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nev
The.Gren
@lae
My friend & I took our fat (Avanti Tracker) and semi-fat (Krampus) bikes for an Epic Ride™ last weekend.
We started off from Dunedin (the city farthest from London in the whole wide world). We had a coffee at sea level and reached a 750m hilltop called Swampy Summit around 11am. This was on-road for probably 15k, then the same again on a mixture of good gravel roads, bad gravel roads, and downright impassable 4wd tracks. We passed a huge group of about thirty hikers on the way.
Then we entered an area called the Silverpeaks which is very popular with hikers due to the scenery, and hunters due to the huge numbers of feral pigs. The hunters are quite popular with the hikers as you usually get a free pork chop from them if you happen to camp nearby. The terrain got steeper and the track narrower and narrower.
The place we were aiming for was right in the middle of the photo above - a logging road that took us to another track that led to my friend's house, which is by the little bay to the right of the photo.
Eventually we made it to the logging road to discover it was soon to be closed for some NZ rally stage. We rode to our junction and watched the cars for a bit while I fixed a slow puncture (still haven't set the front wheel up tubeless yet...)
Then down an unrideably steep and overgrown hiking route to a little stream, which we followed to my friend's house, arriving about 5pm. The trip definitely confirmed my view that the Krampus is seriously over-geared and under-braked, at least for this sort of terrain. Probably 90% of my riding was in the lowest three gears, and my forearms ached for days afterwards from yanking so hard on the brakes. I have ordered a 26t sprocket, although I'll have to do some witchcraft to make my XT brakes fit (they clip the spokes). Otherwise it handled the ride fantastically - no loss of traction even on the steepest out-of-the-saddle climbs or the boggiest corners, comfortable all day long, and the enormous wheel diameter is a bonus when you're too knackered to hop little obstacles, just a casual weight-shift will do it.
This weekend I rode my SS Inbred on my regular MTB ride. The narrow Mary bars are such a luxury threading between trees. I might chop the Krampus bars down to 730 or so.