Did I miss the "it's bloggers' break month memo"? I feel like I woke up from a nap on a long flight and found myself all alone on the plane! :-O Where are all of my blogger friend's blog updates?
Ok, on a personal note, I sold my car today. Whew... finally! So why do I feel like I've lost a friend, or fed my first-born to the lions to keep from being eaten myself? I need to make an emergency, sanity sustaining trip to REI.
Yes, I had 2 cars and work at home, but I don't love my old car like I did my Honda Accord Coupe - AKA road rocket. Sigh.... but....
Bike bling will get you through times of no car, better than car will get you through times of no bike bling.
Thursday, September 30, 2010
Keepin on Keepin on
We've been setting a lot of heat records here the last few days, so I have felt a bit of cabin fever. Life has also been in the way, but I finished retaping my handlebars after a bunch of brake block adjustments, so sucked it up and snuck in a late ride this evening.
The sun is setting so early now - before 7:00 pm - so I was only able to get 15 miles in on a short, but fun little loop (the same one that kicked my nephew's butt last year :-O) and made it a point to push without slacking off even for a minute the entire ride. That TT taught me how important it is to train your legs and cardio to push relentlessly. It's amazing how much you can get out of a short ride if you have a plan for what you want to accomplish with it.
I forgot to mention, I had a huge epiphany riding Sunday evening. I think my beloved bike trail - the ARPT - is in the process of being deforested. The area that is squeezed between the man-made Lake Natoma and I-50, in particular, is hammered by seasonal winds that are greatly amplified, yet an asinine culture of 'let mother nature take care of it' persists in the parkway trail environs' management.
The crux of the problem is that many old, large trees are being lost, but every attempt to grow replacement trees in small nursery areas have been burned to the ground year after year by arsonists. The only solution I can see that might work is to make use of open, but secure areas, like the forever defunct downtown rail yards, to grow trees 15-18 ft tall, and then transplant them.
Failing that, in 20-30 years the ARPT will be a savanna with only the occasional old-growth oak and cottonwood to indicate it was ever otherwise. This kind of thing was done very successfully in downtown Los Angeles in the '80s, and may well continue to this day.
On the bright side, WOW are the squirrels ever BIG and healthy this year. I saw the first ever black squirrel tonight, just after a gray with a very bushy 24" tail. Spectacular! You see whole flocks of quail, turkey, and squirrels intermixed, all chowing down on the bounty of food this year. The coyotes are looking on, biding their time, waiting for the deer to join in on the smorgasbord.
Gears are working great, and I like the new handlebar setup, but the seat is a little too high, and my seatbag is TRASHED! A huge rip along the top left-hand side is threatening to spill bike-bag guts all over the road.
I have a feeling this is going to require I bite the bullet and get a longer seat too, as the current seat's short rails don't afford an adequate purchase for most bag mounts. My seat is about gone anyway, so not entirely unwelcome. More Techie Tuesday fodder!
The sun is setting so early now - before 7:00 pm - so I was only able to get 15 miles in on a short, but fun little loop (the same one that kicked my nephew's butt last year :-O) and made it a point to push without slacking off even for a minute the entire ride. That TT taught me how important it is to train your legs and cardio to push relentlessly. It's amazing how much you can get out of a short ride if you have a plan for what you want to accomplish with it.
I forgot to mention, I had a huge epiphany riding Sunday evening. I think my beloved bike trail - the ARPT - is in the process of being deforested. The area that is squeezed between the man-made Lake Natoma and I-50, in particular, is hammered by seasonal winds that are greatly amplified, yet an asinine culture of 'let mother nature take care of it' persists in the parkway trail environs' management.
The crux of the problem is that many old, large trees are being lost, but every attempt to grow replacement trees in small nursery areas have been burned to the ground year after year by arsonists. The only solution I can see that might work is to make use of open, but secure areas, like the forever defunct downtown rail yards, to grow trees 15-18 ft tall, and then transplant them.
Failing that, in 20-30 years the ARPT will be a savanna with only the occasional old-growth oak and cottonwood to indicate it was ever otherwise. This kind of thing was done very successfully in downtown Los Angeles in the '80s, and may well continue to this day.
On the bright side, WOW are the squirrels ever BIG and healthy this year. I saw the first ever black squirrel tonight, just after a gray with a very bushy 24" tail. Spectacular! You see whole flocks of quail, turkey, and squirrels intermixed, all chowing down on the bounty of food this year. The coyotes are looking on, biding their time, waiting for the deer to join in on the smorgasbord.
Gears are working great, and I like the new handlebar setup, but the seat is a little too high, and my seatbag is TRASHED! A huge rip along the top left-hand side is threatening to spill bike-bag guts all over the road.
I have a feeling this is going to require I bite the bullet and get a longer seat too, as the current seat's short rails don't afford an adequate purchase for most bag mounts. My seat is about gone anyway, so not entirely unwelcome. More Techie Tuesday fodder!
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
Techie Tuesday
Finally! My new 39T middle chainring arrived, and of course you know you're going to get the best pics on the web right here. I'm very happy with the lightening fast shifts, and the installation was familiar, if not easy. Yes, I had to pull the crank again.
As you can see, the 52/39 combo has a lot of duplicates, including a disaster at 21.1 where the first gear on the middle ring is a duplicate and adds nothing. If you are pulling shallow grades, touring at altitude, or bucking variable winds with changes in road surface, you'll sorely miss the granularity that half-step gearing affords you. It's not too bad with a 12-23 out back (9-speed gearing, which is 12-25 for 10-speed gearing), but with a 12-27 or 11-28 you'd really notice the big gaps between gears.
When flying downhill your cadence will pick up a bit, and when grinding up a steep grade, your cadence will slow down some. I used a factor of 95% for the adjustments, which has my base 77 rpm maxed out at 82 on the high end and 60 on the low end. This is a recent enhancement to my gear chart system, along with dynamic titling for the cadence.
Note how close together the line of gears is for the outer and middle ring with 46/38/24 gearing, and how the 1st gear on the middle ring starts helping with big-ring granularity after only its 3rd gear. Something to look for in half-step gearing. These are the smallest gears you can mount on a 130 BCD triple, and are pretty close to standard cyclo-cross gearing if you are looking for a sweet touring setup.
The chainring nuts CAN be backed out without removing the Salsa 28T 74 BCD granny, but I couldn't get the old 38T TA Alize middle ring off over the spider. Fortunately, my crank is one of the 'exo's, FSA MegaExo to be exact, so pulling the crank only requires a 5mm hex wrench and a few minutes. The new steel chainring nuts and bolts made for a worry-free swap, although I did use an informal torque sequence when doing the initial tightening of the bolts to make sure I didn't bend either ring.
The red background yielded pretty true colors in spite of the halogen lamp. Photoshop did the rest. This ring is darker than the outer ring, and in looking up the new 6700 crank on Shimano's site, the middle ring, I believe is this same very dark, anodized ring. The anodizing makes the metal 2-3X as hard.
I also couldn't help but notice that this is very close to the same color as Mavic's ceramic rims. Those have a 'ceramic' coating of aluminum and titanium oxides welded onto the braking surface with a plasma torch. The very heavily profiled teeth on these rings make them very narrow, and having such a treatment, said to be as much as 30X as hard as aluminum, would be a huge benefit. Perhaps that will be an option on DuraAce rings soon.
(My first encounter with this kind of ceramic coating was doing research into the Soviet experience in Afghanistan, where their helicopter turbine engine blades were being eaten up in less than a thousand hours by dust. They began using titanium oxide coatings to solve the problem. The USMC's new SuperCobras' engines are getting the same treatment, as I believe are all of the new US military turbine engines. Scaling up the technology for this use may well explain why the cost has plummeted.)
I had some reservations about mounting the new ring, as it is a 39T, not a 38T, and 52/39 rings don't make good half-step gearing. Half step gearing is an arrangement where the gaps between gears the big ring creates are filled in by the middle ring. The Granny's role is then just to provide 3-5 gears below the lowest the middle ring makes. 53/39 makes better half-step gearing, and on Compact cranks, 48/34 and 50/36, but not 50/34.
Here are the gear charts my Excel program spit out for the various gear combos mentioned. Pay special attention to any two gears that are the same or close for the large and middle chainrings. They are duplicates, and a waste of a gear.
Note how close together the line of gears is for the outer and middle ring with 46/38/24 gearing, and how the 1st gear on the middle ring starts helping with big-ring granularity after only its 3rd gear. Something to look for in half-step gearing. These are the smallest gears you can mount on a 130 BCD triple, and are pretty close to standard cyclo-cross gearing if you are looking for a sweet touring setup.
I didn't modify the cadence on the remaining charts to help detect duplicate gears. I also blocked out gears that can't be reached or used due to cross-chaining. I'm running the 28T granny because the chain-drop with my 24T is pretty bad. Kik Armstrong's Chain-Minder is a good option if you have a braze-on front derailleur. (like you could braze anything onto carbon - a terrible misnomer)
Sunday, September 26, 2010
Rest Week Over
I ended my rest week a day short by doing an easy 20 mile ride this evening on the ARPT. I had to make a few stops to adjust things, as I mounted a new middle chainring on the crank this week, and am fighting an Easton E70 Zero seat post that keeps sliding down on me. More on the crank on Tuesday.
The ride was pretty slow and tame, but I did manage to get a decent run in riding through 'race-track alley' from Hagen Pk to WBP. I ran into Issac again at WBP Pk, and we had another great conversation. We talked till the sun got low and I headed home. Not much to tell, but I'm looking forward to a good night's sleep tonight and expect I'll have some snap in my legs on my next outing.
The ride was pretty slow and tame, but I did manage to get a decent run in riding through 'race-track alley' from Hagen Pk to WBP. I ran into Issac again at WBP Pk, and we had another great conversation. We talked till the sun got low and I headed home. Not much to tell, but I'm looking forward to a good night's sleep tonight and expect I'll have some snap in my legs on my next outing.
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