Weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks of wet weather does a lot of damage to a bike, most of the time you'll not notice the true extent because the water, whilst striping all the grease from your bearings also acts as a lubricant....

Now the weather's not wet and is warm (cooled by the wind, though) the bearings on the 29er have dried out, and, clearly, have NO grease in them at all, letting them creak like mad. Not good, but I really can't be bothered fixing them 'til Sunday, and there's no tmuch I can do for the Headset and BB, they're both terminal, the headset should probably have been put out of it's misery 1,000 miles ago.

The front brake finally stripped the thread from the brass pivot, leaving me, shockingly, with only one working brake. I've now 5 brakes for Hope to repair.

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Another 13+mph avg today, in very very windy conditions, I guess that's it for the summer now, it's definitely going to be windy all the time..

My bike's falling apart a lot now, it relies on a certain amount of water to keep it lubed, so now it just creaks and cracks.. don't really care anymore. I was away from riding for a day and a half and, really, I didn't think 'oh nice day - I could be riding' I thought, 'actually it's quite nice not being a in a house that feels constantly gritty'. I did do a run which was really quite nice, probably 4 miles, and despite the strong wind it wasn't too painful.

In other news my car celebrated it's 9th birthday with a full service and MOT which didn't cost all that much - mostly because it's only done 1500 miles in the 2 years since the last service).

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Busy week this week, well not really busy, busy for me as it involves moving more than 10miles from my sofa.

15 degrees at 8am makes for a warm day, it also makes for enormous winds, say, in the region of 30mph from the East.. and the air was dense too.. great.

Halfway down from the pike my rear brake gave up, thankfully I timed it right and a chap held the gate open for me so I didn't have to smash myself into it to stop (i'd have plenty more opportunities to do this later on)

So that's 100 rides, all singlespeed, all offroad, only using 2 bikes (or about 3 bike's worth of parts)

Tomorrow I'll be running, possibly Thursday too, whcih should give my time to fix the rear brake... only for it to fail again, I expect.

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At risk of sounding like a scratched record, my rear brake failed again today. To be fair to though, they do seem designed to stop pushing the pads once the pad's down to about .2mm thick, which, for the average rider would be fine, but for me, that means over the course of a year it'll add up to a lot more pads being used.

I've been quite critical of Hope's products since the last good brake they made (Mini), but, at least with them you can run them down to the bare metal and actually KEEP them workin in an emergency by winding out the lever reach giving you a little extra piston movement, something that's impossible on the XTS (not helped by the useless reach adjustment which is almost impossible to move in wet conditions.

So, despite Hope brakes having the finish of the average tractor part, at least they're servicable, and consistent (mostly in that they don't work properly ALL the time, but it's better than NOT working a lot of the time), which leads me to think that I'll NOT be using Saints on the new bike, and I'll be selling these XT's rather soon, too, although I do like the fact the Shimano's don't rattle like a box of bearings everytime you hit a bump (which around here's ever couple of inches)

I guess the first thing to do is to box up and post off the 4 dead Hope brakes I have and get them refurbished. Or alternatively swap to Avid cable brakes and try to work a combination that allows massive rotor clearance.

I saw Jon today, he's getting a new car, it won't be as exciting as his lipstick red Hyundai though :(

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