Super, downsize me

In relation to mountain biking, I was downsized once, and while I wasn't happy about it at the time, I suppose I could've seen it coming. My first year on that team, there were three riders from the US. The second, we were down to two, and then finally, I was the last. Those three years did include some pretty good times, and I did eventually get over the disappointment of being dropped. Heck, I even bought one of that company's bikes twenty-four years later, albeit second hand.

That bike was my first 29er that wasn't just an experiment. I give that company credit for designing the first big wheel bike I ever rode that actually felt nimble, while still rolling over bumps better than my beloved twenty-six inch wheels. I credit super short chainstays, shorter than all but one of my small wheel bikes. 

Still, I'd recently adopted swapping a 29" front wheel on to a 27.5" bike as my salvation, and not because I think "mullets" are cool.  It gives a nimble back end combined with an easy rolling front, and big bonus, it's a lot easier to replace today's modern, long travel hardtail fork when a bigger front wheel helps make up some of the length when going rigid.

Of course, sometimes the option that I think will make things difficult can actually be easy, and maybe even already in hand. Remember that short chainstay 29er? What if I downsized the back of that? Well, that would defeat the length advantage of increasing the front wheel which allows me to more easily go rigid, but yesterday I finally estimated how much that reduction would drop the pedals closer to the ground: half an inch.

Not much, so I pulled the bike down and found with 2.4" width tires, the bottom bracket was sitting at what I find is my target of a foot off the ground. A half inch less than that seems rideable, and all I had to do to confirm that was swap in a wheel from the back of my 27.5" bike, and then, well, ride it. In other words, there was zero hardship.

Ironically, with the weld, 

clearance is tigher with the smaller wheel.

Truth be told, I'd been thinking about this combination on this bike for awhile, without the extra thinking step of calculating how little it would drop the bottom bracket height. My bad, especially since as soon as I rode a loop around what, at my house, passes for a yard. I loved the one degree slacker head angle. It was time to get ready and go mountain biking. Hooray!

We may have a winner. After the three miles of road up to the trailhead, I liked it enough to slide the seat forward a centimeter to make up for the slacker seat angle (yes, I'm a sufficiently big geometry geek to know 1° equates to about 1cm at my saddle height), and after a couple miles of trail, I was off again to remove a headset spacer to help match the handlebars to the dropped back end. I really like slackers, angles and otherwise!

A well fed mechanic is best, so happily, 

I stopped by fruiting wintergreen, 

which my family called tea berries.

Even using the short 170mm cranks that any calculator will say are too short for my leg length (again geometry geek: I think the computation would be more accurate using only femur length, as the lower leg serves mostly as a connecting rod, and I have a outlier long lower leg), living in the rocks and roots of New England, I don't like excessively low cranks, but I didn't have any unexpected pedal strikes, and after a couple hours, I have no desire to return to the steeper head angle the big rear wheel gave me. 

I like it! Now, lets see how many more confirmation rides it takes for me to swap in the taller lower stack headset that will gain back four millimeters of pedal clearance while slackening the head angle a further half degree. Maybe it'll be so good I stop estimating computations in my head and just enjoy tbe ride. Oh yeah, I enjoy the computations as well. Win, win!

By no means the narrowest skinny log 

I've ridden to keep my tires clean, 

but it still pleased me.

I did, however, pass on this one, 

getting cold feet at the possibility of wet feet 

in November.