The Strawberry Project

OK, so here’s a quick review of the Kona PhD experience so far.

The bike basics:

Frame tubing - Kona 7005 Aluminum Butted
Fork - Kona Carbon
Headset - FSA Orbit #8BE Integrated
Crankarms - FSA Gossamer MegaExo
Chainrings - 30/39/53
B/B - FSA MegaExo
Pedals - Shimano A520
Chain - Shimano 105
Freewheel - Shimano 105 (12-25, 10spd)
F/D - Shimano 105 Flatbar
R/D - Shimano Ultegra
Shifters - Shimano 105
Handlebar - FSA XC-180 OS flatbar
Stem - FSA OS-150 LX
Grips - Kona Race Light
Brakes - Avid SD 5
Brake - Levers Avid FR 5
Front hub - Mavic Aksium Wheelset
Rear hub - Mavic Aksium Wheelset
Spokes - Mavic Aksium Wheelset
Tires - Continental Ultrasport 700 x 23C
Rims - Mavic Aksium Wheelset
Saddle - Selle Italia X2 Man SE
Seatpost - FSA SL280
Seat clamp - Kona Clamp
Color - White

I went for the 58cm frame given that I’m about 6′1″ - or at least used to be the last time I checked. I still need to make some slight adjustments to the setup as it’s being run in given that I can tell there’s a slight difference in my riding position to the Orange, and it feels a little too upright to be comfortable on longer rides. To be honest, this is probably more due to the fact that I need to stick some bar ends on there which would give me a similar stretch position to that of the setup on my Evo2.

I’d read elsewhere that the saddle was something to replace, but for the life of me I can’t quite see why. If you’re used to being in the saddle, then it performs well and its fairly comfortable. It’s no Gel saddle, so don’t expect Saturday-night-in sofa quality, but it’s far more comfortable than any race saddle I’ve been on.

How fast is it?

Acceleration is better than my expectations. The 7005 frame remains a solid platform to put some power through in a straight line, and it can hold its own against road frames at the lights from experience. Over distance, in comparison to the Evo2, the lighter frame and bigger gears mean that I’m able to sustain a higher average speed over the same distance. Here’s the same route on the two different bikes. As you can see, the PhD was quicker on average, and I wasn’t really pushing it that day.

Kona PhD Speed Profile (mean: 15.1 mph)

Orange EVO2 Speed Profile (mean: 13.6 mph)

What about Vibration?

On the whole the road vibration isn’t all that noticeable on the front end. You can feel the road through the saddle more than you would on fat tyres, but it’s not too distracting. What’s more distracting coming from MTB territory is that all those big hills and patches of debris/crapola you’d normally ride across without thought suddenly become life threatening hotspots on skinny rims.

Anything else on the handling?

Steering is responsive and pretty light - a product of the fact that the bike is ridiculously light in its own right. In fact I’d go as far as to say that it’s pretty frisky if you’re coming from an MTB background. I was out in high winds on the way home from work on the PhD and it felt pretty skittish on the road as I avoided the inevitable Cardiff potholes (actually, it’s probably more accurate to describe them as sink holes)

Gears work OK for around here. I haven’t done Big Hill territory yet (that’s Big Hill in South Wales folks, not Alp d’Huez type Big Hill), but I suspect that the range would be pushing it on the inner front ring. It’s just about comparable to the middle ring of an MTB, so if you use granny gears a lot for climbing long drags, then you’ll probably struggle for a while until your legs get used to the different pace/power output required to drive yourself along.

That bigger outer ring is great on the flat and on the descents too, although for my riding it suits the flat better.

Can you stop as well?

Brakes are pretty good for cantis. They definitely stop the bike, but as the Kona owner’s manual says, they may not stop *you* - you’ll need to hang on and be ready to shift your weight if you need to decelerate quickly.

So in general, it’s all good.  It suits my commute to work really well, and offers me just enough challenge to make it a different ride home up the hills over my trusty old Orange.  I have, however, one slight problem that I need to deal with at the moment. On the supplied tyres I’ve managed 2 flats already, and have now cut a sizeable chunk out of the rear tyre thanks to Cardiff Council cutting back the Hawthorne hedges around the lanes, and then not bothering to use a road sweeper afterwards [probably a different, outsourced department :-/ ]

I reckon that a pair of Specialized Armadillos should do the trick. More on that when I can take delivery of some new tyres.

Tags: Cycling, evo2, kona, orange, phd, review, speed

So this wasn’t a particularly long road route, coming in at just over 30 miles, but it did take me an inordinately long time to get around the route.Here’s a map of the track I took, which loops from just North of Cardiff, up through Talbot Green/Llantrisant and out as far as Llwynypia before heading back down the little Rhondda towards Ponty and back towards Cardiff. This is a pretty good circular route under normal circumstances, given that it’s a fairly long climb out and then level-ish on the return with a final climb towards the finish.

Route Data

Last Saturday saw pretty good conditions at the start of the route, which deteriorated towards the Northern end as snow and skin-smarting hail set in and the temperature dropped a couple of degrees (and remained low).The problem with the route was that my 9 year old original Mega9 Shimano chain decided it had had enough of being punished in winter weather and popped a link. Now this wouldn’t have been so much of a problem had I actually had a chain tool with me at the time, as losing a link is within tolerance - but I didn’t - so an unexpected walk to Ponty ensued in search of <oh the shame> a Halfords to pick up a new chain tool.Thankfully, after negotiating Ponty’ frankly RIDICULOUS roads and pedestrianisation schemes, I eventually wound up at Halford’s Bike Hut (helpfully located on the 1st floor of their store) and got things sorted. Big thanks to Tom at Ponty Halfords for doing the work whilst I had a mozy about the store - even if he did say that it was nice to see an Old Skool bike :-/ I think I’ll be needing my free bus pass soon.The rest of the day was marked by contrast to the first half as I took NCR 8 back in towards Cardiff, which is strewn with broken glass and litter all over the place down through the lower part of the Valley. It’s a pretty desperate and depressing place in winter weather, where (puts on Urban Geographers hat) successive former Welsh Office and Local Authority plans have sought to gentrify the larger urban areas in order to revitalise the valleys and surrounding towns. It hasn’t worked yet.The final stretch was a bit of a ‘mare as I’ve pretty much burnt out by the time I’d got back towards Radyr. This is what happens when you take a couple of weeks off and eat Floridian junk in between. Still, looking forward to taking a similar route again next week.

Tags: cold, Cycling, evo2, garmin, gps, halfords, so cold, so very cold

Father Christmas brought me a Garmin Edge 205 for the bike(s) this year.

The unit is roughly the size of a mobile phone. It’s waterproof, Welsh hail proof (as determined during today’s ride), and can be charged from USB, so it doesn’t really matter if you pick one up from abroad.

Garmin Training Center

Garmin Training Center is the software that’s available for both PC and Mac. It’s on v3.smmat on PC, but only back at v2.x for Mac. Looking at the About information for the softwarem it looks like it’s been put together by none other than the folks at Omni Group, purveyors of such fine software as OmniPlan, OmniGraffle and OmniOutliner Pro. Given that this is a particularly fine stable of software, I can only imagine that Garmin wrote their brief on the back of a fag packet for how they wanted Garmin Training Center to work on the Mac, and then OmniGroup sneezed the code out on to an iPod Touch.

It took Garmin quite a while to release a version of their software for OS X, and they’ve managed to upgrade the software in the meantime for PC users without keeping the OS X version in step. Nothing new there for most Mac users, but it’s a bit depressing that figuring out that there are an increasing number of Mac users out there is taxing Garmin - perhaps they should open up the source to the community :

Oh, the base map is absolutely rubbish for any purpose other than a very rough estimate of where you’ve just cycled in this version of the software. But no matter - there are other maps available out there, including Garmin’s own online services at Motionbased.com which rather handily supports Macs and has done since day one afaik.

Getting Route and Performance Data out of the Edge 205

More on this to follow, but in brief: you can use the Training Center to export a full .tcx file and/or use GPSBabel to read direct from the GPS unit and transform your routes, tracks and waypoints out to GPX for Google Maps or Google Earth.
Getting Route Data in to the Edge 205

So having managed a few runs just tracking my somewhat below-par performance, I decided I’d like to have a crack at predetermining a route and having it available on the Edge for me to follow. You can forget using the Training Center software for this, as all it will allow you to do is create a new route based on historical routes you’ve taken. Total cobblers.

No, for this bit of functionality, you’ll need to grab yourself a copy of GPSBabel and have that installed on your Mac. I’ll post a full howto as a follow up to this - probably to be written on the hop over the pond to Lotusphere. You basically need todo some Google Maps direction finding and then use GMapToGPX to convert the output to waypoints that your unit can use. Pretty simple really, and I haven’t got lost yet. In fact - the only time I disagreed with the directions the unit was telling me, I ended up being wrong and cycling further than I needed to.

Future Usage

Now I’d really like to try and use the Garmin Edge 305 with both the Cadence and Heartrate Monitor, but just can’t stretch to afford it given that I’ve only just splurged cash on the Kona, and then there’s the small matter of feeding/clothing the family and paying the mortgage. Trifling issues, I agree, but duties there to be fulfilled and complied with nonetheless. [Hey Garmin, I'm making eyes at you!]
Right about now Garmin will also be releasing the Edge 605 and 705 models which look set to be all swanky and colourful with their brighter displays and candy-coloured maps.  Again, I’d love to field test these on 2 counts: 1) they’re really great gadgets for cyclists, and, more importantly; 2) it gets me out of the house and away from the keyboard.

If you’re riding reasonably, you should really REALLY go and get one of these to replace your standard cycling computer. Check out EBay for bargain prices rather than breaking the bank on full retail.

Tags: Cycling, garmin, GMapToGPX, gps, GPSBabel, mac, OS X, training

OK, it’s a loooong time since I wrote that I was on the way to owning a Kona PhD 2008. A lot has happened since I put that order in, not least with the actual order and the bike itself. Originally, I was expecting that the bike would turn up towards the end of October, having ordered it at the end of September. As things turned out, that wasn’t to be.

I contacted Cyclestore towards the original ETA and they told me they were still waiting on the arrival of stock. I was OK with that in that new year bikes sometimes take a while to make it to market - particularly when you aren’t buying British. Cyclestore, to their absolute credit, worked really hard to get hold of a bike as soon as possible.

Time ticked by. My birthday came and went. October came and went. Eventually, I decided to check with Kona to see when they were expecting supply.

Now Kona in the UK are distributed by Paligap, who are based over the Channel from me in Avonmouth. After a little detective work, they managed to find a European-based PhD at Kona Europe in Monaco. Around a week later it was shipped to me, via Cyclestore for setup, and was to be delivered by UPS by 22/11 - a week shy of 2 months since I put the order in.

Or at least it should have been delivered by UPS on the 22/11 had managed to get out as far as us, which they singularly failed to do. Live tracking on the UPS website saw the carton out for delivery and then checked back in overnight. It finally arrived on 23/11.

So this is what it looked like after UPS finally got it to me. By all accounts, the FIRST PhD 2008 in the country.

I thought I’d checked the carton over and found it to be OK, but must have been a little over excited. On further inspection (on the other side of the carton) I came across this…

Uh-oh.

Thankfully, on taking the bike out of its packing crate, everything looked to OK. Here’s that quick release skewer that was poking out of the carton (below) - it’s picked up a slight scratch in transit, probably from sliding around in the back of a UPS van. Grrr.

Once assembled, this is the Kona PhD 2008 in all its glory (below). Dig those crazy reflectors!

Once of the main reasons (aside from the fact that they’re the number 1 Kona dealer in the UK) that I went for Cyclestore this time around was the fact that they were offering 10% of the value of the bike in free accessories. I really needed to get a new bag, as the amount of sweat and bacteria in the shoulder straps of my old one would likely cause the UN to come down heavy on me for harbouring a biochemical weapon, and fortunately Cyclestore sell a range of bags from Deuter. I went for a TransAlpine 30L backpack as shown below.

The rest of my booty comprised of a new CatEye rear LED light, a Specialized water bottle to replace one of my aging old bottles on the O2 and a contour headband - the greatest ‘technical accessory’ I’ve ever owned. Remember, at the time of writing, the outside temperature is hovering just above freezing, and the windchill at 36mph on a downhill is significant.

A final inspection revealed that one of the brake levers was slightly bent

Bums.

A quick call to James at Cyclestore sorted things out, even though it meant that they would be out of pocket given that UPS had a signature for the parcel. THAT’s the kind of bike shop you should be doing business with - despite everything over the lack of supply and less than quality service from UPS, Cyclestore and Paligap did not disappoint me in the slightest.

If you’re thinking of going for a Kona, you could do a lot worse than give Cyclestore a call.

Tags: Cycling, fitness, kona, phd, road

My trusty 9 year old Orange EVO2 is getting a new chum to snuggle up to during the dark winter months in the shape of a rather lovely Kona PhD. According to Cyclestore, the 2008 model isn’t available until the back end of the month, which is not unlike the wait I had for the original O2 in October ‘98 when I bought it from Stif’s. Hopefully it will give me as much unbridled joy as the Orange has - tho’ perhaps with less crashes would be nice.

I haven’t seen many reviews for Kona’s top flight hybrid, but know someone who has the 2006 model and think it’s rather swish. Once I get my sweaty palms on it, I’ll do a full review.

My Orange won’t be put out to pasture just yet. Despite what my local bike shop told me, I still think it’s got a few miles left in it yet for XC use. It’s a pity the PACE RC35s on it got a bit flat-spotted on a somewhat amusing fall, although they’re still in pretty good nick otherwise - even after all this time.

Upshot of the story is that although it’s possible to spend an absolute fortune on bikes - in the case of the Orange EVO2 with the Pace forks, it was completely worth it. I have no doubt that I’ll buy another Orange as funding allows, but I suspect the likelihood of me being able to afford either of these babies [1], [2] is pretty remote.

Tags: cyclestore, evo2, kona, orange, pace, phd, stif