Hello from Liverpool - Looking for people to ride with (night riders!)

[regrettable]

Hello From Liverpool (L18 - south liverpool)

I have had my Decathlon Stilus for a few months now and am getting into the sport. It's a great bike for the price and certainly a great first bike if i ever decide to go more advanced. I'm making all my mistakes with it, so to speak.

My rides so far have been mostly relatively long distance - close to the limits of my battery with in one case the battery ending 100m from home Would be keen to find others to ride with. I'm middle aged, but ride pretty hard and fast and know a lot of the trails in the area from my previous life as a trail runner. Just keen to get out and ride out this quarantine ha ha. A typical ride for me is 2.5 to 5 hours. Unusually, I have a big light on my bike - the light and motion 2500 lumens, which lets me do everything at night in bad weather. I've largely exhausted what I can reasonably do on a round trip basis, so in about an hour I'm going to get on a train to Manchester with my bike - a first for me - and ride back via the bridgewater canal, runcorn bridge, and bits of the transpennine. 65km mostly on toe paths - nothing too exciting, but given that it's a new area for me and, again, it's typically bad weather and dark out, that's good enough for tonight.

The biggest problem I have is keeping the bike, and specifically the chain, clean. WIth my long distance rides, the chain gets dirty and gritty enough on some rides that the gears start slipping before i'm even home. i dont know what the answer to this is - suggestions welcome. my "next" bike is probably going to be the reiss and mulller superdelite rolhoff with the belt drive and integrated hub, though i have to do some research to see if that will take the abuse that i expect to give it. The second problem is that the bosch computer that i have (the basic one that comes with the stilus) absolutely needs a little colored led indicator to instantly tell you what mode you are in as with muddy hands its easy to lose track (as you're not always sure if your clicks registered). As I'm trying to squeeze every inch out of the battery, this is important (an LED would use negligible power).

 

[Wiltshire Warrior]

Are you using Wet lube?

 

[regrettable]

Are you using Wet lube?

/standard response start
that's a bit personal, no?
/end

im not using any lube since i'm pretty clueless. I think that my bike shop told me the thing to do is just keep it clean / wash it often with dishwasing soap and water, but i may have misinterpreted his directions.

in other news, in what must have been my 20th or 30th night longish night ride, I fell in the canal last night, with the bike. both of us were fully submerged. adrenaline strength allowed me to lift the bike out probably 10 seconds after we fell in. pulling myself out was a bit tougher as the bank was, well, slippery. i had a gopro mounted but it was not recording at the time. it was an otherwise dark and slightly remote piece of land -- my front light was on max brightness. had i not been able to reach the bottom of the canal with my feet, the bike may well have been gone. as it were, there were no apparent problems to the bike, the motor, the battery, my gopro, my front 2500 lumen expensive light, or my back helmet mounted red light or post mounted cheapie chinese red light. moreover, my iphone was fine. it was a cold night but i had some old ultrarunning temperature control stuff on my top and bottom (xbionic leggings and instinct trail top) so even though i was fairly cold after my swim, it was not so bad and i warmed up when i got going. in a few moments i was back on my bike, a bit more careful. and then an hour later i got a puncture for unknown reasons so decided to call a cab and call it a night. fortunately, the puncture was by a small town.

why did i fall in? as i said, i have ridden and run on a lot of canals in my life. here's what happened:

1. the specific route was new to me. i often explore new routes at night as I've been running at night for decades and mostly bike at night. but still, there are clearly risk factors when you explore new routes in the country in mud at night.
2. i had previously been going at a high rate of speed (around 28-30km/hr, on ECO) on a wide (2m at least) paved tow path.
3. it had just started raining - a light to moderate seemingly freezing rain (though the temperature was about 8C) that looked like light hail.
4. it had rained heavily the day and night before.
5. i was wearing goggles which fogged up a bit, reducing my visibility a bit. this mostly affected my ability to more clearly see the nature of the terrain under my wheels, though i could feel it.
6. the path turned to mud. i had gone briefly from the paved / hard pack gravel section into the mud at a reduced speed (probably around 20-22, possibly on TOUR) and felt that i had *just* gotten a grip on the mud when i suddenly got into some very, very slick section of mud. the bike became uncontrollable and just slid right in from quite a distance. that's it. after i got back on the bike, i noticed that the super slick mud continued for about another 300m or so, then it was mostly "normal" mud from then on (and on, and on). the mud was so slick there that i had trouble even standing and walking around once i got out of the canal even with the fairly grippy shoes i had on. what's more, it didn't seem like the typical "super slippy" mud where there's a thin layer of oily mud on top of a hard surface. it was fairly thick but slippy. mud.

"night" was only an issue from a potential rescue perspective. as things panned out, this could have just as easily have happened during the day. i distinctly remember seeing both my bike lights as the bike was underwater. i also remember time slowing down as i started to lose a bit of control thinking "wouldn't be funny if i fell in."

had i not been able to pull myself out, it would have been a 500m swim to where i could attract attention to myself. my watch showed a small drop in (body/ambient) temperature at the point i fell in.

no excuses. just sharing an episode for others to maybe learn from. no injuries other than a minor pedal gouge in my ankle which i discovered when i got home. when i took the battery out of the bike when i got home, it was no wetter than it would normally be after a ride, which is to say basically dry. I'm looking into nautical themed stickers for my bike now.

here is the google streetview picture of the location. i went in near where the human is. from this picture, it is not hard to imagine the sequence of events.

 

[Beekeeper]

Would be interesting to hear if anyone else has managed to submerge their motors and were there any immediate problems with water ingress or did problems emerge weeks or months after, when rust started to develop inside the motor and bearings. If you have any issues with your motor after this unfortunate event then I’m sure @Bearing Man will be able to advise. I think the Stilus has the Gen 4 motor which I gather has decent seals but is obviously not amphibious ?
I doubt the legendary @Zimmerframe has even got his bike this wet ?
Regarding the chain, you definitely need to apply a lube. Wet lube for winter, muddy conditions and a dry lube for dry dusty conditions.

 

[regrettable]

Thanks for the reply. Honestly, even with it very briefly fully submerged, I don't think the short swim made the motor or bearings much wetter than it otherwise gets in my typical rides. If at some point down the line my motor or bearings succumb to something, it's probably more going to be the gritty sandy mud that I'm always in which must be doing abrasive/ablative damage to the mechanism or seals somehwhere. So far, though, i have seen no evidence of this and while I'll check it out more, the bosch motor and system seems to be running as new.

Thanks for the advice on wet lube.

 

[PhilBaker]

Shit man, glad it ended ok. I went over the bars on my old XC bike riding along a river tow path and landed in a river. The only reason the bike didn't sink was the water bottle was fill of air ?

Really scary though as I was in the middle of nowhere riding on my own.

Survival mode kicks in and I manage to pull myself out using a tree, but then what about my bike!!!

I could see the air bubbles coming out of the water bottle and the bike sitting lower in the water so manage to grab a big tree branch and make a hook to pull the bike to the bank to reach it and pull it out.

I guess an bike doesn't float with the extra weight or perhaps the air in the battery compartment keeps it a float for a while?

Back to your questions. You can upgrade the Purion display to a Kiox without removing the motor on the Stilus and that display has a colour code for each mode. I assume you know the Purion display can be set into a mode to constantly show you which mode your in vs miles left etc? Then you can also glance across to see easy whether your still in Tour or Eco etc.

I've used Ceramic Lube for the last 15 years and love it. I recently brought an eMTB version of it (I'm sure it's just marketing but needed some anyway). I am generally a fair weather rider but have ridden in really wet mud and it did surprisingly well. By the end the gears were jumping though so it certainly wasn't seamless.

If you are always riding in the wet then as suggested you probably need a wet lube.

Glad to know our Stilus is Waterproof ?