One temperature record is following the other here in Montreal, and after my rather foggy Saturday ride, Sunday was forecast to be sunny and warm. Despite not having gotten much sleep, I decided to go for a long ride, getting to the mainland west of the Ile de Montreal for the first time this year. After taking the usual way west, along the Lachine Canal and then following Lakeshore/Bord du Lac to the western tip of the island. Then you cross the Rapides de Sainte-Anne next to the motorway and go across Ile Perrot on the fairly busy and unattractive Grand Boulevard/5e Avenue (a nicer alternative is to go around the island, but that adds a lot of distance). Another bridge next to A20 will take into Dorion where after half a kilometer of very dangerous contra-flow riding on the shoulder of the A20 you turn left onto Avenue Saint-Jean-Baptiste and then merge onto Route 338. Route 338, running mostly parallel to the A20 is not very busy and has a nicely paved shoulder all the way to the hamlet of Pointe-des-Cascades. Pointe-des-Cascades is the end point of the now derelict Canal de Soulange. According to Wikipedia, the canal was built as a replacement for the original Beauharnois Canal but became obsolete with the opening of the St. Lawrence seaway on the other shore of the river. ...

I haven’t posted ride reports in a long time. One of the main reason is winter-related: in winter I find it too cumbersome to take pictures while going for a ride. Instead of just pulling the camera out of the back pocket of your jersey and snapping a shot while riding, you have to stop, take off your gloves, open the zipper, take the picture, stow away camera, put on gloves. And without pictures ride reports tend to be rather dull. Well, Montreal has been experiencing record temperatures of well over 20 degrees (and that’s Celsius, not Fahrenheit!) and therefore I’ve been riding a lot and I’ve taken pictures. Saturday started out somewhat bad: I had woken up at 5:30 but it was all foggy. The fog – and the low temperatures – didn’t go away but at about 9 I got going anyway. After having ridden around the western half of the Ile de Montréal a couple of times now, this time I wanted to head out east. There is bike infrastructure going along the southern shore of the island all the way to its tip but from experience I knew that huge proportions of it are badly designed, badly maintained, or sometimes both. Therefore I took the easiest possible way: turn right onto Notre-Dame and keep going and going and going. Riding on Notre-Dame was alright, despite it being a major thoroughfare with up to 8 lanes. On a Saturday morning traffic was light and with one exception cars passed me with care. ...

My Brooks is still broken, but there have been a few noteworthy developments. After posting about my plight on German radreise-forum.de and on this blog, I have received some useful feedback. A commenter here pointed out that Brooks has an “official” repair person in Philadelphia and that I should contact the US Brooks distributor, Highway Two, to get the repair shop’s contact info. Unfortunately, they didn’t reply to my email. I then contacted Brooks directly and within a couple of minutes they replied: ...

If you’ve read my previous post on the toll of winter, you know that my bottom bracket is grindy. I haven’t kept exact records of how many kilometers I have ridden with it, but I’m pretty sure that it’s only about two years old and definitely has less than 10 000 km on it. That’s pretty disappointing for a cartridge bottom bracket. I’ve looked at different options for a replacement and it was hard to decide between them: ...

Update July 2012: Please also read my recent review of the Model 1. After my recent Brooks mishap I decided to try something new. Velo Orange, one of the brands that sells leather saddles made by Taiwanese company Gyes, had a sale on two of their models, their “Model 3” being a copy of the Brooks B17 touring saddle, and “Model 1” a copy of the Brook Team Professional, which is somewhere in between a touring and a road racing saddle. It would be hard not to compare the VO offerings with their Brooks counterparts, and since I have a good deal of experience with Brooks products, that’s what I’ll do. ...

Winter is far from over here in Montreal. But because of a snapped gear cable I decided to do a spring tune-up on Wolfgang, my all-purpose, all-year bike. A lot of people have “winter beaters,” but to me that never made too much sense: I really like my bike and don’t see the point of riding an inferior quality bike at a time that places the highest demands on bike and rider. Especially, I wouldn’t want to give up on my hub generator and LED lighting at the darkest time of the year. So far, this has worked well for me and the wear and tear of components didn’t seem to be particularly bad. But somehow this winter seems to have been worse than previous, if not in weather but in damage to parts. My rear rim was destroyed a couple of weeks ago, after less than 10 000 km. ...

Update March 15: I’ve written up some repair-related information in this post. Last weekend, I did my first long (i.e. over 100km) ride of the year. The weather was alright at 3°C and some sun with clouds and I had a very nice ride out to the L’Île Perrot. Not so nice was the fact that about 85 km into the ride my Brooks B17 Imperial saddle broke: I heard a quick cracking sound and immediately knew that it had to the failure that I had been afraid of for a long time: one of the rails broke, right behind the clamp. ...

Last year was a bad bike camping year for us. We only managed to do one overnight trip, and even that one had to be cut short due to health issues. Well, there’s always the next year, and the cold of winter is a great time for daydreaming and actual planning of tours to come. Very high on the list of tours to do is a one-week ride from Quebec City to Montreal via Sherbrooke on the Route Verte 1. Using OpenCycleMap and the official guide I have mapped out a 445km route. The idea is to start in Quebec City and then ride back home to Montreal. This has the advantage of allowing us to ride as fast or slow as possible, without the pressure of having to catch a train. It will probably take about a week at about 65km per day. ...

I am a big fan of DIY alcohol stoves, especially the penny stove variety. I like DIYing in general, and in this case it’s also about the fact that a homemade penny stove is actually better than many if not most of the commercial offerings in terms of weight and heat output. Heineken Penny Stove and stand In a recent thread on the German Radreise-Forum about equipment choices for an overland trip from Germany to China, the question of the ideal stove came up. Alcohol stoves were discounted by some, based on the availability of fuel in many countries along the way and due to their questionable performance at high altitudes and low temperatures. I was somewhat surprised by the latter objections, as on the penny stove website there are a number of testimonial about the cold weather performance of the stove, including a quotation by Reinhold Messner who supposedly made tea with a jet-based alcohol stove on one of his expeditions to the Himalayas. However, the information there was not very specific -- how much longer does it take to boil water at cold temperatures and how much more fuel does it take -- and my curiosity was sparked. I decided to test it myself. Air temperature of -9°C Stove, pot, windscreen This winter has been pretty mild in Montreal and so it took some time until it was cold enough for a meaningful test. Last Sunday morning had been predicted to be about -10°C and so I put my stove, fuel, and thermometer out on the porch right after waking up and ran the test after about an hour. So this is the experimental setup: Altitude: 10m Amount of water: 1l Air temperature: -9°C Water temperature at start: 5°C Pot: 2.2l REI coated aluminium pot with slightly to big stainless steel lid (I couldn't find the original plastic lid) Stove: Heineken-based penny stove with wind screen Wind: almost no wind Fuel temperature: same as air temperature Burner at full power I started the timer right before lighting the stove. The lighting itself was unproblematic: I just dropped a burning match into the stove. The total time until reaching a full boil was about 14 minutes and 30 seconds. I didn't measure the fuel consumption, as my kitchen scale recently broke, but the stove still had quite a bit of fuel in it. 5°C water right from the tap Now what's the bottom line? Is the penny stove an appropriate choice for winter camping or riding through the Himalayas? I don't think you can definitely answer that question based on my test. Unfortunately, I don't own any other types of stoves and therefore couldn't do replications of the test on other equipment. But there are some hints: first of all, the stove does work in the cold. Even if it may not be the fastest, it will still boil your water in a not totally unreasonable amount of time. Second, we can compare the stove's cold weather performance with some of the published data at higher temperatures: in this test, a penny stove boiled 32 oz (0.95 l) of water in 7:50 at 20° degree air temp with 18°C degree water temp and 670m elevation. It would be interesting to calculate the estimated burn time adjusted for the different starting temperatures of the water, but I haven't done that yet. Full boil Assuming that it will get colder again here at some point, I'll try to repeat the test at something closer to -20°C and I might also do a test indoors to get a good baseline to compare my results to. If any readers can contribute data on the cold weather performance of alcohol or other stoves, please feel free to comment.

The current weather in Montreal has kept me indoors more than I wanted. Inspired by an article in the current issue of Bicycle Quarterly, I decided to measure the geometry of my Gunnar Roadie.The article in BQ describes how to measure bike geometry from a photograph, and an older article gave instructions how to measure directly on the bike. As a quick summary: measuring on the bike works better for almost all dimensions but trail and fork rake. Trail and fork rake can be measured on a picture, but it’s hard to get them accurately. ...