Okay, look, I know I shouldn’t automatically reject things just because they’re new, but what are we even doing here?
I’m not like a bike designer or an engineer or whatever, but there’s got to be a better solution than this, right?
Right…?
Whatever, it’s not my problem. I stopped trying to keep up with bike tech years ago. As far as I’m concerned, 32-inch wheels are just another thing to throw on the “Let the next generation deal with it” pile, like climate change or depopulation.
So when did I become a cycling renunciate exactly? Well, it’s hard to say, since you don’t just wake up one day hating everything; rather, it’s something that creeps up on you gradually, like the inability to sleep through the night without having to get up to urinate. Certainly I consummated my relationship with retrogrouchery in early 2020, when I took delivery of the first of many Rivendae:
There are also frequent reminders that reaffirm my decision, such as when it took me two whole wrist-snapping days to mount a pair of tubeless tires on the Industry Standard Gravelling Appliance, during which I often found myself sobbing and wailing plaintively to the heavens: “Why do people put themselves through this!?!”
Well, apparently I’m not alone, because there’s a new tool that’s supposed to make the job much easier:
I’m old enough to remember when people wouldn’t even admit to using tire levers with their clincher tires lest their fellow riders accuse them of manual weakness, but the tubeless tire appears to have won the literal thumb-wrestling match with masculinity once and for all, because people aren’t even pretending they can rawdog it anymore:
I don’t know about you guys, but it sure seems like tires are getting a little harder to install lately. Add some tire inserts, and it can become nearly impossible in some cases. Today, CushCore releases a possible solution to that problem. Introducing the Rotary Tire Tool.
And while $299 might seem like a lot, by about the ninth hour of my own ordeal, when mine own thumbs did ache and I did cry out, “My Lob, My Lob, why hast thou Fred-saken me?,” I would gladly have forked over twice that to Satan had he appeared bearing one of these tools in order to tempt me off the cross:
Jesus may have had nails through his wrists, but that’s nothing compared to the pain I experienced in my own.
Unfortunately it’s now too late–not just for me because I no longer have the ISGA, but also for humanity because this tool only goes up to 29″, which is now obsolete, because everyone’s moving on to 32-inch wheels. And even if they do make a 32-inch version you’ll still have to get a whole new 32-inch-specific garbage can:
So much for that.
Speaking of which, do you ever wake up in the middle of the night worried that you’ve been inflating your tires to a sub-optimal pressure? Me neither. Still, I read (or at least skimmed) this post on the Paper-Thin Tire Enthusiast Website with interest, or at least something adjacent to it:
Remember how they said high pressure isn’t faster?
This year marks 20 years of Bicycle Quarterly’s ground-breaking real-road research into tire performance. Back in the spring of 2006, we started testing tires on real roads, with a rider on the bike. The results surprised everybody—us included: High pressure doesn’t make supple high-performance tires roll faster. That went counter to what had been accepted wisdom for over a century. That’s why performance tires were narrow—so they could run at high pressure. Back then, road bikes ran 20 or 23 mm tires, inflated to 110 psi (7.5 bar) or more.
Well, another test says it is faster:
It’s taken a while—almost 20 years… We’re excited that the Escape Collective has used the same techniques for a similar study of real-road tire performance. What they found is surprising, at least at first sight. You may have seen the headline: “Get ready to rethink accepted wisdom.” That’s because the author and tester, Ronan McLaughlin, found that the highest pressure rolled fastest—for all tires he tested.
This would appear to undermine everything the Paper-Thin Tire Mogul has been saying for the past 20 years, but actually it doesn’t, because it only applies to your cheap, crappy tires, not the expensive lambskin wheel condoms he sells:
In fact, I think that is what we are seeing here. It matches what we found in our first tire tests, way back in 2006: Second-tier tires do roll faster at higher pressures, at least on pavement, and up to a point. Above is roll-down data for the Rivendell Rolly-Poly 27 mm tire. Lower times means faster rolling. The Rolly-Poly rolls much faster at 85 psi than at 55 or 35 psi—just like the Pirellis tested by the Escape Collective. At ultra-high pressure, the effect tails off: At 105 psi, the Rolly-Poly rolls no faster than at 85 psi. (Unlike the other differences, the 0.2 second faster roll-down time is not statistically significant.)
However, if we look the results for other tires, we see that the Rolly-Poly was somewhat of an outlier. The Rolly-Poly was a relatively stiff tire, and it rolled fastest at the highest pressure we tested.
To be fair I think what he’s saying makes sense, but I find it pretty funny anyway.
Speaking of irony, here’s a gravel event that has broken with the standard naming convention (sorry, STNDRD NMG CNVNTN) and taken an entirely new approach:
As I understand it, “rolling coal” is this:
I’m sure it’s just tongue-in-cheek, but if you’re planning to go I’d install one of these on your GRVL BK so you can strike preemptively:
You can’t be too careful.