Tried and liked/didn’t like (2009 edition)
I walked into the year with my xtracycle set up pretty much the way I wanted it to be, so this was a fairly conservative year for bikey things. Except for the midlifecrisismobile, which gave me a couple of new things to try out.
The first thing – 650b wheels – didn’t work out the way I wanted them to. I’d read enough recommendations for 650b that I though it could kill several of the birds that annoy me about the xtracycle (toe overlap, rattle on chipseal, slow climbing, and being slower than I wanted for brevets.) After I built up the mlcm, I ran it on a dozen or so shortish loops equipped with Rivendell/Panaracer Nifty Swifty tires, and seemed to get everything except for much more speed (I was getting about ¼th mph faster than the xtracycle, which isn’t anything to sneeze at, but isn’t great.) And then I took it out on the UGB 200 with spectacularly bad results – the bicycle ran so slowly that I reached the top of the Boring lava with less than a hour to get across to Canby (14 miles out, which is doable, but I’d have to push like mad to get there, and that would leave me with no spare time to get across to Gaston), and after abandoning and going home, I woke up the next morning feeling like I’d gone through a peppermill. I commented bitterly about this, but relented when Michael Wolfe reminded me that Nifty Swifties are horrible tires and I’d get better results if I used Col de la Vie tires instead.
I had a couple of Col de la Vies as spares at home, so it was worthwhile to test them out instead of pulling the plug, so I ripped the Nifty Slothies off and put the CdlVs on instead. They rode better, which was good, and they weren’t any slower, which was also good, but within 200 miles I’d picked up two flats and my patience was worn down to nothingness (the second flat was 5 miles out from home on a cold and windy evening, so I was fairly unhappy with the whole idea by the time I’d pulled the nail out of the tire and replaced the tube.) So the next morning the first thing I did was to fit my old Trek wheels with a pair of el-cheapo Chen Shen 700c×25 tires, fit those wheels onto the mlcm instead of the 650b wheels. and then run the exact same loop so I could compare timings.
The 700c version of the mlcm turned out to be ¾ths of a mph faster, and ran about 2mph faster before the wind than the 650b'ed version did. And I repeated this performance the following day.
So, yes, wide tires are smoother (and if I was going to use wide tires I’d need to use 650b because there is almost no toe clearance on the mlcm when I’ve got 700c×25 tires and fenders) but if I’m going to consistantly give up speed for smoothness I’d be better off sticking with the xtracycle, because it’s a nice lively frame that descends like an anvil. So, no, I don’t think I’ll do anything more with the 650b experiment (I’m aware that I could go out and spend ~$100/pair for Grand Bois tires, but I can go a /long/ way riding cheaper fast 700c tires.)
The other new thing with the mlcm has not turned out to be a disappointment. One of the things that’s been problematic with the xtracycle is that all of the storage on it is in panniers, so if I want to take a picture I need to stop, get off the bicycle, pull the camera out of the pannier, and take the picture. This proved to be so annoying that I stopped taking pictures (even after buying cheapie point and shoot cameras that I could tuck into my pocket.) So the plan for the mlcm was to set up with a porteur rack and a rack bag to carry all my camera/rando crap in (and have a platform to carry groceries on if I wanted to stop in at New Seasons on the way back from a R600) and, as a short term solution, to use the Nitto F15 handlebar rack and a home-made handlebar bag to put everything up front.
This has been a huge win on two fronts. First, the camera is right there so I can grab it at will when I’m on the bike without needing to do anything more than stopping, and secondly if I put my cellphone into the front bag I can actually hear it when it rings (when I had it in a pocket or a xtracycle pannier, it would ring and I’d not even hear it. This had repeated unfortunate side effects.) I’ve got a high trail fork, so a handlebar rack has the unfortunate side effect of making the front wheel very floppy when I’m going slowly and/or uphill (so I’ll need to eventually sell a bunch of stuff on ebay so I can either (a) buy a cyclocross fork and rerake the devil out of it or (b) hire a framebuilder to build me a custom low trail fork) but it’s an an annoyance I can live with.
There are a couple of other small things that I’ve tried and liked, too (Nitto Randonneur bars, which have the drops flared out far enough so I can ride in the drops and not have my wrists bumping into the tops, and the Shimano Tiagra brake levers that I’ve got on both bicycles – they are both very very comfortable to hold onto when I’m riding) but they aren’t nearly as nice as having a frontloading bicycle to experiment with.