what are the best conditions for studs? is it fresh powder and or ice that is crushed down? i'm guessing that for sheet ice ie water that has frozen clear they don't work, or am i wrong? m I right the studs need 'bedding-in' with some km?
They work spectacularly well on sheet ice. You can ride (carefully, no hard braking or cornering) almost as if it isn't there (and then put a foot down and fall on your arse because your shoes have no grip).
Agreed. I have some Kahtoona nano spikes, which I wear when cycling with spiked tyres, means you can put your foot down on the sheet ice without falling over... Learnt that the hardway...
Comedy off roading in the woods in the dark on a studded brompton, I accidentally ended up cycling onto a small lake, I got about 2m, and then turned round and got off it Damn Quick™.
I bed my spikes in, largely as I tend to put them on at the first frost forecast, and keep them on all winter. This winter I haven't, as I have a spare set of wheels with them ready. I lost 3 studs in about 1000km last winter.
The studs themselves do little on virgin snow - ideally you need a big low-pressure knobbly tyre (think fatbike) for that. And of course you still want the studs for any ice that's underneath the virgin snow. The Ice Spiker is a normal MTB-size compromise that mostly works on any kind of white stuff, but its rolling resistance is incredibly high and it feels pretty vague on clear tarmac compared to the Marathon Winter (and if you're going off-road, its grip on dry rock is disappointing).
For this sort of area (UK/NL), the actual issue is that when you have about 30mm of snow, what is underneath is a sheet of ice, if you are riding anything but a fat bike, you are going to go straight through the snow to the ice below, then fall over. This is where spikes are great.
Compacted snow is mostly ridable on any studded tyre, but if it's relatively fresh you can get to the point where the tyre grips well enough, but the layers of snow shear and take your wheel with it. This is more like sliding on mud than on sheet ice, so if you're used to off-road riding you're relatively unlikely to end up on your arse.
Not had that as an issue yet. How deep does the snow need to be for this to happen?
The BRITISH speciality of slush that's been rutted by motor vehicle tyres and then re-frozen solid overnight is the nasty one: The studs will grip well enough on the ice, and if it's only a little bit frozen you can generally plough through the ruts. But if it's really solid it comes down to wheel diameter vs depth of rut, and you can tramline on deeper ruts just as well as you would on a rutted muddy track that's dried solid. Some educated guesswork required not to embarass yourself.
Ah, sastrugi. It's what makes cycling on ice with studded tyres *REALLY* interesting. Carry spare underwear...
There is something great about being able to cycle into work on the day when half the office has called in as working from home, and the rest have taken public transport...
J