Oh Snap!

Please learn from my mistake...

When --not if-- you break your rear derailleur cable inside your brake/shift lever, do not continue to use the lever. Under no circumstances should you click the lever all the way over (as if moving to your largest cog) because that stupid little nub with the frayed cable strands will drop down into the guts of the mechanism. I just spent an hour doing surgery on that lever to remove it. Shame on me of course, because my shifting was feeling a little ragged last week and I suspected the cable might be fraying but I was too lazy to fix it.

Huh??!

Lesson learned today: Just because you know how to build and maintain a road bike does NOT mean you can assemble a mountain bike.

When did these bikes get so complicated? Hydraulic disc brakes!?! Oh man...

Sunday Sundries

Dying to call teammates who are on the road coming home from the stage race in Las Vegas. Hmmm, don't want to encourage cell-phone-talking whilst driving. How did stage 3 unfold? Everyone survive? Anybody win or have epic performances? How was the storm? By tomorrow, look for stories galore over at Gary D'Velo, sweixel, Chester, and C-Rancher blogs.

[10 minutes later] ...ok, I couldn't stand the suspense so I called anyway. All SB'ers survived the stage 3 RR, albeit with some bonks, flats, and strange confrontations with angry vampires. I'll spill the results, but you need to visit the blogs for the stories behind the results (and the corrections to my mistakes). C-Walk wins the P/1/2 and Gary and Cookie hold onto to top-10 finishes. (Bizarre interactions between said racers ...C-Walk not making friends.) Aker and Githens (or Githens and Aker) get 2nd and 3rd. In the 3's, Jason the Hammer went on a long solo break but bonked on the final climb and was passed by 7 or 8 guys. Prof Smitty earned a solid 4th in the RR. Oh yeah, Corey won the RR and got 2nd on GC. Congrats Corey! Matt was doing well but flatted today. Not sure about the other Ranchers. Steve Wex flatted (sounds like a lot of flats today) and lost his gc hopes, and Chester finished strong in the 5s. Good on all these guys for getting the first race of the year over with, and especially congrats to Gary and Cookie for going 1-2 in the crit! What a great start to the year.

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Just an FYI in case you go through something similar... On a ride about a week ago, my Mavic Ksyrium freehub had gotten so gunked up inside that when I stopped pedaling, the cassette continued to turn, thus feeding my chain forward and into the gap between my tire and the right-side chainstay. That's not good. My wheel continued to roll with the chain stuck in there and it made a deafening loud screeching sound. OK, what to do? First, pretend it's a fixed gear for the remainder of the ride, and then deal with it at home. Not being particularly up-to-date on the latest mechanical constructs of modern racing bikes, I had absolutely no idea how to get at the problem. I have circa 1980 cone wrenches, but where are the cones on this Ksyrium hub? Sure I could have taken it to a bike shop--we have great ones here in SB--but then I'd have to pay for service and I'd feel like an incompetent idiot. Not sure which is worse.

So I did what any introverted, computer-geek, bike rider would do... I googled it.

I discovered that Mavic maintains a site that has all the online tech manuals for products dating back to 1997, but it's a password-protected site.

So, as a public service, if you need Mavic tech info, go to www.tech-mavic.com and enter username "mavic-com" and password "dealer" to get access to beautiful manuals and tech diagrams. Or you could just go to your local bike shop.

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More tech... do you use a torque wrench when assembling your bike? I never have, but now that my new bike has warning stickers all over it to tighten to specific torques, I'm thinking it might be a good idea to use one. Or I could just go to my local bike shop.

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Local group rides are getting hard! We now have another gaggle of pros hanging around SB. Jesse Anthony, Pete Lopinto, and some others are sharing a house in Carp and I think the rides will be going 1-2 mph faster from now on. Well, I s'pose we all benefit from that. Also, not sure if she's staying for the long run, but Rebecca Much of the Webcor Pro womens team is (was) here. Must be our great weather that attracted them!

What a Hack!

You might not choose me as your bike mechanic. Certainly you won't if a bike's appearance matters to you, or if you care about its resale value.

Yesterday I finally got around to swapping out my three-year-old components for a new gruppo, and as I started working, I chuckled to myself because I knew something would go wrong somewhere along the way. It always does. I strip some critical bolt. Or cut a cable or housing too short. Or the pedal wrench slips when I've got all my weight on it, and the palm of my hand gets punctured by a couple chainring teeth.

Everything was going smoothly yesterday until I tried to tighten down the bottle cage on the down tube. The bolt just turned and turned but never got tight. I quickly realized that the little threaded insert in the tube had come loose and that was the thing turning. Sheesh...it was impossible to tighten down the bottle cage. I don't ever recall putting too much torque into it, and I would think it could be fixed under warranty. Trouble is, I only have one bike and I don't want to be without it.

Only solution I could think of in a pinch...


JB Weld. The stuff is awesome, and can stick just about anything together. So I chipped away some paint around the insert, wiped it as clean as I could, and then dabbed a bunch of JB Weld all around the thing. It was dry by the morning and I cranked down the bottle-cage bolt no problem!

Here's pre- and post- hack pictures...









Of course, when the time comes to sell this frame, I'll probably have to knock off a few hundred bucks from the price!