Kona Ute: Week Two

I knew I'd been lucky my first week riding the Ute, with moderate temperatures and roads mostly free of snow and ice. That luck didn't hold for the second week. I guess that's OK, because I really wanted to try out those studded tires.

I'd purchased the Nokian Gazza Extreme winter tires the same day I picked up the Ute. I wasn't sure I'd need them this winter, but I was afraid I might, and I knew I'd need them next winter. They're pretty pricey, but I found them on sale and got a good deal. Part of my decision to buy the Kona Ute was due to its capacity for big fat tires. The Gazza Extremes are 29 x 2.1-inch tires, with widely spaced knobs, each knob being topped with carbide stud. They are in no way a road tire, but the roads of my commute are beginning to look more like Jeep trails than roads, anyway. OK, so that's an exaggeration, and in truth, I would have preferred a less aggressive tread, but I wanted a studded tire with as much floatation as possible, and the Extremes are the fattest studded tire I could find. I wanted the floatation because my experience has been that attempting to ride on snow-packed roads with skinny tires is very difficult. Skinny tires are great in soft snow and on ice, but packed roads and icy ruts are different. The front tire will break through the snowpack and get diverted sideways very unpredictably. My hope was that going from a 32mm tire at 60 psi to a 55mm tire at 30 psi, along with the switch to wider handle bars, would allow me to safely negotiate those snowpacked roads and icy ruts.



The 2.1-inch tires fit the Kona Ute with room to spare. The casing of the Nokians, mounted on these rims, measures only about 1.75, but the knobs protrude outward beyond the casing such that 2.1 inches is probably a pretty accurate estimate of the width. The Ute has about 3 inches of clearance in the fork and frame, so an even larger tire would fit just fine.

Although the tires fit the frame and fork, I had to make some adjustments to the fenders. The clearance is the closest at the top of the rear wheel. The Ute frame has a crossbar directly above the rear hub, putting a limit on how far above the tire the fender can be mounted, but once I got the fender moved up to the cross bar, there was adequate clearance.

I also had to move the bottom rear of the front fender out away from the tire. Front fenders tend to move from side to side, and the Nokians knobs initially tended to catch the fender struts when the fender wobbled. This would occur mostly when hitting a bump or crossing railroad tracks. A rapid turn of the bars would cause the fender to move (worsened, I'm sure, by the extension I have added to the fender) and the knobs would buzz against the struts. After a couple days of that, I decided to construct a brace to keep the fender from swaying. I bent a soft piece of aluminum strap to attach at the fork crown and at three points along the fender. It works very well. It holds the fender quite firmly while riding, but still allows enough flexibility that it's unlikely that an impact will break the fender.



With the fenders and studded tires the Ute seems to be a pretty capable snow bike. Traction certainly isn't an issue. There wasn't enough snow last week to really test the setup on deeper packed snow, but it handles the clumps of ice and frozen slush piles much better than my skinny-tire rig.

The tires and fenders were great, but my fingers were not holding up. A couple of mornings the temperature was in the low teens and there was a very strong wind out of the west. I don't have the best mittens. I usually wear a pair of medium weight lobster mitts under an old pair shell mitts from Cindy's OR days, but my fingers were freezing. I knew this was coming, too. Last winter my fingers were extremely uncomfortable on my commute. So I called Trails-Edge to order a pair of Moose Mitts, which they make just down the road in Plymouth, MI. They had to make them before they could send them, so they weren't ready until yesterday. As it turned out, they're going to be at the MMBA Expo in Lansing tomorrow, so it looks like I'll be going to the Expo to pick them up.

In the mean time, since I had a few days of really cold weather to get through, I tried my own version of Moose Mitts. Since I've been wearing boots or winter running shoes for my ride, my neoprene shoe covers didn't currently have job, so I put them to use. Threading my bars through them, and wrapping a strap around them actually seemed to work. Sort of. It helped my fingers survive the week.





And today we're getting another six inches of snow...