Originally Posted by
clx1
It's absolute tosh when people say riding in bad weather ruins your bike, I ride every week of the year(except for holidays and snow) on a carbon bike with decent wheels and 23mm tyres.
As long as you clean the bike and re lube the chain after each "dirty" ride you will have no problems at all. Personally I don't bother with mudguards, you and the bike are going to get wet and dirty with or without mudguards!
I think that there is nothing more invigorating that a good long ride in the rain.
As others have pointed out, there is a great deal of variance in what kind of weather we experience in our "Winter Riding."
Having grown up in the Netherlands, Winter riding meant cold wet raining weather, with some short periods of deep freeze (that we all anticipated so we could go skating... no joke the Dutch LOVE their ice skating on open water). Snow was something we marveled at, and mostly was in the 1' to 3" soemtimes we got move and tried very hard to have some fun sledding down some small hills (mostly the side of dikes in the area I live in). Fleezing rain was probablt the worst part of winter. Due to the excellent public transport system, most people I knew would ride year round, but would leave their bikes parked the few days where and there were there was either "real" snow on the ground or freezing rain.
Now that I live in the Buffalo NY area, I experience lots of lake effect snow. We get around 100" to 150" of snow a year depending on what part of town you live in and where the snow bands are heaviest that year. For me that means I am bound to see active snow fall with a minimum of 2" to 6" on average 2 to 3 days a (work) week from mid December through mid February. The snow tends to fall mostly between 1:00 am and 5:00 am, so most days the plows have been out before I need to get to work. That means that I am riding in salt laden slush 2 to 3 mornings every week. That is HARD on a chain. Generally around this time of year my morning average will be around 15F to 20F. Sometimes it takes 6 to 7 weeks before we have a warmup that lets me give the bike a good cleaning. Generally all I could do was add more lube every few days.
I ride about 2500 miles. By March my chain is pretty unhappy with the daily abuse of salty slush being trown at it. This is why I am quite content to ride my hybrid with 8 spped Shimano Deore components year round, but not my road bike with Ultegra. Cost of parts to repair is one problem, tire size limitations is an ever bigger problem. There is no way you'll survive riding in my area without some knobby tires to get some grip on the snow. It is not unusual for the snow to pack together on certain streets, and you'll have to get through 2" to 4" of tick messy stuff. It can be pretty hard even with 35mm snow tires to stay in control (those super wide endomorphs tires would be excellent for those conditions). Other days the roads get icy. Carbite studded tires have kepts me from falling on some pretty slick days.
Idealy I'd need two Winter bikes. One with my "narrow" 35mm Nokia W109's for the normal winter roads that are mostly clear with a few icy bits here and there, then a 2nd bike would have nice wide studded tires with low pressure to deal with deeper snow days. For now a Road Bike and a single winter bike will have to do.
Happy winter riding,
André
André