there was a thread last week. It looks pretty neat but you’d need a fair amount of snow consistantly I would think.
http://ktrakcycle.com/home.html
any risk of a frozen body (inside ur casette that is)
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the rig certainly looks like it works. but my guess is that this is primarily for the downhill market. saw the video, note the footage, the style of music, and that there was not one scene of anyone riding uphill or even on a rolling xc mtb course.
but i have used nokian studded tires (extreme 296’s) on rolling up and downhills in heavy snowfalls. i can vouch for them, they work in nearly all conditions except very deep snow.
One of my favorite wintertime activities is to take my mountain bike out onto snowmobile trails. I also use the Nokian Extremes and they work about as well as I would expect them to. They are fine in up to about 3-4 inches of new snow…more if the snow is really light, less if it is wet and heavy. They are great on hard packed and on ice. They are also find they are good on an inch or two of slush, as long as there is something solid underneath the slush. Where it gets difficult is on crusty or heavily traveled trails. The crusty stuff is just nasty to plow through and even though the rear wheel grips well, the front acts like a plow and creates a lot of resistance. The heavily traveled trails usually consist of a few inches of dense but loose snow and it is hard to get traction unless I get to them early in the AM before the snowmobiles loosen things up again. This kind of snow, along with the crusty stuff, can be a great workout…a series of tempo intervals where I go for a while and then just have to take a break.
The key is to try to maintain floatation by going fast and to running the tires at as low a pressure as I dare.
The ktrackcycle attachments simply look like a slice of a snowmobile, but with a human engine. It seems like it might work, but I’m not convinced it would be any better than the Extremes…perhaps the front ski only?
Victor