Panaracer Gravelking SS Plus+ 3,000 Mile Check-In

A new set of wheels and a revised sealant choice have led to over 1,000 trouble free miles for my tubeless setup.  An apology needs to be made to the tires because all of the problems I was having seem to have been a result of other components.  Whoops.

There is not much to say about the Gravelking SS Plus+ tires.  The tires are wearing like iron, although I think I am starting to see the rounded profile being worn down to a squarer profile.   I could also be going crazy after so many miles in the saddle.

Below you will see how my tires have weathered the riding season so far at various intervals:

Note: I bought these tires with my own money.  Nothing has come to me from Panaracer.  If I were pimping a product I would let you know.

Panaracer Gravelking SS Plus+ 2,500 Mile Check-In

500 trouble free miles makes me start to wonder if I have slayed the reliability demons that were bedeviling my wheels for the first part of the riding season.  My fingers are crossed.

The only real comment I have on the tires at the 2,500 mile mark is that these tires wear like iron.  You can still the slight patterning along the centerline on both tires.  Granted, the now front tire is much more faint.  The question I have now is whether these tires can last the rest of the season pushing my replacement Gravelking SS Plus+ in 38c width to next season.  We shall see.

Below you will see how my tires have weathered the riding season so far at various intervals:

Note: I bought these tires with my own money.  Nothing has come to me from Panaracer.  If I were pimping a product I would let you know.

Panaracer Gravelking SS Plus+ 2,000 Mile Check-In

Another 500 miles and a whole new set of issues.

It turns out it was not the tires, sealant, or rim tape causing me issues.  My wheels were actually starting to fail.

How so?  After installing a tube in the back wheel and riding for about a week all hell broke loose.  On a single ride I went through 2 tubes and my back wheel went out of true.  How wobbly?  My eyeball estimate was somewhere between 5mm to 8mm.  Yes, it was that bad.

I dropped the wheel off with the good people at Goldfinch Cyclery to true.  About a day later I get the dreaded call from the mechanic.  When a mechanic begins any conversation with “Well…” it is time to gird your loins for the bad news to follow.  It turns out that the rim on my back wheel was beginning to crack/separate right down the center line.  That was a new one.  It also explained why I could not get the wheel to hold air pressure or sealant for more than a night.

Now, I find myself with a new wheelset and tires set up for tubeless all over again.  What a world.

Below you will see how my tires have weathered the riding season so far at 500 mile intervals:

Note: I bought these tires with my own money.  Nothing has come to me from Panaracer.  If I were pimping a product I would let you know.

The Adventure Begins…

The adventure begins where the pavement ends.

Unfortunately, it now takes over nineteen miles of riding on a paved trail to get to this point.  Progress?

Panaracer Gravelking SS Plus+ 1,500 Mile Check-In

I did a bad thing.

After the most recent tubeless tire debacle I went back to tubes.  Yep, I cleaned out the sealant, de-boogered the tires, and stuck old school butyl tubes in my tires.

Was it rash?  You bet.  Did I want to spend another afternoon fooling with sealant and an air compressor?  Nope.  Did I want to worry about another bizarre trailside failure?  Nope.

While some of this has to do with the problems that I have been having in keeping my current Panaracer Gravelking SS+ set up correctly it also has to do with the nature of my riding.  More accurately, how the nature of my daily rides has changed over the past couple of years.  What had once been miles of unpaved recreation trails has turned into smooth pavement.

Not only did I resort to tubes I also rotated my tires.

Below you will see how my tires have weathered the riding season so far at various intervals:

Yes, I realize the images at 1,500 miles appear switched between the front and rear. That is because I failed to take a picture of the treadwear prior to rotation.

Note: I bought these tires with my own money.  Nothing has come to me from Panaracer.  If I were pimping a product I would let you know.

A Case of Tubeless Tire Complete Self-Destruction

Prior to the past week or so the Panaracer Gravelking SS+ 700C x 43 had been rock solid.  Compared with my prior two sets of WTB tubeless tires, one set of Ventures and one set of Byways, the Gravelking SS+ had held air like a champ and shown none of the problems of microholes that seemed to bedevil the WTB tires.

Notice that I said prior to the past week.  I kind of want to take back all of the good words that I lavished on the Gravelking SS+.

First, the rear tire on my Breezer started weeping sealant through the tread area like crazy:

This is just a taste of what it looked like every morning.  I would have blamed the sealant, Orange Endurance in this case, but the front tire did not have any leakage.  I would have blamed something on the trail poking holes in the tire, but again there was nothing damaged on the front tire.

Like a fool I poured some additional sealant, Orange Endurance again, and continued my early season riding.  Everything seemed normal.  The tire continued to have spots of sealant weeping.  However, it was holding pressure on long rides (30+ miles) and overnight, so I chalked things up to the strange swings in temperature/humidity we have been having this spring.  One day it is 65 degrees and the next it is 90 degrees with similar swings in the humidity.

Like I fool I went out for a ride this morning when less than three miles from my house the rear tire on my Breezer self-immolated.  There was a sound like a balloon popping followed by a complete flat.  I walked the half-mile or so to the trailside air pump hoping that a little air pressure might allow things to reseal since I saw no obvious major damage.

With a pump or two of air sealant was leaking out of the valve stem and spoke nipples:

Maybe I should have cut bait on these tires when the rear tire started weeping sealant.  Maybe I should have rotated the tires and rebuilt the tubeless setup at the beginning of the season.  Maybe I should have switched brands or type of sealant.

Thankfully I was close enough to home to call a ride to get my ruined bicycle back to the shop and in for some much-needed repairs. It’s enough to make a guy go back to using tubes.

The Final Bicycle Cockpit

My Breezer has gone through several cockpit iterations over the past several years as I have looked for the perfect combination.

I started with the compact drop bars that came as stock and transitioned quite quickly to a Salsa Cowchipper, which had been on my previous gravel bike.  This led to a return to a flat bar with and without bar ends.  Nagging wrist and hand pain forced me to reevaluate.

Toward the end of last season I installed a cheap swept bar that I bought on Amazon.  The geometry of the grip area was similar to the Jones H-bar that I had been looking at for a while.  My hope was that the inexpensive bar would provide an analogous experience to the Jones bar at a fraction of the cost. 

My experience with the swept bar was good.  The hand and wrist pain that I was experiencing was lessened, but the lack of hand positions was uncomfortable over the long run.

So, over the winter break from riding I built out a totally new cockpit:

This is a Jones H-Bar Loop in the 710mm size.  The grips are ESI XXL Extra Chunky cut down to ~7 inches from their original 8.25 inch length.  The components are the same as prior versions including the TOGS thumb grips.

In the loop area I installed a Surly Moloko bag.  It fits perfectly and I prefer the style to the Jones bag.  Of particular note is the Surly bag’s bungee straps on top that allow me to stuff a sweat rag for easy access or stow my sunglasses if the weather changes rapidly.  It’s a little thing, but when you are riding fifty miles from home the little things start to matter a lot.

Unfortunately, the weather in Iowa this spring has been absolute garbage.  Cold, rainy, and windy have been the order of the day for the past month or so.  Riding opportunities have been limited, but the forecast looks good in the upcoming week.  My hope is to put some miles in to report on how the cockpit setup is faring.

Happy trails!

2021 Personal Goals Scorecard

2021 was a year.  Actually, it felt like more than a year.

Looking back I do not know what I really did for an entire year.  Work feels like pretending as our ad hoc work from home arrangement is entering its third year with no end in sight.  Play feels like a constant question of “is this worth the risk of potential exposure?”  Heck, every time I think about going out to grab a pizza my minds starts to think about transmission rates and air handlers.  Yeah, that is what 2021 did to my brain.

Anyway, I digress.  How did I do when it came to my goals for 2021?  Read on below to find out.

Here goes:

1. Read 60 books—73 books in total against a goal of 60.  Victory.
2. Ride 3,000 miles on my bicycle—4,103.6 miles against a goal of 3,000.  Victory.
3. Ride 3 “new to me” trails—I only rode one “new to me” trail: the High Trestle Trail in central Iowa.  It seemed like coronavirus and weather killed every effort I made to ride new trails.
4. Local, direct, and packaging free beer—Pretty good.  You can see the details here, but the theme was heavy on the local (only one non-local purchase all year) and decent on buying direct from the brewer and/or in a packaging neutral form factor.
5. No new car in 2020—Epic failure.  We got through March before the reality of needing two cars that could travel more than 75 miles or so set in.  Granted, I am glad we did not spend the first half of this year trying to rent cars for those few weekends of kids activities separated by hundreds of miles. A single weekend was going for about what our car payment is right now.  That would have hurt.
6. Less lawn, more life—I feel like I am about halfway to my goal of ripping out my lawn in various spots.  I started to build out a large pollinator garden in 2021, but 2022 is probably going to see my finish the project and undertake another similar style bed in another part of my lawn.
7. Deeper decarbonization—Like the prior year, I do not know how to categorize this goal.  Without any effort on our part, my wife and I “avoided” 218 days of commutes to work.    Since 2019 we have “avoided” 383 days of commutes to work.  This is a lot of avoided carbon dioxide and other attendant pollution.  I have also decarbonized my lawn care with a battery electric mower.  It does feel, however, like we stalled out a little this past year.  Our delayed effort to replace out natural gas water heater with a hybrid air source heat pump model ran into supply chain realities.  As a household we made some efforts to reduce natural gas usage by keeping our house a little chillier and focusing on heating the person via electricity.  If there is one thing I am going to work on in 2022 this is it.

Panaracer Gravelking SS Plus+ 1,000 Mile Check-In

Passed the 1,000 mile milestone on the Gravelking SS Plus+ tires about a week ago.  As the weather turns for toward the nasty—forget the Instagram worthy pictures of sunlight dappled fall leaves because it has been rainy and windy here in eastern Iowa—I get to spend some time reflecting on the past riding season.

These just might be the holy grail tires I have been looking for the past couple of years with one caveat.  As you can see from the photos below the tires are wearing like iron.  Previous tire sets really began to show wear on the rear tire at the 1,000 mile mark.  The Gravelkings have not even shed all of the rubber “hair” from the molding process.  I will probably rotate these at 1,500 miles or so.

The ride quality is good on either pavement or mixed surface trails.  Honestly, I do not even think about these tires.  I just “point and shoot” when I am riding like a mountain biker in the 1990s trusting his Smoke/Dart combo would carry him through.

The only caveat is that the 43C width might be a bit much.  This is a chonky tire.  With a nearly slick center section you have to rely on the width when the going gets soft.  Like the WTB Byways previously, you have to wait until the tire sinks a little bit into the terrain before the side knobs bite.  Granted, the trails around here were mostly like concrete all summer with drought like conditions persisting.

A quick note on size.  The specification is for the tire to have a width of 43C.  With my fancy new digital calipers I measure the tire at ~44.5C front and rear at several points along the tire’s circumference.  This is a chonky tire.

Below you will see how my tires have weathered the riding season so far at various intervals:

Note: I bought these tires with my own money.  Nothing has come to me from Panaracer.  If I were pimping a product I would let you know.

Third Quarter Progress on My 2021 Personal Goals

I am nine months into the year and the end is coming into focus.

Let’s see how things are shaping up with just under a quarter of the year remaining.

1. Read 60 books—57 books down.  Two in process should put me on the doorstep of my goal before mid-October.  With some cooler weather there are going to be some good reading nights in the near future.
2. Ride 3,000 miles on my bicycle—Ended September having ridden 3,839.2 miles.  Success and then some.  Aiming for something closer to 4,500 miles as a “stretch” goal.
3. Ride 3 “new to me” trails—Rode 1 new trail (High Trestle Trail), but COVID-19 seems to be getting in the way of me riding anything else.  Or the weather.  I have taken three days of vacation where it has rained—during a summer of drought—so I am not thinking this is my year.
4. Local, direct, and packaging free beer—Keeping it local.  You can check out my beer purchasing below:

• No new car in 2021—Fail.  I have spent enough time dwelling on this failure.
• Less lawn, more life—Took out some scrubby turfgrass and planted the start of a large pollinator garden.  (Part 1 and Part 2)  I have a few more things to do in order to get the bed read for the winter and future planting next spring when I intend to complete my vision of a pollinator oasis.
• Deeper decarbonization—Again this is an interesting case of how you frame the situation.  I did not end up replacing our water heater or furnace with air source heat pump models because supply chain constraints meant high prices that pushed me to wait until next year.  Plus, we finally got contractors in to complete repairs stemming from last year’s derecho so our house budget was kind of blown. However, consider that by the end of September my wife and I had not commuted to work for ~165 days or more than the entirety of 2020.  With three months to go, we will have avoided well north of 200 days of commuting.  Plus, we have not taken an airplane flight since the summer of 2019.  The direct carbon emission savings of those two differences is a big deal.