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i've stripped (and polished, if i'm ambitious) many an alu frame over the years. walnut blast works fine if you've got a local media blaster handy. otherwise lots of chemical stripper options out there if you want to DIY the thing. aircraft (aluminum friendly) stripper is quite effective, but noxious. there's a couple less toxic "green" options out there that do the job, but require a bit more elbow grease (multiple applications, etc). mothers mag / aluminum polish is the shit if you want to make things shiny afterwards.

Sneaky name change caught me out...... Loved the pod cast.

based on this week's events gonna throw strava here as a wild card, they thought it was a good idea to file a lawsuit based on a questionable patent against a company ~25x their size (based on net worth)

I do think the warranty discussion is super interesting and worthy of its own thread. I have my own thoughts, but I'll save them for if (when) that thread is spawned. I'm sure most of you have seen the YT video from the other site, if not, its worth the watch. I'll likely publish some thoughts over the next 24-48 hours. There is still a fair bit of confusion around what is happening there.

Let's be real though, lots of high end sales involve carbon wheels, and lots of people go after them thinking carbon wheels will make them better but they still ride blue flow trails and the wheel are being extremely under ridden, as well as road bikes. The amount of people smashing carbon rims multiple times vs the number of people that they'll last forever due to their riding level, is hugely Sku's to the rich blue trail riders that are more likely to have a blown up freehub body than a damaged rim. I've been pounding on a set of...

Edit: Apologies if this is repetitive to others reading this, I just wanted to try and be clear. And I forgot to add, building community is hard. An app does nothing by itself, but the infrastructure an app provides create the opportunity to more easily scale something that is like community. This isn't field of dreams, and building it alone does not solve the problem. But its a start. Quick clarification: This isn't Strava with privacy - yes, it has similar features with respect to activity tracking and navigation but it's also organized race events, multiple formats, varying timing windows...

Two points of clarification: First - the use case: This isn't competing with professional timing systems. Those will always be better for sanctioned events, and that's great. This fills the gap between Strava segments and weekend races - think Thursday night softball, not the championship game. It's rec-league MTB/moto where renting timing equipment is a non-starter, but showing up with the device in your pocket is totally feasible. We've already proven this works in our town, but again, there are holes (and big privacy concerns). Second - accuracy requirements: For rec-league, ±1.5 seconds is fine. With 50-100 participants running longer...

Most Strava users use their phone. Most paying Strava users with a Strava subscription use a garmin device.

I'm really just surprised segments are patenable, I get the tech or algorithm that makes it happen being locked down, but the ability to essentially patent a mapping/time function generally is outrageous. Maybe Garmin will fight and win the suit opening it up for you. Strava should focus on making their platform more accurate and competitive rathe than trying to scare competitors.

This whole lawsuit is bizarre to me. One of the most insane cases of biting the hand that feeds, I'd imagine that over 75% of Strava users are importing ride/run data from a Garmin device. Strava's whole model is an aggregate that is reliant on third party metrics being imported in. Garmin could put the plug right now and make people choose between a device/software that accurately tracks multiple key metrics for training, or a glorified social media platform. I think the anyone with a pulse will take Garmin over Strava. Lest we forget last year when Strava bullied Trailforks...

Yo @jeff.brines cool idea man! Obviously late to the party here as well. - Yeah, you probably should have gotten some ideas from your potential users before writing 100k lines of code. UX Research, man! haha but hey, you're doing it now and it'll definitely help get it right. - Reading through your initial description of this being a 'race app' had me thinking about how auto-starting the race course would be problematic. Others have chimed in with the 'rolling start has an advantage vs. static start' issue. In my mind (and based on what I've seen on Garmin...

In fairness, I'm guessing the price-performance-reliability triangle was better on a per-unit basis for Vitus to swap everything to carbon from Flybike than it would be to try to get decent quality alloy equivalents. RE: Ibis+Trek+Specialized alloy frame storage. I would also hazard a guess that most manufacturers are "locking" it behind carbon because it's a much easier feature to build into a bike on carbon than alloy rather than any specific agenda to use as a premium feature to upsell to carbon.

Apple sells a $2,000 iPhone and a $600 iPhone and their premium image is just fine. I'm really not seeing the brand erosion you're talking about with Ibis. What I am seeing is tons of riders, new and old on Rimpos and utterly stoked about them. Every single weekend I'll end up riding the lift with someone on a Ripmo. 1B people have iPhones, so access to the product alone doesn't erode the brand. We cannot ignore the god awful rebrand Ibis did recently, taking their iconic head badge and making it look like a sticker from Costco. The new...

The Path in Orange County had a fairly strange scenario, that seemed like a drawn out location swap more than anything. Basically they made a new location, that would function as the 'normal' bike shop... And the old location became an 'outlet' store to sell clearance items and it just had a shit ton of stuff for a while. They recently blew most of that out, whatever is left, and are now closing the old 'outlet' store, saying there is not enough inventory left over to justify the location. Again, it really just sounds like a prolonged location swap where...

I always found that the easiest way to move old inventory is to have the new item next to it at full price...

Here’s my $0.02: Robot raises a solid point different doesn’t always mean better. There’s been a lot of hype around why USD is supposed to be superior, but honestly, I haven’t seen anything measurable (quantitative) that makes me a believer, especially in single crown setups. Instead of starting with why USD might be better, I think it’s more useful to lay out some core problems with current suspension forks and then explore if USD might help solve them. Compliance: Across every sport I touch...skiing, moto, MTB there was a phase where “stiffer = better.” Everyone wanted to be the guy...