The staring at the ceiling lack of sleep last night can only mean one thing. Tomorrow I face a pack of production editors all wondering where those words I promised them for first thing January are. Which means another bank holiday bites the dust in favour of rattling out the last few hundred nouns and verbs on the nuances of disc brakes.
Actually the disc brakes thing is always a lot of fun. After deliberately trying to slide, grind, overheat or just rattle to death around 40 disc brakes (a few less actually make the test pages) we then head up to pad makers Fibrax in Wrexham (that's near Coed Llandegla trail fans).
There we take a fresh example of each brake and run it through a battery of dry and wet braking tests to get scientifically calibrated and guaranteed same context stopping power results for every brake. It was a good one this year too, as we added some heat build up drag tests to dig deep into the data on Shimano's new finned pad and sandwich construction 'Ice' rotor and the new Avid Code DH brake. Unfortunately for one of the brakes that was well up in the contenders stakes coming off the trail it also saw our first ever complete disc meltdown and explosion. That was a proper noise when that happened.
Outside of that it's been a mad month of multiple bike riding on every day (yup, thanks to the ever ready to run spaniel that includes Christmas day, Boxing day and both sides of New years day) through the holiday. All heading towards the splitting down of no less than 18 £2500 full suss trail bikes for the WMB TBOTY uber test. We've also had two potential trail messiahs laid in the trail manger for exclusive first tests - the Whyte 146 and the new Planet X Ti456 - both setting new standards for slack angled handling gold, cranking sense and mirth.
Sorry but you knew I was going to try and lever a lousy festive pun in there somewhere surely.
Anyway more updates on how the workshop fills and empties like a mountain biking Severn bore over the next few weeks as we get into the swing of 2011 proper.
In the meantime, get on your bike, get onto the trails and grab yourself a great big year starting grin before we all get back to work again tomorrow.