After 3 yrs on this trail blog.

It’s time to consolidate the interesting days on and off the trails at our official blog site.

offthebike.dirtraction.com

There’s more than just trails in our everyday life. We will cover more of the rest on the new platform.

thanks for reading.

Happy Trails!

We’ve the chance to build it better and slightly more technical than what we can do in Kent Ridge some half a year ago.

The track will includes rollers, big berms (inslope turns), a slope style like 7ft tall WALL RIDE, simple drop off, DH rock garden, XC-like false flat and contour rides, and the ‘got to be skillful to ride fast’ ziggurat.

For the past 1 week, Jason, Peter and I with the help of 2 workers and occasional help from various other bikers, we managed to get half the wall ride up, 1 full berm ready, a 1 1/2ft drop off( with rollable options)  and a nice long rock garden that react nicely to those well chunky suspension fork.  The series of rollers is half done and should be ready by the end of the week.

We do suggest riders not to ‘test’ the wall ride at the moment as we are still securing some of the sturcture.

Rock Garden - building in progress

First we’ve to address a few issues before building new one. The state of the trail is bad after the new contractor for this place trying to keep things sane by doing whatever without knowing what is it to manage a bike park. The wooden wonder is rotting away with various key bridges broken, the pond loop is disconnected as the new earthy plateau is place over the old BikeAsia100 race trail. Descender is a series of ruts (is a fall line truck road in the first place) and Mimosa is eating up the whole trail.

With a bit of luck and planning, National Parks committed some resources from their contractors to grass cut whatever needed so to ‘resurface’ all those hidden trails that everyone race on a good 9mths ago. Dirtraction with RMC came together with a proposal to get all these fix up before moving forward to build new trails.

With resources tight as ever and the economics timing as bad as the imploding white dwarf, support for these trail restoration effort is minimal. We’ve (Dirtraction and RMC) decided to place in our own resources, time and money to complement and get things into place before we loose all these trails to mother earth again.

The bridges is repaired, new connecting lines from the pond loop to the top of the kidney hill is made and most of the grass cutting  are done within this one month.

- the wooded wonder is totally ridable now.

- pond loop is now connected to the new lower kidney climb

- kidney loop is split and reused (600metres)

- totally new upper kidney descend and contour line ride is created (approx 800m)

Jason inspecting the ‘Jungle Bridge’  and right the lower kidney climb

Bush fire in tampines, beware NO naked fire for this dry season!

Upper Kidney contour ride, a fun filled gentle section

With the addition of new these new trails in tampines, this coming Night Marathon race can be race on the ‘best of’ Tampines Bike Park.

Monster Mud Madness is probably gone and the good old finishing straight would no longer take the riders with the old Kids Singletrack taking over.

A point to note,

Upper Kidney and Lower Kidney still needed abit of surfacing work. the trail is freshly cut, ruts are big and random. we will make it a fun surface to ride on soon.

the Rock N Roll bad turn

before and after

the China Bowl wall half done

watery culvert

giving the snake bend an easier longer path.

I got my 3rd finger incident in a month, hate those rock crush.

Glove no gloves doesn’t matter, it still shread.

to be completed .. yet again.. (blame it on the rainy monsoon)

2 big sections that need some further work include that bad turn at ‘Rock N Roll’ and China Bowl wall ride.

been an eventful 2 weeks, and Joey is leaving the next day, we are thankful to have IMBA working together to develop this beautiful bike park, and we hope to see Joey back in the future.

phew!

After one nice lap of warm up ride, the trail crew gathered at Grave Drop again.

We split the work among the 15 volunteers, with William, Ellery, Joshua and Nik taking care of the entrance choke and rocks. Ken, Ling, Ming, Max and insect stunk me handled the ‘hole’ before ‘Ling’s step’.

55 and Kee join in halfway after completing some other task, and Soon added his meticulous touch to the rock garden.

the work continues through the long rainy afternoon, with the last hour powered by pure adrenaline of completion, pushing the biggest drop rocks into place for the bottom.

Gravedrop ended up as a sweet north-shore like ride, lots of stale rock and good technical riding needed.

As the name suggest, the lines will not be easy and will be curvy and lack the flow of the previous stuff we build over the 2 weeks.

We started building the drop from the bottom midsection.

Doing as much small rock work as much as we can at ‘Ling’s step’, a rock garden mid section. while I concentrate the work with 55 and Kee to get bigger drop off rocks into place at the bottom.

The effort took the afternoon with Ling, William, Joey and me placing whatever we can before the day close.

A tiring mosquito infested day.

We will try again tomorrow.

Fatigue set into the whole bunch of trail builders.  I am nursing the daily weightlifting and the 40km round trip daily on my MTB to test the trail, eventually sinking into carbohydrate debt aka ‘the body simply can’t recover fast enough for the next day’

The work force is tired from the rocks moving and even our experience trail guru, Joey is getting a some flu-ish symptom from the rain and hardwork.

We persist on and kept the morale high.

We let the machinery do whatever needed.

While Hwa continue on the tricky blue corner. digging whenever the slope is dryer (the rain soak mud is dangerous for digging) , I guide Kee and 55 with 2 dumper truck loads of aggregrate so to armor up the blue ridge with a top coat riding surface.  There’s still bunch of manual work involved. The dumper can only bring stuff as far as the wide blue lines, and wheel barrow kicks in shuttling the granites uphill in the narrow mountain bike trail.

A rock choke is installed after the cobra garden and 2 dips to drain water going down the slopes are added. TO spice things up, 2 flat slabs of launch rock are placed on the fast line before ‘Tidak apa-apa’ slope so to allow option for people to take some small air.

This doesn’t stop William and Ling from joining me in building what we eventually become the start of cobra garden.

With almost unlimited supply of granite rocks lying around cobra garden, we placed our effort so to make it longer and better, with interesting drops in mind.

A workforce of five got things moving pretty fast. Big slabs are moved into place with the help of Kee and 55. While William gather rocks for the in between and Ling moves rocks 2 times heavier than herself around like just another pebble.

By tightening up the rocky trail and placing a ‘must pass’ dropoff at the tip of it, the end product rides better than it looks. A sick drop to nowhere for the first timer.

Right : check Ming’s awesome surprise look

The day ‘must mention’ incident is actually pretty much not very trail related.

Do check out Ming’s nice commentary of the ‘William Boar incident‘

While we were working on Cobra Garden, Joey separately supervise Hwa and his excavator in fixing the touchy blue corner, a tight corner that doesn’t have much platform to start with, we placed a rolling crown turn onto the corner with an inside drain taking the water off the slope.

definitely one interesting day!