28 January 2009 - 22:32Re-acclimation

Harder than I thought. Three awesome days on the bike in warm weather, and I am already whining about being back in winter. The air temperature was 5° last night as I took the beast for a walk. I was sad, and even a little grumpy with the cold.

Today, it is puking snow. As you can imagine, school is cancelled, meaning I get to accomplish practically nothing. The forcast is for 14-18″ on the valley floor, more in the mountains. Can you guess where I’ll be tomorrow morning…?

Something popped up in my inbox the other night, an update from Bike Rumor on the official release of the Niner carbon fork that I’ve been riding since November.

The first commentator shared his fear and distrust of Niner’s testing methodology. Now, I didn’t actually see his Armchair Engineer License, but since my degree is from the prestigious Lazy-Boy University I’m just guessing that he didn’t quite understand this particular testing method…

The test as pictured is a shear force test, the steerer is help firmly in place, and the dropouts are thrashed back and forth with measured force repeatedly until it breaks. It’s called cycle testing. Back and forth, back and forth. Kinda like when you might be riding a bike down something bumpy huh?

Camp J

Now, I’m not on Niner’s payroll, but they do let me test products for them from time to time. I wouldn’t ride it at all if I thought it was sketchy in any way. It is a widely known fact that Niner tests their products against a stringent set of thresholds put forth by the German DIN Plus standard for load and cycle testing. We all know that Germans are sticklers for details, er Audi, Benz or BMW anyone?

Anyway, I don’t think Dicky knew I already had one of these. Despite that fact, I still may get another one, possibly in glow-in-the-dark blue to match my finest skid free extra husky boys footie PJs. We’ll need that extra light when I have to wheel Dicky’s drunk keister around on my handlebars at SSWC09.