Any question answered...

rent a banger from sadcars
if you get something else get the max insurance as the gravel will scratch it up

For any car hire I'd get third party insurance from someone such as Questor, Eversure and icarhireinsurance

yeh i saw a bunch of "gravel insurance" options and thought they were taking the piss. apparently not.

ace. what time of year did you go and make Mrs H a once in a lifetime offer to be the luckiest girl alive?

yeah. just use these guys: https://sadcars.com/
P.S. you must go to the westfjords. was by far the most beautiful bit of our trip. we went at the end of winter in the cheapest possible 2wd hatchback. it handled the snow fine.

I recently purchased an alloy cross race bike and just noticed that if I allow the wheel to sit naturally in the dropouts, the wheel is not aligned correctly and causes cantilever brake and gearing issues.

This is easily fixed by aligning the wheel by eye and clamping the QR skewer - however, this obviously isn't ideal if I'm looking to swap out the wheel quickly.

Is this normal? the frame has no accident damage and looks pretty much as good as new - I'm thinking it may be a QC problem from the factory...it's a Paul Milnes frameset, so not high-end manufacturing.

Can this problem be fixed? I think to file a few mm from the NDS dropout could potentially address it.

If anyone has any suggestions, I'd be happy to hear them.

is it definitely the frame and not the wheel?

Wheel spins perfectly true

I had this on my TCX, it wasn't by much though and shifting was fine. Braking wasn't, but then when you have cantis you can't shift the blame on anything else.
Have you bought the frame 2nd-hand? if it's not aligned properly there's only so much you can do.

yes, but how's the dish on the wheel?

@greenhell

we went in october

Thanks for the response folks!

I've just tried another wheel in the frame and it does not have the same issue - looks like it's the wheelset at fault.

Why would a wheelset be dished off center?

Is it ok to align it by eye in the dropouts and use them to race?

This is the wheelset in question

If you’re just staying in Reykjavik, with just two people I found it more cost effective to use Reykjavik Excursions to do the touristy stuff and not have to worry about parking in the city centre.
We went in April and I wouldn’t have wanted to drive in the snowstorms or late enough to catch the aurora borealis (or both).

I had this on a milnes 'columbus' frame. Standard for budget euro geometry frames I reckon. Would obviously be a disaster on a disc frame.

Top tips chaps, thanks. Plan to spend best part of a week driving about seeing the sights and not dying from exposure. Was tempted to book off season but reconsidering. Many roads are closed in the wintery months.

The BRM tri-fist love tour seems a good option.

Don’t spend too long in Reykjavik. Make sure you see the join in the tectonic plates. Find metal churches.

1 Attachment

Water got inside my front bicycle light today. I think the usb cover wasn’t closed properly. Now the light won’t switch off.

Any recommendations on how to best dry it out?

Place it in a bowl of uncooked rice* in an airing cupboard if you have one.

*Or silica gel if you have any.

Yes we hired a medium-sized Chevrolet petrol hatchback. You don't need a 4x4. No hire cars are permitted to go off-grid. It's a really good idea to obey this.

We went in March a few years ago. Hired a 4x4 Skoda estate. It was pretty hair raising to see other people in tiny hired hatchbacks swerving across icy roads in blizzards. In the towns and cities the roads were salted and cleared but further out not at all. We felt safe in the Skoda.

It was incredible to come and go from our hotel, deep snow could be drifted from one side of the road to the other in a couple of hours, so the landscape could keep changing.

I'm not sure it will bring anything more to the discussion but I recently had a new wheelset assembled and came across a similar problem when mounting front wheel on the frame whereas I did not have any problem with the previous wheelset. The wheel did not seem to want to mount centered however turns out after a couple of playing with putting the wheel on and off, it magically ended up putting in properly. Maybe something was in the way (conical spring or whatever)

Quick release springs on the skewer incorrectly?

Best I could do was put it in a tupperware of rice, then put that on a radiator.

When I try to switch it off the led just gets dimmer.

makes sense. i have no particular burning desire to marlboro-man about in a 4x4, i can do that at home.

Make sure the car has at minimum snow tyres (if you are going in winter). On one journey we visited a tiny town and had to cross a small bridge. An hour later the bridge was 3 foot deep in snow. A car had been beached on the snow. Thankfully other drivers had spades in their cars and dug the stranded car out and cleared the bridge.