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.