Pages

Tuesday, January 19

Not the worst tho

A three day weekend not necessarily wasted, but perhaps piddled gently away.  Rode over to the short track course on Saturday, more or less because that's about the amount of energy I had to throw at life.  Nick "Dip 'n Spray" Barlow joined me.  We spent most of our time riding slowly and talking abut how were probably not going to be able to race short track this year.  Still important to pre-ride tho.

Sunday was mostly a family day... part of that being putting Nia in the car and driving back over to the short track to look for my very replaceable 5mm allen wrench that has the very hard to replace 8mm niblet that I left in the leaves when I fixed Nick's chain.

Honestly, losing something like this and then finding it in and amongst a bunch of leaves twenty hours later made me feel like quite the success story.

BTW:  Broken chains on a single speed.  It's never happened to me, yet I'm always the guy with the chain tool and the quick link.  Most I ever did to a chain was destroy one roller on a PC1 at the '06 Trans Rockies.  Still worked tho.

Oh yeah, my Fly Pedals finally showed up on Saturday.

I wasn't much feeling all about it on Monday, but I figured maybe my wheelie practice area was dry enough to give them a whirl.

It wasn't.

My biggest motivation to get out and try for a bit was to see if I could just settle on a 32X20 or 21 for practice purposes.  I'm anxious to get rid of the gears for awhile (again).  They seem kinda dumb (again), but... wheelies.  I had been doing most of my practice in the 27 or 31 (dunno).

The soft, moist conditions forced me into the bus yard driveway.  The cassette goes 17-19-21-24, so I went with the 21.  It was fine.  Had to make a few mostly mental adjustments, but I think I'm done practicing in the grass.  My chosen field is lumpy and goes from soft to fast-rolling way too frequently, thus the reason I found myself practicing in such a low gear.  I need to remove as many impediments to my progress as possible.  I'm not so afraid of busting my ass on pavement because, as I've mentioned before, I'm really good about bailing out of a wheelie gone bad.

I gotta order up a new SS slider from Paragon Machine Works for the Stickel, and when I get it, restore things to their natural order (again).  The gears can sit in a box until such time that I have to figure out whether or not I'm building up the third or fourth worst "road bike" the Tour de Burg has ever seen.

BTW:  I heard the best way to put a Chris King headset into a Waltworks frame is to use two cinder blocks.  Anybody ever heard anything different?


5 comments:

Anonymous said...

best cycling vid of all time

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1jzs6dk4bs

crackofthearse cycling team, to join - yah gotta be rad - ride at -40oC, ride like there is no tomorrow, and go against the grain in life.. that's all.. no clicks, no pricks, and no licks...just bike

Anonymous said...

here's another good cycling site - https://www.facebook.com/cyclebuttcrack

this is amazing, I've done 25000km a year, but 75000km is a hell of a lot..
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/01/09/462402664/1-year-more-than-75-000-miles-cyclist-breaks-76-year-old-record?utm_campaign=storyshare

Year, More Than 75,000 Miles: Cyclist Breaks 76-Year-Old Record

Anonymous said...

You have a Waltworks now? Sweet!!!

dicky said...

Not mine. This frame was built for a giant.

T Schmidt said...

How are the flys? I ordered some after seeing your post and the wait has had me cursing your name for a while now. Or maybe not.