rotorburn profile

It's rather different for LiIon batteries - you don't want to discharge too low or charge them up too high. You can squeak a little more runtime out if you charge to a higher voltage, but your battery life goes down a bunch.

What I run on my bar is a standard 18650 pack (6 cells) with high capacity cells - they you can charge it conservatively and run it on a pretty high mode while not worrying about runtime when you're in the middle of nowhere ... alone ... at night .. in the rain.

Another benefit is you can take a spare 4-cell pack as a backup. Those weigh almost nothing and can be strapped anywhere.

I had bike shops mess that up on me, one time my quill stem came completely off the bike, right in front of traffic.

The best was when the “whiz kid” mechanic used gear cables on my brakes. I’m lucky they snapped on the flats, i could have died in the wrong place!

Now i prefer to be the one to make the dumb mistakes. At least I assume I’ll screw up and thus triple check my work.

Good point. I spent most of my early riding days in Halifax worried about the "damage" to the trails.

Then the city council made a secret deal to swap the pristine parcel of land that had the trails on it to a developer. Within a few years that whole place had been blown to bits and gorgeous granite bluffs turned into parking lots and shitty apartments.

The same thing has slowly happened to me in most of the places I've lived. A few ribbons of trail in the front country really doesn't register when compared to the kind of things going on elsewhere. Etiquette is good, as is ensuring friendly relations with other trails users, but it's easy to go way too far with this.

This was getting really bad off of the Legacy climb train in Squamish. Loamers, a new one each week, just carved down the hill off the climb trail. Not even snuck in around a switchback, and no camoflauge. So of course they get trampled by everyone.

One of those loamers doubled back on the climb trail - except it pointed you DOWN the climb trail. I almost got taken out by a couple Italian tourists DH types. As I dodged them, they assured me that I was not, in fact, on a climb trail (that I'd climbed a thousand times) and that they were in the right.

I do miss the days where we'd make the entrance a couple hundred meters past any official trail, over a log and a couple rocks so we'd limit the onslaught at least a little bit. Sure, it's "gatekeeping", but I'd take that over what we have these days.

I like the OneUp, but I was coming from terrible experiences with Reverbs (I'm still mad), and an arguably even worse experience with a 9Point8.

The OneUp does a few things well: cheap, very easy to service, available parts in Squamish and good friendly support, etc.

What I find it doesn't do so well is the finer points of the engineering side. My biggest issue is that the brass keys jostle around in the aluminum pocket, which is just bare aluminum. That wears down the aluminum (to an oxide, probably) mixed in with slickoleum, creating what looks to me like a grinding paste that then rubs on the outside tube and on the bushings and generally creates havoc.

I've had to epoxy the keys in place a couple times, which helps, but that's pretty heavy handed. Now I'm dealing with wear on the outer tube. You can rotate the tube to have it wear on new keyways, but this whole situation kind of rubs me the wrong way (groan).

I think I'd be happy to pay the money for the Wolf Tooth version, but I'd love one that requires less maintenance. At least the one-up maintenance is like a 7 minute job.

I've got the 12 speed MTB version. The shifting isn't as good as the original XX1 of course, but not terrible. Slightly better than SunRace level, which is a little disappointing at that price. Not as good under torque as the XX1, with the occasional loud prong as it finds its place again.

I did pre-emptively take the big cog off, loctite the bolts and torque them to what felt appropriate (they came rather loose) and I haven't had issues with creaking. No issues with the lock ring coming off either.

I'm not even a year into riding it though, and it appears to have as much wear as my XX1 did after 2 full seasons - just about dead. This is true on on both the steel and alloy teeth (they appear to wear fairly uniformly). That's really disappointing, as I was expecting the steel to last way longer. Given this (and assuming I'm not crazy), it seems like it's actually a fairly poor value. Not Hope Cassette bad (I'm still bitter), but the X01 would seem to be a better value and have better shifting.

I was a big MT5 fan, and still think they make sense at a given budget.

That said, I had BOTH levers start leaking after a few years, within a few weeks of each other. Magura was great with their 5 year 'no-leak' warranty though. But I don't really trust the carbotecture stuff as much as real metal.

I also found them to need more cleaning/maintenance to stay decent than high-end Shimano's. Nothing crazy, but I'm lazy so I swapped to Saints/XTR 4 pots and no complaints (except serviceability I suppose).

Stock pads are pretty close to garbage if you're riding aggressively. I usually pick some up from Germany as local retailer's prices were madness.

I had a pair of those R0's back in like 2011/2012 or so. Could never get them working correctly and swore at them up and down. Looking back, I wish I knew enough back then to be able to properly rebuild them myself.

Andrew's suggestions on the MT5's were spot on and worked well for years, and lately I've been running Shimano Saint / quad-piston XTR's, both of which have treated me well with the usual Shimano power and ease of maintenance. My next set will be rebuildable though, the Shimano's aren't so hot in that category.

I invested hard into being able to service my own reverbs. Every time it was a nightmare. It just seemed like poor engineering that never got better.

Then I invested hard into 9Point8. Not sure I've ever regretted a purchase so much. I take that back - Hope hubs are the worst (for me anyway, that doesn't seem universal).

Now I have a OneUp v2. Not perfect, but absolute bliss compared to those nightmare experiences.

Will I hate RockShox/SRAM forever? Well no, they have some good stuff. But I avoid Hope like the plague. When taking another chance on a company is a gamble of hundreds of dollars, it makes sense to be unreasonably shy once you've been burned 3-4 times!