Minus Ten Review- 40

Ten years ago I rode in the pines on the North Side of Ingawanis.

Ten years ago on the blog I was a week back from Interbike and processing a bunch of info. That was back in the heyday of the 29"ers acceptance and growth. Things were humming right along then. Well......with the exception of the economy. The "Great Recession" was just hitting the news then and we were fearful in the cycling industry about just what that might mean for us going forward.

One of the things I was working through was trying to get a test bike for the then new Gates Carbon Drive, or just belts, if you will. I'd tried one the year before at Interbike when Gates was out in huge numbers touting the superiority of the system over traditional chains. Only........you couldn't use it with derailleurs, so...... Yeah. There's that. Oh! Internal geared hubs though! Right........ There's Rohloff and...... Expensive and anything else is not as reliable or doesn't have the range of gearing. Whatever.....

The point was that Gates was telling us this was the best thing since sliced bread, so I listened to their story, mounted up, and then got the belt to "ratchet". (Read: skipped a tooth) Funny thing happened then. Gates said they needed to go back to the drawing board. Yeah....... Marketing fail.

Then they came out with Center Track, which did a great job making single speed riding with a belt more reliable. But my set up will still ratchet in super high torque situations. And you still can't use a derailleur set up.

Then I also had just about wrapped up my fork experiment. The Blackbuck was the bike and I swapped a whole bunch of forks in and out of that bike to show that you could make anything work, if you liked the handling. Offset and axle to crown measurements were also discussed along with trail figure and what that all meant. It was fun, but I made my head hurt with all the tinkering with numbers.

And the first "Touring Tuesdays" posts were rolling out. That was a fun series which is being reposted every Sunday now for a while. Check it out......