Gravel Riding Tyres

I rode an event called Gravel Macedon last weeked with friends. We rode the 46km route which is big for me as it had 800 metres of climbing.

So "gravel" riding has come to mean riding road ish bicycles on gravel roads with bigger tyres. Possibly with a large hill in the route.

A historically minded aspect might be to consider if the early Tour de France riders were riding paved roads in their entire tour. They were not, so the old is new again.

The big tyres help a lot, and you can choose tyres with knobs that stick up instead of what is called a file tread pattern where the tyre is flat with a few slits.

The lugged steel frame on my bicycle from the 1960s or 1970s has reasonably good clearance for bigger tyres. I can get a 40mm in the front and a 45mm in the rear.

Some more knobby tyre consideration for next year:

• Kenda Alluvium GCT Tyre 700 x 40c (stocked by 99 Bikes)
• Panaracer Gravel King SK (stocked by Merin Cycles UK)

Unfortunately as "gravel" is sort of new and popular, lots of tyres are sold out and also some are only available at their full recommended retail pricing, which is to say they are about $100 australian a tyre!

3d Printer PID tuning

In first work problems, my 3d printer needs tuning after some surface changes in my print bed. It is acting drunk right now when it tries to keep a steady temperature:

Heater

Recv: PID Autotune finished! Put the last Kp, Ki and Kd constants from below into Configuration.h

Recv: #define DEFAULT_Kp 18.74

Recv: #define DEFAULT_Ki 1.53

Recv: #define DEFAULT_Kd 57.31

Recv: ok

Bed

Recv: PID Autotune finished! Put the last Kp, Ki and Kd constants from below into Configuration.h

Recv: #define DEFAULT_bedKp 43.15

Recv: #define DEFAULT_bedKi 2.18

Recv: #define DEFAULT_bedKd 570.37

Woody Prusa 3d Printer Repair Time

I've got some sort of problem in my 3d printer with the bed leveling probe, which is a proximity probe the printer uses to figure out how hight the print head is from the print bed.

It is probably a wiring problem; wiring is by far my weakest skill in playing with 3d printers. I probably have some dodgy tiny wiring problem in a solder joint or a splitter cable. I figure after 2 years by

When I first built the printer I had some trouble with probing. I thought it was a problem with the probe or my setup but it was the particular bed surface.

Anyway I have a spare probe and also found a supplier of a splitter cable I need, so one of those things is likely to fix my problem. I'll start with the splitter cable change, from my dodgy part which is a three way solder of three cables to a professionally assembled one without any soldered wires.

A guide about the splitting and which wire goes which way is here, along with some Marlin config things.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjB0ZucPf9s&t=177s

Cloned Prusa PINDA 2 probe.