Some easy TLS removed 3.5kg from my WRT weight of 30kg all-up. I hope to lose another 1kg with tweaks to my kit.

Edit: 30kg all-up = 14.5kg for the bike, 10kg for the strap-on luggage, 5.5kg for the Camelbak, or thereabouts.

1. Bikepackers are an odd crowd — quirky and very friendly. Same seems to go for other fringe cycling groups. Some part of me wishes the rest of the world was like this, but then you'd no longer notice how special certain groups of people are :-bd 2. Over-thinking the grid references doesn't help. N...

Thank you Stu & Dee for the event! :-bd I thoroughly enjoyed my first time out, in spite of that bastard headwind up the side of Claerwen on Sunday — met a few people, rode through splendid scenery, cake at the end — result :grin: Will be better prepared for next year — packed lighter and a litt...

I'm taking mine, if only for the experience of off-road night riding. I'm expecting a couple of long days in the saddle and to get to where I want to camp is going to take a bit of darkness, I think.

I'm curious...if you're packing your tent/bivvy along with your sleeping bag/down jacket, what happens on the second day when the tent/bivvy are inevitably wet. Do you separate them into individual dry bags and if so doesn't that make them pack up less well? Good question — this is my first bikepac...

Front bag —  Hunka XL bivi bag — 500g Tarp, cordage, pegs — 600g Sleeping bag + liner — 800g (cheap summer bag, but I'm a warm sleeper) Therm-a-rest mat — 200g Groundsheet — 150g 2.6kg in the dry bag, but light strapped to front of that, plus cache battery on top, so a little more. I have a smaller ...

Asposium wrote:

Wilkyboy wrote:Sorry, noob question — what's "LHC"?

lonely hearts club

Ah, of course, thanks!

T'riffic, thanks

Sorry, noob question — what's "LHC"?

Okay, so it's first time for me at BBHQ on a WRT weekend (actually on any weekend). So, what should I expect? Should I turn up at 1pm ready to roll, because there's not much happening? Or should I turn up on Friday night expecting for a full-on, all-night disco? Then again, will there be stalls to b...

Have you still got your old shoes with the cleats still attached in the same positions? If so, switch back to them, raise you saddle 8mm back to its original position and give that a go — if it works then there's your answer. If still in pain then maybe the damage is done, or it's something else ent...

Both I've not been over Drygarn Fawr but have been over Carnau from Jones' Trails at Trallym. It's pretty bleak up on the top from what I remember and, as Stuart says, a mix of rideable and hike-a-bike. The "bridleway" isn't always apparent on the ground... Thanks both. Hopefully I'll be ...

Quick Q — is it hike-a-bike or rideable, up and over Drygarn Fawr? (869 585) I can't tell from satellite view.

26-inch full-bounce MTB. Over 20 years old, so not particularly light, but still a lovely bike, even if it looks a bit dated :-bd 2.35 Hans Dampf on the front and 2.10 Nobby Nic on the rear — that's as big as the frame and suspension fork allow. I've no idea if these are good tyres, but I'm hoping ...

I reduced carbs in my diet after new year and dropped from 76kg to 70kg over that time — and definitely thinner. Not particularly LCHF, but I have gone back to butter and the like, just not huge amounts. I eat a lot of eggs and greens now. I seem to be doing okay converting away from burning carbs —...

... but probably lose some efficiency charging battery to battery, although it hasn't been noticeable ... I'm running a long-term test on all this at the moment — it's over a year now. Empirically, if you charge everything to 100% then losses battery-to-battery appear to be about one third, i.e. 30...

Is there a photo of said gilet being modelled by someone somewhere for us noobs, please?

I don't know if it's relevant but I tried using another brand power pack with pass through as if it were a cache battery and had the same result. What it seemed to be doing when connected between my e-werk and my Garmin was just passing through the output from the e-werk, so when I slowed too much ...

It may also make a difference exactly which GPS you're using — I understand from the audax crowd that the Garmin Edge 810s have a tendency to do some weird switch-off stuff when it loses external power, that neither the 800 nor 820 do. If that's the case then you're on a hiding to nothing, unfortuna...

It appears that many of the hub dynamos that have through axles suffer poor bearing life due to their having to use smaller balls to create space for the axle. May be the reason that shimano only do QR hubs. Trouble is that when the bearings fail, changing them involves return to the factory. This ...

26-inch full-bounce MTB. Over 20 years old, so not particularly light, but still a lovely bike, even if it looks a bit dated :-bd 2.35 Hans Dampf on the front and 2.10 Nobby Nic on the rear — that's as big as the frame and suspension fork allow. I've no idea if these are good tyres, but I'm hoping t...

Is it just me, or does it look like someone was putting the boot in with those GRs?!



ps. I won't be riding all this, not in 50 hours at least.

Hmm, BikeHike gives me 6,500m of elevation-gain, but RWGPS gives 5,400m of climb for exactly the same data. That's just under 25m/km overall, so Welsh-enough without being too-Welsh, and the extra 1000m over 200km I think will go unnoticed, if it's there at all and so long as it's not all at once! h...

Checking some of my longer rides, they vary in moving speed from 9kmh to 15kmh. Depends on whether I'm "racing", surface, weather, how heavily laden the bike is, etc. ... Here's the Strava bit ... Many thanks! :-bd Plus you might end up "wasting" a good few hours in a pub, and w...

Those are interesting data points, thanks :-bd What I'm struggling with at the moment is the monumental scale of the landscape — just routing between Stuart's GRs, I'm getting distances and climbs in the region of 300m per 10km, so 3000m per 100km. I'm currently a Flatlander, living in Cambridge, an...