Week 9 .....The bare minimum

Not quite!

Another slow week in terms of quantities of rides.....

My commonly used machines at the mo were looking pretty sorry, single speed had worn out brakes and was covered in filth, scotty the cyclocross was looking pretty manky as well, partly due to removing the mudguards, had I mentioned before that I hate mudguards!

I had fallen behind on my frame build so the shed beckoned me in the evenings for some filing and rubbing down, lots to do but very satisfying.

This didn’t permit me to shirk my training though so a quick fix was to commute home from work on Thursday and back in on Friday. This trip went well enough, dull and uneventful, it felt like a means to an end, as of course it was.

"Trouble and Strifes" birthday rained off play on Saturday leaving Sunday for early morning ride of the 3 bridges route

Sunday morning’s feeling of being behind on cycle maintenance put pay to the 3 bridges ride and was instead was substituted for cleaning and maintaining my bikes.

Time had come for the evo single speed to be re-upgraded back to disc brakes…I had ordered a fresh set of Avid pads and an olive to bleed and setup the rear, this was not to go as well and swiftly as anticipated, the front needing bleeding as well but all was installed with only the time taken being the pain. (BTW check out the rotor, pimp or what!)

Sunday also yielded time for frame building work to continue, namely  I needed to work out some of the geometry for fitting me so I could take advantage of a bargain at Planet-X on stems. This was unfortunately going to prove to be a dark day in the history of my new audax machine.

I unpacked my new spangly wheels, whipped off a saddle and seat post off one of my other bikes, unpacked spangly carbon bars and scavenged around for the stem that I took off scotty after the bike fit and assembled said components to frame and forks.

Armed with a tape measure and spirit level and scotty for reference as well as the data provided from the bike fit I set about adjusting and positioning things to understand the stem length required. This turned out to be a 90mm, funnily enough as it stated on the bikefit info which I didn’t realise till afterwards but at least it all tallied.

As I had everything together I thought I would offer up some disc brakes I had to see how the position looked on the bike for both the caliper and hose guides, rear looked ok, a bit of tweaking would be required as the mount had “curled” a little at point of welding but that was all fixable. Front however was a different story…….offering up the caliper revealed that the mount was too close to the spokes so wit ordinary mounting the caliper would be jammed into the wheel….Grrrr…special mount I thought….OK I could design something in CAD (computer aided design for those that don’t know) get it machined, no doubt at great expense but it could be done……perhaps, it hought, I’ll just put discs on the wheels, just to check everything…..%&?* the disc hits the forks!!!!!!!!! They are essentially scrap at least for this machine, my hand crafted disc road forks were useless, the fork crown was a narrow road one which put the leg angles at such an acute angle that there wasn’t clearance for the disc to rotate…..gutted!!!!

Unusually for me, I didn’t sulk about this, something in the back of my mind didn’t mind, remembering the trouble we had on the course getting the legs to align correctly, I think I had it in my head that there was something wrong with them anyway irrespective of the disc fiasco, this error would be put down to experience and the cost would be considered a training course fee alone, at least i know what to look out for when fitting discs to aroad bike!

 

After an hour or 2 on the internet I found the perfect replacement, a steel fork of similar weight with the same looking fork crown, matching fork ends, similar disc mount but with curved blades which is what I wanted originally anyway, the only downside was it was American, Surly to the rescue, I have Surly forks on my single speed and they seem pretty good and a pretty cool brand with fresh ideas to all types of cycling, credit card to the rescue and the trigger pulled…money can buy happiness ….sometimes

Overall, not much cycling, but in some form or another bicycles had occupied virtually every spare thought in my head.

Target for the week: 100K

Total distance achieved: 87.1K