Crankzone

There’s an excellent article over on diylife.com on emergency mountain bike repair and some of the tips are probably ones you’ve never heard. My favorite: ‘inflating’ a flat tire by stuffing it with grass and dirt to make it back to the car. Incredible. I also didn’t realize that a rock can be used in place of a chain tool or that a taco’d tire can be bent back …

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In case you missed it earlier this week, USA Cycling announced the junior and U23 riders who will be competing in the 2008 UCI Mountain Bike World Championships in Val di Sole, Italy, June 17-22. Of the 12 riders selected, it looks like 9 are from the western US (California, Colorado, Arizona, and Utah). Our 3 East Coast reps are Jamie Dinkins from Powell, TN; Kerry Werner from Birdsboro, PA; and …

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Have you ever found yourself on the trail without your trusty tire lever?  Perhaps you left on your bench at home, or it fell out of your seat bag that you forgot to zip up (again!).  Or maybe you don’t use tire levers but you just can’t get your riding buddies tire off without a little help. 
Use your quick release lever as a tire lever!  Most QR’s have a nice rounded profile th…

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There’s a new mountain bike trail on Mt. Wellington in Tasmania (Australia) and according to legendary trail designer Glen Jacobs, “this is an amazing piece of hand-built engineering of unequalled workmanship.” If you don’t know him, Jacobs is to mountain bike trails what Jack Nicklaus is to golf courses and his work includes the 2000 Sydney Olympic MTB course plus hundreds…

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What do you do when you wreck your motorcycle in the middle of a race? Ever the competitor, Leon Haslam runs across the track, grabs a mountain bike, and heads off toward the finish. Or at least that’s how it goes in my mind

Original post by Jeff Barber

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I’ve been considering a 29er for my next mountain bike and I’ve been trying to read as much as I can online about others’ experience with the larger wheels. I’ve even test ridden a Cannondale 29er and it felt great but I imagine the 29er works so well for me because I’m tall and I’m not bad at climbing (not to toot my own bike horn ). But are women trying and …

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Following the Chile Challenge Rich Houseman and Melissa Buhl currently lead the USA Cycling Mountain Bike National Gravity Calendar Standings. The fourth event on the USA Cycling Mountain Bike National Gravity Calendar will include the downhill and dual slalom contests at the third annual Capital Cup at Wisp Resort in McHenry, Md., June 20-22.Original post by asmith@usacycling.org

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This weekend I got the chance to check out a couple north Georgia mountain bike trails I hadn’t ridden in a while so I thought I’d let you know what’s up. We camped out at Fort Mountain State Park and the main mountain bike loop looked pretty overgrown. Ok, pretty overgrown might be a bit generous since the Powerline section looked nearly impossible to follow with briars covering…

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A buddy at work has been complaining aboout chain suck on his race bike and asked for some suggestions.  I gave him a response typical of many shop mechaincs, “just file off the burrs on the teeth of chainrings and you should be good.”  He tried it, and came back telling me he still had chain suck problems.
In researching the problem, I came across this great site by Jonathan Levy ca…

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A few mountain bike gadgets and tech you may have missed this year:

The RAM Mount: Want to take your GPS, cell phone, and PDA out on the trail but don’t have a good place to stash them? How about on your handlebars. If I had one of these babies I’d probably end up using all 3 mounts for my different GPS units.

The Ride by Ellsworth: The Ride is a bike that makes use of the NuVinci …

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