What Have You Done to Your Bike Today?

At. Bloody. Last.
The trailer's landing gear may or may not end up working out for this application. I thought the gear was already adjusted for the largest possible wheel, but may have that wrong. Still need a road test, but it pulled nicely around the back yard despite the remaining snow.

Having finally succeeded at what should have been the relatively simple task of attaching Chip's trailer to my new fat bike, I went ahead and swapped the red water bottle cages for some purple ones. Burley's choice to eliminate the option of a QR skewer for compatible rides mean that this trailer is no longer compatible with bikes using QR skewers.

That is why I would also recommend against buying one of these despite the fact that I love the trailer itself. It seems to me that Burley put all their budget into engineering the trailer and only assigned some interns to slap together the bike-side hardware at the last second. To whit: having found the proper length thru-axle, I am now obligated to carry not one but a pair of open ended 17mm wrenches. The new axle is also much heavier than the one it replaces. I don't usually complain or care much about weight, but this is just silly and there's no reason for it.

Burley's recalled QR skewers were fiddly and difficult to properly tighten, but mine gave me no trouble at all past that. Not until they were all recalled for safety reasons. The replacement is significantly heavier, requires the use of tools to install and remove, and includes fiddly bits which lead me to question its effectiveness. In short, I don't trust and refuse to use it, even at the expense of not using that trailer any longer or running it on the 'unsafe' QR skewers. Hopefully it will work out on the fat bike. If not, the whole mess is going up for sale.

here comes the story.......my lizardskins bar tape is losing it's skin in high use areas on my fuji tread and i have a set of flared drops not being used so....flared drops coming soon to a tread near me and decided to give the bike some more pop with some camo green gel cork bar tape.....which is en route to a porch near me


bike........


new tape........



not impressed with LS tape lifespan based on usage......that is all.

Today, I installed the Wolf Tooth Components' B-Rad gear that I recently received. Spoiler alert: the stuff is awesome. I really hope the road and singletrack tests turn out like my back yard test did!
To be clear, the B-Rad3 rail mounted to the frame is not required to use the double bottle adapter. The former is used to relocate the cage or cages' mount location. In this case, I hoped to move the bottles' mount location down-frame using the B-Rad3 in order to gain clearance for my frame bag.

Though you have to look hard to see it, there is clearance between the two cages. Even loaded. Barely.

With bottles. Note the extra gunk on the LH bottle: it's the one that previously rode under the downtube.



With the frame bag. Though there is virtually no contact between frame and bottles, I'm considering an alternate mounting arrangement in order to move the bottles further down-tube. It's far better than it was. Also, I now have a set of free bosses underneath.



It goes without saying that mounting the water bottles like this will decrease clearance between said bottles and the rider's legs. Based on a spin around the back yard, it looks like there is still plenty of room. Less than before, but enough. I think. If the loss of clearance will matter anywhere, I imagine it will be on singletrack. I will find out when I can.

i12ride said:

How much weight does ur max water load weigh? I only fill my 3 liter camelbak halfway or so for a 3 hr ride. Looks like ur playing the color match game with purple. I did it with lime green then gave up and went black with a few things. Diggin the bike and that rail thing for adding more cages

Click to expand...

I am unsure of the weight, though it'd be easy enough to figure out: on the touring bike, I like to carry enough water to complete a summertime metric century. That looks like 3x750mL=2250mL+500mL=2750mL. That's 2.75L or 93oz of water on the bike. Plus my Camelbak with its 100oz bladder gives me 193oz capacity. That appears to come to 12lbs of water, if Siri is to be trusted. Wow. Also wow that doubling up my water bottle cages would give me just about the capacity lost by ditching the Camelbak.

To be fair, I do not need remotely that much water for the majority of my rides, even the multiple metric centuries where I've put the self-supported thing to the test. Those rides have generally been in places with ready and easy water supply options. Food, too. I aspire to ride in places where that's not true, where the supplies you bring are all you have for the next x miles. For that reason, I like to ride as though resupply isn't available, even when is.

I am definitely going for a purple and teal look on the fat bike. Never imagined I'd be that guy, but there it is, and I love it.

With all the talk about racks and packs I thought I would mention my struggle/solution to my rack pack. Over the last twenty years I have had a number or rack packs and they all eventually would end up sliding over to one side or the other and make me look like a doofus. I wanted to buy the topeak bag with the center track and snap in attachment. Problem in when I ordered my gravel touring bike they asked if I wanted the titanium rear rack and I said yes. Now I don’t want to discard a $200 titanium rack and replace it with a Topeak rack.

I searched the web for a rear rack bag that would attach more sturdy than the Velcro straps that come with most bags. I gave up and made holes in the bottom of one of my bags and zip tied it directly to the rack. It still has the Velcro straps in case the zip ties don’t hold up but it seems to work real well on my test rides.

Going back through these, it's looking like I'm a Wolf Tooth fan. It's turning out that way. FWIW, these bits were all purchased through regular retail outlets at regular cost. I seem to be going about this all wrong in that respect.

Still, here are the B-Rad 2, 3, and 4 rails all together. Note the B-Rad 2 has Wolf Tooth's Double Bottle Mount already installed.


B-Rad 4 installed in place of the B-Rad 3. Note the twin heavy duty zip ties used to stabilize the base of the B-Rad mount. It is primarily secured using the bike's triple bottle bosses. I could have done this same thing with the B-Rad 3, but it would have meant using only two of the three bosses. While I've no doubt that would have worked out just fine, it hurt my OCD.
This is about as low as the bottles can go. Clearance is tight but good all around. There may even be room to mount something skinny up toward the top of the rail.