What Width Tyre Is Best For Cross Country Riding? | #AskGMBNTech

[Music] hello and welcome back to gmbn Tech today is an Ask show so if you've been using the hashtag askjnbn Tech if you've got your questions up on YouTube and Instagram we've been having a look through to look at some tech questions to answer today I know I think you've gone about cranks I do so har korma says I currently have a bike with 175 millimeter crank arms and I'm getting loads of pedal strikes and having issues with manuals would go into shorter cranks help out I'm thinking of 165 millimeters wood 10 mil really affect anything yeah it kind of will um so the pedal strikes having shorter cranks might actually help you with those pedal strikes uh that is why hope and the likes of five Dev are putting out some really short cranks at the moment even going down to 155 and saying that that is perfect for this sort of scenario yeah um having shorter cranks will actually bring your feet in as well which might square off your hips a little more and that's said to be good for cornering and jumping as well so it might actually help you out with your manuals um I think it's worth giving it a go I've moved down to 165s and I absolutely love it granted I am a little bit of a shorter Rider but they are a nicer feeling although I will say that 10 mil might not be a big difference for your legs per se um but think about your pedal to saddle height will now change by 10 mil because you're bringing that pedal up so you might want to compensate by bringing your Saddle Up by 10 mils as well um and you might want to think about the fact that your cranks have come in when they're in the three o'clock to nine o'clock position two which means that your pedal might not be directly under your knee anymore so you might want to think about that for and aft of the saddle rail as well however what I'll say is change the cranks go for it and ride a small amount first to see if it affects anything on your body and then start to make some geometry changes or bike fit changes after that next question is from Shredder Dave he's saying what width tire is best for cross-country riding but because I mean it depends for best right but I mean there's been a recent Trend towards going wider in XC racing um as the courses have become more technical travel has gone up and then it's giving you ability to run slightly lower pressures have a wider footprint on the trail and not bottom out those like 1.9 to 2 inch width tires that were super common for the lightweight uh we were at World Cup in the year looking at prototype tires and I was asking what width are they are they 2.4 and it was sort of like maybe yeah or a bit bigger could have measured them but so that is a trend however sometimes you do have to think about the specific conditions so I was at the British Champs last week it was a bog um it was very muddy so I ran 2.35 bazos uh which is a little bit wider than normal for me but it meant I could drop the pressures a lot not worry about hooking up and slamming my rims on the Rocks um and it was it was good having that wide but actually some other people who had some tires let's say for 10 years that were like a mud spike in a 1.9 so that kind of went massively the other way and it cuts through the mud if it's really soft you get down to the harder stuff and that was really good for traction but then because of the narrower Tire they had to bump the pressures up quite a lot to compensate on the rough so it was the odd advantages to both um I think it honestly is sort of what you've got available and then what you're used to riding if you I'd run like a 2.25 probably as normal for like the biggest range of XC conditions and then that allows me to get really into like that characteristic of tire and learn how that rides so I can't say what's best but I think learning learning what you've got consider the conditions you're going to ride most often and um for what you do have then figuring out the entire pressures that work best for you in combination of your suspension and whether you maybe want an insert or not can be really good for cross-country tires because it sort of conversely to maybe like a down or Tire with a sidewalls are tough enough without an insert on XC you get that flexibility from a nice light sizable and a little bit of protection from an insert so that's that's what I say to Australia Day yeah so the big it depends always but also do check on what the clearance is for your frame so XE frames have a maximum tight width that you can run as well because you don't want to be wearing into your chainstays for example so question three typical guy says why do the officials blow a whistle after each downhill racer goes by it uh it's not the fans it's during practice I noticed yeah the Marshalls will blow a whistle as soon as they see a rider on course because this alerts all the fans uh further down the track who might be crossing the tape and walking around the course um that there's a rider on track and so they want to watch out and stay back behind the tape it also lets another Marshall know that a ride is coming down and they'll effectively blow the whistles all the way down the track to alert everyone that someone's coming so that's it simple next one is from Gabriel uh he's been having problems with a shifting only half of the cassette shifts well he's playing around the barrel adjuster and you can get the chain shifting nicely at one end of the cassette and then moving say to smaller Cog sticking doesn't work he says I've already changed cable and cable housing and shifter uh I can count as myself it normally means that something is bent basically either your rear neck or the hanger um saying it's changed the shifter but not mention that so I think that would be something to look at you've got a video coming out about the correct use of a hanger alignment tool Great Piece of Kit so I would start with that because before thinking about replacing anything um it is so annoying you get it dialed and then it just throws out and you can't get it fixed also maybe thinking about the B tension screw um I find if I have too much B tension so the sort of too much gap between the guide pulleys or the top jockey wheel and the cassette when it's down in the small sprockets you have such a big distance between the guide pulley and the actual cogs it just makes it a bit vague so having that dialed in and having the correct trailer for your sort of shape of cassette if it's really wide range or tighter because you need the drill to actually be able to move track the cassette properly basically through the angle it moves through and gives that nice tight shifting so yeah get your stuff straightened out and that should help or they could maybe just just spare one in see if it fixes it and yeah it's always worth yeah okay question five from Matthias Hansen says why are internal Hub gears so uncommon I know nothing about mon variants but surely there must be a good decently priced ones to mount on mountain bikes less maintenance and wear would be a nice upside to having one for sure yeah I mean there isn't many available so we've got the classified system which Neil did a video on recently um but that does need to work with an existing drivetrain as well it's not just a system in itself it effectively added almost like two variants like a front derailleur almost yeah it doubles it isn't it yeah but in the hub um we've got roll off um which has been around for a really long time and people do swear by them um but sort of Bear in mind that this needs to be built into a wheel um and you're looking at about a thousand pounds for that system um and there are some sort of it can be about a kilo to two kilos in weight so you've got to weigh up you know literally the weight of a roll-off um with the cost of it to a mechanical drivetrain that can be much much lighter just only 100 hundreds of grams um and potentially hundreds of pounds rather than a thousand pounds um and then you know in terms of others there just really isn't any on the market you mentioned alfine but that's um that's more important really uh mountain bike specific so I think availability is a really big issue there isn't many on the market there isn't many options weight definitely price definitely I think that's a really leading point and also culture we're just so used to getting Drive trains manufacturers are so used to speccing drive trains on their bikes as well that is kind of a culture thing that we stick with this um standard sort of drive train um and also having that sort of ability to customize different parts of your drivetrain I think and replace parts and having those parts readily available in bike shops also is a really big thing so I think there's a lot of factors but I do agree with you it is a good system that I think some people should maybe start looking into developing yeah if you're set up with it already then it works but it's just getting getting to that point it's tough Yeah final question for today is from Joshua Shepard who says why does no one remember boss suspension as much as they used to considering it wasn't long ago and this was actually 2021 they released a 39 mil substantial Enduro Fork I remember them yeah I love them no I do think it's a big shame that they're not around so much anymore because I really enjoyed they used to come as standard on some YT models um really early on I had a Capra top Pro level one um with boss suspension and I thought it was amazing it's super buttery they were lovely stuff that's I always get I've never had I've never used boss but I always keep an eye on them I think it's this like slightly mysterious amazing come out with some really interesting stuff just on mountain bike from Olivier bassard they're based down in Toulouse in southern France where they actually manufacture all their forks I think maybe while they haven't done better is they're just not prioritizing mountain bike sales you know they've got their Motorsport arm that's massive relative to mountain biking really for suspension and we get caught up in that mountain bike but cars are you know you know they've got a lot more suspension yeah um and then there have been I think some some Cs and service issues that have maybe tainted their brand a little bit I think that would be fair to say um yeah in the UK we didn't have a UK distributor for bus so everything anytime anything went wrong any warranty issues had to go back to France and it was kind of a big ordeal and people wouldn't be able to ride their bike in the meantime so um it did take them in the UK and I think losing OE you know specs bikes um losing any of those contracts uh does just bring them out of your mind because it's not Fox rock Shots that's why we think of fox and RockShox all the time obviously they make quality products but we just see them all the time on bikes so they're at the Forefront of our minds it's just a kind of secular process really like they're not there so you don't think about them so you can't buy them secondhand so they're not there yeah and it's just house things go in the market sometimes I think yeah and it's a struggle to buy them here in the UK they're just literally not for sale so I think yeah there a lot of issues with it and I don't think it's because the forks are bad so it would be a shame to lose them um I feel like yeah it I I don't know why we don't see them anymore it would be nice to see more of them um but anyway thank you very much for your questions and uh if you've got any Bernie questions now don't forget to use hashtag askgambien Tech down in the comments below and we'll try and get back to you on a show like this but thanks for watching yeah see you next time

Channel: GMBN Tech

Views: 24,368

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Id: ZnbVHEeLHuc

Length: 11min 46sec (706 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 14 2023