March Round-Up
Flat.
No, not my tires. I’m referring to the month of March. What a month for cycling! First, there was Lance’s crash in the Vuelta a Castilla y Leon. What we see here is an angry Lance Armstrong being carried away Quantity: 1.
He could probably burn a hole through a wall with that stare. (Photo: Agence France Presse from velonews.com)
Result: a broken collar bone.
Get ready to set off the metal detectors at the airport. (Photo ©: Team Astana from cyclingnews.com)
Just look at those screws! It looks like someone built a deck in his shoulder. Are we setting ourselves up for greatness here? Greg won the TdF after being pumped full of lead. Lance beat the TdF 7x after beating cancer first. Floyd rode to victory on a dead hip. Now we have The Lancinator!
A lot of the media is trying to play up a story about the tension between Lance and Alberto. What a bunch of crap! Let’s face it. Lance knows how to win. All doping suspicions aside, Lance knows how to screw with the peleton’s head. He can play the riders like a cheap puppet. I’ll bet you a 5mm allen wrench key that when Lance decided to come out of retirement he sat down with Johann and Alberto to lay out a strategy. There was wheeling and dealing about who gets to win what and how. The broken collar bone was unexpected but it can play perfectly into Lance’s hands. If Tyler can ride with a smashed up collar bone and grind his teeth to a pulp then Lance can swing a victory with a metalized collar bone.
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall!
Except here, all the King’s men actually did put Humpty Dumpty back together.
And then there are my own trials and tribulations. My bike pretty much fell apart during a ride on the last week of March. It started off with a loose left crank arm. I noticed that for some reason I couldn’t shift properly. Well, the crank itself was shifted! I stopped at a nearby bike shop and the on site wrench tightened everything up for me. He was like my angel with dreadlocks.
Then, a few miles later, I noticed that my front brake rubbed. WTF? Why?! It turns out that my left brake lever slid forward which in effect tightened the cable! So I had to pull/wobble the lever back up the handlebar to relieve the tension. And if that wasn’t enough, my right lever jiggled loose too!
But it didn’t end there. I rode over a bump and my handlebars rotated around the stem clamp!
It was one seriously fucked up ride. I was waiting for a spoke to pop or my tires to spontaneous flat but they didn’t.
Despite this, I did have some good moments. First, I got this.
Patience is always rewarded.
That’s right. It’s a vintage Cannondale R600 frameset! Yes, that is a front reflector on the headset but I swear I bought it like that. Go on, laugh it up for now. It won’t be there forever.
The best part is that I only paid $100 for it from a local ad on Craigslist. I had been scouring the local Craigslist for a deal like this for a long time. Good things do come to those who wait. According to the seller, he got it from an old lady who outfitted it with a super high quill stem, BMX handlebars, and lots of lights and reflectors. He offered all those bits and pieces to me but I just wanted the frame. What am I going to do with that kind of junk anyways?
According to the serial number, it was made in 1992. It was kind of hard trying to figure the exact model since it’s not depicted anywhere on the frame. I was able to ID this to an R600 model by looking through the 1992 catalog archived on the Vintage Cannondale website. The color is an awesome “Bright Metallic Blue” and my picture doesn’t do the frame justice. Unfortunately, the frame does have dings on it.
Grind grind grind! I hate it when a chain slips off.
And then there’s this.
Wheels are like candy. Just can't get enough of them.
Two 26″ wheels arrived at my doorstep. I cheated myself out of building a set of 26″ wheel. At $112 it just wasn’t worth it to build my own. The IRC tires are $25 each at Performance which leaves $62 for the rims, hubs, and spokes. The wheels are probably machine built and they were built poorly. They were untrue and spoke tension was all over the map. Thankfully it wasn’t anything that a few minutes with a spoke wrench and truing stand couldn’t fix. Having the experience of building the 650B wheels made this feel cinchy!
So how do they fit? Well…. they fit, but just barely. Check this out.
The tire is millimeters away from the fork!
The picture on the right is my front 650B tire in the fork. It’s a close fit but there’s still plenty of room to the fork. On the right is the 26″ wheel and it is millimeters away from the fork blade and the electrical tape I used to wrap the excess cyclometer cable. So how fat of a tire can I shove in a cyclocross fork then?
One massively fat tire.
How does 45mm sound to you? That’s about 1.78″ for you non-metric folks. The tires are actually rated on the sidewall to be 1.95″ wide and I’m not sure how they possibly got to that number. Does IRC mean the tire will be 1.95″ when it is compressed against the ground?
The 26″ wheel is slightly smaller than the 650B wheel even though the 26″ tire is slightly bigger. I thought this was an interesting shot. The red line highlights the height of the 650B wheel and tire on the left.
A 650B wheel and tire vs. a 26" wheel and tire.
I have no idea how well this set up will work or how stable I will be on the dirt. The rear wheel needs a brake rotor and a cassette. I ordered a 11-34t cassette from Nashbar and a second rotor will be ordered shortly.
I’ll have plenty more to yack about in my next post… whenever that will be.
