Rugged Wheels update and preview

Rugged Wheels is my new business venture born in the woods of Eastern Ontario, a destination with thousands of square kilometers of gorgeous wilderness for epic rides on and off road.

Why Rugged? Because out here, buff trails are the stuff of fantasy. Here we contend with Canadian Shield, limestone flats, dismal swamps, rooty cedar and pine forests, sticky clay, water crossings, and pointy rocks everywhere.

The lightest gear is no use if it breaks. Even on a road ride here it can be a long hike back to civilization and you can't count on others along the way. So our wheel vision emphasizes quality and durability: built to service, built to last. Rugged Wheels for rugged rides.  

For the last couple of months I've been spec'ing wheelsets, ordering parts, and building wheels in preparation to launching my web site. Here's a preview of some of the goodies.

The following are custom carbon rims, all for tubeless mounting and built on DT Swiss 350-series hubs. There's an 80mm-wide fatbike rim, a 38mm deep road rim, and a 60mm deep road rim. The road rims are 25mm wide to allow for wider (e.g. gravel) tires and include a rim braking surface, although I'll be building these up for disc brakes. I'm also looking into an option for a more discreet rim graphic, but hey--these are meant to show off the brand!

Here's the 3 Amigos together for comparison:

Light dual-sport motorcycles like the WR250R, CRF250, and more are rightly gaining popularity. Upgrading the wheels or having a second set with different tires improves the ride experience. Here's the set of SMPro wheels I built for my WR250R, mounted with an MT-21 in front and D606 in back. Hubs and rims are SMPro with Bulldog stainless spokes and aluminum nipples. Everything is made by the same company in the UK--they supply wheels to many well-known factory brands in Europe. 

Ignore the ghetto balancing weights. The nice ones I had in stock didn't fit the slightly larger Bulldog spokes, so I need to order new weights. 

Note these wheels look a little grungy because they have 500km of trail riding on them, and the tires have about 2000km.  

The hubs have a nice, clean design, include spacers and bearings, and build up well.

Here's a close-up of the Dirt Tricks sprocket I've run for 13,000 km of filthy trail riding. 

It shows no functional wear compared to a brand new sprocket on the right. Amazing. 

Like DT Swiss on the bicycle side and SMPro on the moto side, Dirt Tricks is a brand I've chosen to import because it's such good stuff.

I also rebuilt my stock WR250R hubs with new SMPro rims and Bulldog spokes to be able to run a more street-oriented tire. 

The real show here is that zirconium PVD-coated sprocket from Dirt Tricks. This coating is expected to be more durable than the chromium plating on the regular sprockets. Colours look amazing when you change the lighting angle. 

Rugged Wheels will offer these products and more in 2017:

• Wheelsets for bicycles and motorbikes. These are sold as predefined upgrade packages based on carefully selected components and sizes that are most popular and optimize performance, durability, and cost. Lightest and cheapest is available elsewhere; that's not our market. Retail sales are through bike shops only. You can order bicycle options from Imad or Brian at Rebec & Kroes in Ottawa. We're interested in hearing from motorcycle shops that want to offer wheels and parts for dual-sport and off-road applications.
• Small parts for wheels. Whether you need hubs, rims, spokes, or other related parts, our plan is to provide sales and technical support. If you've ever tried to spec a wheel, you know there's a lot to figure out. One supplier has over 60,000 SKUs just for wheels...
• Custom-cut spokes for bicycles. Our Morizumi spoke machine enables us to offer precision-threaded spokes as cost-effective options (order 1 or 500!) for servicing your own wheels.

London to Sydney Motorcycle Adventure

As for many adventure riders, crossing central Asia is definitely on my bucket list. Until (if) that ever happens, enjoy the vicarious thrill of this epic journey on KTM 690s which was posted recently to YouTube.

WR250R tear-down and mods

It’s been too long since I’ve had time to post anything, so my apologies in true Canadian fashion. Getting wheel packages spec’d, ordered, and built for my new Rugged Wheels business has taken much of my time outside an already full commitment to my day job. However, it hasn’t been all work. Thanks to rainy cool weather lately, where it hasn’t been cold enough to go fat biking and yet it’s been too cold/wet/muddy for other riding, it’s been a perfect time to show the WR250R some love and complete its 21,000 km service.

From this:

To this:

...and hopefully back again later.

According to the manual, 21,000 km is a major service interval. Besides the usual stuff like oil change, cleaning the air filter, lubing cables, etc., it’s time to inspect bearings, replace brake hoses, flush coolant, repack the headset, touch up some rust spots on the frame, and do some other deeper inspections. 

New chain sliders are always welcome. This is the third set on the bike. Wear was high (not surprising given the mud in my area) but appears to be even, suggesting chain line and tension are OK.

In the hopes of tackling some more adventurous rides next year, I’ve also taken this opportunity to improve some key parts of the bike.

Wheels

As reported earlier, I’ve built up a rather nice set of new wheels around SM Pro hubs, rims, and Bulldog spokes (all of which I am now importing as a dealer for SM Pro). Although I only managed to get in a few short test rides before my season ended, the improved handling that these properly tensioned and balanced wheels gave the WRR was immediately apparent. Steering and suspension felt a lot more crisp, probably a direct consequence of the higher wheel stiffness that using heavier gauge spokes and higher tensions achieved.

I’ve also rebuilt the original hubs into a second set of wheels with the same SM Pro rims and Bulldog spokes. These wheels will be shod with a set of Mitas knobbies oriented to 80% road use for those longer trips where any dirt is likely to be just gravel roads. The first set of wheels will keep full DOT knobbies, an MT-21 up front and D606 in the rear.

For gearing, I’ve decided to stick with a 47T Dirt Tricks rear sprocket (one of the gorgeous new zirconium-plated models; I'm also a dealer for these now), but change the front sprocket for a 14T (for road-oriented riding) and maybe revert to my current 13T for off-road oriented riding. 

14/47 is still a little shorter than stock 13/43 gearing, so I’m hoping I can get away with just the one ratio. In any case, alternating between 13T or 14T up front shouldn’t require a different chain length, just an axle adjustment.

Suspension

A frequent complaint with the WRR is that the shock has intrinsically poor rebound characteristics—even when you crank down the rebound setting. This video explains it well, and it certainly captures my own experience. It’s frustrating to not be able to find a good set-up, despite having good success dialing in my mountain bike suspension.  

Clearly, motorcycle suspension tuning is a subtle art beyond my available means of time, budget, and patience. So off went my forks and shock to John Sharrard at Accelerated Technologies near Peterborough, for his tuning expertise. Although John prefers to receive the whole bike when tuning, that wasn’t practical for me, so instead, he ran some tests on my parts, took them apart to have a look at the internals, and called me to discuss a tuning strategy.

John feels the forks have a pretty decent set-up already. However, they could benefit from some revalving of the “comfort shim” and adjacent shims that together provide initial compliance to small-amplitude, high-frequency bumps. These shims form one of two valving stages in the WRR fork. The second stage of shims provides large bump compliance once you’ve blown through the first stage. Both stages will be tweaked together (softening the first stage and hardening the second stage) to provide more initial responsiveness, a smoother transition between where small bump compliance ends in the first stage, and more big-hit compliance. In addition, John recommends using Motul 5-wt fork oil with this set-up. Although I’d used Spectro 5-wt in my last fork service, John measured the viscosity as-received and found it was closer to 30-wt. Not sure what happened there.

For the shock, John advised against a piston and valving upgrade (e.g. using a Gold revalving kit, which is often recommended in online discussions). He feels that the stock piston has adequate porting for my riding style, and changing it would only introduce another tuning variable that would make it harder to identify an optimal solution.  Instead, he is going to rebuild the valving around the strategy of replacing the stock spring with a higher-rate (stiffer) spring, coupled with valving to achieve higher compression and rebound valving to match the stiffer spring, but then running the rebound more open. This approach should decrease preload on the spring compared to the stock spring, but achieve lower energy and compression of the nitrogen. In short, it allows not running the system so hard (i.e. to try to overcome the original valving design flaws), which in turn should improve compliance and allow more adjustability of the damping through the clickers.

Incidentally, John measured the nitrogen pressure to be 145 psi (vs. spec of 150 psi), which is pretty good considering there’s 21,000 km of dual-sport riding on the shock. He also thought the forks were pretty clean inside considering all the mud I've run through in the last 13,000km since last service.

With any luck, there will be a repeat of tropical Christmas weather like last year, that will allow me to test-ride the suspension before the full grind of winter sets in.

Brakes

The 21,000 km service indicates that the brake lines should be replaced. Although mine appear to be in good shape (and I replaced the pistons and seals last year), they are seven years old and that alone is enough of a reason for me to replace them. 

HEL Performance Canada sells gorgeous braided stainless brake lines for a very reasonable price, and you can customize their appearance to match your bike. 

These lines came with banjo bolts and crush washers, but the bolts were about a ¼” too short so I reused the stockers. Fit seems pretty good, and from prior experience they are certain to improve brake feels.

Skid plate

Aluminum skid plates are not just awesome at deflecting rocks, they also reflect engine noise in a way that is tiresome on long rides. Prior experiments with different sound dampening materials and methods to bond them to the aluminum have all proven to be failures, as the detached rubber here clearly shows. 

My latest iteration is to try this 3M bitumen-based soundproofing material that I bought at Canadian Tire. 

Preferably it would have an aluminum facing (like the Dynamat I used on the wings of the skid plate) to reflect heat and reduce the chance of getting trail crud embedded in the material. However, the adhesive seems super strong so it’s worth a try. Based on whacking the skid plate with a hammer, this stuff certainly dampens any ringing noise.

Fuel tank

With many more months before the road salt is gone and I can ride the WRR again, I may pull the trigger on ordering a larger gas tank (~11L) to gain some extra range. Currently I’m relying on a 1-gallon (3.8L) RotoPax mounted on my rear rack for extra range over the 7.2L stock tank. While I rarely need to dip into the RotoPax, having the option of confident 400km range all-in would reduce range anxiety, especially when exploring.

Whole new bike?

Ah yes: the perennial question of "is it time to replace my bike?" Considering I'm only halfway to the first valve inspection (at 42,000 km) and don't have the budget for a new ride and its unknown shortcomings, beyond installing a larger tank it probably doesn’t make financial sense to spend any more money on upgrading my WRR. When it is finally time to replace it, there are likely to be many interesting new options for small-displacement DS bikes, like the CRF250L Rally (which, however, is heavier and less powerful than the WR250R). Or hopefully something in the 300-400cc range to give that extra bit of power for inevitable highway riding.

Rugged Wheels: SM Pro Platinum build for WR250R

The last few weeks have been particularly busy as I work on getting my new business up and running, Rugged Wheels Inc. -- "Rugged Wheels for rugged rides!"

As part of setting up and testing my processes, I've been ordering hubs, rims, spokes, and other goodies from my suppliers, including DT Swiss for bicycles wheels, and Central Wheel Components for moto wheels. Having recently rebuilt my mountain bike wheels, it was time to test some wheel upgrades on my trusty WR250R. The stock rims have taken a beating from trail riding and the front certainly needed replacing.

Central Wheel Components in the UK is an OEM of premium hubs, rims, spokes, and complete wheel sets for several well-known motorcycle brands. Their brands include SM Pro hubs and rims, and Bulldog spokes which are renowned for quality, but don't seem to have much of a market footprint in Canada. Having become a reseller for their parts, naturally I wanted to test them out on my WR, so I ordered rims and spokes to use with my stock hubs as well as a complete front and rear wheel kit with SM Pro hubs. I'll eventually put knobbies on the SM Pro wheels and mount street-oriented tires (probably a Mitas pair of E 07's or other tires to test) on the rebuilt stock wheels.

Everything arrived nicely packed.

The hubs look great: clean machining, laser-etched logo, good bearings, and slick seals and axle inserts.

These are the Bulldog polished stainless steel, straight-gauge spokes with aluminum nipples--the recommended combo for my application. 

The SM Pro Platinum rims are made from 7050 series aluminum and independent testing shows they are both stronger and lighter than the Excel A60 and Takasogo rims. The finish is excellent and so far has proven entirely resistant to scratches from tools and spokes during wheel building.

  

There is a rainbow of colour options for these rims to match your bike, and the spokes can be ordered powder-coated as well. I often for boring black with silver spokes and nipples, but may rebuild them with black spokes another time.

First step is to coat the nipples with anti-seize. I use Rock-and-Roll ceramic since it's on hand and has proven to be excellent in all sorts of uses on my motorbike. 

Next up is lacing. Here's the front wheel under way. 

Finally there's the meticulous process of truing and tensioning to spec. I found that both rims trued up pretty well--I could get them within 1/2mm laterally and radially without too much trouble. For a rugged wheel, it's also important that all the spokes are evenly tensioned or the wheel will not stay in true and has an increased risk of failure. 

The finished wheels look great! For now I'll transfer my old rotors and sprockets to these wheels, but the rotors are due to be replaced and I'd like to run a smaller sprocket with the street-oriented tires to get more top-end speed. My current setup is 13-48 which is great in the dirt but tops out at around 100km/hr--barely enough for secondary roads around where I live. 

Looking forward to trying these. And soon I'll be able to accept orders for wheel parts or complete custom wheel-sets. Stay tuned!

Dual sport on your doorstep: James Gamble homestead on Peter Robinson Road

As I described in a recent post, Peter Robinson Road between March Road and Old Almonte Road runs through a desolate swamp that, incredibly, was the location of some optimistic and tenacious homesteaders in the late 19th century. In my last post, I described the James Carter homestead which sits on a large, gently sloping "island" in the middle of the swamp. But as the old Huntley Township map of 1879 shows, there's another even more isolated homestead that belonged to James Gamble, situated on smaller island that lies close to Old Almonte Road.  The outline of what must be the foundation is obvious in the aerial photo:

As you can also see from the aerial photo, Peter Robinson Road in this location is just a muddy, rocky track that's usually flooded year round. The scrub and mush completely obscures a view to the island. This is all you see from the track, and there's no way I was going to try to use through that to the island:

Instead, I continued a hundred metres or so further down Peter Robinson to a clearing on the right at a slight rise in the land.

From here I backtracked through the underbrush directly behind my bike, crossed a stream, and bushwhacked a little further south before I finally emerged from the undergrowth to see the entirety of the island:

Even when I visited at the end of a remarkably dry summer the bugs were awful. I can't imagine how tough it must've been in the summer 100+ years ago, with no screens on the windows and the heat of a wood-fired stove radiating in a small cabin!

A foundation was indeed located right where I expected. It's little more than a depression in the earth, and quite easy to miss unless you know exactly what to look for. This is the view from in the foundation. Just to the left another depression with a dead tree sticking out of it. Not sure what it was, but it could've been either a cold storage cellar or perhaps a latrine, although it was located only a few metres from the home. There may not have been another location at this site where it was possible to dig this deep without hitting rock or the water table.

Some dry-laid foundation stones were clearly visible.

This is looking into the second depression with the dead tree. Clearing away the overgrowth might reveal some hints to its purpose. 

I couldn't find much information about James Gamble to determine who he was, what family he had, and what he did to make a living. Hopefully with a little more research I can fill in more of a picture of his life.

Something I have deduced is that this area was not ravaged by the great fire of 1870. One nearly contemporary account of the fire describes how a group of men took a wagonload of tools down to create a firebreak near Hugh Kennedy's home on the Long Swamp Road (now called Old Almonte Road), which was the site of the former community of Clandeboye. However, it's reported the fire bypassed this area altogether. Both the James Carter and James Gamble homesteads are shown on the 1879 map, but since that's after the fire it's not clear when they were actually built. My guess is that much of Huntley township was depopulated for several years after the fire, since there was very little left to rebuild with (no timber for construction, no forage for animals). Sustaining even a rough, pioneer lifestyle. would've been very difficult without the means to import resources until the land could recover. 

For the hardscrabble homesteaders in Huntley Township, the allure of green pastures opening up in the North American west after the end of the US Civil War proved too much to resist. Many families emigrated out of Upper Canada. This story repeated across the region from Ottawa to Georgian Bay, resulting in many of the abandoned roads and ghost towns we see today.

Mountain bike wheel upgrade: DT Swiss XM401 rims

Every five years or so there seems to be enough cumulative small improvements to bicycle technology that riding the newest bike models can feel like a whole new exciting sport. Short of replacing your entire bike though, there are some strategic and affordable upgrades you can make to reinvigorate your riding and extend the life of your bike.

On mountain bikes in particular, you’re probably already familiar with the wide range of handling and control improvements achieved by simply changing tires to better match terrain and riding style. Less familiar to many riders though is how profound a difference upgrading your wheels—or at least your rims—can make in how your bike feels and performs. There are some solid technical reasons why wheels make a sensible upgrade.

Let’s use my bike, a 2014 Santa Cruz Tallboy 2 Carbon, as an example. This 29er is at the XC end of the spectrum but is built much more durably than a fragile race machine. The wheels are WTB i9 Frequency rims at 19mm wide, laced with DT Competition butted spokes to DT Swiss 350 Classic hubs. Pretty decent spec that’s representative of many mid-level XC bikes.

The problem with 19mm wide rims is that their narrow platform offers little stability for mountain bike tires. You can see this by grabbing the hub of your wheel and pushing it from side-to-side to flex the tire against the ground. That sideways movement is amplified by your body weight when riding, causing a squirmy feeling in the wheels. Large knobs increase the squirmy feeling because they enable more flex to occur between the rim and the terrain.

Mounting the same knobby tire on a wider rim increases the tire’s lateral stability and reduces the squirmy feeling. It’s the same principle as why standing with your legs wide apart can brace you against a sideways push. But there’s another source of lateral movement that’s less obvious: rim flex that occurs as the rim itself tries to resists forces from pedaling and trail bumps.

In cross-section, a typical bicycle rim is essentially a “D”-shaped tube. Since the spokes are all attached to the rim in one line (unlike on some fatbikes and adventure motorbikes like BMWs, where spokes are laced tothe outside edges of the rim), there is no lateral bracing to help the rim resist twisting forces that can arise, especially when hitting bumps. Torsional/bending strength therefore relies mainly on the rim design itself. Large diameter wheels (29ers) are more susceptible to these forces for a given rim width than 27.5” or 26” wheels. However, increasing the cross-sectional area of the rim—making it a larger “D”—greatly increases the rim’s ability to resist twisting. As a result, upgrading to a wider rim not only improves tire bracing, it provides a more rigid platform for the tire to push against as it engages with the terrain, reducing overall lateral flex in the system.

Sure, interesting theory--but how does it actually feel in seat-of-the-pants riding? Is there enough benefit to justify changing your rims?

To test this, I rebuilt my back wheel using the same hub and spokes, but swapping the WTB 19mm rim for a gorgeous new DT Swiss XM401 23mm wide rim. (As a DT Swiss dealer, I ordered a bunch of these—let me know if you want some.) The XM series is aimed at the more aggressive end of the XC spectrum ("All Mountain" on the DT Swiss scale) and is meant to offer strength and durability over pure light weight, but it isn't as heavy as their Enduro or DH rims.

Here's the new rim, still in its plastic, resting on the wheel. 

As you can see, edge-on the original rim had taken some damage beyond what truing could fully overcome without creating a weak and unreliable wheel.  

Rebuilding was straightforward: I taped the new rim to the wheel and simply transferred each spoke one at a time to the new rim, using the included Squorx aluminum nipples and washers instead of the original brass nipples. 

Almost done!

Careful truing and tensioning to the DT Swiss spec resulted in a beautiful, strong wheel.

Some DT Swiss rim tape and a lighter valve stem completed my tubeless build.

A dose of Stan’s and a good shake resulted in a perfect seal the first time. No air lost overnight.

Even though it’s a wider rim, the XM401 it’s still remarkably lightweight: the complete rear wheel weighs only about 40g more than the original build with the 19mm WTB rim! You may balk at replacing anything on your bike with something even slightly heavier, but consider what you gain: the increased tire bracing, torsional strength, and air volume together achieve a remarkable performance upgrade.

Indeed, a two hour test ride on fast, flowy trails with rock gardens and roots showed a profound improvement in the feel and handling of the bike. The rear wheel simply felt more planted in response to bumps, and more precise in its control. There was none of the squirmy or vague feeling I had previously felt on off-camber corners or in rock gardens, and cornering traction improved as a result. It also felt like the suspension was more in control, not like there were two separate systems of wheel flex and shock conflicting with each other in reaction to rider and trail input. While I can’t quantify these effects, qualitatively it almost felt like I was riding a new bike. All this from just changing a rear rim! 40g is peanuts to trade for this massive improvement.

Update: I've also swapped out my front rim but haven't had a chance to try it other than a few laps around the driveway. Front end feels noticeably more solid, although a more rigorous test is needed to assess how it affects steering and suspension feel.