First hardware failure

After around 2000 miles of use I've now had my first parts failure - or at least an early warning of impending failure when I started to hear some grumbling coming from the bottom bracket.  With this starting to occur with just days before the Steeplechase sportive the timing was pretty bad.  Given that the bottom bracket was a second-hand "no-name" item of unknown condition its failure isn't too surprising.

Looking around for a replacement there is no clear winner as for every BB there seems to be a roughly 3:1 ratio of good to bad reviews. [sigh]  In the absence of guidance I've gone for a reputable brand name and sacrificed a little lightness in exchange for the extra set of sealed bearings of an FSA platinum pro (ISIS fit 68x108).  The weight penalty for the quad-bearing setup is about 20g so not too onerous.  Fitting it was no drama other than realising I needed a crank puller...

With a 1 mile test ride round the block to bed it in Mark and I set off on The Steeplechase in near ideal conditions.  Times much improved over last year with Mark coming home in just under 5:40 (28 min improvement) with me a little further back at 5:53 (25 min improvement).  This was sufficient to get us each the Silver standard with Mark only two minutes off the gold standard! 

Earlier in the year we did the Flat-out in the Fens sportive with me coming in at 4:31 and Mark at 4:30, each 15 minutes better than last year and well within the Silver standard time of 5 hours.  Maybe next year we'll be able to shave off the 10 minutes needed to hit the Gold.

Nobody likes a wet arse

With the worsening weather one aspect of the bike has caused a certain amount of consternation and that is when splashing through puddles you get a wet backside.  On my other bikes I either have a modest rear mudguard or a rack with enough "middle" to keep the water off your back.  With the very airy "Airy" rack  there's neither a beam nor infill so there's no option but to fit a mudguard.  Getting mudguards intended for my application seems to be difficult - either they don't come in a suitable size or the design suffers from a fundamental flaw for my intended use.

All was not lost though as I happened to have a spare SKS front guard intended for a for a narrow 26" MTB wheel.  After drilling out the rivets holding the original mounting hardware it could be slid into place and marked up.  I chopped it down to about half the original length and was able to use an original bracket onto the bridge and add a set screw through a spare hole in the rack to secure it at the rear.  It all looks pretty neat really but I've yet to try it to see how much of the water it deflects but I have high hopes.

Braking improvements

The standard Tektro brake pads have cartridge-style pads but unlike most they are secured with a screw through the back of the pad rather than the more common approach of a pin going through the sides of the holder.  With the carbon forks there isn't much space so the screw head tends to rest against the blades of the folks which isn't ideal.  As a result I've taken the decision to swap to the other sort of pads but they only come in 70mm rather than 55mm lengths.  That geometric change makes it harder to use the "toe-in" trick to reduce the v-brake judder but it's still essential to get as much toe as possible.

In another change I've added some inline "sissy" brakes for convenience around town.  Doing that has made for some interesting cable-routing, with one cable going over the bars and another under them.  If you try and route the cables in the natural way using one brake pushes the cable for the other one applying that brake when you didn't mean to.  The other change to the routing has been to change the hanger from a straight to angled version to give more clearance on the stem.  With the "over the bars" routing this looks a little odd but works well.

Computerfication

 

The more observant of you may have spotted in the previous photos that I've got bar tape and cycle computer fitted now.

 

I'm quite pleased with how the tape has worked out as it was a job that I was dreading.  I've used the Bontrager Gel Cork tape, which has the benefit of using silicone strips to grip rather than adhesive.  This means you've not got trails of tape backing getting in your way and you can unwrap the tape and have another go at it if you don't think you got it right.  The trick to fitting it seems to be to keep plenty of tension to it and to alter the amount of overlap depending on the curve radius.   I have to admit to having a laptop in the garage with me showing a video of a pro wrapping their bars and watching that like a hawk, with my finger on the pause button.

Overall I'm pretty happy with it but I'm undecided about how far I want it to extend over the flattened aero-section of the bars and I'm still not sure whether I prefer the diagonal end cut on the inside or the outside edge of the tape.  I think I prefer it on the outside but I'll wait till I've done a few more rides and redo it when I add the in-line brake levers.

One thing I've found with the Polar computers that I use is that the cadence sensors never have quite enough range to work in the intended position and I've found that the supplied magnets for the crank need to run a very small gap.  The sensor gap is a problem on a bike that gets squeezed into crowded vestibules on commuter trains and shuffled up and down 3 flights of cramped, hairpin-landing stairs as the smallest knock to the sensor is enough to jog it out of alignment.   So as on my other bikes I've instead used a 5*10mm rare-earth magnet which fits rather nicely onto the end of the pedal shaft.  You can just see it in the top right of the picture here, you can also see much larger sensor gap I can run between it and the downtube-mounted sensor.

You can also see in the quantity of muck that gets thrown up during the course of a single days commute along a damp towpath.  Speaking of which the combination of titanium frame, carbon forks and wide 700c tyres makes this quite the most comfortable of all my bikes along the towpath.

Commuterfication

With the sportive out of the way my thoughts turn to making the bike fully ready for commuting.  Top of that list is a rack, for which the most appealing choice is the titanium Tubus Airy.  It's a small rack so has limited heel clearance but that shouldn't be a problem for me as my pannier is set up with very offset clips to cope with the limited clearance on the Airnimal.  For once the rack weighs exactly what was claimed of it - 230g plus another 120g or so for the bolts and mounting arms.

Next up was a rear light.  On my other bikes I have the lamp+reflector integrated into the rack.  On the Airy it is a little harder to mount a light, so instead I've gone for a seatpost mounted one.  In this case a NiteRider CherryBomb.  At half a watt it is pretty bright, has a good beam spread (blinding direct on) and has a built in reflector.

Steeplechase Sportive

After a week of the country being battered by strong winds (up to 40mph gusts ) it was with some trepidation that we lined up at the start of the Steeplechase for the "Epic" 90 mile route.  Unlike the 77 mile "Flatout in the Fens" event I did earlier in the year this one had hills, so the combination of a new bike with only 10 miles on it, an extra few miles, no significant training runs, hills and wind meant that it was going to be a challenge.

The run to the first feed station was uneventful and we made excellent time - plenty fast enough for the "gold" time but of course we had a strengthening headwind to come.  If anything the stop came too soon and we weren't really ready to stop.  Indeed many people seemed to pass it by, a decision that I wonder how many would come to regret.

The run to the second stop seemed to take much longer than the first, with some more substantially hills and a 20 mile slog into the ever stronger wind. The bike was working well and I spent a long time hunkered into the drops to get out of the wind.  The run up to the feed stop was a long uphill run, which hurt and had me making use of my 34-28 gear combination.  Oh how people scoffed when they saw the ratios on my cassette but by the end of the day I would rely on that gear on the larger hills.

By the time we set off on the third leg the wind was at full strength and at times the crosswind was sufficient to make staying on the bike hard work.  When we didn't have a crosswind we had a headwind.  Our pace had slowed dramatically and for about 5 miles we were convinced that the feed station and a few minutes respite was just around the next corner and each time groaned to find that we were mistaken.  The bike was still working well but I was beginning to get a little back ache, which wasn't surprising after 60 miles on a new bike.  If I'd had a couple of weeks extra to get some training rides in I think I'd have been fine but it's been 20 years since I last rode drop bars and my muscles just aren't used to it.

For the final "sprint" home we were told that we would have a tail-wind, maybe it was the fatigue but it really didn't feel like a tail wind to me.  With about 15 miles to go I started dropping off Mark's wheel and he gradually disappeared off into the distance.  He was feeling a lot more sprightly than me at this point and was on the cusp of hitting the "silver" time so had a great target to aim for (which he achieved with 90 seconds to spare).  I on the other hand had no way of hitting that mark and was just struggling to finish and lost huge amounts of time crawling up even the smallest of hills.  In the end I finished in 6:18, almost 10 minutes behind Mark.  Next time I shall make him carry a rucksack containing 50KG of bricks to nullify his weight advantage over me!

So, opinions on the bike.  It's nice, my choice of gearing works well, the setup is good and the saddle is comfy.  I'm a happy bunny.

Fitting

A slightly delayed update but last week I popped into Triatheletes Edge in Cambridge to have them "fit" the bike to me.  The process started off with a very thorough measuring of me and a chat about riding style and intended use, then crunching all those numbers on the computer.  From that we got a printout of  the "ideal" frame geometry for me, which pleasingly is pretty close to what I have, and another couple of printouts featuring all the critical min/max/ideal positions for the various components. 

Armed with the magic numbers Rob shuffled the saddle up a bit (something I knew needed doing) and forward by a reasonable amount (the reverse of what I expected), the stem down by a bit, rotated the bars up and the hoods down and invited me to give it a go on the turbo trainer.  Initial thoughts were that it was very much more comfortable but that we needed to adjust the handlebar and hood rotation a bit more.  Another couple of tweeks there and we were done.

The whole process took somewhere between 60 and 90 minutes but only cost 25 quid.  A very worthwhile investment indeed.