Hurricane Hilary approached today, so it has been raining. Modestly, but steadily. A fine day for fixing bicycles!
First up, tires.
As per my weight weenie ponderings, I have a pair of new Maxxis Ardent sneakers for the hardtail. According to the Maxxis website, the 26” Ardents are 735 grams, mine weighed in at 725 and 710 grams. Pretty consistent and it is always nice when they come in under expectation. There was a fair bit of Stan’s sealant (modestly nasty in one tire) left on the old tires so I scrubbed that out and weighed them. The Minion DHF was 905 grams and the Minion DHR II was 860 grams. A 330 gram savings (0.73 lbs).
The DHR II is a nominal 2.3” width, the Ardent is 2.25”. As hoped, this is mostly the shoulder tread since the carcasses measured out about the same when inflated.
The Ardent has unexpectedly deep lugs. It’s a much more burly tire than I anticipated. This much of a difference for the 26” over the 29”? Or am I misremembering? So I got out the 29” and….
I had remembered the tread properly. I had misremembered the 29” tire that came on the front of my full suspension bike is an Ardent Race tire. Aha! Maxxis likes to make shrunken versions of some tires and call them the “Race” variant. This does not appear to exist for the 26” wheel? I’m thinking I may have made a very happy mistake and landed on the perfect tire for me.
While the rear wheel was tire-less, I did a tiny bit of truing. It wasn’t that bad but the DHR II is wide enough to make even small deviations look troublesome. No good to have tire rub on the frame if a wheel goes even more wobbly.
Next I switched the 9 speed cassette (12-36) out for the 11 speed cassette (11-34) that was on the commuter bike. This takes advantage of the Wheel Top EDS OX which I’ve been testing on the Sette hardtail. It also gets the commuter bike back on spec, since I put the XT 9-speed shifter from the hardtail on it. Not absolutely sure the EDS will find a permanent home on the Sette but I might as well keep the commuter functional for now. I lose two teeth on the low gear but as long as the little ring is working this should be fine. And with the EDS derailleur I’m free to go with an even bigger range if I ever want to buy a new cassette.
When I installed the new front brake on the hardtail, I left the shifter mounted inboard of the lever and this was a bad choice. I did so because it was going to require removing the gear position indicator off the shifter. I don’t really look at those so it was just the effort, not a desire to retain the function. And since I had to take the indicator off the other shifter to fit it where I wanted on the commuter bike…at least they will match if ever re-united.
Once again the Wheel Top default settings (I used SO 11 speed) were not even close. Armed with the wheel top tech insisting that each range increases by 150 units after confirmation, and my growing suspicion that this particular confirmation requires exiting the cog configuring screen, I entered values from before more easily. Since the largest cog requires a setting higher than I used on the commuter, I went to the trouble of using the intervals between cogs from that bike, and subtracting those in sequence from a starting point that was right for the largest cog. That dialed it in pretty well.
Then I decided to torture myself with more EDS experiments but that will have to wait for another post.
Sun Dappled Forest 
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