Al's WebLog

Al: a blog about bikes and stuff.

  • Pivot shimming FTW

    Since I first had the Crafty, the rear end has been, shall we say, lose. Its the most side to side flex of any bike I’ve ever owned, plus, if you pull its a bit more, it clunked. The shock mount bolts would also come lose after a ride or two, even when Loctite was…

  • Shaking that ass

    I’ve been off the Crafty for a couple of months, not ‘cos I didn’t want to ride it but because of had a small coming together with the ground whilst riding my hardtail on a local XC trail. Result, one broken humerus. Nothing funny about that, let me assure you.

  • Home Server Room Power Monitoring

    So with the new ESXI box came another upgrade to the “server room”. This upgrade comes about for a couple of reasons. Firstly I wanted to know how much power things were actually using when they were doing things (part of the reason for ESXI on a Xeon-D is to do more with less power).…

  • ESXI Home Server – OS Install

    In my last blog I explained how and why I ended up with the hardware I have. Here’s how I made it work. So ESXI is nice and simple to install onto a USB drive, especially when you have Supermicro’s iKVM with remote media mounting. Stick the USB stick into the mobo, log into the…

  • ESXI Home Server – Part Selection

    I’ve had various bits of hardware running as servers in my house for many a year. Latterly I have an Asus Terminator T3-P5G965 running Linux as my main dev and pissing about box, an HP Microserver N36L running FreeNAS as my storage (it runs a Plex server too) and sat alongside a pfSense box I…

  • The Italian Job

    4 days riding in the Italian Maritime Alps. Its a good way to get to know a bike. Its also a good way to remember just how long the Crafty is when it doesn’t fit in your bike box…

  • Aldi “So Crafty” down tube guard

    One thing I’m keen on is avoiding holes in my down tube caused by flyng rocks. On my Nukeproof I forgot to stick an old tyre on the down tube at Afan once and had to pull a rock out of the underside of the bike, after it had flicked up and embedded itself. Lesson…

  • 1st Impressions – riding

    Having spent some time in the shed, its only right and proper that I spend some time out on the trails. So far I’ve been out for 2 local rides and 5 rides up in the Lakes on the Crafty, which gives a good early impression of where things are going and what tweak things might…

  • Quick crank upgrade

    So on the R+ the cranks that come stock are RaceFace AEffect jobs

  • 1st Impressions – physical

    With the bike arrived the first thing to do was strip it down, after hanging it on the scales of course (15.26kg).

Got any bike recommendations?

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