which may be the problem with being in a very small clique. It seems to be similar to the old madformountaingbiking site – they were an outfit that were around a few years ago during the .com boom. It all looks very reasonable too.

Here is some mindless bike related violence to keep you occupied and this will probably let you calculate how many times you need to walk to the shops to burn off all those donuts.