After my spine crushing experience with a terrible alumnium frame, I cleverly went straight back to the real stuff- steel! For a bargain price of R4000, I hooked up with the most classic steel framed bike I've ever owned. This bicycle was beautiful. Nothing fancy- triple butted chro-mo, clean welds full XT groupset (the most beautiful shimano groupo IMO), some of the first 'snake' stays to ever grace a bike. It was these features that made her (definitely a lady, this one) ride like a dream. It was a 1998 Diamond Back (Racing) Axis.
When it came to upgrade time, I stupidly stuck with the beefy looking Manitou's, this time wasting my hard earned money on the next model up. These still had elastomer's- but they were now split into 3 sections and the last section had been replaced by an inch long steel spring. A step in the right direction I suppose, but why did they have to take so long to get full steel spring forks right?!
The other two things that niggled me was the colour scheme- a full on American red, white and blue brash paint job and the fact that it had zero stand over clearance. Nada, zip, nought- this is the bike I learned to track stand on, solely because I had no other option! Proper old school frame geometry meant a very long non-sloping top tube . I remember gazing longingly at the 15&16 inch versions and their pretty sloping top tubes and sighing very loudly, wishing that I was short like Harry(sorry, couldn't resist!)
In trying to tell the story of any big falls I might have had on this bike, I've come to the realisation that I can't remember any. Maybe it was because it handled so well? I raced it all through my 'Intermediate Mens' years and even one year as 'Under23's' so I was definitely pushing it.
For the sake of this post though I'll mention one very big wipe that might have happened on this bike when I was up on holiday in Howick, Natal. I was riding with Tony Keytel and we had enjoyed a typical Howick ride through the Sappi Forests. All that remained was a steep, fast, flowing single track trail down Beacon Hill. I was really looking forward to this last bit as it had been a year or two since Tony had seen me riding last, and I was keen to show off what racing had done for my skills on a mtb.
I overtook Tony just before he entered the downhill trail and started picking up speed. The Savannah like landscape started rushing past me and everything started to blur. The dark line before me was perfect -smooth, shallow sweeping bends and no reason to pedal as gravity took care of that! The track started to get deeper as it sank into the ground from the combination of over-use and rain erosion.
Very quickly, the grass seemed to get higher around me and the trail dug it's way deeper into the ground. My speed was still climbing and a Windows™ warning 'BLA...DING!' sounded in my head, but I could still hear Tony's bike clattering behind me. So I kept off the brakes even when my pedals started skimming the sides of the clay earth that the singletrack was now embedded in.
My pedals only skimmed twice in fact- the first one was the warning and 2nd one was the lesson. As my pedal embedded itself into the side of the 'donga' the 2nd time, Mother Earth won the battle of momentum (p = mv) and flung me from my bike into the Cartwheel of Death (BTW, this was only a kilometer or two from Harry's Cartwheel of Death mentioned in post number 'Een'). According to Tony's scorecard, I executed a very graceful triple cartwheel and managed to follow the line of singletrack very accurately the whole way through the movement, resulting in a skeleton luge-like skid on my belly for the final few meters.
Lesson Learned!
Posts
