Let's offroad / mountain bike / mtb / ride dirt

I’m looking for some carbon wheels for my Epic.
Mainly XC riding, running 2.3 tyres.
Looking at Hunt Proven XC wheels.
Any other suggestions in that kind of price range?

Dt swiss? Duke? I think beast will be over budget.

When did SPD shoes become so fucking boring in terms of colour? I need a new pair of race shoes and everything comes in black or grey, but I want something brightly coloured. Boring.

I want something brightly coloured.

"Gravel" turned everything to shit. Sorry "earthy" colours.

Just use overshoes? They're going to be covered in mud anyway, right?

A white pair of the Sworks Recon is pretty flashy. Or if you can find a pair of the metallic Lake MX332s (which you're right, they only make in boring colours now)

These are a bit garish:

Andy has a point, even those copper ones are a bit plain by MTB standards.

New Fizik xc shoes come in purple

I tried a pair of the Vento Ferox Carbon shoes from Fizik, and they felt really uncomfortable, unfortunately.

Ah. They are quite narrow. Work great for me, luckily, though all mine are grey/black coz I’m an unimaginative drone

I love these, had a pair of blue ones that wore till they died. Could not find the orange ones in my size, so had to settle for black. Clean up very well.

Shame they don't do an equivalent with Boas, Sectors are good, but not the same as these

Gaerne and Vittoria still do some garish colours, their fit is very 'italian' though. Read narrow and tapered toe.

This is the problem. As I get older I seem to be much less tolerant of squeezing my feet into narrow shoes and them being uncomfortable.

Snap. I was blaming that on being a lot hotter out here, but age is quite a likely culprit.

I think I want my Sidis to be a 47 in terms of width, but a 44 in terms of depth.

And a 45 in terms of length

Scott and bontrager do some slightly louder shoes. I’m with you though, not enough metallic purple shoes

Wide (er than most) and loud

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For the second year running, I've gone riding in Scotland and it's been sunny. Although it did try and snow a bit earlier, even though it was 12⁰C

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Mick Hannah was on our uplift bus at Innerleithen today. And that's the only place we saw him, because he rides at a million miles an hour. Proto Yeti DH bike looks hawt in real life. Again, I only got to see it on the bus, so have no idea how quick it goes down hill

I’m about to take ownership of my first ever mtb. My hope is that I will mainly use it to get into some xc racing but it’s first job will be a 4 day bike packing trip in mid June.

Are there any rules of thumb for setting up my position on an mtb. Since it’s xc/bike packing I was thinking I’d try to replicate the fit triangle I have on my cyclocross bike and then tinker from there. Does that sound reasonable?

Put the saddle at the right height, run a stem that allows your elbows to bend a fair bit, run your brake levers flatter than you would think.
That's about it.

You'll want less reach than with drop bars, because wide bars = arms shorter. Unless you don't want wide bars, but everyone wants wide bars.
Basically this ^.

View from the top of The Golfie?

Last year I built this GT LTS retro mod thing but I only really rode it properly once before getting frustrated with leaky forks and brakes, stripping it and hanging it in my garage and almost selling it.

I realised recently that I had enough decent parts to put it back together so I did that, and fitted it with 1 x 10 stuff this time (so it was a bit different to my singlespeed Honzo ESD) and rode it at Glentress yesterday and out in the hills above Comrie today.

Positive:

I’ve really enjoyed riding it this weekend, at Glentress I only had to push for about 5% of the climbs as opposed to probably around 40-50% when I ride there singlespeed. I still had to push up the absolute cock ache of a climb at the end of loch Turret today but I did a lap of the Comrie trails when I got back there and was really getting into riding the short sharp techy bits of the climbs.

Negative:

Since putting the bike back together I’ve been butting up against the capacity of the tubed 26 x 2.4” rear tyre to smash through rocky terrain and realising that even with the little bit of suspension, it’s not as capable as the tubeless 29 x 2.6” tyre on the Honzo.

I’ve also found that the difference in stiffness between a 135mm qr dropout rear and with suspension pivots and 148mm thru axle handrail rear and is quite noticeable.

I’ve realised I should probably move the gears onto the Honzo. Giving up having it as a singlespeed is going to be difficult but I think I’d really enjoy having gears on it. I imagine it’ll be even better on the technical climbs than the full sus.

Maybe I should run with both bikes in my fleet for a little while longer.

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There are plenty of classy options on AliExpress, albeit at risk of "style" over substance

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