 No, no, you see this right here? This is my broken Gates carbon belt drive and it broke on my trip in New Mexico when I was riding the GM, GM, GDMBR. There are very good reasons for why it broke. So I brought in Dave from priority to talk about what happened and how to make sure this doesn't happen again in the future. I hope you find this educational. I wanted to do the talk over Zoom, but for some reason, Dave's a Microsoft Teams guy. We really had to think creatively. Teams allowed us to come up with great ideas together and put better product out there for our customers. Dave, my man, how you doing, brother? Ryan, so good to see you, my friend. Let's get right to the point. I broke my belt. See this thing? It's broken. It's the last thing we want to see. I don't like it. I know, man, and I know it's pretty rare in the circumstances that I was in where we're pretty rare, but what did I do wrong? We've kind of talked about it. Well, it's more than pretty rare. I mean, I think I can count on one hand how many times I've seen something like that. I'm gonna ask you some questions. Is that all right? Yeah, yeah, let's do that. Yeah, tell me about, and I've looked at the photos and thank you, and I've obviously been following the journey. Tell me about when it happened, when the break happened. What were you doing? The break happened when I was riding up a steep single track, so all of my weight cranking on the bike really hard and it just, and it was broken. No! That's when the belt failed, but my belief is from looking at the way the belt actually tore that what caused it happened earlier. So I wanna rewind, I wanna talk about all that mud. What are your best two days on a bike? Yeah, exactly, man, yeah, that was such a fun day. After pushing through snow, then I got to the mud. Yeah, and you know, even before we talk about having the belt in the mud, I do think it's worth talking about if you were on a chain and derailer. Yeah. How do you think that would have held up? I think a traditional bike with a traditional drive train would have completely locked up in that situation. I mean, I can't say for sure, but I've had a lot of regular bikes, let's call them, and mud is a showstopper. And luckily with this situation, it's one of the reasons why I love the pinion and gate setup is that it can handle some extreme environments like that. And so it worked, but it still, it got a little cranky. Yeah, you know, and in my experience, having been in mud like that, you would have had derailer, derailer hanger, cassette, you would have had other issues there as well. And I don't know if you would have made it as far as you did. That said, it's very disturbing to break a belt on a bike that's this new. And especially, I mean, you know, you've had bikes with thousands of miles where you haven't broken a belt. So a couple of things. So before you left, I know you changed your tires, you did a couple of things, you went with wider tires. You removed your wheel, put it back in a few times. What was your belt tension before you left? I'll be honest, man, I have no idea what the tension was. I mean, it worked, it felt great, but as far as like calculating the actual tension, I don't know. Did you ever strum it even to feel if it was tight or loose? Not really, no. And so I think this is like, I get so comfortable with these bikes that like they always just work. I've had them for years. I've never really had to mess with the tension of the belt. So I'm like, oh, it's fine, let's go. Yeah, so totally fair. The first thing you wanna do before you embark on a multi-day off-road adventure like this, not the first thing, but one of the things you want to do is certainly check your belt tension. And Gates has a free app for iPhone and Android. They work really, really well. And you can check what the tension is. Now, on your bike, it should have been around 50 Hertz before you left. And once you get the feel for that, you'll have the feel for it, even just going down and plucking the belt. Here comes the sun dootin' doo-doo. You see this bouncing up and down? This is the Gates app that shows you what your tension is set at. It's super easy to use. When you download it, it gives you instructions on exactly what to do. All right, so you've got your phone with the app open. You point the phone's microphone pretty close to the belt, so it gets an accurate reading. And then you just strum that belt like a guitar. 59 on that one. And then we're gonna move the crank a quarter of turn and take another reading. You're gonna wanna do this three or four times and make sure that the numbers all kind of match up. Let's do it again. All right, that was 61. Let's do it one more time. Little turn of the cranks. 59, and then it gives you the average reading. So 59, Dave said to keep my belt around 50, so my belt is tensioned a little high. I saw in some of your video when you were rinsing off the belt, I saw the deflection on it, and to me it looked pretty low. So I don't know what your belt tension was before you got into the mud, but I have a feeling it was under 50 Hertz. That said, that's where I would start on any adventure on opinion bike is at 50 Hertz. Now, you're riding along, you're in the mud. The Gates CDX system with center track has really good mud shedding abilities. However, the tighter the tension gets, the better those capabilities get. And so even increasing your tension when you're in a bad scenario for a short period of time can be a really good idea because that will increase the mud shedding ability of the system. I'm gonna jump in here again to show you how to tension your belt. It is very easy, all you need is a four and a three millimeter Allen wrench. All right, you take your four millimeter Allen wrench and you loosen up these slider bolts right here. You don't take them all the way out, you just loosen them up. And then you take your three millimeter Allen key and you work on this bolt right here. And if you tighten it, it's gonna move everything back this way, which will increase tension on the belt. If you need to take away tension, you back this off a little bit and that will loosen the belt. And you're gonna wanna measure this with that phone app. The bolt back here, also four millimeters is just to keep these slider bolts in place. Once you get it all set, make sure to tighten these down a lot. This is very important. You don't want these to be loose. Did your belt ever pop off? Oh yeah, it popped off probably three or four times. And that was the first for me. I kind of panicked because I've had a long day already. There was thunder overhead and then my belt popped off and I was like, oh crap, I don't really know how to get this back on. I've never done it. Like in all the years of having these bikes, never happened. Now, here's the big question I have. The big question that's gonna tell me, at least confirm what I think happened. When your belt came off, you could either A, put it on the way you'd put on a chain where you start at the top and then you turn the pedals and the belt rolls on or you could B, remove your rear wheel, place it on the front, place it on the rear and pop the rear wheel back in. Which path did you choose? I took the path of what I thought was least resistance. And so I was just in panic mode and I was like, God, I got to get this belt back on the bike. I need to move. I need to get out of the storm. And so I was like rolling it onto the cogs and it was hard. It was very hard to do. But I slowly like kind of jimmied on there. And I knew that it was like stressing it out, but I'm like, it's okay. It's a Gates carbon drive. They're bomb proof. Yeah. And with the right precautions there, very much bomb proof, very, very much. I'm going to share something with you here on my screen. Let's see if I can do this. So I want to show you something. And I'm sure you've read this thoroughly as you have the Priority Owners Manual, right? Yeah, absolutely. Okay, cool. So let's go over to Before the Table of Contents. Okay. Page four, Before the Table of Contents here. We've got the handling of the bell. And do you see down there in the bottom left-hand corner? Yeah. Do not roll on. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oops. Yeah. Yeah, so it's even before the Table of Contents, right? Are you like suddenly making fun of me, Dave? No, no, not at all. Not at all. But I do think it's really important to know what happens. So your bell, let's talk about what happened before it broke and what happened when you were in the mud. So part of the magic of the Gates Carbon Drive is you have these carbon tensile cords in the belt. It's about a dozen of them. Think about these strings, right? And so you've got these strings in there, the tensile cords made out of carbon that make the belt strong so that it has this great tensile strength in a pulling strength. But it doesn't have side-to-side strength and it's not designed to. So when your belt came off the bike, what you should have done at that point is, number one, never, ever roll it on. But number two, hopefully we had understood the bell tension before you went into this, but the moment it rolled off and you're in mud, greater tension sheds mud better. And so what I would have done is, first off, I would have removed my rear wheel to put the belt on, not rolled it on. And then I would have increased the belt tension. Going to even 70 Hertz for that day would have made sure that it shed mud better and that it didn't roll off again. So if you've done that the first time, and it's super easy, you need a four millimeter Allen wrench to loosen your sliders. I'm sorry, five millimeter Allen wrench to loosen your sliders and a four millimeter Allen wrench to add tension. If you've done that the first time it came off and not rolled it on, you wouldn't have had this problem. And so what happened is as it kept falling off and as you kept rolling it on, those carbon cords, and again, think of them as these straight cords, several got damaged on the outside. And that's why when you look at the brake, you see it almost stepped, you see it in different places because you have those dozen cords and as you damaged several of them, you're now operating on less cords. And so days later, when you were putting in all that torque because you're a decently strong human and you have a little bit of gear on your bike and you're going up a single track, you're putting on a torque in, you weren't operating on those, call it dozen cords, you might have been operating on half those cords. And so the belt just didn't have its original strength anymore. No! And that's why we see that stepped or jagged break that you have there. It shows us that some of the outside cords were damaged from the roll-on. So then your belt broke. And that's a horrible experience and certainly the experience that no one at priority ever wants you to have. And I think it's safe to say nobody at gates either. And not experience that any of us are used to. But then you put on your spare and you continue the ride, right? Yeah, that's exactly what happened. Yeah. I know we always ship you with a spare belt ride because, you know, multi-day off-road adventures, you know. Yeah. I got a little talky, you know? Cause I've never broken a belt. I had a spare belt the entire summer, last year on the divide, it never even came close to needing it. And then I was like, I was looking at this and I was like 700 miles, no problem, one belt should be fine. Yeah, so it should be. And you're right. It absolutely should be. Had you not encountered the mud, it would have been fine. Had you, and again, it's not your fault, but had you on first time, had you tensioned it before you left home and then the first time it came off, re-tensioned it and reinstalled it the proper way, I firmly believe the break wouldn't have happened. Yeah, having a spare is a good idea. Can you show your viewers, and I know you've seen this, how to roll, how to coil a belt? Yeah, so here's my new spare belt, Dave. Okay, and that's a coiled spare belt. So it's really easy to coil it and then uncoil it. And I know- Slightly like walk it out, right? Yeah, that's it. That's exactly how you do it. Don't pull, but slightly walk it out. And can you coil it? Let's see it. See the magic. Do the magic trick right there. There you go. And it's really important that you do it the way that you're showing, so that again, those tensile cords do not get damaged. If you damage the cords, again, you got about a dozen of them, the more you damage, the weaker your belt is. So what you're doing there, that's a very simple, easy, lightweight way to carry a spare belt. And any of these things would have, I think, allowed you to continue that last grueling day. But I'm really sorry it happened to you. It's definitely not the experience that any of us want. In that thick mud, you wouldn't have been out there with your phone trying to figure out how many hurts you have. What I would have done is I would have cranked down and gave it a lot more tension. Over a period of weeks, if you had a lot of tension on your gearbox, on your hub, that would cause trouble. But for a day or two, increasing the tension, a turn or two on those tension knobs, that wouldn't have done any damage and would have, again, prevented mud from sticking and would have helped keep the belt on. So lessons learned for next time. I mean, hopefully there isn't a next time in terms of that mud, because it just looked horrible. Nothing about today has been easy. One of the things I love about watching your videos is even when the situation gets really tough, your glass is always very half full. And it's something that I really appreciate you about you as a human. And watching your struggle on those two days just makes me continue to appreciate you in the journeys you take. I loved watching it. And thanks for sharing your attitude and perspective. You know, always tune whether you have a priority or not. You can always hit up our hotline. You know, it's infoatprioritybicycles.com. You can text WhatsApp us or call us at 917-819-1665. It's 365 days a year. So if people have questions about anything with their bike before they go on a multi-day adventure, let us know, we're here to help. Right on, man. You guys are awesome. Look at this sad, sad belt. Woo-hoo-hoo-hoo, oh bummer, what a bummer. I really wish I didn't have to learn my lesson the very hard way, but I can only hope that my mistake will help you prevent a similar fate. Thank you so much for watching this video. Check out my channel for all sorts of other fun adventure videos. Please like and subscribe, and we will see you down the road with a new belt, and this thing is never breaking again. It's not happening again.