I’ve not been cycling outside for the last few weeks as my aforementioned front light really isn’t bright enough to convince my wife that it’s safe for me to do so. And of course it’s cold and I’m a wuss. And I’ve had the flu.
Anyway, that’s enough excuses from me for now. One of my colleagues has asked an interesting question on our internal cyclists forum at work: what tyres are best in this weather on a road bike? Or is trying to stay in the saddle while the road is icy an impossible task?
I know what the answer is for car tyres; I just fit all-season tyres to my car rather than the summer tyres which are all you can usually find in the UK. My impression of winter tyres for bikes, based solely on the marketing blurb, is that they’re thicker and more puncture resistant than normal tyres but don’t have any more grip on ice.
I have 700×30 Schwalbe CX Pro Cyclocross tyres which offer more grip in these conditions than my normal winter 700×25 Conti Ultra gatorskins. They were mostly fine for a 20-mile loop round country lanes yesterday, but I had to get off and walk for a few stretches of very slippery compacted snow/slush/ice mix
(“javascript and cookies are required in order to post a comment”. Srsly?)
The Javascript/cookie requirement has so far stopped 420 spambot comments in the fortnight since I installed it on the two blogs I admin. The other gets the lions share of the attacks due to its higher pagerank, but I expect that to even out over time.
I was using Bayesian filters alone to classify stuff but even with a 95-98% success-rate it was still quite a lot of work to check for false-positives and false-negatives. Combining the two techniques means over 99% of bot-comments are discarded at source so my workload in checking the ones which get through is much less.