ok I am back and have more time.
We have ice biked up here maybe 20 or so years. We started riding the snowmoble trails. Here in central Maine we have very variable weather. We used to get a lot of snow, but with a wide swing in temps... The snow would get warm... get packed.. then refreeze.
Frozen snowmoble trails are a blast. It is like riding a frozen roller coaster. There are more trails available than in the summer. Ponds and lakes are frozen and passable. There are signs up, fences are down. Your bike does not get dirty and there are no bugs. It is absolutly incredible riding.
If the snow is frozen but there is not a lot of ice... the Nokain is an excellent tire [we did not learn of them until we had been doing our own for years] The have a nice square profile so they float better, and they are lighter. I forget but I think they were about $120.00 apeice. A freind bought the first pair... none of us wanted to spend the money. In the not too icy conditions they were clearly faster... so of course before too long we all had a set.
If it is icier... they do not hold well at all compared to homemade. Homemade tires....we try to go for a nice wide square profile [the old fisher fattrax was a great tire]. We would run about 300 sheet metal screws in them.
I would always cover the screw heads with silicone calking, and then also cover that with an old tube cut open. We found duct tape would not hold up.
On bare ice... tearing around a small oval.. we used a narrower more rounded tire. You wanted to be able to lean it over in the turns. A smaller tire also saved weight... and you could keep the screws close together but still used less of them overal. At the begging of this... it seems as if each week someone had a new set up. We were trying to be secretive about it.
These screws NEVER touched anything other than the ice. We did not want to dull them. We even carried them from the truck across the lawn to the pond. We would wear groves into the track... churning up snowcone type ice shavings.
You could tell who had the shorter screws because as the shaving built up.. they would loose traction first... they would go down in a corner ... and then get the scraper out... and clear off the track.
We were able to come up with tires there were grippy enough we had better traction than good tires on clean pavement. Yet we would still hit the corners fast enough that you could go into a two wheel drift coming out of the turns .
You could really tell the difference in frame stiffness with the flex in the turns.. One of my earlier bikes was an older cannondale. The frame was the monster stiff oversized alum. yet this was back when they used smaller steel forks. The fork would flex and it wandered in the turns. It had a higher bottom bracket so I could pedal deeper into the turn.. yet this benifit did not make up for the better handling of the bike I now use.
My favorite Pond bike is my Serrota T-max... stiff oversized steel... with a fork to better match the frame... and the geometry gave it very quick handling
ooh talking about all this makes me want snow..
in time in time
glenn
by mikeschn » Mon Sep 10, 2007 4:09 am 
