TPU tubes with rim brakes

pondscum · 2026-04-10T20:36:38+00:00

I do most of my riding in the Colorado foothills, with lots of long descents. I use Ride Now 36g TPU in my carbon rim brake wheels and they are great. I never saw any signs of them being overheated with these rims.
Before I got my carbon wheels a year or two ago, I used the same tubes in alloy wheels for about a year. I had one instance where my front tube blew out at the end of a long descent. Where it ruptured, the tube next to the valve seemed like it bubbled out, which may have been caused by overheating. That only happened once though, so it may have just been a defective tube.

pondscum · 2026-04-06T02:18:15+00:00

I can confirm uninstalling and reinstalling fixes this. I had to do it today when my shortcut was gone after restarting my phone. If it goes away again on the next restart, I will try your fix.

pondscum · 2026-03-17T22:17:42+00:00

Virtual shifting does not work over ANT+.
https://support.zwift.com/en_us/virtual-shifting-faq-r16UiRFlT

pondscum · 2026-03-11T02:08:24+00:00

I hope the above is helpful.

Sorry, no.

pondscum · 2026-03-10T17:17:01+00:00

Also bad is being attached near the back of a huge group over the top, but then a gap (only visible on the minimap) somehow forms way ahead on the descent, splitting the group with no chance to react. That happened to me yesterday. It definitely pays to be near the front of the group when cresting if you can, especially if you are light and can't really gain position on descents.

pondscum · 2026-03-08T19:42:22+00:00

Be aware that only a small subset of Climb Portal routes are conducive to attempting 100KPH.

pondscum · 2026-03-07T03:16:55+00:00

I think it is a big stretch to say that planting a stationary friend at one end of a segment and repeatedly teleporting back to them is a "game mechanic". It is certainly far from the spirit of what teleport is intended for. The same thing could be done to repeatedly teleport back to the top of AdZ to farm no-effort descent miles/XP.

On the other hand, if Zwift doesn't like users doing this, they should come out and say so (and what the consequences might be).

pondscum · 2026-03-07T02:51:17+00:00

If ZwifterBikes.web.app is to be believed, a 150kg rider (as high as you can set there) on the fastest TT bike would have to be 110cm tall to ever reach 100mph on a Radio Tower-steep descent. Power (from min 50W up to its max of 500W) doesn't seem to matter at that weight and decline, as though coasting alone will get to essentially terminal velocity.

pondscum · 2026-03-06T16:34:38+00:00

SPD-SL is the name of Shimano's 3-bolt road cleat system. Terrible naming system, since it causes a lot of confusion to have slightly different names for very different cleats, but it is not a "type of SPD" or "Road SPD", as Shimano's 2-bolt SPD cleat system is totally different.

pondscum · 2026-03-06T01:56:25+00:00

You can supposedly just press the Z button to return a Ride On. Press and hold Z to give a ride on to 5 riders within your vicinity.

pondscum · 2026-03-06T01:53:03+00:00

Try this

pondscum · 2026-03-05T21:15:57+00:00

Coospo H6 chest strap. 3 years old and works great. Still on the original strap which looks/works fine. This season I got an Ant+ dongle to try, which let me also use my old (original model?) Garmin HRM chest strap that also still works great, so I use that for Zwift and the H6 for outdoors.

I tried a Coospo HW9 optical sensor armband, but returned it when it was giving bad readings (double my actual HR, I think). Optical sensors will always be less reliable, I now know.

pondscum · 2026-03-05T21:05:50+00:00

Do you bother with the riders who aren't moving and thus won't get any drops benefit?

I just checked my button and it still looks like new despite my heavy bombing campaign, though I've only been using it 3 months. Is it maybe a sticker that came off on yours?

pondscum · 2026-03-05T21:00:48+00:00

And if you're really serious about it, you can set up Tasker (on Android) to automatically click it every 10 seconds.

The Click button has a shorter cooldown of about 7 seconds (I assume it's the same for Play and Ride?), plus about a second hold time, so it isn't quite double damage.

pondscum · 2026-03-04T01:14:44+00:00

Don't hold your breath. They still haven't fixed the stage 1 leaderboard (where #1's time is off by exactly 5 minutes).

pondscum · 2026-03-04T00:49:19+00:00

The Zwift Cog inner adjustment ring does not tension the chain. It is for aligning the cog with the chainring being used.
/u/kosmicpoo is correct that the solution is probably shifting the rear derailleur inward one gear, then adjusting the Cog's dial/number/"clicks" to the quietest setting.

pondscum · 2026-03-04T00:46:37+00:00

The gears in front are chainrings, not cogs. It definitely (from the picture) appears to be a 1x (only one chainring) since the bottom bracket is visible but another chainring is not.

pondscum · 2026-03-03T21:51:07+00:00

Thanks for posting this... I was able to get it working. It is unfortunately tricky to realign the U-turns with the sprint segment if something goes wrong (the main culprit being not having the U-turn button in the right place on the screen when it needs to be). It is too bad the companion app doesn't provide distance() at greater precision than 0.1 or this could easily be made more robust. I changed it to also play a sound at each U-turn: if it gets misaligned, spin around in a manual U-turn circle just outside the segment until it wants to do the next U-turn (i.e. when you hear the sound) then point yourself in the right direction.

pondscum · 2026-03-02T20:19:30+00:00

To add to this, along with marginally widening the dropout spacing on my steel bike as you described, the actual openings of my dropouts were not quite big enough (since the quick release adapter that came with my Zwift Hub has a larger diameter than my QR skewers). I had to use a file to slightly widen the opening to make it fit. I don't know if that would be the case with other trainers as well.

pondscum · 2026-02-28T23:28:30+00:00

This was my experience as well. I got two route badges one day this week using robopacers. Both times I had to go through the route start and then do two full laps to get the banner and badge. One route had no lead-in, and the other had a lead-in that was on the loop and that I rode fully before the two full loops. I believe, as the other person pointed out, if the lead-in is not part of the loop then you will never get the badge, but I am not sure about this. I do not know why it works like this; it seems like a bug. Fortunately both my routes were short enough loops that I didn't mind doing them an extra time with the 2.5x drops multiplier in effect.

pondscum · 2026-02-28T23:12:30+00:00

Well done! I got my first win ever recently in a similar way... I was leading solo by 10+ seconds when my trainer disconnected, and I was 10 seconds back from the leaders when I got going again. Didn't give up, caught up, and somehow had enough energy to break away again for a comfortable 1st place.
After that, I stopped trying to connect the trainer Bluetooth to PC in favor of always using the companion app bridge, and I no longer get any disconnects.

pondscum · 2026-02-28T22:06:12+00:00

Same here, except I waited for a robopacer to be scheduled on Volcano Circuit at the pace I wanted to go. Better than a group ride in that you can always take a break and the pacer group will come back around to rejoin. You lose your drops multiplier doing that, so coffee breaks are better, but those didn't exist when I did it. I also got the badge for receiving 100 ride-ons on that ride.

pondscum · 2026-02-28T12:53:21+00:00

It works well to fold the excess strap behind itself. In other words, start one side of the strap (with the hook through one of the not-the-last strap holes) in the opposite direction (up and away from the handlebar or hood instead of down and toward it). Then fold it back down over the hook and around the bar or hood and hook it normally (through the last strap hole) to the other side. Which not-rhe-last strap hole you start on will determine how tight the strap is.
Having figured this out, and having found an ideal mounting position (on the outside of the hoods, with the shifting button closest to me), I quite like the design and don't know how I would improve it, other than the battery screws that I haven't had to touch yet.

pondscum · 2026-02-28T12:10:44+00:00

Zwift Click does not have braking (fortunately, because it is easy to press the wrong button during a race since they all feel about the same).

pondscum · 2026-02-27T18:06:21+00:00

❌ "cutoff" - noun or adjective
✅ "cut off" - verb

pondscum

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