Endurance ride

The bike trip this summer will feature a couple of 70+ mile days. I know from experience I’ll be tired and sore by the end of those rides, but I want to know I’m still fit enough to go that far. So today I rode to San Marcos and back, a little over 70 miles.

A cold front passed through last night. This morning it was 50F and overcast, with moderate southward wind. San Marcos is to the south so I had a nice tailwind going out and a difficult headwind coming back.

The wildflowers are in full bloom now. Even with the fatigue and soreness, I had to stop a few times to photograph the fields near the road.

I first rode this route over 30 years ago. Kyle is much bigger than it used to be — I saw a “population 50,000” sign at the city limit. There are big subdivisions along Old San Antonio Road and Old Stagecoach Road now. More houses, fewer wildflowers.

I stopped in San Marcos for breakfast at the Mochas And Javas Cafe, a loud, lively student hangout serving coffee drinks and omelettes. I had a bowl of cereal at home before I left but by the time I got to San Marcos I was ready for a three-egg omlette.

When I reached Town Lake on the way home the sky had cleared, the temperature had gone up, and everyone was out enjoying it. I’m not a social guy but I still feel joyous seeing couples and families out enjoying the parks.

The whole trip took 7 1/2 hours, including an hour eating breakfast in San Marcos and a couple of convenience store stops to take in some fluids. I’m sore and tired but now I know I can still ride that far on the heavy bike I’ll take with me this summer.

Bike shipping

The bike shops in Pueblo will be busy the week I arrive. I phoned two of them. One sounded pained that I’d ask them to receive and re-assemble my bike for me. He said I needed it to arrive at least two weeks in advance. The other bike shop said they simply couldn’t do it that week. I’m glad they’ll be busy — it’s a good problem to have.

I could easily re-assemble the bike myself but I’d need a place to do it. If I were to check the bike into luggage, I could re-assemble it at the airport, or maybe outside the airport if they’re sticklers about it. But then I’d have to get rid of a giant cardboard box somehow. It would be rude to just abandon it at the airport.

On the other hand, if the airline for either of the two legs of the trip were to refuse to accept the bike box, I’d be in a bind. And if the bike were damaged in transit, it’s possible I wouldn’t have the right tools or parts to repair it. Even if I were to find a taxi that could carry me and my bike, I’d have to find a bike shop to help me. And the bike shops will already be busy.

Another option would be to ship the bike box to my lodging in Pueblo. Same problems there, though.

People sell special bike cases that might do a better job of getting your bike through luggage than a cardboard shipping box. But what would I do with the case when I get to Pueblo? The cases are expensive, not disposable. I guess I could ship it back home again. Or maybe ship it to, say, a UPS store in West Yellowstone, assuming they have one.

Those cases aren’t designed for bikes with racks though. I’d have to ship the racks separately.

In other countries, you might use the trail to travel across the country with your bike. Even if Amtrack were an option, I don’t think I’d do it. Amtrack is supposed to be awful.

Yes, 3mm matters

I swapped out the 113mm bottom brackets on the touring bike and the Rivendell with 110mm, and sure enough shifting got better. It’s more obvious on the Rivendell, which has had subpar shifting since I first bought it. A bike mechanic suggested 1.5mm on each side wouldn’t matter. I guess even a professional can be wrong sometimes.

I installed it on the Rivendell and then, without telling my son what I had done, had him ride 20 miles with me. Afterward, he said the shifting problems had gone away.

Now I know the chain line actually makes a difference. That’s a good lesson for the next bike I build, or the next bike I encounter with shifting problems.

Bottom bracket

I like how the new touring bike looks and even happier with how it rides and brakes. Still, I can feel a slight rub in the drivetrain. I think it has do with the chain line, the line formed by the chain going from the front gears to the back gears.

My bike has a triple crank in front and a 9-speed cassette. At any point in time, the chain is attached to one of the gears in front and one of the gears in back. Imagine standing over the bike and looking down at the chain. Suppose you’re using the biggest chain ring in front and the biggest cog in back. (That’s called “cross-chaining”). Because the chain ring and the cog are not the same distance from the center of the bike, the chain does not form a straight line — it flexes a little bit as it leaves the chain ring and again as it leaves the cog. The flexing adds friction and is bad for both the chain and the gears, so cyclists try to avoid riding that way.

Now imagine the chain is on the middle chain ring and is about in the middle of the cassette. The chain ring and the cog are about the same distance from the middle of the bike, so the chain forms a straight line. This causes the least friction and the least wear on the gears.

Of course those are just two extremes. As you shift gears, your chain moves back in forth in front and or in back. The chain is designed to flex a bit to deal with that, and it works great. Still, if you can minimize how much it flexes over an entire bike ride, that’s going to make the ride a little bit smoother.

The advice I’ve read is that when your chain is in the middle chain ring and the middle cog, it should be parallel to the bicycle. Put another way, you want your middle cog and middle chain ring to be the same distance from the centerline of the bike.

It turns out my middle chain ring is 47mm from the centerline, whereas the middle cog is 45mm from the centerline.

The bottom bracket length influences the spacing between the crank and the rest of the bike. The crank vendor recommended two bottom bracket lengths:

I ordered the first one because I didn’t know any better, or maybe I didn’t even read past the first length. Just doing the math, it looks like I should have ordered the second one.

I phoned up my local bike shop earlier this week to order the 110mm model. It will take a few days to get here and maybe half an hour to install. I’ll report back on whether it makes a noticeable difference.

Camping gear

My wife and I are making progress planning this summer’s Pueblo-to-Yellowstone trip. To recap, I’ll fly to Pueblo, bike to Yellowstone National Park, and then spend a few days with my family touring the park.

Between Pueblo and Yellowstone, I hope to mostly spend the night at motels, cycling hostels, or bike-friendly churches. Hostels and bike-friendly churches are first-come first service, so I could arrive to a No Vacancy sign. Or I could tire out or get stuck somewhere waiting out a rain storm.

To play it safe, I’ll also bring a tent and a sleeping bag. A tent, sleeping bag, and two panniers is too much bulk for the rear rack, so last weekend I bought a front rack. My LBS had a nice Tubus front rack that had been sitting on the shop unsold for a year, and they sold it to me at a heavy discount. Tubus racks are great: they’re both strong and light. Unfortunately, it didn’t fit the bike. I brought it back to the bike shop and exchanged it for a Surly front rack. That one fits great. It is rated for twice as much weight and is a lot heavier than the Tubus rack, not that I plan to carry much weight on it. And although it doesn’t matter much, it also looks nice.

My tent is a very light-weight model I bought used from a guy in Utah. My sleeping bag is the model my mom bought me to go to Philmont Boy Scout Camp in 1976. It still works fine, and I wouldn’t hesitate to take it on a car camping trip or a backpacking trip, but it’s pretty bulky.

It turns out sleeping bags have improved in the last 50 years. Judging by the REI website, for not too much money I can get a sleep bag rated for 40F that’s lightweight and also stuffs into a small sack. I’ll try to take care of that this week.

I originally planned to bike into Grant Village at the south end of the park, then ride on park roads to the town of West Yellowstone at the north end of the park. Various sources say the park roads are narrow and full of RV drivers who aren’t necessary careful around cyclists. Instead of riding Grant Village to West Yellowstone, I might need to meet my family at Grant Village, or find a different route from Dubois, Wyoming to West Yellowstone that doesn’t involve biking through the park. That would be a shame; I’m sure it’s beautiful biking through the park. But it would be ironic to ride 700 miles from Pueblo to Grant Village over highways and mountains, only to be crushed like a bug by an RV when I arrive.

Balance

There are different ways to carry heavy stuff on your bike: rear rack, front rack, hanging off the seatpost, attached to the handlebar, and so on. How you distribute the weight can impact how the bike handles. The general idea is a balanced bike handles better than an unbalanced bike.

One way to gauge how well the bike is balanced is to ride handless, without your hands on the handlebars. I noticed this on my Rivendell. This is a big bike, almost too large for me, and small differences in weight distribution seem to matter more than on a smaller bike. There’s a small rack over the front wheel. On the rack is a small zip-up bag with a three-pound u-lock, a few tools, and an inner tube. With that setup, it’s dodgy riding handless.

The other day I attached a rear rack and hung a pannier with a laptop and some clothes on it. Now the bike is easy to ride handless. The Rivendell is well-balanced this way. It’s not noticeable when I use the handlebars but I imagine if I were riding for several hours, I might pick up on the difference.

Tomii

The bar tape arrived Saturday. It looks good. I rode the new bike to the end of South Walnut Creek Trail Sunday morning. It shifts well and brakes are great. They squeaked a bit at first. I had some Allen keys with me so I stopped at the turnaround and adjusted the toe-in. That took care of most of it.

The bike feels good. I’ll have a better sense for how it rides once I put racks on it and hang some weight in it.

I may want a flatter stem. The current one is 100mm with a 25-degree upward tilt. I may try a 100mm with a 15-degree tilt.

On the way back I stopped at Flitch for coffee and tacos. There were just a few bikes there, and one of them was a Tomii, made by a custom bike builder here in Austin. I knew of Tomii Cycling through a personal connection, and had seen an interview on YouTube with the owner, Nao Tomii. He’s both a custom bike builder and an artist. Check out the beautiful hand-hammered bells on his website.

Anyway, it turned out Nao Tomii was there at Flitch. I introduced myself and we had a long chat about the bike business. Nice guy and really interesting to talk to. He offered a tour of his shop. I plan to take him up on that sometime soon.

320 to 390 inch-pounds

As predicted, the mechanics at the bike shop only needed a couple of minutes to figure out I hadn’t torqued down the crank enough. I had checked the crank earlier and was reluctant to tighten it any more for fear of breaking something. The mechanic called the crank “loose”.

The crank spec says to use 320-390 inch-pounds. I can estimate lengths but have no intuition for torque amounts. I should buy a torque wrench so I can apply tighten it down that much without worrying about overdoing it.

Anyway, after tightening down the crank, the front derailleur shifted as it was supposed to. I offered to pay the mechanics for their time and as usual, they declined.

Back in the garage, my next problem was a loose headset. I’d tightened down top cap and even tried a different cap. A YouTube video suggested I needed a spacer above the stem. It wasn’t obvious why this would matter but it fixed the problem.

I installed the black SKS Bluemels fenders. Fenders are a pain to install. No matter what I do, I can never get them to line up perfectly. (Mechanics have told me they hate installing bike fenders too). The front of the front fender is crooked but it doesn’t rub on the tire. The back fender looks pretty good.

Silver fenders might look better. There seem to be fewer silver fenders available for 26-inch wheels than for 700c wheels. If I manage to find the right ones, I may try them instead.

All that’s left is the bar tape. I decided to use a spare, dark brown Brooks saddle that I bought used a while back. I have a roll of black bar tape but with that saddle, I think some brown tape would look nicer. Brooks sells some brown microfiber tape that would probably be a great match but I couldn’t find anyone in town who had it in stock.

Ultimately I ordered some dark brown cork tape. It’s hard to tell how well the color will match but the cork should be more comfortable than the microfiber.

I did a test ride around the block yesterday afternoon. It shifts great and the Paul brakes are fantastic. I’ve never been able to put the bike into a skid with cantilever brakes. With these v-brakes, I can stop on a dime.

Cassette spacer

I took the rear wheel to the bike shop to ask about the loose sprocket in the cassette. It turns out I needed a spacer between the cassette and the hub. It took them about a minute to figure that out. 

Back in the garage, I hooked up the chain, adjusted the rear derailleur, and then got derailed by the front derailleur. Despite my best efforts, I can’t get the front derailleur onto the big chainring. I know it’s not the high limit screw — I loosened it until it was no longer in contact with the shift mechanism. And it’s not the cable tension. It is as if the derailleur can’t reach that far.

Here’s my current theory. The crank vendor recommends two bottom bracket lengths: 113mm for a 47.5mm chainline and 110mm for a 45mm chainline. I have a 113mm bottom bracket because, frankly, when I scanned the crank description that was the first number I saw and I didn’t bother to read any further. I think the current bottom bracket moves the crank just a couple of millimeters beyond what the front derailleur can reach. 

This feels like a rookie mistake but after all I am a rookie. I guess I’ll measure the chainline and then go back to the bike shop to ask their advice. If I need to buy another bottom bracket, that’s ok. Or just as likely they’ll look at it for a minute and show me something I overlooked. 

Progress

The bike is taking longer to assemble than I expected. I spent a bunch of time trying to fix how the cable housing inserts into the brake hoods so that I could pull the cable out and re-insert it. No matter what I did, the housing wouldn’t stay aligned with the center of the housing. I finally gave up and accepted the next time I replace the cables, I’ll need to unwrap the bar tape and re-realign the housing. Maybe that’s normal, or maybe that’s what I get for using inexpensive Tektro levers.

Another blocker was the Velo Orange bottom bracket. I’m using a nicer bottom bracket than the Shimano UN300 I used in the last bike I built. It certainly felt nice out of the box but as soon as I put it in, it felt stiff. I removed it and took it to the bike shop to get their opinion. They agreed it felt stiff but suggested trying it out to see if it loosened up. If it doesn’t, the bike shop can ask the vendor for a replacement. After I attached the crank and pedals, it felt better but still a little stiff. if I fails, I hope it happens soon.

Finally, as I was attaching the chain I noticed one of the 13-tooth sprocket in the cassette was loose. I don’t own a torque wrench but the lock ring seemed tight enough. It looks as if a spacer is missing. I thought maybe I’d dropped and lost a spacer when I unpacked the cassette. I searched the floor, the workbench, and even the trash can — no spacer. Finally I checked the parts diagram on Shimano’s website. There are spacers between other sprockets but not between the 11-, 13-, and 15-tooth sprockets. So either the lock ring is too loose, the sprocket is misaligned, or the cassette is defective. I’ll ask the bike shop about it today.