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| Snowy day on the Monon. |
I got the fatbike specifically for the purpose of riding in this kind of weather. Unfortunately, the rear wheel went bad after a very few hundred miles and I failed in my attempt to shame BikesDirect into standing behind their product. (BikesDirect: "you get what you pay for.")
Too bad, too, because this would have been a cool ride in the 3" of powder coating the Monon Trail yesterday.
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| The ill-fated fatbike. |
What to do? They are 25mm, to be sure, but the Schwalbe Marathons on the Neuvation are crying to be ridden in the dead of winter. So ride them I did.
It was a balmy 18 degrees at 9 am heading north along the Monon.
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| The y-axis got cut off, but that red line is running between 15 and 20. Green is the dewpoint, whatever that means when it is too cold to have dew. |
The plowing stopped suddenly in Broad Ripple, leaving me alone with my road bike and my thoughts in 3" of powder snow for the five miles to Carmel. A little more use of the trail made the ride back slightly more challenging, with random packed snow and occasional ruts from a mountain bike or XC ski.
Things went south as I rode south of Broad Ripple. Loads of rock salt had turned the snow to slush and water, but the noon temperatures were still south of 25 degrees. (Mission accomplished: three uses of a word, with different meanings, in the same paragraph.) Now I was riding with soaked feet in freezing weather. There were more than a few raised eyebrows as I heated my feet in warm water in the faculty lounge.
2 comments:
I wonder if paying a shop $50 or so to rebuild the fatbike rear wheel would be a good course. On the one hand you hate to throw good money after bad. On the other hand, it takes precious few rides in the snow to make that $50 seem like money well spent.
Yes, probably. Better than buying a set of fat wheels on Amazon for $200, only to have the same result. I will be self tightening those spokes today for a last effort.
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