Short term review: Vittoria Open Pave CG tyres.

Well loved Shimano R500 wheels and Vittoria Open Pave CG's. Pretty much indestructible.

Anyone who has done much riding will tell you that wheels - and in particular tyres - are the most important single component if you're seeking to get the best performance out of your bike. But like with most things in life, there's a trade off with tyres: light fast tyres tend not to be tough or long-lasting and are more prone to punctures, heavier tyres are more durable but tend not to roll as nicely. I've tried quite a few different tyres and have found some which had great potential they never quite lived up to. For example I was a big fan of the Grand Bois tyres initially for their lovely supple ride, but found their high price, lack of puncture protection and short lifespan too much of a hurdle to overcome.

Enter the Vittoria Open Pave CG. The kind folk at Abbotsford Cycles sent me of the 25mm wide model of these these tyres to test. They are the clincher version of a distinctive green-banded tubular tyre popular with the pros on rides like the Paris-Roubaix. They're a nice, light folding tyre - sub 300g - and they look the part right out of the box. They were easy to fit and the light file tread reminded me of the Vittoria racing tubulars I used to use in days of old. The sidewall and tread appear to be smartly a single piece of rubber, eliminating a weak spot I found a fatal flaw on the Challenge Griffos. 

By Tasmanian standards, this is a very very nice gravel road.

I have been running the Open Pave's for a couple of weeks now in all conditions and I have to say I'm most impressed. On the tarmac, they are smooth and fast and responsive like a good light high pressure road tyre. They roll along with a pleasant hum, their grip is impressive - inspiring confidence in the wet. But they also handle dirt road astoundingly well. I've given these tyres an absolute pounding on the sub-standard roads around home. Even my venerable Gatorskins develop cuts and small holes over time and repeated gravel runs, but there's not yet a mark on the Open Pave's. 

In general, only a madman rolls down bumpy dirt roads with 100psi in their tyres as it's generally a recipe for shaking the fillings out of your teeth. The Open Paves have a suppleness to them that - while it certainly doesn't made the ride plush - certainly smooths out the bumps and reduces the road buzz far better than anything else of the same width. 

I note the Open Paves' are available in a 27mm tyre as well, which would probably be more to my liking for the sorts of conditions I ride in regularly where the road changes from tarmac to gravel and back every ten kilometres or so on some of the quieter routes I prefer. I'm going to use them in the 360km Oppy ride coming up in a couple of weeks in preference to the red Rubino Pros I usually ride on long road events. 

A few of the online reviews I've read have suggested the Open Paves are a good commuter or winter tyre, but I think this is selling them well short. This is a tyre perfect for spirited road riding in all conditions. They're an ideal tyre for Audax cycling, combining the elusive mix of fast-rolling, toughness, suppleness and strength. I'll keep riding these to see how well they last but at this early stage I like them so much that when they wear out, I'm definitely buying another set.

Yes, I have tested lots of different tyres!

Too windy to ride.

Too windy to ride today with winds of 50km/h predicted and gusts usually 50% above that. It's enough to knock a man from his trusty steed. This was the be a week of cycling up the West Coast of Tasmania, but it wasn't going to be a pleasant trip so it has been put on hold for the time being. So instead I've decided to clean up the shed and patch some tubes which have been sitting too long waiting for some attention.

My effort to tidy up my tools has left me rather chuffed. It doesn't seem like much but it's cleaned up the bench and has made my tiny working space much neater and far more organised than it was.

Not all sweetness and lights.

With a big ride coming up I gave some thought to some new lights. Though I like my generator hub, something small and light and frictionless. A friend of mine VictimOfNoel (not his real name) has a set of the neat LED units from ayup which I quite liked. They come with a six hour battery and mounts etc which I thought would have been ideal for Audax rides. So I ordered some. Or at least tried to. Dearie gracious me.

First I had to endure their truly appalling website with it's shitty flash animation and bizzare design, which is not much fun over a dialup connection, trust me. Once I managed to find what I wanted it was impossible to find the exact price, because GST and shipping were added later in the process. Once I had ordered, I noticed the default shipping address in paypal was wrong, so I e-mailled them to ask if they could correct my error.

After a week of waiting for either a response to my e-mail or for my lights, I e-mailled ayup again this morning asking them to either confirm shipment of my lights, or to refund my money. Within 30 seconds my money was refunded. Shit! Even Tel$tra tries harder than that to hang onto customers. My refund was accompanied by a note referring me to a mass mailling they sent out during the week pointing out they were out of stock of some of the merchandise they were still selling on their website. No attempt to provide me with something different, no offer to ship something same day. Nothing.

I hate bad service. Even through their product is a decent one, they deserve to fail. I'll never deal with this company again and I recommend you don't either. During the week, I noticed this on a blog. Ayup manages to observe about four of these simple rules of how to shed customers:

1. Refuse to help when the customer is not happy with the product or service.

2. Ignore customers when they are standing there and it's obvious they need some attention. Better still, make sure you keep talking to your friend on the next register.

3. Push customers into buying stuff they don't need.

4. Lie.

5. Be rude and talk down to them. Do your best to make them feel like idiots.

6. Make sure you never have important items on your shelves.

7. Have only one or two people serving at peak times.

8. Display one price on the item, then charge a higher one.

9. Make sure your staff doesn't know how to do a simple transaction, like a lay-by.

10. Don't return phone calls or emails.

3,899km so far this year.

Sanity in gearing

I'm back in the saddle again, happily. I've managed to churn out 160km since whining about being slack on Saturday. The extra miles have me feeling good on the bike and have really boosted my confidence for this weekend's trial. I've finally fallen in with a bunch of local riders of about my speed, ability and shockingly casual attitude, which is ironic because I'm leaving town in four weeks. Hopefully there will be a similar mob in Hobart.

Spending more time in the saddle watching the scenery go by has me pondering a few things. Why is the cable routing on Shimano SPD drop bar shifters so inelegant? Couldn't they have run the cables along the handlebars like Campagnolo do instead of leaving them hanging out in the wind? Would I be happier with down tube friction shifters just to make thing prettier? The big issues clearly occupy my mind.

Anyway, I'm working on a cunning plan to upgrade my crankset so I can use the old gear to build up a road bike for Mrs Surly Dave. (She gets a road bike, I get a new crankset, we're all winners). Being someone to completely over-analyse everything, I've hit the spreadsheets. I ride at an average speed between 19km/h and 23km/h. Now and again with a tailwind I'll nudge towards 30km/h. Up hills I'm slower - 10 to 15km/h depending on the hill. So I need gears which help me ride in that range.

OK, so here's where things get technical. I generally pedal with a cadence between 70 and 90 revolutions per minute. Let's call it 80 for the sake of the argument. My gearing ranges from 109 inches down to 29, or to put it another way, I travel between of 9.2m to 2.3m per pedal revolution. With a 52/39/30 triple crankset and a 12-27 cluster, my bike is set up to propel me at speeds of between 13km/h and 50km/h. The trouble is, I seldom go this fast. I very, very rarely use my top chainring. (The yellow highlights on the gear chart below show the gears would use at normal speeds, some are duplicates. Click to make big).

It works out that about eight of the gears on my 30-speed are never used except for when I'm in a hurry on long downhill. This is, of course, not counting the duplicates and the gears which can't be used because of chainline issues. Being charitable, that takes out another 12 combinations. So on a 30 speed bike, I've got about ten useful gears.

So it turns out that getting whole bunch more gears doesn't deliver anything more for the average cyclist except added weight and complexity. Wow, big surprise!

But assuming for a moment I'm a typical, or even sane, cyclist who seldom exceeds 30km/what would be the ideal setup for me? (I don't want to get rid of the lower gears, they come in handy for getting up hills.) It turns out to be 44/32 front chainrings with a 12-27 ten speed rear cluster. That gives me 92 down to 29 gear inches and an effective speed range of between 40km/h and 12/km/h at 80 rpm. I'd guess that such a setup would cover just about every casual and recreational cyclist in the world except those lucky few who have a downhill commute with a tailwind home.

But do you reckon you can buy such a setup? No way. Not even in the compact double cranksets so popular of late. Why not? Presumably because when you ride the Tour De France, you need a 53 tooth front chainring to give you a huge 120-something inch top gear to charge down mountain passes and in the sprints. It's madness, madness I say.

2,296km so far this year.