Red (and black) Christmas Bike: the Sequel

   During Christmastime 2016, I received my Vitus 992, a bike that originally came from a shop in Montélimar, France, about an hour drive north through the Rhône valley from Avignon. The Cervélo bike was not coming from quite so far away (Salt Lake City), but its similar color scheme and the timing of its arrival were strangely familiar.
   This was one of the worst packing jobs I’d ever seen done by a bike shop – and you can imagine I’ve seen a bunch! There was very little cushioning provided to the frame, the wheels weren’t secured to prevent shifting in the box and there were no endcaps put in the hub axles to protect them and keep them from poking through the cardboard box. There was also no cushioning of the fork or one of those spacers attached to protect the dropouts and prevent the fork from being crushed laterally.
   Despite all this, the frame came through it very well. There were a couple nicks that I’m pretty sure were caused by the shifting wheels, but nothing tragic – it is a 15-year-old frame, so I wasn’t expecting perfection anyway.
   The CSC logos on the frame were a bit tattered on one side and, except for one “C”, were almost completely missing from the other. I noted that the design featured similar, kind of macaroni-shaped segments, to make up the letters.

    I did a pencil rubbing over one of the remaining letters on the frame, then transferred the image to a piece of card stock in order to create a stencil. I then traced a bunch of segments onto a piece of white vinyl decal sheet that I had purchased on eBay. I used what remained of the decals as a guide before removing/replacing those pieces, and I laid out a piece of masking tape as a straight edge to make sure the logos were lined up properly.
   The compulsive side of me thinks they don’t quite look perfect, but the realistic side of me knows I’m the only one who will think that! I have completed the tweaks to the setup that I mentioned in my last entry, and included a cassette with more "climbability":

   Like I did with the other bikes in my collection, I created a descriptive photo plaque to hang with the Cervélo, featuring the image below and the following text:

   Swiss great Fabian Cancellara excelled in the classics, winning Paris-Roubaix, Ronde van Vlaanderen and Strade Bianche, EACH three times! He also won four world titles and two Olympic gold medals in the time trial and holds the record for the most days in the Tour’s yellow jersey (29) without ever winning the overall title. The 2008 Cervélo Soloist, is the bicycle Cancellara rode to victory in that season’s Milano-San Remo.

   I’ll be taking a few weeks off from writing during the holidays. Stay safe and enjoy the festivities, hopefully with plenty of family and friends. I’ll leave you with a photo from the Cycle Tech “Ride with Santa” event held back on December 9th. Sue and I are in the back, dressed in white and red, right in front of our home. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Italian Excitement...and Disappointment

   There is a tendency for the good and bad in life to balance out, so I was not too surprised when my luck turned foul after two very good deals for Italian racing bicycles fell into my hands. I had been holding off on making any purchases, as sales had been rather slow for the past year, but a fairly recent three-way transaction made some room in my rafters and in my budget.
   I few months ago I had featured on this blog some photos of a 1989 Pinarello Montello in “Spumoni” colors. I’m always looking around for great bicycles at reasonable prices, and a local seller had that bicycle listed on eBay. I had sent him a note about a possible cash deal, saving us both some money (eBay’s PA sales tax for me, seller fees for him) with an in-person pickup instead. The bike required just a bit of polish and some new handlebar tape, before being added to my For Sale page.
   This was the company’s top-of-the-line racer from that era, and usually buyers from the States equipped these frames with more affordable components from Shimano or SunTour. However, this owner obviously had some disposable income and set up this Pinarello with excellent Campagnolo 7-speed Syncro gruppo and Cinelli bars/stem.

   A second Italian classic came to me in the form of a 1988 Colnago Super, again indirectly through eBay, with seller this time reaching out to me after I had noted an unreasonably high shipping price shown in his listing. We arranged instead a purchase through a Paypal invoice, again saving us both a nice chunk of cash in the process!

Excuse the weird photo, not mine

   The Super had the fishnet paint scheme that was common with several brands of that era, and I always liked it best in blue or green, as it resembled fish scales. This bike came equipped with a quality Shimano 600 Tricolor group, but you know me and Italian components – I’ll be swapping in one of the Campagnolo 8-speed groups I have stored on my shelf.

   …and then came the bad. First, when trying to arrange a ride with my brother, it came to light that the 2000 Pinarello Prince I had built for him about nine years ago had developed a fracture on the aluminum drive-side chainstay. Now, we were planning on an off-road ride, so at least our plans weren’t interrupted, but it became clear a replacement would have to be found for him eventually, as he wasn’t too confident about riding this bike again, whether I could arrange some type of repair or not.
   My brother didn’t realize how quickly I jump on such issues, and I managed to find a very nice, mid-2000s Colnago “Chic”. This was another eBay transaction converted to in-person exchange with a really friendly guy who lived in northeast Philadelphia, which yielded a quality aluminum machine with dependable Campagnolo Centaur components and a nice set of Easton wheels.

   It needed a bit of a tune-up and cleaning/repacking the headset with grease, but otherwise it was ready-to-go, and my brother was very excited, especially with the prospect of owning his first Campagnolo-equipped bicycle!

   The Prince curse unfortunately continued as some annoying creaking developed in my own Pinarello, and despite my best efforts, I could not come up with a solution. I headed over to my pals at Bikesport for a second opinion, and a couple days later was informed that the aluminum bottom bracket sleeve was separating from the carbon and that a crack was also present near the seatpost collar.
   I love this bike, but I had just put in over $400 for a repair to the headtube last autumn. I didn’t really want to sink a similar amount of money into mending this bike, just to have more issues creep up, so I’m afraid my Prince is going to become a wall-hanging in the “Cycle Tech Museum”.

   When considering something to take its place among the rideable bikes in my collection, I thought about some of my all-time favorite pros, and Fabian Cancellara came to mind. He won tons of races on Trek and Specialized bicycles, but I ruled those mainstream brands out, even though I’ve always liked the thin, curvy “Zertz insert” seat stays on the Roubaix bikes, circa 2008-2015.
   What I came up with is the bike on which the Swiss legend won a surprise victory at Milano-San Remo in 2008, a carbon Cervélo Soloist. These bikes were the grandfathers to the modern aero-road bikes, with drag-reducing tube shapes.

 
   The original owner had selected the upgraded version of the bike, with a 3T carbon fork and cockpit. The SRAM Force components weren’t CSC-team spec, but I’ll probably leave those be, since they are high-quality products. I will be replacing the Mavic Aksium wheels with appropriate Zipp 30s, although I will have the aluminum brake track version, as I didn’t really appreciate the way the braking surfaces delaminated on the carbon wheels I had previously.