Minus Ten Review - 48

All my images from this week ten years ago- Gone! So you get me staring at you!

Ten years ago this week on the blog I had a lot of images posted. All gone now. If you've been keeping up here with the "Minus Ten Review" posts, you know why.

I won't beat that dead horse again this week.

Ten years ago, Thanksgiving was late. So there was a Turkey Burn ride at the Camp. The third one saw a great turn out and a lot of fun was had. Looking back, it seems I had a single speed, but I don't know which one since the pics are gone now. Oh well.......

Also ten years ago I was telling you all about how much of a hassle it was that there was a waiting list for Trans Iowa. People were wanting to know when there place in line was coming up, and I suppose they were trying to make decisions on whether or not they needed to get into gear to start training for 300 plus miles of gravel. The thing was, I couldn't care less about maintaining a waiting list, and all the bother was just to accommodate folks that, in the end, typically represented the biggest part of no-shows anyway. After several years of attempting to make the waiting list work, I just ended it. Wow...... That made life a lot easier on my end! Plus, no one was in limbo for weeks. You either got into Trans Iowa, or you did not. There was no "try", to borrow a turn of phrase from a famous movie character.

Finally, I had a very interesting set of tires in for review. GEAX, (now just simply Vittoria), sent over three versions of the Saguaro. A full UST version, a tubeless tire requiring no sealant whatsoever, a "TNT" version- tubeless but requiring sealant, and a standard, folding bead version which required a tube.

Between them, I could tell how much weight a tire would gain from the differering constructions involved in the casings for each. The folding version, of course, was lightest. As I recall about 600+ grams or so for the 2.1" tire. The TNT was in the mid-700's. The full UST version was something close to 900 grams. Same width, same tread pattern. Only the tubeless variants had more weight due to different techniques necessary to help them seal up on an appropriate rim.

Obviously, a 300+ gram weight penalty for full UST meant that this choice quickly went the way of the dodo bird. You cannot get full UST anything in 29"er these days. It just isn't a viable option for a human powered machine. But.......with the advent of e-mtb rigs, might we seee a resurgence of full UST tires? I would not at all be surprised, because "hybrid powered bicycles", (which is what I am calling e-bikes now, because that's what they are), have power to spare to waste on heavier weight components, and in reality- heavier weight components are necessitated by the non-human power factor anyway. 

Anyway, 2008 was quickly coming to a close. In December I ran a series of retrospective posts, which you long time readers have seen as "rearview" posts. I may go into a bit of a different mode for the last four "Minus Ten Reviews" this year. Stay tuned.......