Buildin' Bikes

Picked up Juju's road frame from Kitsap Powdercoating last Wednesday. Their work was immaculate! Spendy for the special-order color (+$100), but looks fabulous. Spending evenings building it up this week. VERY purple, with lots of purple anodized bits. I was very disappointed that the purple headset I found on ebay for it was for a 1" threadless instead of the old-school 1" threaded that is on it (sigh).

I'll be sure to post photos once it's done!

Halloween 2009!

The kids were docked out in style this year. Best costumes, best makeup!!!! Too bad it only lasted a few hours...

Warm commutes in the Fall!!!

Got up this morning and looked at the weather station: 55 degrees outside at 5:30 AM! It was nearly 60 degrees at work by the time I arrived on the bike. Nice!!! Long-sleeve woolie and a refelective vest were perfect. Not bad for end of October!

Should be nice on the way home unless the great faucet in the sky gets turned on again.

Friday Night Wheelbuilding

Here's what bike nerds do on Friday nights: Get home, cook dinner, do some chores, and then head out to the shop for an hour or two to build wheels. These are for Julie's bike rebuild for xmas. Smokey/purplish Kings laced with purple nipples to to Mavic Open Sport rims. All told, the wheels were less than $300 to build up. The purple skewers add a nice touch.

Pretty soon it'll be time to tear down her ancient Salsa frame for some powdercoat love!

Broken Collarbone ver 2.0

Mason got pushed from behind at his soccer match on Saturday. Broke his clavicle (again). Sooooo..... he's back in a harness and a sling til after Thanksgiving. Not happy about it. Wanted to kick the shit out of the opposing coach for encouraging "good hard play" as he called it. Figured I would've gone to jail. Poor lil guy. So much for a year without a trip to the emergency room....

For all those lame-o's that think American football is a contact sport, I'd advise you to watch a soccer match sometime.

No pads

One break

All game

Solo Ride

Took the Asylum out today to test out the "new" cranks with the inky dinky rings. It's nice being able to start from my house and ride to the trails at Green Mountain. Nice warmup and let me try the 36t big ring. Like my buddy Ed had commented in an earlier post, it's a bit too small. Nice spin rate, but a 38t would probably be the cat's meow between gearing and clearance. I used the hell out of it on the road today, and was glad to have something bigger than a 32t ring like on the old 2x9 setup I had.

After I hit the trailhead, I cruised the old service road/trail past the lower pond and Tin Mine areas. The pond was very full after our recent torrential rains (4" last week), and had started to spill out onto the road in a few areas. Very scenic...

From there I continued to climb the trail up to the peak. Descended Wildcat to the Horse Camp, and then took Beaver Pond out to Plummer. Still a nice view despite the cloud cover. I Continued on back down Plummer to the Gold Creek area, and got really soaked on my way to Tin Mine.

Tin Mine is really wet and in bad shape on the lower area, but still a stout little climb at the end of the ride. The "mine" is not very impressive, but still cool to ride by and check out.

From the top of Tin Mine I made my way down the service toad where it turned into a local residential road, and rode the 2 miles back to the house. 26 miles, lots of mud, and one tired & dirty Monkey!

29er Gearing

After running a 2x9 (22-32) on my Asylum OCD, I wanted to try something different. I was looking for some color and a 94mm BCD chainring size. Here's what I got: Old school FSA square taper cranks off of eBay. Pretty good deal for them. Today I finally got around to installing them (amazing what a compressed nerve in your hip does for activity limitation) on the Asylum:

Thanks to my nifty stockpile of 94mm BCD rings, I was able to set a funky triple up with a 20-30-36:

A pain in the ass to get the derailleur set up due to rear swing arm clearance, but it works pretty well. Can't wait to take it up on the trails and test it. My thought with the 36t is that I get a bit more range on the road and the downhills, as well as eat up some chain slack.