Mountain Bike Recommendations.

Quoted message said:

Trying to get back into biking and need some recommendations on current

bike

Quoted message said:

models. This would be used to cycle to work as well.

Would like to spend between £1,000 and £1,500.

Cheers

You can have a lot of fun for that amount of money.....

First consideration is hardtail or full suspension?

For £1000 you can get a very good hardtail with good forks and groupset. My
personal current favourite is the Cannondale F800 with Lefty Fork, now
reduced to £1000. Or you can get a Specialized Stumpy for about that, I
think, if you shop around. Basically you'll get a good frame, fairly
lightweight with a mixture of LX and XT kit, and a Manitou or possibly Fox
fork.

For full-suss £1000 will get you in the door, but you might want to go up to
£1500 to get a better setup. WMB have a test this month of 3 fullsussers for
around £1500 - they recommend the Specialized Stumpy FSR and the Marin Rift
Zone. Personally I'm a big fan of the Enduro.

Plus there's a range of Trek Fuel and Liquid bikes you can get, a couple of
Kona fs bikes etc.

I don't know how long you've been out of mtbing, but FS technology is
currently moving towards designs that eliminate pedal bob. So you really
need to try out a few bikes to see which best suits you, as they all
approach the problem in different ways.

Of course, you could just go into your LBS and tell them you have
£1000-£1500 to spend, and watch their eyes light up.....

HTH
Nick

Wish I had £1000-£1500 for a new bike....

in message <[email hidden]>, Gary Coutts

(') said:

Trying to get back into biking and need some recommendations on
current bike models. This would be used to cycle to work as well.

Look, there is something systematic going on here. People keep asking
about using mountain bikes to commute. Don't do this.

A mountain bike (particularly if you're spending fifteen hundred quid)
is a very specialised piece of machinery designed to cope with very
steep gradients on very soft, loose, broken or slippery surfaces. For a
whole variety of reasons it's completely unsuitable for use on urban
roads which have shallow gradients and stable, hard surfaces. The
suspension's wrong, the tyres are wrong, the gearing is wrong, the
riding position is wrong. All of these things will sap your energy and
make your commute much harder work than you need. Meantime, the luggage
and lighting accessories you stick on the bike to commute will
compromise it when you do take it into the territory it was designed
for.

Quoted message said:

Would like to spend between £1,000 and £1,500.

If you have this sort of money I suggest you do one of two things:

(i) If you really want to take your bike into serious hill country, buy
a cheap basic hybrid for commuting at say £250 (e.g. Edinburgh Contour,
£214), and spend the remainder on a serious mountain bike. If you're
doing this you will need to decide whether you want a cross country
bike or a downhill bike, or something in between ('all mountain' or
'freeride'😉; and whether or not you want full suspension (£1200 will
buy you a very good hardtail, but is at the low end for a good full
suspension bike).

(ii) If you don't want to take your bike into hill country, *and* you
have a very secure place to keep your bike at work, get a really good
hybrid.

--
[email hidden] (Simon Brooke) http://www.jasmine.org.uk/~simon/

<p>Schroedinger's cat is <blink><strong>NOT</strong></blink> dead.</p>

Simon Brooke said:

in message <[email hidden]>, Gary Coutts

(') said:

Trying to get back into biking and need some recommendations on
current bike models. This would be used to cycle to work as well.

Look, there is something systematic going on here. People keep asking
about using mountain bikes to commute. Don't do this.

A mountain bike (particularly if you're spending fifteen hundred quid)
is a very specialised piece of machinery designed to cope with very
steep gradients on very soft, loose, broken or slippery surfaces. For a
whole variety of reasons it's completely unsuitable for use on urban
roads which have shallow gradients and stable, hard surfaces. The
suspension's wrong, the tyres are wrong, the gearing is wrong, the
riding position is wrong. All of these things will sap your energy and
make your commute much harder work than you need. Meantime, the luggage
and lighting accessories you stick on the bike to commute will
compromise it when you do take it into the territory it was designed
for.

Interesting. My normal bike for getting to work is broken at the
minute, so I'm using my mountain bike, and I can't think of any way
it's more difficult to ride than the normal bike. I put my luggage in
a saddlebag which is easily removed for off roading, and I always use
crud catchers anyway.

This would be different if I actually needed lights at the minute, but
even so, it's just a case of clipping one over the front bars and one
round the seatpost.

My main reason not to do it all the time is one of theft, but there is
one of convenience, too. But it's certainly no harder to ride on the
streets, and it's a good mountain bike.

A

Ambrose Nankivell said:

Interesting. My normal bike for getting to work is broken at the
minute, so I'm using my mountain bike, and I can't think of any way
it's more difficult to ride than the normal bike. I put my luggage in
a saddlebag which is easily removed for off roading, and I always use
crud catchers anyway.

Crud catchers compared to formal mudguards with mudflaps just aren't on
the same planet when it comes to effectiveness in reducing road spray.
And if you can't tell any other difference then either you're really
good at changing tyres in a hurry or you have road tyres on your MTB
(compromising its ability to cope with soft ground) or knobblies on your
commuter, and they just suck /sooooo/ much on the road you could box
them up with a brush and a crevice tool and re-market them as a vacuum
cleaner.

Riding a serious MTB for commuting will just coat an expensive set of
too low gears with road crunge while wasting long travel suspension
where it won't be any great help and say to potential thieves "Look
here, Steal Me! Steal Me!". I'm with Simon on this one, it's just a
case of "but why would you want to do that?".

Pete.
--
Peter Clinch Medical Physics IT Officer
Tel 44 1382 660111 ext. 33637 Univ. of Dundee, Ninewells Hospital
Fax 44 1382 640177 Dundee DD1 9SY Scotland UK
net [email hidden] http://www.dundee.ac.uk/~pjclinch/

Peter Clinch said:

Ambrose Nankivell said:

Interesting. My normal bike for getting to work is broken at the
minute, so I'm using my mountain bike, and I can't think of any way
it's more difficult to ride than the normal bike. I put my luggage in
a saddlebag which is easily removed for off roading, and I always use
crud catchers anyway.

Crud catchers compared to formal mudguards with mudflaps just aren't
on the same planet when it comes to effectiveness in reducing road
spray. And if you can't tell any other difference then either you're
really good at changing tyres in a hurry or you have road tyres on
your MTB (compromising its ability to cope with soft ground) or
knobblies on your commuter, and they just suck /sooooo/ much on the
road you could box them up with a brush and a crevice tool and
re-market them as a vacuum cleaner.

I know crud catchers aren't really up to the job, but neither are the
mudguards on my moderately expensive bike designed for commuting.

Likewise, the tyres on the mountain bike have a nice flexible carcass
underneath their knobbles, whereas the tyres on the commuter bike have
a stiff as anything carcass, which only run with sufficiently little
rolling resistance when pumped up to maximum pressure, which opens up
the cuts in the tyre and increases the puncture risk.

Quoted message said:

Riding a serious MTB for commuting will just coat an expensive set of
too low gears with road crunge while wasting long travel suspension
where it won't be any great help and say to potential thieves "Look
here, Steal Me! Steal Me!". I'm with Simon on this one, it's just a
case of "but why would you want to do that?".

But, yes, in general a well designed commuter bike would be much
better. It just seems that they're hard to get hold of. I had one I
made the old-fashioned way (steel frame from mid-price mountain bike &
upgrade components as you go along), and when it got nicked I tried
buying an all-in-one replacement, and found that it had all these
issues. At a retail price of £450.

So, I do agree with Simon's point about not wanting to use a mountain
bike for commuting, but he's just wrong about them being more
difficult to ride on the road than a cheapish hybrid.

The reason not to commute on an MTB is because of the convenience of
having a bike you can leave outside the shops, that always has luggage
capability, and that you can fit good road tyres (I suggest
Continental Top Touring 26x1.75), good mudguards and good lighting
to. To suggest you can get this for £250-350 is a bit of an
overstatement, though. I'd say it starts a bit higher than that.

A

Ambrose Nankivell said:

I know crud catchers aren't really up to the job, but neither are the
mudguards on my moderately expensive bike designed for commuting.

So what have you got? The SKS on the 'bent and the Brompton standard=20
ones on the folder are certainly better at dealing with road crunge than =

the crud catcher on the front of the MTB.

Quoted message said:

Likewise, the tyres on the mountain bike have a nice flexible carcass
underneath their knobbles, whereas the tyres on the commuter bike have
a stiff as anything carcass, which only run with sufficiently little
rolling resistance when pumped up to maximum pressure, which opens up
the cuts in the tyre and increases the puncture risk.

Are these the ones you're recommending later on in this post? Doesn't=20
sound like you're very leased with them... I've had a very good=20
puncture record from Schwalbe Marathons running at 100 psi (think 3 in 3 =

years, one last week but the tyre needed replacing anyway as it was=20
rather well worn). My subjective feel is they're better in the wet than =

the Conti TT I used to run, though that's hardly a scientific point.

Quoted message said:

The reason not to commute on an MTB is because of the convenience of
having a bike you can leave outside the shops, that always has luggage
capability, and that you can fit good road tyres (I suggest
Continental Top Touring 26x1.75), good mudguards and good lighting
to. To suggest you can get this for =C2=A3250-350 is a bit of an
overstatement, though. I'd say it starts a bit higher than that.

Where doesn't, say, the Kona Smoke fit in there?

Pete.
--=20
Peter Clinch Medical Physics IT Officer
Tel 44 1382 660111 ext. 33637 Univ. of Dundee, Ninewells Hospital
Fax 44 1382 640177 Dundee DD1 9SY Scotland UK
net [email hidden] http://www.dundee.ac.uk/~pjclinch/

Peter Clinch said:

Ambrose Nankivell said:

I know crud catchers aren't really up to the job, but neither are the
mudguards on my moderately expensive bike designed for commuting.

So what have you got? The SKS on the 'bent and the Brompton standard
ones on the folder are certainly better at dealing with road crunge
than the crud catcher on the front of the MTB.

Don't know. They're no-namers AFAICT, and not much wider than the
tyres. I concede that they probably keep me drier than crud catchers,
but nothing like acceptably so. I should probably mention that about 4
or 5 km of my commute's along a canal.

Quoted message said:

Are these the [tyres] you're recommending later on in this post? Doesn't
sound like you're very leased with them... I've had a very good
puncture record from Schwalbe Marathons running at 100 psi (think 3 in
3 years, one last week but the tyre needed replacing anyway as it was
rather well worn). My subjective feel is they're better in the wet
than the Conti TT I used to run, though that's hardly a scientific
point.

No, they're Maxxis Xeniths that I'm having the problems with. The Contis
were on my old bike. I agree that Schwalbe Marathons will be as good
as Conti TTs, though.

Quoted message said:

Where doesn't, say, the Kona Smoke fit in there?

It looks like the tyres are inflexible, and I'm not sure the mudguards
are wide enough. Maybe I'm being harsh cause I'm dissatisfied with my
current bike, though.

A

Ambrose Nankivell said:

Don't know. They're no-namers AFAICT, and not much wider than the
tyres.

Good mudguards needn't be. Get some SKS ones with flaps and I think
there's a good chance why they're widely held to be the badger's nadgers
of mudguards.

Quoted message said:

No, they're Maxxis Xeniths that I'm having the problems with. The Contis
were on my old bike. I agree that Schwalbe Marathons will be as good
as Conti TTs, though.

Practice what you preach and put some TTs on if you really like TTs!

Quoted message said:

It looks like the tyres are inflexible

You can tell that from looking at a picture? And in any case, it
shouldn't be a Major Issue to change them for something you prefer.

Quoted message said:

and I'm not sure the mudguards are wide enough.

Based on what? As I've said above, good mudguards don't have to be huge
things if they're a good design set close to the wheel. And flaps help
too, like those that come on the Smoke.

Quoted message said:

Maybe I'm being harsh cause I'm dissatisfied with my
current bike, though.

Maybe, though in the wider context of the thread is it not the case that
something you think isn't actually very good is not the greatest
benchmark for being perfectly acceptable?

Pete.
--
Peter Clinch Medical Physics IT Officer
Tel 44 1382 660111 ext. 33637 Univ. of Dundee, Ninewells Hospital
Fax 44 1382 640177 Dundee DD1 9SY Scotland UK
net [email hidden] http://www.dundee.ac.uk/~pjclinch/

On Tue, 27 Jul 2004 10:08:02 GMT, Simon Brooke <[email hidden]>
wrote (more or less):

Quoted message said:

in message <[email hidden]>, Gary Coutts

(') said:

Trying to get back into biking and need some recommendations on
current bike models. This would be used to cycle to work as well.

Look, there is something systematic going on here. People keep asking
about using mountain bikes to commute. Don't do this.

It's probably because even less than 10 years ago, a MTB just meant
'bike with fatter tyres'.

My bike was sold to me as a mountain bike.

But would it pass muster as such nowadays?

--
Cheers,
Euan
Gawnsoft: http://www.gawnsoft.co.sr
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