On Mon Jan 6 08:15:10 2025 AMuzi wrote:

On 1/6/2025 4:50 AM, Catrike Rider wrote:

On 6 Jan 2025 10:27:40 GMT, Roger Merriman <roger@sarlet.com> wrote:

Frank Krygowski <frkrygow@sbcglobal.net> wrote:

On 1/5/2025 11:01 AM, AMuzi wrote:

On 1/4/2025 6:12 PM, Tom Kunich wrote:

I ride almost 4 times a week and until recently with a fair sized group.
Now there are about 6 of us that ride together on and off. But a lot >>>>> of my
riding now is solo. This largely because the group is aging and losing >>>>> the
ability to do the rides that I still do. Saturday rides are easy rides >>>>> but
on the way out to the coffee stop, they ride harder than I care to, and >>>>> then on the return trips they are riding a lot slower having burned >>>>> themselve out.

Perhaps one of them is capable of doing my North Palomares route but >>>>> if he
did he would drop me like a stone since he is 20 years younger than me. >>>>> And he would freeze to death at the top waiting for me. So the group id >>>>> sging out from under me. Or too young snd too fast to ride at my speed. >>>>

Four degrees at dawn today. I skipped; too damned cold.

Warmer than that today, but still too cold for me. I took a walk in the >>> forest preserve instead.

I saw someone had ridden a bike through there, based on tracks in the
packed-down snow on one gravel roadway. His tires weren't wider than 32mm.

It got me thinking about the old puzzle of trying to determine the
direction a bike was going from its tracks. It's not easy! I could tell >>> the front tire track from the rear because the front track has a sharper >>> radius of curvature. But which direction? (Arthur Conan Doyle got this >>> puzzle wrong in one Sherlock story.)

I'm pretty sure I was able to work it out eventually, but from extra
information. The tracks were straight on one short steep hill, which
seemed to be a clue that he descended it instead of climbing it. (In
addition to wobbling a bit on a climb, I think his rear tire might have >>> spun a bit climbing it.) I was also looking for an obstacle that he
would have swerved a bit to clear, which would have given another clue, >>> but didn't spot one.

Some MTB and gravel treads are directional so if the snow is crisp enough >> to work out the tire pattern that is one potential clue.

Roger Merriman

As I understand it, the treads should be pointing opposite each other
on the front vs the back. Even road tires have directional tread, but
I once read a blurb from Schwhalbe where they admitted that the
direction of the tread on their road tires was only for looks.

+1

Why are there direction arrows on fully smooth road tires?

The rubber treads are tapered and overlapping and the story was that stresses of riding rapidly could cause the top overlap to peel off of the bottom overlap and pull the rest of the tread with it. I remember seeing this on motorcycle tires long ago but
never on bicycles since they would never grow hot enough to melt the adhesive.

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