Dartmoor mountain biker

  Nineteen straight days in the workshop - that's where I was on Bank Holiday Friday, on day nineteen. During that time I worked non-stop, from 8.30am to 6pm or later, with just an hour at most on my static bike, each morning, prior to showering and heading back to the shop. I tackled a whole range of jobs during this time, from simple cable swaps to tapping a bottom bracket shell (above). Some of the jobs were more demanding than others, such as the Reverb dropper post (below), which just had brown inside it! It took a significant amount of cleaning and replacing almost all of the internals, but I got it back to 'as new' condition for the owner. I had some beautiful bikes to work on though, such as this Evil Wreckoning (below), which needed a bunch of work, including brake bleeds and a new headset. I think I'm right in saying that literally every single customer that came into the workshop, stopped and took an admiring glance in it's direction. Who wouldn't tho...

With a winter this wet, the question of where to ride crops up. Anyone who is conscientious about their impact on the trails, be they open moorland or hand cut woodland, has a struggle at this time of year, but especially so in this current climate of lockdown restrictions. Fortunately, I have two choices open to me; the old tramway, running out into the middle of the southern moor, or the man-made trails at Plymbridge Woods. I can choose The Moor when I want solitude (though that's increasingly rare, as people have more time on their hands and seem to spend more of it on Dartmoor), or Plymbridge when I want to get loose. Yesterday it was the latter option. Sometimes it's hard to beat the option of carving smooth, clean turns on a smooth, clean trail! I'm going to do some more detailed posts about my bike set-ups, suspension settings, pressures, and such, but I have to share this little revelation with you! In an effort to get my trail bike set up for some bikepacking adven...