Equipment
What is a hobby without fanatic attention to the equipment details? For those of you with an interest, here are a few details on our packages!
Equipment Configurations and Recommendations
The Roller's Bikes |
2006 Ventana X-5
This bike was spec'ed by me and built by Chad at Red Barn Bicycles in Montana. I have given this bike a beating and it has kept going. The components are starting to show their age, but they have done very well in light of the amount of year-round riding I have done. The Roller's Original Mountain Bike2013 Trek Madone 5.2 road bike:
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Ken's Bikes |
2015 Santa Cruz 5010
Ken's Old Bike
Ken's Old Old Bike |
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Rack | 1UP USA Quik Rack - This is a very easy to use tray-style bike rack that fits in a receiver hitch. This rack is solidly built, lightweight and very easy to use but the best feature is that it folds up compactly so it is easy to store in the garage when I am not using it. It is a bit expensive but I like it over other high-end racks. By popular demand, I have put some more details and pictures about this rack on my Infiniti G37 on a separate page. |
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Clothing |
I am not a fanatic on clothing. Fit is the most important feature followed by price and features. Some of my favorites are:
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Gear |
In addition to clothing, every mountain biker needs to have the proper gear:
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Camera | Canon SD800 IS - A good sub-compact camera that I carry in a jersey pocket for quick shots. The image stabilization really helps when I stop for a quick shot and I am still breathing hard. I use a ziploc sandwich bag for a camera bag because it is small, waterproof (rain and sweat), quick in and out, and I can replace whenever I want. The camera seems plenty rugged because it has not given me any problems after carrying it this way on every ride over several years. |
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GPS |
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Lights |
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Software | ||||||
SportTracks - This is my primary interface to the GPS. This collects the data and produces routes and charts like elevation profiles for the ride. It nicely organizes ride data by date and location and produces lots of useful reports. I also save the GPS data in GPX files (a standard GPS data format) so I can use them in lots of other applications. This is not free software, but it is not very expensive and it is well worth the price to me. I highly recommend SportTracks. |
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TopoFusion Pro - TopoFusion's forte is looking at multiple rides at the same time. I use TopoFusion to combine track data from multiple ride into a single merged map for each location. It has lots of other features, some similar to SportTracks and some that are new and useful, that I like. It is another low priced piece of software I highly recommend. By the way, I have exchanged e-mails with the developer (another mountain biker) and they have a very useful support forum. |
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Google Earth - Free mapping software from Google. Allows me to view multiple locations and get a good sense of the elevations changes involved. See the consolidate trail map to see what I am talking about. |
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My own software! I wrote my own software to do a variety of tasks from translating between various file formats to merging mulitple trail networks into a single Google Earth file. This makes consolidated map updates fast, easy and error-free. | ||||||
Irfanview - Irfanview is a fast, free photo viewer that I have used quite a bit. The big application for this web site is the ability to quickly re-size photos to a specified size. I have lots of pictures, but they are all much larger than they need to be for presentation on the web. Irfanview has a batch capability to quickly re-size any number of pictures. Irfanview is also great for quickly cropping pictures. It is not a full-power photo editor, but I don't always need a heavyweight tool to get the job done. |
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Joomla! - Joomla is an open source content management system (CMS). When I decided to completely re-architect my web site I wanted a system that made managing all of the files and image easy and allowed site-wide updates and format changes to be made easily. This wasn't the case with my previous hand coded site. I didn't have any experience with any CMS, but Joomla seemed like a reasonable mix of capability and ease of use and, as open source, the price (free) was right. I have used a few open source add-ons that have been very useful and easy. I don't have a lot to compare it to, but it seems to be getting the job done. |
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