The inaugural riding of the MTB-OZ town Norco, in its most recent guise as Tim's object of affection.

Ian and I braved the eleph^h^hments yesterday, ignored all good advice to the contrary, and rode a couple of tracks around Kirth Kiln in Gembrook. A bit of a combination of tracks I could remember out of the ORCA book.

Climactic conditions ranged from cold and damp to cold and pissing down: track conditions varied between wet clay pits, wet sandy slurry and wet slippery rocks. According to our team geologist (Ian), the soil type is "weathered volcanic", which apparently means that it's a mix of abrasive sandy stuff on a bed of clay that doesn't drain very well. I'm guessing that we did about 15-20km, because I don't have a speedo on the new beast yet...we called it quits while we still had a hint of brakepads left.

I'm happy to say, the Norco rocks.

With the hard-points (pedals, bar, saddle) set up to be as close as possible to where I had them on the Cleanskin, the bike feels very comfortable and familiar. So, for "just another hardtail" and the same riding position, how different can the ride be?

The most notable thing about its ride it is how light it feels in very tight technical work. With a bit of pedal pressure, the front end lifts up and over obstacles effortlessly. A quick pull up on the pedals, and the rear wheel is flying. The new bike weighs about the same as the old one, so I don't know where it's keeping the weight. With a bit of fork sag (especially under a bit of brake dive), the steering is nice and tight, responsive and as precise as all hell. Point it where I want to go, and as long as the tyre hooks up, I'm there.

I'm still shaking off the final throes of a lurgi, and I haven't been on a bike for weeks, but the Norco just wants to be hammered up hills. And back down them, as best as I could tell with a constant stream of water jetting from my big front rubber into my face. I let a bit of air out of the X-vert partway through the ride, which made a nice improvement to the action which I thought was a bit stiff up until then. I'm sure I'll tweak it further before I'm sure of my fork tuning, but at the moment I'm running about 120psi (less than the 140-odd recommended for my weight), with very little compression and lots of rebound damping. The wheel seems to stay on the ground, gives me excellent feedback as to what kind of traction my front tyre has, absorbs the hits reasonably well without feeling mushy, and landed the (minimal) air I was getting without a drama. I didn't play around with the damping at all on the ride, so we'll have to see what we can do with it. No hint of bottoming out, but nothing that I would expect to bottom out on.

Only little problem seems to be the headset. It was sounding gritty and unlubricated by the end of the ride, which is a bit of a worry considering that it's nearly new, and I'd just installed and greased it. Maybe I did something wrong with the seals. I'll strip it down again and see what's going on. Maybe time to skin a lizard. Or just stop riding in shithouse conditions. Granny ring limit screw also needs a tweak. Minimal problems for a very wet shakedown ride.

I had the only stack of the day, on the same techy walking track as the second photo on the assorted photo page. It was a very long diagonal step, about a foot down from the high part of the track which stopped, to the low part which kept going. I dropped the front down, which landed and kept going down...and down (hmmm...how far _is_ 105mm?), which unsettled me and made me lose my balance. As always, I lost my balance in the direction of the creek, so there was nowhere for me to put a foot down, so I landed on my back, 6 foot down the gully, with a bike on top of me. I also had a big dab on the section that Rich is riding in the aforementioned photo, but it's been flattened/straightened out alot since we were there last.

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