Ayup Roadie - Ayup Multisport revisited

I did a post on the Ayup roadie lighting kit a while back.
These lights are a bit viral. Once you see them you just have to have them. At least 4 of my workmates have them now, and 1 nutter has 4 pairs. Everyone I know who has brought lights in the last year has gone for Ayups, except for 1 person who opted for the grunty NZ made Night Lightning. More on that later.

The attraction to these lights seems to be the overall package. No one thing really stands out, except maybe their simplicity, and the weight. If you are a weight weenie, this is the system for you. The Ayups are so small and light that you can even mount the 100 gram 3-hour battery on your helmet and hardly notice it. The light units themselves weigh only 58 grams. This is where all the other systems come a distant 2nd place. The aforementioned Night Lightning iBlaast has a large unwieldy lamp, and the battery is large and heavy by comparison (to the Ayups). There is no doubt the iBlaast is more powerful, but that is the one thing it has over the Ayup. A very important consideration for sure. The Ayup Roadie Kit is now called the Ayup Multisport kit, which is pretty much the same, except you get 2 x 3 hours batteries instead of 1 x 6 hour.

There have been a few upgrades from Ayup in the last year, and they now have a dedicated head mount for night running and multi-sporting which seems to work well with their minimalist approach.

I had never actually run my battery completely out, so I decided to test it to failure the other day. You are supposed to get 6 hours out of the bigger battery, but 8 hours later it was still going. Admittedly it was a lot dimmer, but they weren't going yellow, just a very gradual lessening of intensity over time.

After a year my battery’s cord developed a small nick in it where the cord comes out of the casing. An email to Ayup and within a week they had replaced my battery. That’s pretty good service.

I think the next part of their arsenal to try is the new “gecko” version of their helmet mounts. The old one didnt agree with my old helmet’s worn out padding so well , so I will let you know if I get my hands a the new one.

The heavier 6 hour battery still only weighs 156 grams and is about the size of a pack of cigarettes.

Shown here are the handlebar mount, helmet mount, light and a 6 hour battery (and a ballpoint pen for scale).
Another review here from a unicyclist.

Read More

Kiwi Brevet kit evaluation 2014

Here is some gear geekage and ramblings from my 2014 Kiwi Brevet, recorded in no particular order. A few people have asked for a list of kit, but lists are pretty boring so here are some of my views on different bits.

Ayup with the large battery

Lights
I used the older Ayup lights with the weaker bulbs and run them with the multi-strength battery (on low) to draw even less power. If Ayup made a light with a single bulb I would probably use that instead. For the 4 and a half days of this years Kiwi Brevet I used only 1 and a half of the smaller Ayup batteries, although I also had another of the larger batteries spare. This was riding to the letter of the law and having 6 hours a day resting. Lighting demands for Bikepacking are not great, because generally you are not going that fast. If you had to have only one light, as I did, its best mounted on your head as it can be a big help when setting up and breaking camp in the dark, as it often is, when you are riding 18 hours a day : ) In a world where the electrical items you buy can often end up as landfill within months, the Ayups are the most resilient piece of electrical kit I have ever owned. The lamp and large battery above was purchased in 2008.

GPS

Garmin Etrex 20

My Garmin Etrex 20 was great and with judicious usage I only went through 1 set of batteries which died in the last few kms of the last day. The Etrex 20 was recommended to me by Geoff Blanc after the 2nd Kiwi Brevet because:
1 - It has the longest burn time of any modern GPS, (25 hrs).
2 - The batteries are replaceable, (I used 2 x lithium AA's, the same as my camera took). It is not the most intuitive GPS at first, and it does not have all the flash online connectivity of the later models, but it does the basics well. The best comparison would be like comparing your old Nokia bar cell phone to a modern smart phone. You know which one is going to have the better battery life and be the most robust.

Spot trackers
The spot tracker I had used the AAA lithiums and for me lasted the whole 4.5 days. I had another set spare.

Camera
A simple one bought from Cash converters running on AA lithiums, same as the GPS.

Phone
Samsung Galaxy S2 with a spare $35 chinese battery bank, good for maybe 1.5 charges. Probably for weight and bulk reasons a couple of spare phone batteries would be another option. The phone was really there for social media purposes, email-to-blog/FaceBook/Twitter and got very little usage.

As you can see there are a lot of batteries in there, and batteries are heavy. If you were not interested in recording your trip you could save a fair bit of weight. Maps are also heavy and take up a lot of room as well, so if you have faith in electronics then you can save on some bulk. I think Thomas Lindup went fully electronic with an Iphone with solar powered battery-pack, as did Simon Morton, and a few others experimented with solar charging with differing degrees of success.

The bulk of it
Look at a loaded bike, visually at least half of the luggage you are looking at is your sleeping kit.

Sleeping bag, bivvy sack and bedroll on the front. The rest on the back.

Tent/bivvy sack, sleeping bag/liner and sleeping roll/mat. Its a lot of bulk and usually takes up one whole end of your bike. If you are confident in your pre-booked accommodation and your ability to get there  (be wary of accommodation anxiety - stress caused by trying to meet a predestined location at a certain time)  you can drop all this kit. That is not something I would do or recommend, but for a seasoned campaigner in a hurry, or a novice on a cruisey schedule it is definitely an option. Part of the allure of Bikepacking for me is the idea of being self sufficient, but that's just my take. If you are not as fit, then credit-card touring is a great way to get started. Even if you are traveling light you should still have an emergency blanket, rain coat and a puffer jacket in my view.

Luxury
I have a bit of a phobia about getting saddle soils (a boil) so I always take spare shorts, and a top, and antiseptic soap, and wash the used clothes each evening alternating with fresh ones. Some people don't bother, but many of them have their own special "procedure" to insure that nothing untoward happens in the nether regions. Apparently there has been a lot written about this area but I haven't come across it yet, if I find anything I will link to it. Veteran Endurance record holder Jay Petervary did the Tour Divide on the one pair of shorts..... I also met several people doing the Kiwi Brevet who did not even use any chamois cream !

Saddles

The famous Brooks B-17 .
Is it all it's made out to be?

How much you enjoy your bike packing experience can often come down to how well your butt reacts. It's pretty hard to train for the kind of a work-out its going to get, because issues don't really start until after a couple of days. Unless you are doing two-day training rides you are not really going to know what to expect. One thing that seems to be consistent, 95% of the people using the Brooks saddles seem to have minimal problems, if any. Either that or they don't want to admit that the expensive heavy saddle they bought is a dud!  It appears the most popular Brooks saddle is the B-17. The weight of these saddles is what puts most people off them, and not surprisingly, at around 500 grams that's about double the weight of most saddles. But put another way, its only about the weight of a small water bottle. And if it means you don't get a sore bum then I'm pretty sure at day 3 you'd be happy to have one.

Brooks saddle owners do tend to rave about them a bit and Brooks try sell the whole Olde Worlde british culture of the bicycle thing. It's a bit like having pet Seamonkeys. You have to feed them the special Brooks proofide and put on the special seat cover in the rain etc. I'm not sure how many people actually do this  : )  Everyone has a favourite saddle but in my experience so far, after 3 days most bums are mincemeat. I will be trying a Brooks next time. I recently brought a Brooks Swift, and after the breaking in period, going back to my original brevet saddle, a Specialized Toupe, I couldnt believe how terrible the Toupe felt, and that was my second favourite seat to my Fizik Gobi !

Bikes
Rigid vs hardtail vs fully. I have have tried both extremes, twice in the Kiwi Brevet I have used a 26inch full suspension bike, (Santa Cruz Superlight) and this last time I used a rigid drop-barred 29er (Surly Karate Monkey). No matter what you use, at some stage, someone else will always be on a better option. They all have their pros and cons. As I get older I am thinking the plushness of a fully has its advantages, and next time I will be on a fully 29er, although a hardtail 29er would probably be just about as good.

The hard-core bikepackers tend to favour fully rigid 29er bikes because they are lighter, and potentially simpler, but New Zealand has some terrain that is a lot more fun on a suspended bike, and I personally have never felt that having a heavier bike slowed me down in any way. I think there has to be a pretty big weight differential between two bikes in order for it to make a difference. While there are some steep pinches in the Kiwi Brevet, its not like you are grovelling uphill for 3 hours at a time in your granny gear. One way of limiting weight is to not carry so much water. This is the exact opposite of what I do. I will have 3 or 4 bottles and they will be full most of the time. Not that intelligent, but safe. This contrasts with my Kiwi Brevet riding partner Brian who would take minimal water on, because he was confident in his ability to pick safe streams to drink out of, and would even go as far as to not full his bottles up at the bottom of a climb if he knew there was a stream on the other side. Knowledge is power : )

See below some bike weights from Team Voodoo Lounge. All of these guys had done at least one Kiwi Brevet before except Calum, and Simon, and Simon doesn't muck about and did hours of gear testing, research and tire squeezing.

18 kgs. Thomas, rigid, carbon
20 kgs. Andy, hardtail alloy
21 kgs. Jeff, rigid, steel, drop-barred
22 kgs, Calum, hardtail, alloy
22 kgs, Simon, hardtail, alloy
27 kgs, Tor, rigid alloy.

These weights are "dry" for bikes, minus the full water-bottles and and back-packs people might have been wearing, but with all bags attached. From memory all the bikes were 29ers. Compare these weights to Dave Sharpe's disc equipped Carbon Cyclo-cross Hakkalugi which weighed in at 12.4 kgs. It takes a very motivated person to want to ride hours of gnarly single-track on 33 millimetre tyres though. The plus side is when you hit the gravel or tar-seal its game-on!

Bars

Salsa Woodchipper, trimmed .

I think Tor and Simon were running Jones H-bar styled set-ups while everyone else was on more standard flat-bars, except for my Salsa Woodchipper drop-bar. If you were to ride 1000kms in 4-5 days with just a set of flat bars, then there is no doubt you would do some damage, at least temporarily, to your hands in the way of numbness. A sensible bare minimum is a flat bar with bar-ends, but a very good addition is an aero bar which can also be used to tie a front bag onto. Basically you just need a couple of different positions to rest your hands. A drop-bar or a Jones H-bar offers many positions and the Jones bar has plenty of mount points for electronic gizmos and bags. On a drop-bar you will have to run road-style brake/shifters while on a Jones you can run standard MTB stuff. There are a lot more variations in handlebars out there today than there were a couple of years ago. For drop-bar usuage SRAM is actually the best in my view, as all their road kit has the same cable pull as their MTB stuff. Shimano on the other hand seems to have gone out of their way to make stuff incompatible between road and off-road on their later stuff.


Tyres
Tyres are a very personal thing and can be the cause of much frustration.I saw several people who suffered catastrophic tire delaminations. This shouldn't happen, but if it is ever going to happen, it will happen on the Kiwi Brevet where you are exposed to all kinds of wildly varying terrain. Be wary that some tyres are not supposed to be used with tubeless sealant in them. I was very very happy with my Stans Ravens which are a very light tire that roll amazingly fast. To look at them offers no clue as to their speed and grip. I wouldn't choose a tire based on weight, but rolling resistance can be a big thing. My only gripe was that I spent so much time making my non-tubeless rims, tubeless-ready, and to then suffer a sidewall pin-prick puncture in the North Bank rock garden. Remember that tubeless tires only really self-seal on punctures that happen on the "bottom" of the tire, not the sidewall.

One set-up that really impressed me was that of Peter Maindonald who ran UST rims with burly UST tires that he could air up with a hand-pump. No risks there. Obviously you always take a couple of spare tubes and a pump that wont unwind your tubeless valve-cores when you undo it. Either that or you make sure the cores are done up tight. Some people will take one full size tube and one a 26er which are a lot smaller and lighter but will fit in an emergency. I always take two tire boots made from old road tires and usually end up giving one to someone else.

Peter Maindonalds rig. Well-specced and it felt very balanced and light.

The unforeseen
I had a few issues, some of which were possibly my own fault. I used a set of pedals that were not really up to the task, and when one of them imploded while riding up the steepest sealed section of the course I was very lucky to salvage my ride due to the kindness of a local at Arthurs Pass. Had I been riding shimano SPDs I could have just plonked on one of his, but I wasn't. I was on Crank Bros Candys so I was more than happy to throw a flat pedal with toe-clips on my left side and get moving again. The next day in the technical single track of the Wharfdale I was unlucky to flick up a branch which snagged in my drive-train and mangled my rear derailler. Fortunately my Karate Monkey had horizontal drop-outs, so I was able to single-speed the frame and do the next day and a half in one gear at a time. If I was on my Santa Cruz Superlight, I would have just torn off my hanger, which is a sacrifical point on those frames, which would have saved my derailleur. I always travel with a spare hanger. You'd be silly not to if you have the option. The adaptability of the Karate Monkey definitely saved my butt for sure. There are emergency derailler hangers that can also be packed.

Injuries
For the first time ever in the Kiwi Brevet I got really bad Achilles pain. I still dont know why. I was probably fitter than I had been before but there were too many variables. An extra 70kms riding a day. Different pedals, a different bike, different shoes, different bars. It started on day two so it wasn't the toe-clip or the single-speeding to blame. It took me 3 months to recover fully, doing stretches twice a day, so you don't want to go there.

Old tried and true stuff
The bullet-proof  Freeload rack. Unbreakable. The 3/4s Thermarest sleeping mat was rock solid, although I lusted after Steves one, which looked like this. It was insanely light and looked as comfy as hell. Brian pointed out that his cheap foam bedroll was a lot lighter than mine, but it also stuck out in the air a fair bit creating a bit of drag in my view.  My simple bivvy sack did its job but we were lucky to have good weather.

See below Simon's tent which folded down to nothing and did not stick out in the wind too much when packed on his bike.

Simon does a tent test pre-brevet. Tor and Thomas give advice. It looks a lot more luxurious than my bivvy sack : )

Til next time!

If you want to know more about the event that inspired the Kiwi Brevet, (the Tour Divide), then follow the trackers here as it the main event is happening right now. 27/06/2014. There are currently a couple of Kiwis in the top 10. The gossip can be found on the forum here.

If you are interested in doing the full length of New Zealand equivalent to the Tour Divide in 2016, then go here http://touraotearoa.blogspot.co.nz/

Read More

Ayup lights (08 roadie kit)

Here are some first impressions on the new ayup LED lights I got over a month ago. I am ashamed to admit that I have done only one off-road ride with them. The rest of the time they have been gainfully used like this:

• Hanging out the washing late at night.
• Blasting the neighbours retinas while he smugly sits in his spa pool late at night while I am out hanging out the damn washing!
• Blasting the retinas out of anyone silly enough to stick their head over the divider in my office.
• Using them for illuminating the engine bay in our car while changing the oil.
• Feeding the chickens late at night
  
• Commuting the 2kms back and forward from my work to my house!

So far the tiny 6 hour battery still hasnt run out of its 1st charge.

I have shown my roadie 08 kit (which is effectively just half of the MTB 08 kit), to 3 different guys at work, and they have all been impressed enough to buy kits, one the 08 MTB, one the 08 Enduro, and another guy a headband with a single set for running.

I think its the overall package that sells them. Incredibly light, simple robust construction, with long burn times and cheap pricing. The lithium ion polymer batteries are cheaper than anything I have seen before. All the bits are purchasable separately, but its probably cheaper to get one of their kits that seem to have about 2 spare of everything.

What are they like in the real world? My kit is awesome on the road, and pretty damn good off road, but I think for total confidence a full two-light kit would be the way to go for serious off-roading. Thats 1 set on the helmet, and 1 set on the bars.

I did notice in my only forary in the dirt that the light was very flat with no shadows, I am not sure if this is an LED thing, or because they were mounted on the helmet. I'd like to see how it compares to my workmate's two-light kits or try off -roading with the lights on the bar, its a 10 second job to change from helmet to bar.
More details here: http://www.ayup.com.au

Thinking of building your own LED light set, you could do worse than this link:
http://www.instructables.com/group/danpowerled

Read More

The last post

Santa Cruz Superlight

I had my last dry run on my fully loaded brevet bike last night. I took it down the Big Weta part of the Danzig track, which is getting pretty rutted out. It performed really well. The weight seems very well balanced this time. I weighed both my dry bags when I got home, 2kgs on the front, 2.6 kgs on the back. The front consists solely of an air mattress, a sleeping bag a bivvy, and two spare tubes. The rear is mostly spare clothes and toiletries, and two 6 hour Ayup batteries.

1 (sawn-off) toothbrush
with 5 days paste in a straw!
This will make a big difference
on the climbs.

I have the kind of stuff I think I will use regularly attached to the frame of the bike to keep life simple. Chain oil, sunscreen, water purification tabs, butt-paste, pump and tools. I have converted to tubeless tires and am running the Stans Raven tire on the back. I cant see how those tires work at all, but when climbing at least, their traction is incredible, maybe its the extra load on the rear coupled with the soft compound? Descending on the loose stuff will not be so confidence inspiring I am sure.

We have a full contingent staying at the Voo Doo Lounge for the friday and we will likely pick up some more riders on the return.

Lock ring remover, spare
drop-out etc etc

My fitness seems pretty good right now after some good results in the local Vets TT series which have been pulling close to 50 riders for each race. I managed to win 3 of the 4 I entered so I know I am good for at least 30 minutes !!! Ha ha. The "Big-boys" reps up Mt Climie that Matt and I did with Dave Sharpe nearly put an end to me but I managed to recover from the nasty saddle sore that resulted quickly.  Simon Kennett tells us the predicted wind is a Nor Easter for day one, which sounds perfect, but we know anything can happen. I am really looking forward to getting out into the wilderness, in particular the Waiuta, which although its very hard going, its also very beautiful.

Magic beans for Cleetus!

Hopefully all our technology hangs together and we get some of the "alleged" summer that NIWA promised us earlier on.

Will try to keep you in the loop with updates when cell coverage allows.

This is the last post via 'wifi", anything else comes via 3g and a phone . 

You can follow the live trackers on the official website.
http://kiwibrevet.blogspot.com/  or the Twitter feed
https://twitter.com/#!/KiwiBrevet

I will be trying to post updates to my site and blogs too.
http://jeffsbike.blogspot.com
https://twitter.com/#!/mrwhippy

You can also see stuff from Tweeted with the Kiwi Brevet hach-tag here:
http://hashtags.org/kiwibrevet

PS, You can see a list of profiles of all the riders here:
http://kiwibrevet.blogspot.com/p/rider-profiles-2012.html

Read More

Only 134 sleeps til the Kiwi Brevet !

I knew I was really looking forward to 2012's Kiwi Brevet when I was daydreaming about the new course and I nearly rode into the back of a parked car. I also had this strange dream where I was riding my bike flanked by a group of Pukekos. Birds are very portentous to me. Native birds anyway. Maybe it was a combination of Brevet memories of all the Wekas we came across near Moana, and the time we were riding with a baby deer. The mind does strange things. I have done a lot of very cool things over the years on my bike, but so far the Kiwi Brevet tops them all. A special combination of adventure, camaraderie and challenge.

Last time I was very green, and apart from doing Outward Bound in 1984 I didn't have much outdoor experience. My aim was to able to cope with anything that nature threw at me. I wasn't interested in buying into the "accommodation anxiety" thing, riding on into the small hours to try and make it to pre-booked accommodation. I felt the need to be prepared. If you break a freewheel in the middle of the bush your credit card wont save you, so I took a bivvy sack and a sleeping bag.  As it happened we did experience a breakdown of sorts with my buddy coming down with heat-stroke and an enforced camp 3/4s of the way up the Mangatapu on day 1. Its not like he wasn't fit. We had done a fair bit of training together and I was worried about keeping up with him to be honest. Anyway, we had the gear for a comfy night out so we were sweet. It was the most memorable night of the ride for me too. Camped out on Murders rock, with an amazing night sky..

In the end we were all very lucky, with good weather the whole time and what seemed like a perpetual tailwind. That doesn't mean to say it will be the same this time around. New Zealand's weather can be very changeable.

This time I am looking at different bike options. Last time I adopted a pretty simple approach. I brought a Freeload rack and bolted it onto my Santa Cruz full suspension bike (my installation pix here). Freeload built the first, and to my knowledge only rack that will bolt on to almost any fully (or suspension fork). If you have a fully the only other option is one of these overgrown seat bags. Having never used a seat bag I cant comment on how they work. I guess the weight is up a little higher. Freeload also do a pannier specific rack now, which I have but have yet to test.

I ended up riding with two other guys with Freeload racks. Jonty had them on both ends and Nick had one with panniers on the back. While they would have have been very envious of my fully as we rode through the Molesworth corrugations, I was very envious of the ease of access that Nick had to gear in his saddlebags. There was no messing about with un-strapping a dry bag which you probably just spent 15 minutes cinching up so it wouldn't wobble off after a couple of hours on a gnarly track. A couple of small side panniers like Nicks were brilliant.

Outside the Black Ball Hilton.

Now that I have a rigid 29er Surly Karate Monkey I am wondering if I should use that. Its going to be at least 2 pounds heavier than the Santa Cruz which weighed in at 28.5 pounds with aero-bars and rear rack (no load). The 29er wheels roll beautifully and I am not yet convinced the weight would make a lot of difference.

It didn't seem to be a problem for the Aussie Brovet guys who came over with their fully loaded Salsa Fargos.  There is a hell of a lot of climbing in the Kiwi Brevet, but it is spread out over 1100kms. Its got to be pretty damn steep for a heavier bike to make a big difference. There will be a few very steep segments this time around, probably more than there was last time, but if it comes down to it, if you get out of bed 30 minutes earlier the next day, any disadvantage from having a heavier bike would be gone (I think). This implies a degree of competitiveness, which we weren't actually buying into in 2010.  I am pretty sure I wont be buying into it again in 2012 ! The Karate Monkey is also a very simple bike, cable discs which are so set and forget, compared to my finicky hydraulics, and friction bar-end shifters. No pivots or shocks to break. Who am I trying to convince?

Cleetus in Port Underwood. It was hot.

Riding a fully in 2010 made it fun for me. I am wondering if that's what kept me fresh and enabled us to bang out the last 200 plus kms from Hanmer in under 11 hours. How tired would I be if I rode a steel rigid bike the whole way. That is the big question. Am I stuck on the big-wheeled band-wagon? I guess I need to do a few long rides. Some with CX tires, some with full sized tires. The CX tires fairly scream along on the flat stuff, but in lieu of suspension, a fatter tire is the only suspension you will be getting on a rigid frame.

More questions, a camera or not? I took some good photos last time, many of them good enough to be used in magazines, and I also used my little phone to take some passable photos for blogging. What's the use of doing such a cool event if you don't take the time to snap a few quality shots to document it and skite about what a fun time you are having while you are doing it! There is a lot of weight in there if you also take a phone charger, plus one for your lights. The new Ayup light's batteries come with a low-power light setting so that could greatly extend battery life.

The next thing I am geeking out on is a bivvy sack versus a tarp. A tarp could be a bit smaller and breathe a lot better. I only used my bivvy sack twice last time and I found it a bit sweaty. Here is a very cool set-up. Charlotte used one like this in 2010. Check out this website pimping the pros of "quilts". It actually makes a lot of sense.I am also keen to use aero bars again, they are a great place to hang some light gear off and you really appreciate having another position for your hands, and the ability to stretch out and take some more weight off your butt. I made sure I was well used to my aeros before the last Brevet and even did a lap of the Coppermine circuit when in Nelson with them on. Right now I am messing with some home-grown minimalist aeros in my shed. Never throw anything out : )

So that's were I am at at the moment.Thinking about the Kiwi Brevet on February 4th 2012.
Only 134 sleeps !

Read More