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The Chamois Cream Showdown

02.21.2010 by Ray Niekamp // 15 Comments

Guest poster Jeff Hemmel compares two major brands of butt lube.

I’m 40 miles into one of my usual rides and there’s a battle raging in my pants.

The combatants? Two chamois creams, each holding onto their own piece of territory. In this corner, weighing in at $19.99 for an 8 oz. jar is Paceline’s Chamois Butt’r, a pretty common cream found in many bike shops. In the opposite corner, weighing in at a daunting $24 for a 4 oz. tube, is dznuts (pronounced DEEZ-nuts), a premier high-end brand.

Which will take the title in the, uh, end? I’ll let you know as soon as my nether regions finish sorting it out.

Go ahead and laugh, but this is serious testing, from a bona fide professional journalist. Before my ride I had carefully measured out equal amounts of both creams (or just grabbed a two-fingered scoop), applied the creams to specific boundaries of my anatomy (or as specific as you can get when you’re messing with an area you can’t really see), and then got on the bike and rode a precisely measured course (I just go up to this sign, which is about 22.5 miles from home…and turn around).

Why? To find out once and for all if one glob of goo can actually be worth more than twice the price of the other. And yes, let’s face it, just to have the opportunity to say something about Dave Zabriskie’s nuts in print.

One difference between the two products is immediately obvious. Dznuts is a thicker viscosity cream with an almost whipped appearance, where Chamois Butt’r is somewhat lighter, with a shiny, almost watery look to the surface. Apply them and both provide a cooling sensation. On the road they maintained that feeling of coolness, but with subtle differences. Chamois Butter’s sensation was slightly more pronounced, dznuts a little less in your face. (No jokes about the butt-face jump in logic here.) Other than that, however, both seemed to do the job. Late in the ride I did feel like dznuts thickness helped it to stay on slightly better, where the less-thick Chamois Butt’r may have been losing a little of the battle to sweat. The cool sensation of the Chamois Butt’r, however, seemed to last slightly longer than the dznuts, perhaps distracting me a little more from how long I had spent in the saddle. At the end of the day both washed away, from me and my chamois, with soap and water.

The Euro Version of Chamois Butt’r contains menthol, witch hazel, and Brazilian peppertree, but contains mineral oil and a few other ingredients that give a natural ingredients proponent pause. Dznuts relies on tea-tree oil as an anti-bacterial and anti-fungal, Evodia, a Chinese herb, for wound-healing and anti-inflammatory purposes, and Masterwort for its wound-healing and calming properties. It claims a more organic approach, trying to stay as natural as possible.

Why avoid certain products? It’s up for debate. Mineral oil is petroleum-based, however, and has been blamed for doing everything from promoting acne to messing with cell development. It’s also, however, the basis of many baby oils. You’ll just have to make your own call on this issue.

So back to the original question — is one worth twice the price? Probably not. Both get the job done. A lot of dznuts premium probably goes into its fancier, high-end packaging. I do like that it’s a more natural product, however, and I prefer its texture and consistency.

[lasso type=”table” id=”1″ link_id=”2152″]

I said I’d let my nether regions sort things out, and truth be told, my butt has apparently been telling my brain to go for the dznuts, as it’s the cream that’s been seeing the most use since the initial showdown. Once it runs out, however, the butt and the brain will likely have to factor something else into the equation — the wallet — before the next purchase.

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Categories // guest post, Review Tags // chamois cream, guest post, Hemmel, Review

The Thule Echelon/Thule Crossroad Rack Review

01.19.2010 by Ray Niekamp // Leave a Comment

Guest poster Jeff Hemmel fills our winter days with thoughts of warmer climes — and taking our bikes along. Here’s his take on a Thule rooftop rack system.

Like a lot of people, I occasionally take a bike on vacation. Other years my Giant Sedona DX typically came along for the ride, but lately I’ve spent a lot more time on my Trek road bike, so when out latest trip drew near, it was the Trek that got invited to the dance. (Sorry, Sedona, but it really meant nothing, and I swear I was thinking about you the whole time. Honest.)

Problem is, my trusty hitch-mount bike rack didn’t really fit a road bike’s contours — and cables — too well. On top of that, we were also considering taking our smaller car, one without a receiver hitch. Enter the subject of this review, the Thule Echelon fork-mount bike carrier.

Or rather, the Thule Crossroad rack system and the Thule Echelon bike rack review. Huh? You see, today a lot of cars (okay, a lot of cars of the sport wagon/SUV variety) come with lengthwise factory rails, but no widthwise crossbars, leaving it up to the consumer to add the rack portion of the equation. In other words, before I could rack, I had to rail.

I’ve had good luck with Thule equipment in the past, so I chose their Crossroad system. Setup proved pretty simple. A polyethylene-covered, galvanized steel Thule load bar slides through a pair of the Crossroad’s feet, and then the assembly can be placed atop the factory rails. Thule accommodates a wide variety of rail styles by relying on a flexible, rubber-coated steel band to actually secure the foot to the rail. To fasten, pass the free end under the rail, hook it in the appropriate slot on the foot, then simply tighten things up. The outer cap of the footpad includes the necessary Allen key, and also serves as a handy knob to tighten things down. As you tighten the strap around the factory rails, the mechanism simultaneously locks the load bar in place, no tools required. Once I had the front half installed, I repeated it on the back.

Hints? Do a basic line-up beforehand. At the rubber-coated base of each footpad is a small arrow. Try to line it up with the center of the factory rail to best spread the load. I would also suggest upgrading to the locks Thule offers, both to keep your rack secure, but also to just make sure no one pops off an end cap and leaves you without your tightening tool, or a loose cap ends up along the side of the highway. Single-key lock packs come in multiples of two. Plan ahead to cover all four feet, as well as whatever carriers you choose to install afterward.

With the basic Crossroad system installed, next came the Echelon. A square bracket and two bolts lock the front of the carrier to the forward load bar, and the rear is attached to the aft bar with a simple backing plate, bolts, and screw knobs. That’s really all there was to it. Loading the bike is just a matter of positioning the rear wheel in the carrier tray, slipping the front fork’s dropouts onto the front skewer, and clamping everything in place.

I preferred the Echelon’s front clamp to cheaper alternatives for multiple reasons. For one, the cover/cam lever secures the fork in one simple motion. For another, a large adjustment knob makes for quick adjustments while securing and releasing. Loading a bike takes under a minute. At highway speeds, the rack proved surprisingly solid, although I’d again upgrade to a lock on the clamp just for peace of mind, not only to keep the bike in place, but also to keep the bolts inaccessible for any really determined thieves.

The complete Thule 450 Crossroad system, with a pair of 50” load bars, runs $240; the Echelon bike carrier $150. You can see how your own vehicle measures up at thuleracks.com.

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Categories // Accessories, guest post, Review Tags // Accessories, guest post, Hemmel, Review

Reviewing the bike review sites

10.08.2009 by Ray Niekamp // 4 Comments

A new web site came to my attention this week. It’s a bike review site, called, appropriately, Bike Reviews.com.

This site takes its place next to an older, established site, Roadbike Review.com.

Each site has its strengths and weaknesses, and I thought it would be worthwhile to review the review sites.

BRBike Reviews.com

Apparently this site is new enough that it is still building content. It reviews road, mountain, BMX, and fixed gear bikes. However, bikes are all it reviews. No accessories or parts.

When you pull down the Bikes menu, and select Road, a page displays that features Trek, Bianchi, Raleigh, and Felt (not Specialized or Giant?). That’s not to imply that those are the only brands they review right now. You can search for others, and probably find some, like this Masi road bike.  But if you click on the Raleigh or Felt bikes, you will get links for only their 2010 models. The pages have dead links for model years 2003-2009. I assume reviews for those bikes are still in the works.

The site encourages reader reviews. Readers can award star ratings to bikes on a scale of 1 to 5 (5 being the best). At this point, few bikes seem to have more than three reader ratings.

But new or not, the site still has some glaring vacancies. A search for Specialized bikes turned up all of their mountain bikes, but none of their road bikes. When I further refined the search to my bike, a Specialized Allez Elite, I got a blank page.

What about the reviews themselves? Frankly, they’re not really reviews. They’re  one-paragraph synopses of the bikes’ specifications. The Masi review linked to above is a good example. It reads like a sales brochure the Masi company might have issued. If you want to know whether the bike performs the way you’d expect, you won’t find that here.

Why, then, would anyone want to visit the site? If you’re in the market for a bike, and want to get an idea of what you have to choose from, this could be a good place to start. It should be fun to watch this site grow, and if we’re lucky, to start adding its own original reviews based on real road testing. Whether that will happen is anybody’s guess.

RBRRoad Bike Review.com

This is a site you may already be familiar with. It’s been around for awhile. Road Bike Review does just what its name says — it provides reviews of a wide variety of bikes, and not just road bikes. Cruisers, hybrids, cyclocross, recumbents, tandems and more — but no mountain bikes — are featured in reviews, as well as accessories.

Because the site is so big, you have to drill down several levels to get to the review you want. Let’s say you want that review of the Specialized Allez Elite.  Click the “Road bikes” link, then “S” for Specialized, then click through two pages before hitting the review you want. Even then, you find links to reviews of 19 different Allez models.

These reviews are written by visitors to the site, not by staffers, so the quality of the reviews varies widely. Some are succinct and informative. Others ramble, and still others offer nothing of use (“Dude, buy this bike. It’s rad!”).

To help you narrow your choices, the top of each page features three bikes that have received the highest ratings from the site’s visitors — 4s or 5s on the same 1 – 5 scale used by Bike Reviews.

It’s also worth checking if you want to buy a certain component or accessory. Handlebars, saddles, shifters and stems — bottom brackets, cassettes, cranksets and derailleurs — tires, wheels, hubs and rims — locks, lights, bike racks and trainers — shoes, shorts, socks and jerseys — you get the idea.

I spent a lot of time on Road Bike Review before I bought my bike — and the comments I found here helped me make my decision.

So Bike Reviews is new, and prettier, but has a way to go. Road Bike Review is huge, minimalist in design, but potentially helpful. Each is another arrow in the quiver of a bike consumer.

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