SkiBike Season 2015 - Wayne's Damp Squib?
Posted: Saturday, 18 April 2015 by Waynemarlow in Labels: Austria, D.I.Y., France, SkiBike
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So what has been the result of 2015 in regards ski biking
for yours truly. Sort of an odd year in some ways and not what I had really intended.
I have skied more than ski biked this
year and that has been a bitter pill in some ways, as I do enjoy the biking on
snow. Mind you the conditions I have skied in this year, which generally have
been really slushy and poor, I haven’t missed
much, it’s not been an epic snow season for sure.
Skibiking with three others who I hadn't skibiked with for a year and noting how their sytles have changed highlighted something to me, watching the film I had taken reinforced that. All four of us are self-taught, without really discussing method and generally have evolved a method to get down the mountain safely and in control. We are all now very competent and as good as most. What we have all done is end up with a very similar style of riding though, yes some sit, some stand but we all ride with that very “waggly” rear ski controlling our speed and the front maintaining the direction.
On the technical side I haven’t really moved forwards, as the
intended bravado of publishing a method to make ski bikes from composites,
turned out to be a bit of a dud, purely because the bike frame turned out too
heavy. The one I built using a surfboard
type method, weighed in at 10 kilos fully inclusive of skis v the semi moulded
one at about 7 kg. If you simply convert a quality downhill mountain bike with
good components, you are going to be around that weight and save yourself a
load of build time. The first build method
I used of using a sacrificial MDF mould, CNC cut, I think will sort the over
weight problems out nicely. This summer I’ll try and get ahead of the game and
finish this project off. Apologies to anyone who had read and was following
that earlier article on ski bike build, I just need to go back to where I was
originally and build out from there.
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| On the technical side I haven't really moved forwards |
Secondly, I wanted to try my idea of a front ski adaptor, but
due to the lack of skibike time on the snow owing to work commitments and mainly due
to the nature of the groups I travelled with ( all skiers and snow boarders )
taking only a skibike to resorts, which were known to be limited to certain pistes,
or may never have seen a ski bike before, without any plan B was always going
to be risky. Again, over the summer I may build one or two prototypes and ride
them locally.
With the days I have ski biked, have I learned anything? Yes
in lots of ways. Why do ski bike manufacturers insist on having such long
forks, long suspension travel and by consequence such a high peg height. You see these bikes around and the riders look
like Giraffes on the Serengeti. Get that centre of gravity down guys and girls
and restrict the amount of travel. For me that was highlighted riding a hard tail
SnoScoot for the day. I've always run low peg heights instinctively and once
you ride a bike with very low COG you will understand what I mean. The SnowScoot
takes this to the extreme with your boots virtually at ground level. The
feeling of being down on the snow really does feel much more akin to actual
skiing, throw in the bike aspect and you really do get that true ski biking /
skiing cross over.
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| Don't make your foot pegs too high |
Many will say that
with a low peg height, the inside peg will hit the snow, but in all honestly I
have yet to get problems, even on very steep hard pisted conditions, nor will
being so low in powder be a problem, with the very low frontal area of the Scoot,
probably being the easiest bike I have ridden in powder. Talking of pegs, I
rode a bike with pegs that simply bolted into where the crank goes. They are also
quite small in surface area. For the first time I had sore balls of my feet,
painful ankles and worse still, my ageing hips were starting to really feel
hard done by after a single day. As the rider of this bike sits most of the
time, it hadn't been a problem before but I stand all of the time, it really
did highlight the importance of measuring what the distance between your feet
are when you naturally stand and opening the peg width to suit.
I tried skis with the side cut spread across the front and
back ski i.e. each ski starts wide and ends narrow, with the rear ski turned 180
degrees to form a constant arc across the two skis, this year for the first
time. As much as I found them interesting, they have an inherent problem. At
speed they work fine and will carve well on their edges as per a conventional
ski. As soon as the front ski begins to take a different line, as in when you
want to scrub speed off by allowing the rear to slide out sideways, then a
whole new geometry problem arises. Most obvious was when you wanted to “hockey
stop” to a halt, as you kicked out the back end and lent the bike into the slow
speed corner, the geometry arrangement actually makes the ski edge bite in even
at more of an angle, the last thing you want. It really did perplex me to start
with and once I learnt to keep the bike much more upright, to the point of
actually almost slanting the bike down the hill, I could break the ski off its
edge, but for a novice that is not very intuitive as under G force the bike naturally
leans in, simply compounding the problem. In comparison to a normal ski, you
have to ask whether the high speed advantages are worth the slow speed
disadvantages.
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| Shared sidecut skis - are the high speed advantages are worth it? |
Skibiking with three others who I hadn't skibiked with for a year and noting how their sytles have changed highlighted something to me, watching the film I had taken reinforced that. All four of us are self-taught, without really discussing method and generally have evolved a method to get down the mountain safely and in control. We are all now very competent and as good as most. What we have all done is end up with a very similar style of riding though, yes some sit, some stand but we all ride with that very “waggly” rear ski controlling our speed and the front maintaining the direction.
 |
| Skibikers - time to go waggle that rear ski |
Some will criticise that we are not carving enough, but if
you think this method through and compare it to normal skiing, you have to ask
just actually how much do you carve with skis. Yes in nice open terrain, say
nice blues and easy reds, you do carve on skis but then ski bikes do take nice
open turns, using the edges to carve on similar terrain. On steep black runs or
tight tracks between pistes, where you short swing down the fall line, in
skiing you actually are encouraged to compress your legs slightly to encourage
side slip, controlling speed, use a leg extension to edge check and build a
platform, to then compress the legs ( unweighting ) rotate the skis back up the
fall line and across to the new direction, again side slipping to control
speed.
Surely with the evolving method that the four of us are
using, are we not doing the same. The front ski controls our heading whilst the
rear ski goes from side to side controlling speed, the rider compresses /
lowering their body to allow the side slip just as a skier would, now extend
out the legs to effectively load the ski edge ( platform ) and then pull the
legs in to allow the bike to rotate back up the hill, once past the fall line allow
the bike to side slip and start to extend the legs slightly, using the side
slip to control the speed. As Skibikers we need to also use the front ski to
maintain direction and I'm tending to find that on very steep slopes the handle
bars are nearly always in the same plane as my shoulders, i.e. if I'm facing
say 10 o'clock to the fall line then my front ski is pointing much the same.
That again is a skiing basic, your shoulders should always face down the fall
line.
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| Evolving skibike riding methods - perhaps it's time to write a book |
Interesting stuff, perhaps I should write an illustrated
book. Lol!
So another ski season on bikes and I think probably the
first true season where we virtually can go anywhere in the ski world and ski bike,
give yourselves a big pat on the back all those who have been at the forefront
with seeking permissions from ski resorts and a further big pat on the back to
all those participants who are now actively “ Ski Biking”.
