Belgium Bound

   Recently I’ve found myself a little frustrated to not being able to complete some of my projects, but not for altogether bad reasons, as there have been a few more involved repair/maintenance jobs coming into my shop. However, I have had to reverse the intended order of my projects, as a few parts searches have become annoyingly difficult.

   Weeks ago I had all of the touch-up work done on the Vitus 992 Lotto Team bicycle and was then able to apply the replacement decals (see photo below). I have managed to collect nearly all of the Mavic parts intended for the build, but have struggled to find any reasonably-priced brake levers.

   I evened settled on a bit of a “cheat” by using Simplex SLJ downtube shift levers, only because the Mavic 820 versions were exact replicas of this model, and any Mavic counterparts were listed at brutal prices!

   Unfortunately, the already-extended delivery time of the overseas replacement for the broken derailleur hanger will be doubled because the initial shipment of the part was lost somewhere in transit. The seller seemed unfazed about making another attempt, so we’ll see how that goes. If you remember my first experience with this part, I’m going to have to do some work to make it fit anyway!

   My two current Italian projects have been held up by parts searches as well, but I’m hoping to finally have the correct parts in hand - I just haven’t had the time to try them out. The Basso needed to have a longer spindle for the bottom bracket, and the Battaglin needed a proper Campagnolo headset.

   The project I was able to finish up is the Cannondale Six13, which I think is a beautiful color and is super-lightweight. I had many of the Cannondale parts, such as the seatpost, stem and bars on hand from the failed "Ultimo" bike experiment, and filled in the rest with Shimano 105 and FSA components.

   As my wife and I are both turning 50 this year, we are treating ourselves to a trip to the Benelux region in a couple of weeks. Actually, she is already in Paris, accompanied by her sister and niece, and I am going to fly to Brussels, then take the TGV to Lille to meet up with her.

   We are going to drive around to some cycling landmarks from the Paris-Roubaix race, like the velodrome in the finishing town, and walk a bit of the famous cobbled Arenberg Trench. On the way back towards Brussels, we’ll hit a few Tour of Flanders sites such as the treacherous Koppenberg climb (below) and the race’s museum in Oedenaarde.

   On the 8th I plan on celebrating my birthday by visiting the BMC Concept Store just outside of Ghent and renting a pro bike to ride the famous Muur de Geraardsbergen (think Manayunk Wall, but with cobbles), or Mur de Grammont to the French. I’m hoping to have good enough legs to ride it twice, once for the experience and another with some stops for pics, but we’ll see.

   Along the way to Luxembourg and then back to Amsterdam and Rotterdam, I also plan on visiting the Mur de Huy, the nasty finishing hill for La Flèche-Wallonne, and driving up the ramparts of the Citadel of Namur (photo below), which was the site of a thrilling finish of a stage of the 2015 Tour de France, as well as last season’s Gran Prix de Wallonie.

   Before I leave for the Low Country, I plan to do one or two interesting new rides stateside and will share details about them in my next blog entry. 

School's Still in Session!

   One of my semi-regular cycling companions brought his cyclocross frameset and a bunch of parts over to my shop last week for some instruction on how to put it all together. Matt has a decent bicycle knowledge base and is very capable mechanically, but I suspect he also gained a good deal of information during his search for the parts needed for assembly. In hindsight, I would say his main reason for needing help was my large collection of specific tools for the job, as I found out my directions were mostly of the occasional “trick of the trade” variety.

   I discovered quickly how great it would be to have an extra set of hands, as the whole bike came together in just a few hours, as opposed to usually finding it necessary to put in a complete bike build over a couple of days by myself. Awkward operations like holding brake pads in place or calipers closed while tightening a cable became much simpler.

   Of course, doing the work with someone who shares your enthusiasm is always more fun, and we even fell into a friendly competition of “who can drop fewer small parts and tools”. I was narrowly leading the competition 3 to 5 until I accidentally let go of the rear derailleur housing loop, and it uncoiled, knocking down five of the seven Allen wrenches I had lined up neatly on my workbench.

   Here are the final results of our All-City “Macho Man” crossbike project:

   I was planning to ride with Matt and his brother Ryan that weekend and received a message a few days earlier that his bike had a couple issues during a brake-in ride he had taken. He had found that the cable housing to the rear derailleur didn’t provide enough slack during hard turns, so I brought along my tools before our planned journey off into the woods of the Perkiomen Trail.

   I had assured him the job would only take twenty minutes or so, but we kind of teamed up to make a mess of things. Since adding length to the housing would shorten the amount of cable left to cinch into the derailleur, I knew that we would probably need a new cable and brought one of those along. We undid the wonderful bar tape job on the righthand side, just down to the shifter hood, pulled out the cable and removed the short section of housing from there to the top tube.

   By looking at my Bianchi we realized that the mistake was made choosing the wrong position of three sets of cable stops that run along the top side of the top tube. Matt was using a SRAM 1x10 group, which does not use a front derailleur, so we had just used the stops on opposite sides of the tube – rear brake on the left and the rear derailleur on the right.

   What we should have done was route the housing around the left side of the stem/steerer tube and looped it back to the middle cable stops, which we found didn’t interfere at all with aggressively turning the front wheel. Matt was pulling the cable back through and I noticed that during our testing we had pulled the housing a centimeter or so out of the shifter, so I nudged it back into the little cutout in the hood.

   He tightened the cable while I re-wrapped the bar -I don’t know why I did that before we tested the shifting. Maybe trying to save time in order to get out on the trail?

   Unfortunately, we didn’t have the shifter down in its lowest gear when Matt had pulled the cable through, and when I pushed the housing, I had actually bumped the metal nib on the end of the cable out of the notch in the spool/reel (whatever you want to call it) inside the shifter. Needless to say, nothing worked during our test, and I almost immediately knew what I had done.

   Freeing the metal nub from the reel through this tiny hole in the side of the hood was a bit of a challenge, but I had a small tool (actually one of those nutcracker picks) that works well in such occasions. I can’t remember who did it or why – perhaps in the excitement of actually getting the nub loose – but we pulled the cable out completely, which was another mistake.

   SRAM shifters have a cable routing which might be advantageous somehow mechanically in that they go in through the side and are channeled up through the top, but it doesn’t work well with a cable that has been cut. The individual strands of the cable get caught easily when you are trying to insert it through the hood, and after a couple of fruitless attempts, Matt headed to the local shop (just down the hill from his place in Schwenksville) for a new cable, which has the convenience of an end that is soldered together.

   It was simple process from there, and I enjoyed wrapping the handlebar for the third time, feeling much like an amateur mechanic, but I suppose it was a good lesson. We had a very enjoyable ride together, despite the cable adventure cutting a chunk out of our schedule, and the fact that Ryan and I both developed slow leaks in our front tires.

   Brendan also stopped by last weekend to talk pro racing and build projects, and to pick up his De Rosa. I was finally able to find a Campagnolo C-Record rear derailleur for which he wouldn’t have to take out a mortgage, although it was missing its limiting bolts.

   After an unsuccessful search through all the small bolt boxes at the local hardware store, I heading over to the “old reliable” Bikesport, where my pal James handed me a box of miscellaneous junk (as he called it), and I came away with not only a broken Campy rear derailleur for the bolts, but a nice set of MKS pedals, which are a Campagnolo clone! They will look great on the Basso when it is complete.

   The best part of the deal, since a set of Campagnolo limiting bolts cost about twenty-five bucks (OUCH!) online, is that James let everything go for only five dollars. YES!

   So I’ve now installed both C-Record derailleurs to go with the Delta brakes of the same group. I matched up Brendan’s 3T stem with a set of handlebars of the same brand and gunmetal finish, then wrapped them in some cool De Rosa embossed cork tape.

   While I can’t really take credit for the complete bike build, I feel that I’ve done a decent amount of upgrades to the De Rosa and wanted to share some pics. It is certainly a beautiful machine to look at, in any case!