Thursday, December 7, 2017

Its fingers sweep the ground

The photograph was taken on November 4th.

This morning the temperature was -7 °C when I started riding the bicycle, but it warmed up during the day to 1 °C. In the afternoon it started snowing, but that will turn into rain during the night.

In the beginning of this week I did some repairs to the bicycle. The rear tire had got badly worn. Earlier I have written here how good the Schwalbe Marathon Winter tire is, but it turns out there is a big drawback: they are not durable. When I inspected the tire I noticed that 1/10 of the studs were lost, and many of the remaining studs had gouged the inner tire so that it was leaking badly.

I bought a new winter tire, made by Suomi Tyres. It has only 106 studs (the Schwalbe had 240), but is seems quite robust. The price is half of the Schwalbe tire, which lasted less than 2000 km of riding. It remains to be seen how well the new tire handles the varying road conditions.

One needs to take it easy during the first 50 km of riding, so I haven't yet done any heavy braking, but otherwise I liked the way the tire performed today. There was a thin cover of packed snow on the road, slippery enough for testing winter tires. I rode through the central park. Thanks to the cold weather the paths were not muddy, but there were some hard ridges on the path in some places, and one had to take care what way to ride.

(Posting title is from the poem Little Chief by Louise Ayres Garnett.)

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