"Big" News

Well, if you have been living under a rock lately, I can forgive your ignorance, but those that read this blog surely know that I have become a recent convert to "fat biking", which I can blame my Salsa Cycles Mukluk for, (bum hub or no). Well, now that love has been seriously stoked!

Moonlander- Seriously fat!

Yep! There it be. The 4.7" tires, the steel frame, and the "Surly" moniker in the scrawled script. Feast yer eyes on the largeness.

Obviously, some folks will be stumbling all over themselves to get one of these. I am mildly intrigued. There are some things I can embrace about this bike. Other things are just......well, very Surly-ish. 

Surly stuck with 135mmOLD hubs front and rear necessitating a monstrous 28mm offset to the frame and wheels. This so it could clear the 2 X 9 drive train, which itself is customized to fit the frame and purposes of the bike. That is cool. But......I have found that I use a triple quite frequently. 

The Moonlander may swing me over yet. I'll wait to see about it after Interbike and hopefully, a test ride.

100mm wide

I'm more excited for the Clownshoe rims, which are 100mm wide. That's 18mm wider than my current Rolling Darryl rims. I think these in combination with a Endomorph rear and Big Fat Larry in front might be the ticket to the "slightly more float" that I craved for last winter. Plus, I am reasonably sure that this would fit my current Mukluk, and, er.......something else I have up my sleeve!

Then there are the tires. The "Black Floyd", which is a wide, smoother treaded tire, looks perfect for gravel, pavement, or smoother surfaces where treaded tires make less sense on a fat bike. 

The "Nate", a really heavily knobbed 3.8 incher, looks to be the perfect rock crawling tire for El Paso fat biking, or on real off road rides where grip is needed. I can totally see having all these tires in the arsenal for my fat bike. (And future fat bikes. Yes- there will be more!)

So, the tire and rim offerings coming out make more sense to have for my needs in terms of the fat bike stuff.

Surly Ogre 29"er

I may retire my '03 Karate Monkey. Hold on....it all will make sense here in a minute! 

You see, I've been wondering how long my '03 KM is going to hold out. I would be sorely heartbroken if it broke, or failed in some other way. The BB is stuck in it, and I know it is knocking now, which isn't a good sign.

Now I see the Ogre. This is Surly's take on a 700c/29"er Troll, which is there "utility bike". I basically have put the KM into "utility mode" for the past several years, but it isn't ideally suited to that purpose. For instance, the KM has no rack mounts, no real good fender mounts, and I can't really love that rear drop out/disc brake set up. Never have. The Ogre solves all that and has trailer capabilities as well.

I have all the parts to build one now. I just would be adding a rack, and off I would go doing "lite errands". This would also become my foul weather commuter, and I could totally see an Alfine 11 speed hub on this one. Add the Alfine generator hub up front, and it's all done. A total, go anywhere, anytime rig for my commute/errand needs. My '03 KM would be returned to mtb duty then? Not so fast!

2012 Karate Monkey

Enter the 2012 Karate Monkey. It has ditched the cantilever posts, (finally!), and Surly lightened up the fork a bit.

The other changes made throughout the years since 2003 have also been retained: Different butted tubing, newer, nicer rear drop outs, "braced" top tube for better stand over, and continuous housing cable runs. Nice things to have, and I would like that.

Now I would transfer over a lot of the stuff from the current KM set up, retain the single speed deal, drop bar, and us it for single track. It wouldn't cost me much extra beyond the frame.

My current KM would be hung from the wall. It has served me well all these years, and this would give me time to carefully remove the bottom bracket at some point, after hours, days, and perhaps months of soaking in some magic elixir!

At any rate, Surly has really brought out some very interesting stuff for 2012. It will take a while to process all of this. And ya know what? They haven't shown us everything up their sleeve yet either......