UPDATE: Routing Internal Brake Cable on a Pinarello Prince

Like a lot of other bikes with internal cable routing, my new Pinarello Prince has nothing inside the frame to guide its internally routed cables. NOTHING!!! I was frankly incredulous. WTH?

Before we go any further, please note that shifting cable should NEVER, EVER be substituted for brake cable. This could be a fatal mistake. Brake cable is thicker, and made for max strength with much less regard for stretch, while shifting cable is all about minimizing stretch. The cable housings are also completely different.

Note that road brake cable has a round-nose bullet shape, while shifting cable has a barrel shape. If there's any question in your mind, STOP. Get help. This is a serious matter that must be done with certainty.

If there were no factory ends on brake cables many of us would be dead, but it's also the reason you can't just reverse thread cables through the frame and fish them out with a hook. That bullet MUST be anchored in its place in the brake lever in your shifters, and everything that goes over it between those shifters and the front frame port MUST be threaded onto the cable before you fish it though the frame.

STOP! Before going any further, make damned sure you have EVERYTHING you need threaded onto the brake cable, including the housing, metal stop, and plastic frame insert, because once you start winding wire you can't put this stuff on - it's too late and you'll have to start all over!!!

After pulling the fork, which I highly recommend (have a clean plastic container with a lid for the headset so nothing gets lost, and maybe take a pic of the top bearing assembly just in case, but really it's pretty darned simple) if you want to fish the cable out of the top-tube with ease, use a dental mirror and an AAA penlight to see what's in there.

Find some cheap crafting wire, mine was something my wife dragged home from the 99 Cent store, something that is weak and bends easily. You'll need 4-5ft of it. Push the wire through the back hole near the back brake and fish it out of the slot revealed by removing the cable port near the top of the head-tube.

A cable strand is much too hard, but ~ the right size

Wind the wire tightly around the cable with your fingers, with a loose spiral near the end, AND, a very tight wind 2-3" from the end to form a good, solid anchor. Start from the end and wind backwards up the cable. This pattern of winding is important because when you pull on the wire you'll find it'll begin to unwind at the end of the cable in a way that makes the cable end "Hunt" in a circular pattern as it unwinds in a loose cage of spirally wound wire. This forms a kind of sheath that will guide the end of the cable into the slightly flared plastic end which covers the back brake cable port that's embedded in the frame at least once, which is all you need. 

For under $10 you can get a magnetic fish from Lowes Depot Zone, and a lot of other places, but with the fork out you have plenty of room to just use your fingers to guide the wire & the cable through the front fitting cutout. BTW, there is a device made to fish thread out of holes, it's called a crochet needle. Ask grandma. I made a suitable hook years ago out of a piece of metal coat-hanger, but a crochet needle is tailor made for this job.


Now lets talk about the EASY way to thread cable, by slipping it through cable sheathing. Sheathing is really just a guide, and not a structural material meant to bear load when braking, although it can be left in place to stop frame rattles.

If your cable and cable-end is still intact, you can disconnect it from your rear brake and just slip the sheathing over it through the frame, after removing all the housing bits aft of the rear frame port, and the front plastic port insert. Pull as much sheathing as you feel you need and add a foot. You can reuse this hand-crafted tool again and again. Maybe put it in your cable doo-dad drawer/tub with a label so you can distinguish different lengths used for the rear brake from the shifter cables. (the front brake cabling has no interface whatsoever with the frame)

AFAICT these sheathings are the same size

I bought 2 brands of sheathing, JagWire (great stuff) and XmomX (from naughty moms?) I like that you can see the cable when it's inside the XmomX stuff, but just now when I was putting it away it kinked badly. That won't do. If it kinks inside the frame it will not route the cable, so stick with the JagWire IMHO.

BikeTiresDirect had a sale on tools, so I finally gave in and bought a Park Tools cable cutter. Beautiful piece of hardware, and I'm thrilled I don't have to dig out my Dremel tool with a cut-off wheel every time I need to cut cable. As a practical matter, the new Shimano housing melts easily and becomes a bit of a mess when Dremeled. $31 with my Gold membership and 10% of that as a discount on my next purchase.

Sorry for the long delay, but I've been on an annual-mile grudge match with a Strava friend, so I've been putting in 120 - 135 miles a week lately - fueled by Social Security checks. Anyway, thank you for your patience.

Cheers!

Sunlight Kills COVID-19 in THREE Minutes!

UPDATE: 9/24/2020

Sneezes and coughs are aerosols, and in full sunlight, in pretty cool conditions, even in dry climates (it was 80-90 degrees here yesterday, and over 90 today) sunlight kills COVID-19 in 1.5 minutes. Public drinking fountains have been kept sanitary by full sunlight for centuries, because sunlight, with enough exposure, kills EVERYTHING.

After 9/11 a govt lab was set up at DHS, the National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center lab (say that three times fast), to test for biological weapons. They've done some preliminary testing on COVID-19. It's unclassified - but for official use only. SMH. WTF!?! So I want to emphasis the great officialness of this use!

I should point out that contrary to my last post's speculation, HIGHER humidity, not lower, kills COVID-19 faster, but nothing like sunlight's 3 minutes.

Anyway, here's the link to the PDF file. Sunlight kills COVID-19 to undetectable levels in ~ 3 minutes in full sunlight. Here in the high desert we're beyond "Full Sunlight", but the study includes definitions for Full, Half, and Quarter sun, so you don't have to guess without some guidance.

AFAICT, based on Weather Underground's real-time reporting of solar energy during the day, we have ~ 125% of sea level sunlight here at 3,000ft, although irradiance depends heavily on the exact wavelength of light. Shorter, higher energy wavelengths are not screened out as well by Earth's atmosphere as longer wavelengths are.

Simultaneously taken measurements of solar irradiance with high resolution spectrometers at Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany (730 m a.s.l.) and Wank (1730 m a.s.l.), horizontally separated by 5 km, show a clear wavelength dependence of the altitude effect of the global irradiance: 9% per 1000 m at 370 nm increasing to 11% per 1000 m at 320 nm and 24% per 1000 m at 300 nm. The altitude effect of direct irradiance is considerably higher than that of global irradiance at all measured wavelengths.

Heat & Humidity reduce 18 hrs of required kill time indoors substantially - to less than 1hr at 60% RH and 95 degrees Fahrenheit. Note that some airline cabins are sterilized by UV-C lamps, a wavelength screened almost 100% by our atmosphere. UV-C kills almost immediately as air is channeled past a long irradiating tube, so air travel in that case should be safe WHILE IN THE AIRCRAFT.

Of interest to me, age plays a huge role in mortality, doubling twice between 60 and 89.

Worth mentioning at this point that I tried in vain a couple of days ago to ride while covering my mouth with my Turtle Fur balaclava, my lightest one, and was gasping for breath in 2 miles while sweating profusely in 80 degree weather. Knowing that sunlight kills COVID-19 in a few minutes, I will ride on sunny days with no face covering in remote places, bringing along a neck gaiter to cover my face if indoors.

Please do read the full report in the linked PDF file. It's quite helpful and short.

Stay safe, but get some!

Social Distancing for Athletes

I am thrilled that others are starting to address the question of social distancing when exercising, especially where aerodynamics and drafting dramatically affect outcomes.

As cited in the above-linked article, published in Cycling News....

"In the absence of headwind, tailwind and cross-wind, for walking fast at 4 km/h, this distance is about 5 meters, and for running at 14.4 km/h , this distance is about 10 meters. Further work should consider the effect of headwind, tailwind and cross-wind, and different droplet spectra"

 Four things about this interest me.

1. 10 meters is ~ 30ft, which is more distance than the 20ft I recommended in my last post.
2. The distance to speed ratio decreases with speed, as 4km/h requires 5 meters distance, but 14.4km/h requires only 10 meters, not 18 meters, as 5/4ths of 14.4 would imply.
3. Humidity is expected to influence distance. (5 micron droplets have a lot of surface area for their internal volume)  
4. Transmission is heavily dependent on droplets for propagation, and being 5 microns, 2X the size of PM2.5, is why masks and HEPA filters will trap most of a COVID-19 viral load.

 The virus itself might be much smaller (btw, smaller particles are caught by diffusion), but the droplet it depends on to infect you will get trapped in ANY HEPA filter.

From Wikipedia...

 Filters meeting the HEPA standard must satisfy certain levels of efficiency. Common standards require that a HEPA air filter must remove—from the air that passes through—at least 99.95% (European Standard)^[4] or 99.97% (ASME, U.S. DOE)^[5][6] of particles whose diameter is equal to 0.3 μm; with the filtration efficiency increasing for particle diameters both less than and greater than 0.3 μm.^[7] See the Mechanism and Specifications sections for more information.

COVID-19 droplets are 5.0 micros in size

Again, cross-winds will sweep pathogens away between athletes, but head-winds and tail-winds will not. To point #2 above, I believe it is the amount of air mixed with breath and dispersion of air into a much larger body of air that result in a flattening of the curve as speed increases, where speed is your speed added to the wind's speed. Obviously, speed also reduces your time of exposure, limiting how much viral load you can absorb.Tail-winds are probably the worst of cross, head, tail, because it holds you in the contamination cloud the longest.

When riding alone in a tail-wind and encountering a group riding in a head-wind, remember you will be in their cloud for some time, especially if they are observing ~ 20 meters (65ft) of social distancing at 18-20mph. To mitigate your exposure consider holding your breath for a few seconds. With a closure rate of 35mph (50fp/s) you'll need ~ 1 second for each rider you pass in a paceline, assuming it's a pure headwind. Any crosswind component will reduce this requirement.


When stopped, whether riding alone or in a group, consider stopping on a side street or road where other groups are unlikely to encounter you when riding.

For cycling groups I would recommend breaking into groups of 3, and only regrouping at rest stops, being careful to keep a cross-wind between riders when stopped. Riding in large pacelines of a dozen or more seems reckless given what we now know.

One question I have not been able to answer is what happens to the COVID-19 virus/s in a droplet when the droplet dries up in the wind? I suspect that a mucus droplet protects and sustains the virus and when it dries up COVID-19 immediately starts to degrade and is more vulnerable to deadly UV rays, but I haven't been able to confirm this yet. 

Please be safe, but do get out there and ride to stay healthy. COVID-19 kills by taking your breath away, so keep those lungs and heart healthy!.

Got Balaclava?

Balaclava As N-95 Mask:

I was just reading the new dose of sanity - that ppl should wear mouth, nose & face protection when in public in the US. To that end I just wanted to remind everyone, if you have a balaclava, you have the best possible face mask. There's no leakage around the edges, because there are no edges. A balaclava covers your entire face & neck.

I have both the Barrier and the Thermal  Pearl Izumi balaclavas, but in warm temps I prefer the Turtle Fur balaclava. Wash in anti-bacterial soap containing BENZALKONIUM CHLORIDE, or soak in alcohol, or probably, just leave out in the sun for 4-6hrs.

If you are headed for a high-risk situation you can't avoid, like taking someone to or picking them up from a hospital, you can tape a HEPA filter vacuum cleaner bag over the mouth with duct tape.

I suppose a cotton balaclava would be best, but that wouldn't be at all warm, so guessing nobody has ever made one. I guess you could boil it to shrink to fit tighter, but if there's any kind of elastic in it boiling it will ruin it. Ditto for bleaching.

Turtle Fur Balaclava

When I ride, and I DID ride, ~ 100 miles last week, you can pull the hole down under your chin for unobstructed breathing. If you stop to talk to someone, pull the mouth cover up, and keep the wind blowing BETWEEN you, so whatever comes out of your mouth or their gets blown away by the wind.

If you ride in a group you'll be inhaling the breath of everyone in front of you UNLESS you have a crosswind. I'd RX a min of 20ft of distance between riders if riding in a group, and practice rigourous pace-line rotation to min the risk. When in front you should be in clean, sterile air. Not so much the further back you go. Line up to get a crosswind between everyone when stopped.

Up here at ~ 3,000ft the sun is roughly 30% more intense, so that and a strong, dry wind make it hard for any micro-organism propagated in a water droplet to last long, but the best protection for me as a rider is there are plenty of places to ride where you won't see a living soul, or perhaps one just in passing.

When passing a rider, assuming a closure rate of 30-40mph, that's  ~ 50ft/sec, so you'd be in a "danger zone" for ~ 1/10th of a second. You aren't going to get much of a viral load in a tenth of a second, and if you and they are healthy enough to be out riding at that pace, not much chance of infecting each other with ANYTHING.

This is more true when there's a crosswind, because then the "window" is narrower than 5-6ft. With head or tail winds you might want to hold your breath for a few seconds just as you pass, but still a very tiny chance of getting infected by anything.

Cologne As a Distancing Indicator:

I was riding down Apple Valley Rd here and came up behind a ped up-wind of me in a 25mph wind who was wearing a ton of cologne. It occurred to me that if you can smell someone's cologne or perfume you're probably getting too close. I did, for about 5 seconds but the wind still mixed a lot of fresh air with his breath.

Do consider wearing cologne when on a group ride, and explain the logic of it to the rest of the group. This idea could be a break-thru in public health. Maybe someone in the group could bring a spray-on bottle to share. Rotate that duty.

Be safe, and exercise to stay healthy!

PS:
Dead Wrong about no cotton balaclavas. Tons of them out there - some as cheap as $3.00. Just Google it. This will scare the crap out of the kids!

Cotton Balaclava from Amazon

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