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Steve's Whistler Nipple Cam Thread - latest vid 20/08/09

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Steve M

Turbo Monkey
Mar 3, 2007
1,991
45
Whistler
1. Dirt Merchant to Lower A-line, 19/08/09:

2. Schleyer to Rock City, chasing Mondraker team rider Cesar Rojo, 20/08/09:

3. Goats Gully, 21/08/09:

4. Original Sin, 22/08/09:

5. D1, 23/08/09:

6. In Deep, 24/08/09:
Get a root.

7. Reverse-cam of Ryan De La Rue on In Deep and Duffman:

8. A-line chainless race run by Ryan De La Rue, 30/08/09:
Some fancy whips and scrubs in there at a fair clip too.

9. No Joke and little bits of Freight Train, 31/08/09:
Riding like a bit of a pussy with some crappy line choices but shows the track well anyway - and it's a sick track.

10. Fantastic to Crank It Up to Lower Whistler Downhill to Rock City to Canadian Open, 13/09/09:
Excuse the slowness and largely crappy riding, I was hungover as hell. However managed to score a ride on a prototype Superco Silencer (apparently there's only two in the world at the moment), with super rare Push-tuned Boxxers (that were unfortunately valved for someone much lighter than me), did half a dozen runs on it. Interesting bike!

11. WC Singletrack to Ho Chi Minh following Ross Dunlop, 13/09/09:
Unfortunately my tech skills aren't as sharp as Ross's, he gets away a bit in the super tight stuff.

12. Ride Don't Slide, 19/09/09:
General rule of thumb is that you don't ride this track for 3 days or so after it's rained, cos it's super steep and tech, with a billion roots just waiting to mess you up. It rained heavily for two days right before we rode it. Unfortunately the camera doesn't come close to capturing the steepness, but the number of crashes, sideways action and times we end up spearing off the track should give you some idea of just how hard that was to ride. Epically long track too - the video is 17 mins long.

13. Freight Train Downtube Cam, 26/09/09:
The fireroad at the start of the vid is pretty scary, I'm fairly sure you're doing over 70km/h if you do it brakeless.

14. Blue Velvet, 27/09/09:
This run is pretty much an upper-mountain version of Crank It Up, but a little bit steeper, faster, flowier and not quite so many jumps. Cruisy run because pinning it means you can overshoot some of the jumps enormously - anyone who's ever jumped 35ft to a flat landing will agree that it's not a great feeling

15. Angry Pirate to Samurai Pizza Cat to Crack Addict, 13/10/09:
Angry Pirate is IMO the most technical trail on the mountain. Anyone can get down it but doing it fast is DAMN hard. There is very little flow for most of it, it's super tight, if you get off-line you clip pedals and/or hit trees, and there are very few places you can get pedals in. It's not the kind of track where you can just be ballsy, and go fast simply by being daring - it's 100% skills. I rarely ride the track (same with SPC and Crack Addict) and I suck at super tight stuff anyway, so excuse the fairly crappy riding.

16. Upper A-line, 13/10/09:
Chasing Jazza Kootenay Gravatron Hucker Wilson down the newly-refurbished Upper A-line. Last run of the season in the bike park, they've made a lot of the berms much steeper, added a few jumps, and made some of the existing jumps much nicer/bigger so you didn't overshoot the living hell out of them.
 
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JCL

JCL

Monkey
Aug 31, 2008
696
0
Cool vid with Cesar. Only 2nd time down the trail LOL.

That guy is far to quick to be a bike designer.
 
S

Steve M

Turbo Monkey
Mar 3, 2007
1,991
45
Whistler
JCL said:
Cool vid with Cesar. Only 2nd time down the trail LOL.

That guy is far to quick to be a bike designer.
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hahah yeah, he's f**koff fast when he wants to be. I've done probably 20-30 runs of that track, been living here for nearly 3 months, and I had to really put some effort in to have a chance of keeping up with him when he didn't even know where the trail went. Ridiculous!
 
John P.

John P.

Turbo Monkey
Sep 24, 2001
1,170
0
Golden, CO
ozzemale said:
hey steve, what bike is that you're riding ? Still a legend?
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Udi said:
i believe it's a green 09 sunday
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Correct. He had some 'issues' with the Legend after casing the hell out of the step-down jump under Fitzsimmons on the Canadian Open course.


Steve, next video I wanna see is Ride Don't Slide, complete with the hike up. Be careful not to stop at the log drop with the hornets' nest in it. :)
 
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Steve M

Turbo Monkey
Mar 3, 2007
1,991
45
Whistler
John P. said:
Correct. He had some 'issues' with the Legend after casing the hell out of the step-down jump under Fitzsimmons on the Canadian Open course.


Steve, next video I wanna see is Ride Don't Slide, complete with the hike up. Be careful not to stop at the log drop with the hornets' nest in it. :)
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I actually got footage of a run of RDS a couple of days ago, just gotta edit it all together and upload it. Unfortunately I missed the most exciting part - the hike up. My net connection has very limited bandwidth per month, I've probably burnt most of it already :)
 
JCL

JCL

Monkey
Aug 31, 2008
696
0
Jase76 said:
Great vids.

Have you had a bounce on Cesars bike? I'd be interested to know what you think if you have.;)
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Did a few runs on it. Even with an oversprung fork it was by far the best thing I've ever ridden. I also learnt more about suspension listening to Cesar for 20mins than I have reading thousands of pages of stuff on the net.
 
cesar_rojo

cesar_rojo

Monkey
Feb 29, 2008
175
21
Socket said:
1. Dirt Merchant to Lower A-line, 19/08/09:

2. Schleyer to Rock City, chasing Mondraker team rider Cesar Rojo, 20/08/09:

3. Goats Gully, 21/08/09:

4. Original Sin, 22/08/09:
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That was lot's of fun! Just got now back in hot Barcelona, missing so much Whistler. I think I need a excuse to move there in summer...
Seing this videos right now makes me feel sad for not being able to ride there anymore this year.

Thanks for everything Steve, a pleasure to meet you, next year more :D
 
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Bent

Chimp
Aug 15, 2009
11
0
hey, what camera did you use for this and how did you set it up for chest / rear cam?

Thanks
 
S

Steve M

Turbo Monkey
Mar 3, 2007
1,991
45
Whistler
Bent said:
hey, what camera did you use for this and how did you set it up for chest / rear cam?

Thanks
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Using a GoPro Hero Wide with the chest mount harness (www.goprocamera.com I think). Just put it on backwards to film behind you, don't forget to change the angle between camera and the mounting plate though when you do :)

Sandwich said:
do tell!
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I wasn't entirely sure what to expect handling-wise but it was pretty solid. Geo on the apparently medium sized proto was a bit shorter than my large Sunday, but head angle felt about the same and BB height comparable too. I expected it to have that reluctance to rip the back wheel around into tight corners that other high pivot bikes have had, but it was only marginally different to the Sunday. For the majority of corners it was very easy to turn. Where it really rocked was down super rough stuff with big hang-up type rocks - Schleyer, Rock City, Lower Whistler DH etc, cos the rear end didn't get that jarring hook-up feeling at all. I was also super impressed with how well it kept the wheel on the ground, even with a fairly craptacular DHX3 in there. However with that damper at least, it felt like it blew through the first maybe 70% of the travel pretty easily and ramped up fairly strongly at the end - not so strong that it felt like it had run into a wall like some frames do, but enough that it took a pretty hard hit to notice it bottoming. The spring in there was a 450 so on the soft side for me, but I actually don't think it was too soft as such - the sag wasn't really excessive and low-speed bottom-outs weren't particularly easy to achieve; with a damper that gave better compression control I reckon the leverage rate would work quite well. Pedalling-wise, I think it's the kind of thing most people would consider fine unless they're pretty anal about their bike not bobbing under power. It wasn't as dialled as some bikes, but it was better than many others too. Pedalling over rough ground... well I gotta say I didn't really notice much difference between that and the Sunday in terms of pedal-kickback, at the very least the Superco wasn't any worse but I didn't notice it being distinctly better either. Everything worked fine and as it should under brakes, no surprises there. It was also friggin awesome on rough and off-camber stuff, the rear end didn't get kicked off-line easily at all. I noticed the difference in clearance between the chainring on the Superco and my P40 bashy on the Sunday - there's a spot on Rock City where I invariably hammer the P40 bashy but didn't touch the chainring on the Superco. I don't know whether or not running a bashy on that bike would be necessary or justified, would have to ride it for longer to work it out.

The biggest problem for me was that I just wasn't able to ride it set up quite as I would really like it. The Pushed Boxxer in particular was tuned for someone a fair bit lighter than me, which meant that it was too easy for me to overwhelm the compression damping and as a result I ended up running a pretty stiff spring rate (though I run my own fork quite stiff anyway, just with tons of compression) which basically felt pretty crap. Every time I hit rough stuff fast, the rear end would be pretty planted and stable, and the fork would be all over the place which I thought made it harder for me to find the limits to how hard I could push the rear end, both in a straight line and in corners.

A couple of minor niggles with the frame though - it wasn't as quiet as I'd sort of expected it would be, and a couple of times the chain got sucked into the rear tyre.

Without doing a comprehensive review - I reckon that if the bike had a slacker head angle by maybe 1 or 2 degrees, and a half decent shock in the rear end, it'd be one of the best bikes I've ridden (oh yeah and it's light too). The head angle isn't ungodly-steep or anything but if you've ridden something with say a 63 deg HA then going a couple of degrees steeper just makes the bike that little bit less comfortable than it could be, particularly on steep and/or fast terrain where a slacker head angle means you don't have to hang off the back quite so much. They've got the suspension feeling pretty dialled (or at least giving me the impression that with a real damper it'd go super hard), geo generally very solid, it's light and seemingly pretty stiff. I have no idea what reliability would be like on one of those things, or strength, but if reliability is good then I couldn't think of much to improve on (that really stands out at least) that I haven't mentioned already.
 
Sandwich

Sandwich

Pig my fish!
Staff member
May 23, 2002
21,192
6,167
borcester rhymes
Thanks boss!

Easily the best review I've read. Interesting to me that you felt the HT was steep. The numbers suggest a low-rider esque 63 and I noticed on my racelink that the headtube seemed to slack out as the rear end was preloaded...more so than other bikes that remained more balanced and weighted both sides more evenly. The noise is probably a fight between the lower weight of no slap guard and the proximity of the chain to the stay...the RL had 1cm of clearance in areas...but it also had a 3mm thick tube protecting it.

Anyways...thanks for the review. Can you say where you borrowed the bike from, or is it hush-hush?
 
S

Steve M

Turbo Monkey
Mar 3, 2007
1,991
45
Whistler
Sandwich said:
Thanks boss!

Easily the best review I've read. Interesting to me that you felt the HT was steep. The numbers suggest a low-rider esque 63 and I noticed on my racelink that the headtube seemed to slack out as the rear end was preloaded...more so than other bikes that remained more balanced and weighted both sides more evenly. The noise is probably a fight between the lower weight of no slap guard and the proximity of the chain to the stay...the RL had 1cm of clearance in areas...but it also had a 3mm thick tube protecting it.

Anyways...thanks for the review. Can you say where you borrowed the bike from, or is it hush-hush?
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It's not steep steep, I'm pretty sure it's about 65deg (felt pretty well the same as the Sunday), but if you've spent time on a bike with a ~63deg HA (eg my old Banshee), when you get back on a bike with a 65deg HA it just feels a little twitchier and you notice yourself having to stay a little bit further back on the bike. Noise - yeah it's not a big deal, easy fix esp on that bike I reckon.

Borrowed the bike from Terry, just started chatting to her outside GBB and she offered to let me take it for a spin. Annoyed the forks weren't tuned for me though, would have been nice to ride some Push-tuned stuff and see how it goes. Had some Magura brakes on it too (Louise FRs or whatever, not the Gustavs anyway) which I had to run upside down cos everyone on this side of the world runs their brakes the wrong way around (yes "wrong", not "other" :)), bit dodgy but seemed to work.
 
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F

Floor Tom

Monkey
Sep 28, 2009
288
55
New Zealand
Nice thread mate. I'll check out the videos tonight when I'm not at work. Are you going to be out there again next year? I'm hoping to be there for at least a couple of months if not more.
 
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