Danneaux. As promised- after all the help i received from you both from your responses to my posts and from reading through the archives, i now have some photos for you of the finished Sherpa. The tour saw my wife and i travelling from Burnley to Berwich taking in a good chunk of the yorkshire dales, heartside and some of Northumberland on our way. We didn't follow the national route 68 as I have followed it before and was disapointed that it skirts around the Yorkshire Dales. On this trip we went straight through the middle of them, taking in the Park Rash climb ( on a day when the locals thought it was closed for snow and that we were mad) and going over Tan Hill.
We have never carried so much as we did on this trip, mainly due to the unseasonably cold weather (with temperatures below freezing most days and down to -10 over night). We also had an exta kg of tent with us than on previous trips as we were trying out our wedding present : a hilleberg keron 3gt. The extra space this offers with all the kit is truly luxurious, and a definate bonus over our namatj 3.
The sherpa performed perfectly, never once feeling unstable rather refreshing after my calud buttler tourer which with full camping load used to feel like it was made of elastic not steel. My favorite piece of kit must be (apart from the frame obviously) the brooks flyer select. My second brooks, this one is absolutely beautiful and already taking on a lovely patina after just over 500miles. Having only ever ridden 28mm tires and less, the 2" duremes provide excellent grip and comfort, though on day rides they make themselves felt. The B&M luxos B has been a revelation on night rides (with my wife saying one night " i thought that was a motorbike coming towards me), and the gearing using friction shifting dura-ace bar end mounted as thumbies has been faultless and easier to use than i expected.
During the build my circumstances changed a little when we moved to a flat in Manchester, as this is my second bike and lives in our bedroom a compromise had to be made and the humpert bars stepped into the rescue. In total these have been a good compromise, though i do find that wihth ergon grips i can not get them perfect, either the bar end is too wide or the grips too narrow.
The only item of the bike that i am not over the moon with is the B&M usb-werk. I went of this option (with the Luxos b) over the luxos u as i wanted something that could easily be removed from the bike for security reasons and that could be moved from bike to bike for the sake of spreading the investment. Unfortunately, despite incorporating a small cache battery- it seems pretty much incapable of charging any of the three smartphones we own (one being a work phone that i do need to keep half an eye on whilst on tour). It has however managed to keep my garmin gps ticking over so is not faulty, the next step will be to experiment with a powermonkey as a larger cache battery to see how things go.
Anyway, a rather long post. My next adventure will be a 260 mile round trip to snowdonia for a weekends mounting in the may bank holiday, enjoy the pictures
And finally, from the sherpa's first outing, stopping off in Tatton park on my way from manchester to shrewsbury on its shakedown ride:
