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Auckland Bike Slob

~ Cycling aimlessly around New Zealand – so you don't have to.

Auckland Bike Slob

Monthly Archives: December 2013

Riding to Woodhill

16 Monday Dec 2013

Posted by Mr Slob in Riding

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Tags

Auckland, Cotic, Cycling, forest, Minginui, new zealand, Roadrat, Woodhill

When I was a child, my family and I lived for a couple of years in a pine forest. Not because we were Beatrix Potter style charming woodland creatures, but because my mother was scared of the wind. You see, we had arrived from England in the mid 1970’s and my parents had chosen the Marlborough Sounds as the ideal place to live. We hadn’t been there long when it became clear that the wind which periodically howled through The Sounds was slowly driving my mother crazy. At first she resisted – when the wind started up at night, she would get my sister and I out of our beds in the upper storey of our A-frame house, tell us to put our mattresses up against the visibly buckling ranch slider windows and sleep downstairs.
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But eventually she realised that this level of anxiety was untenable, and when our goat tragically hung itself, she decided that it was time to move house. My mother confronted my father and demanded that he find the town in New Zealand that was furthest from the sea, and therefore the wind. Fortunately he is a Master Mariner and consequently entirely qualified to find such a place. After consulting various maps, charts and taking sightings on his sextant, he determined that we should move to the teeming metropolis known as Minginui. Not only was it way the hell inland, in the middle of the Ureweras, but it was surrounded by a Radiata Pine shelter belt. Surely my mother would be safe from the wind there.
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And so it was that we moved to Minginui, and lived there for a couple of years amongst the trees. This formative childhood experience left me with an unfashionable fondness for pine forests, as well as the conviction that as soon as it gets windy, everyone should be putting mattresses up against their windows.
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I was thinking about Minginui on a rainy Tuesday morning in the Woodhill Forest Mountain Bike Park. It’s years since I’ve done any proper mountain biking. In my early twenties I owned a flourescent-orange Diamondback Ascent and my friends & I would frequently thrash our bikes and ourselves around the Riverhead & Woodhill forests. Before there was a park and before bicycles had suspension. I had gotten the urge to reacquaint myself with Woodhill but I didn’t want to drive up there. So the Off-Roadrat and I caught the train from Auckland city out to the Waitakere station and rode the remaining 25km. Most of the way it was pleasantly quiet backroads, but there was a stretch of about 5km on the main highway to traverse.
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I rode around the park for a couple of hours, got lost a couple of times and then cycled back to the Waitakere station just in time to catch the 2:30pm train back in to town. Although it was a nice day out, I’m not in a big hurry to take up mountain biking again. But I am tempted to explore some more of the Woodhill forest area – I wonder if there’s an overnight trip to be had somewhere up there…
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Route here

Salsa Casseroll

15 Sunday Dec 2013

Posted by Mr Slob in Bicycle Build

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Auckland, Casseroll, new zealand, Salsa

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Last year I was pottering about on TradeMe, looking for nothing in particular, when I cam across a Salsa Casseroll frame. It was a 2008 model which, strangely no one else seemed interested in. It came with a Chris King headset and Salsa seatpost & stem. I managed to resist the first time it appeared, but when it was relisted at an even lower price, I caved in and bid. I was the only one who did, and it was all mine for only $280. Soon after, also from TradeMe I bought a set of wheels – Mavic OpenPro rims, Shimano Ultegra hubs, with 72 spokes between them. I hid the wheels & the frame behind the couch for a few weeks while I scoured various exotic corners of the Internet for more parts.
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From XXCycle in France, I bought a Stronglight crankset. Why the Stronglight? Three reasons, they’re reasonably cheap, they’re quite good looking (I really don’t like those modern Shimano cranksets that look like a stingray is glued to your bottom bracket) and they come in a good range of sizes. The ‘standard’ 50t road ‘big ring’ is too big for me, and I wanted a low bottom gear for ascending some of the very steep hills you find in a city built on 57 volcanoes. So I chose a 48/34 and put a mountain cassette (11-34) on the back. This has worked out really well – I spend most of my time in the outer ring, and the middle third of the cassette. If necessary I can crawl up steep hill in the 1:1 bottom gear, and I have never spun out in the top gear.
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Lying around in the garage, I had a set of Miche dual-pivot brakes. So installed them hooked up to nice Tektro levers. To change gears I bought 9-speed Ultegra bar-ends. Why bar-ends? I like their simplicity and versatility, also if the indexing gets screwed up, you can switch them to friction.
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I was very fortunate with the all important contact points – the saddle is an old Brooks I salvaged from a 1970’s Peugeot, and the handlebars are Grand Bois Maes Parallel that I found on sale at Planet-X in the UK. Both of these items are very comfortable. At first I put on Shimano Deore deraileurs, but I have since replaced them with Shimano 105. The tyres are the classic Panaracer Paselsa TGs.
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Built up like this, it was my Sunday rider. But I don’t really ride on Sundays, so it wasn’t getting much use. I thought I’d try riding it to work, this required the addition of some accessories – via TradeMe, a Tubus Fly rack, from Rose Bikes in Germany, a B&M Lumotec IQ Fly-T Senso Plus front light, SKS mudguards and dynamo hub front wheel.
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So now I ride it all the time – to work, on “training” rides on the way home from work, for longer loops around Auckland and it’s even been on a little tour. I like it a lot – it’s very comfortable and reliable, without being slow or boring. It’s not perfect though – the bottom bracket is low enough that it suffers from a bit of pedal strike, and there is some toe overlap. Maybe one day I’ll buy a nice 650B randonneur to replace it. We’ll see…

Rail Trail Bail

10 Tuesday Dec 2013

Posted by Mr Slob in Riding

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Tags

Cotic, Hauraki Rail Trail, new zealand, Roadrat

I was sitting in my car on a rainy Thursday night, in the carpark of the Thames Pak’n’Save, stuffing my face with a McDonalds Fillet’o’Fish while listening to the final melancholy tracks on Echo & the Bunnymens’s ‘Live in Liverpool’ album. “Nothing ever lasts forever” Ian McCulloch was singing – unlike these fries I thought, which did seem to be lasting forever. Why are there so many of them? When I was was a kid there were 8 fries in a small bag and 15 in a large, but this ‘medium’ had thousands in it. Would I never be free of them? The melancholy atmosphere deepened when the CD finished and the carpark PA became audible. It was playing ‘Snoopy’s Fucking Christmas’. I slumped down lower in the seat – where had I gone wrong? What twisted train of events had brought me here?
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Well, I’ll tell you. My plan had originally been to catch the ferry from downtown Auckland to Coromandel Township on Thursday morning, ride down the coast to Kopu, get on the Hauraki Rail Trail, ride to Te Aroha, stay the night, ride back on to Coromandel on Friday and catch the ferry to Auckland. Is simple, no? But a representative from the ferry company had called me on Wednesday to tell me that there would be no sailing on Thursday – apparently due to a “weather warning”. My initial reflex was to cancel the trip, but then I remembered that I like weather, so the ride would go ahead, but I would drive my car down there instead. Sure enough there was lots of weather – it poured with rain all the way there.
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I had been informed that the road from Coromandel to Thames was very pleasant to cycle along, but as I drove along there through the numerous blind corners and past the not infrequent slips I realised that that was bollocks. Riding along that road today would be both miserable and scary. So I came up with a backup plan – park in Thames and ride to Te Aroha along the Rail Trail. Maybe ride back the same day.
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I assembled the Off-Roadrat in the rain, put on my Buffalo jacket, and set off from Thames at about 1pm.
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The first 26km section from Kopu to Paeroa is classic flat gravel rail trail, through open farming country. There are lots of little bridges, and cattle stops. And cattle. And horses. The signage isn’t that great – I missed several of the links between sections and spent some time in Paeroa riding in circles trying to find my way through. The second section was quite different, it wound through bush, past waterfalls and through a long creepy tunnel.
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It was the tunnel that made me wonder if I was going the right way – I thought that was on the Waihi gorge section, but I was supposed to be heading for Te Aroha. The trail continued along beside the river and eventually popped out in a small town. Te Aroha? Nope – Waihi. Ummm, ok then. By now it was about 4pm and I was hungry. So I ate a toasted sandwich, drank a cup of coffee, bought a light (in case it got dark before I made it back) and got back on the trail. While eating the toasted sandwich and drinking the coffee, I had decided to bail out of this thing, ride back to Thames tonight and drive home.
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It really is a nice ride through the gorge. “Was it still raining?” I hear you ask, why yes it was. Did it rain all the way back to Thames? Yes it did. In fact, do you remember that bit in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s book, ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ where they’re living in a town in the middle of the jungle and it doesn’t stop raining for 5 years? Well it felt very much like that.
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I finally made it back to Thames about 8pm. After 100km of soggy riding, I was starving. The first thing I found to eat was an artificial food-like substance from a multinational chain. And that’s how, dear reader, I ended up in the Thames Pak’n’Save with too many French fries, listening to Echo & the Bunnymen.

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