Crook Type 3 is a transformed version of Crook, the Cinelli Mash I built up and rode on Aids Lifecycle 9, from SF to LA. The concept was simple, and absurd: after completing the 570 mile ride (if successful, which it was) I would swap out the gray frame that made that journey for the limited edition green/ white variant, celebrating the achievement. You can read about the build process for Crook Type 3 here. Suffice to say, I kept the bottom end from the original Crook, and replaced the top end, going with a silver dip theme above the frame line.

Cinelli Mash 09 Limited Edition Green/White Adidas-inspired variant
SRAM Courier 300 Cranks (48/165)
Shimano A520 pedals
Custom wheelset: Soma hubs laced to H+Son 43s
Sugino Track Cog system (17) (Currently 75 inchgear)
SRAM single chain
Dia Compe brake/ carbon fiber cable housing
Paul Comp cross lever, silver
Titanium spacers
Columbus headset and seatpost clamp
Thomson Elite post, silver
Thomson X2 stem, silver
Nitto RB-021 compact bullhorns
VO elkhide wrap
crankbolt wrap caps (!)
Brooks Swallow saddle, honey
Thomson stem cap
Continental Gatorskin Hardshells 25c
Awesomeness

Here’s the build in the wild…

Note the Paul Comp cross lever. That was a hard find, with a deceptively simple solution: Order direct from Paul Comp…
The elkhide is still stretching and getting comfy but it’s gorgeous. I miss gel padding, though. Crank bolts for bar ends. HA!

The gold hub works nicely with the color scheme, which was fortuitous. I’ll eventually have a brass bell on the front end too.

Sneaky inclusion of my Three-Pin rider logo under the chainring, for science.

On Crook 1.0 there was a quote here: ‘by hook or by crook’ which was my inspirational mantra for getting through ALC on a fixed-gear. Now that that was done, I elected to retire it, moving the bike name from the head tube to the usual position here. The cog decal moved from seatpost to seat stay. Oh, and there will be a pinup girl on the nose, it’s just not done. The other missing decals are a Type 3 lettering piece for the name, and a vinyl of our ALC logo used on our ride shirts.

Some adjustments will follow, in seat height and stem. But so far, it’s a greeeaaaaat rahde!

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Related posts:

1. Bike Build Process Log: Crook Type 3 Conversion
2. Team Lope Bike Bio: Crook
3. Friends of Team Lope: Team Hype out of LA

In this brief installment of the Ye Blacke Death build logs, I messed with rings, and installed other things.

My challenge, as I showed Lung over the weekend, was that the bottom bracket spindle that I have on this build is too short. I COULD just get a longer spindle, but what fun is THAT. So I frankenbuilt the drivetrain. I spent a lot of time, too much time, playing with chainrings. I started by pulling the middle and small rings off of the crankset that came ont he old Vista that became wrongBike(tm) but this led to the discovery that the chainring bolts were too long, even with a huge amount of spacers. And, additionally, one was stripped and took some effort to get it out. Then I went after the Campy cranks I had in the shop, pulled the two rings off of those to get at the shorter bolts, to use on the Vista cranks… but once I did so, and installed the assembly on the frame, I discovered the short spindle. So, off came the ring for the third time, and the Campy crank was reassembled, with a single 53 chainring. This went on fine, but the corresponding non-drive crank arm hit the frame. Through experimentation, I found that the Vista’s crank arm didn’t, so now i have a Campy right side and a Vista (Suntour) left side. Done!

i sure know my way around quickly pulling chainrings, between the Miche cranks and now these.

This is the Bobike seat that’s going on the front of Ye Blacke Death, right above the back of the front rack. It’s a trick little system. I MAY get a windshield for it, but we’ll see how that pans out. I set out this past weekend, on a Daddy/Wee Z day, to get some installation done on the project, and my intention was to get fenders, rack and seat up on there. Each gave me problems but I saw what needed to be done to solve them. The seat clamps to the stem, necessitating that tall Nitoo Techntronic stem, but I need to get the rack on first. The rack wants to go on after fenders, of course, so that made fenders the next in line.

I was installing in the carport, as an experiment while the cat was away. I put wee Z in the pack and Tole, and she was good for about an hour, so that was actually pretty AWESOME. It’s not the first time I’ve wrenched with her hanging out: I’ve done a number of projects upstairs on the back desk with her in the sandbox. That requires bringing the stand, the bike parts and all the tools upstairs, which is kind of a pain, so I wanted to try the carport this time.

You can see I got the fenders out, there. These are from Woody’s Fenders. Amazing build quality, hand-crafted goodness. I subsequently got them on the bike. Not complete, though. The rear needs to have an L-bracket drilled into the wood, and the front has a bigger issue: seating a front brake securely on the fork, on which the fender also hangs. I need a longer bolt. So there’s that. But progress all the same. You can kind of see, from this shot, some of how it’s coming together. Lung saw it a little farther along and up close.

Getting closer!

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Related posts:

1. Bike Build Process Log: wrongBike – Effing Crank Bolts!
2. Bike Build Process Log: Ye Blacke Death – Bars and Saddles
3. Bike Build Process Log: Ye Blacke Death – Gamoh Go!

After Aids Lifecycle, I did a moderate overhaul, ie. drivetrain cleanup and brake inspection, and a surface cleaning of the bike, to return it to it’s former shiny self. Gorgeous I says!

I still quite like the ‘Crook’ placement above the Mash crest. That worked out nicely with the die- cut vinyl.

Here’s a shot of the Team Lope crest on the downtube. Kind of a subtle place for it, I think.

One noticeable scar from the road: a rock chip on the wheelstay. I think this was probably from when one of those pacelines passed in the middle of traffic at 40mph sending us into the gravel. You guys were really fast and cool and stuff.

Here’s that scrape from the chainring moving back up IN there. Fortunately, it’s an aluminum frame so no worries. And on close inspection, many of my bikes have this scrape, either from the chainring or a chain scrape along the way. Badge of honor…

There’s that Three-Pin name plate, along with a shot of the bike’s signature quote:

"By hook or by crook"

What’s really cool is that on the opposite side the lettering is partially worn off as if from age. Gives it some flavor.

That sweet cog reflector sticker. Nice touch on the black seatpost.

Ah, Crook. Ya done me well.

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Related posts:

1. Bike Build Process Log: Villain 3.0 – Strippery!
2. Team Lope Bike Bio: Fix-e
3. Bike Build Process Log: Crook

This is another inchgear calculator app. Now, I like mine just fine, and it’s quite powerful. No disputing this one is aesthetically pleasing, though, no doubt.

However, I love the copy:

"How many inches are you pushing?

We’ve all been there. The dude/t isn’t taking the hint despite the fact that you’ve used "interesting", "stock" and "just like the manufacturer made it" to describe the bike in question. You suspect that the tiny chainring and huge cog yield some wimpy drivetrain, and in the days before Chainvetica you couldn’t be sure. Now you can.

Chainvetica does the math your PBR addled brain cannot. Given the tooth count of your chainring and cog, it calculates gear inches — an ancient formula designed to sum up just how hard it’s going to be turn over the cranks on your fixed gear. The more inches you’re running, the harder it is to push. Use it to pick your cog. Use it to quantify the power of your massive quads.

As an added bonus, Chainvetica also calculates your speed at a cadence of 90 rpm. Your skinny jeans will make 90 rpm exactly "as fast as you can pedal" so basically, this app also calculates your ride’s top speed without all the bourgeois cables and stuff.

All this functionality presented on a bed of orange and Helvetica. Good stuff.

(Does this work with SS mountain bikes? 27c tires? 650c wheels? Kilometers per hour? First of all: yuck. Secondly, we’re working on that.)"

Dude, if I were a hipster urban cyclist with an iPhone, I’d be like ‘Sweet! Wait. What?’

Piss being taken WHILE item being sold!
ha

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/chainvet … 6126?mt=8#

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Related posts:

1. Bike Build Process Log: Villain- The Magic Gear
2. sign the googlemaps “bike there” feature petition
3. Bike Build Process Log: Fix-e 3.0

OK, now that I’m back from Aids Lifecycle, it’s project time! What’s life without projects, I ask? Well, a projectless life, certainly, but anyway, onward…

I have four concurrent bike projects underway, and this is the first report from those efforts. It’s time to frankenbuild Villain 3.0!

You may recall I have two Look KG381 frames, my favorite vintage of my favorite road bike frame. One is the KG381 Team (one of the team spares from the 2003 season) and one KG381 Jalabert Edition, which was the special edition consumer model.

The Ja-Ja is currently built up as my road bike, with the Dura Ace groupo from that year, good to go. Note the saddle upturn was a joke, please.

The other frame was built into my first carbon road bike fixed gear conversion, Villain. Villain made it through two iterations, before being retired. I partially cannibalized it to form the drivetrain for Crook, my Cinelli MASH build, but also, it was struggling under the burden of the fixie conversion with a very high inchgear. So the thing needed an overhaul anyway, and the frame suffered some minor damage when the damn Miche flangeless bottom bracket worked it’s way inward, allowing the chainring to strike the wheelstay.

Between the two frames, the Ja-Ja is immaculate, and the Team frame is a little weathered: some sticker damage, some chips and that scrape I mentioned. But I LOVE the black bare carbon look.

So, Villain 3.0 is a fusion of these two rides. I’m attempting to pull everything off of the Ja-Ja road bike and put it on the Team bike, swapping out parts here and there, and building up a more subtle road bike as a result, then selling the Ja-Ja frame. it’ll be sad to see it go, as I love it so, but while I DO have many bikes in the stable, I bristle at an unused frame hanging there, and Villain in it’s fixie incarnation wasn’t necessary any longer.

So the first step is dissembly of Villain. Not too hard, given I gave his wheels to Raully Raul when I built up Fix-e for him, and I had already stripped the cranks off for Crook. But I pulled the bottom bracket, took the bars off, and cleaned the frame inside and out, noting no noticeable thread damage to the shell, which is good. Good bye, Villain headbadge! (don’t worry, replacement is already made)

I’m keeping some of the Villain gear. I love the Thomson X2 stem, and will be reusing that in lieu of the Ja-Ja FSA stem. I also prefer a few other small gifts from Villain that will make it over.

Not much more to see. I started taking Ja-Ja apart, but this is a slower process, because I’m going part by part, transferring the group over to the Villain frame. I’ve never built up a road bike, so I’m trying to be methodical about the transfer. That said, the best WhytheFace moment was then I pulled the Ja-Ja bars and unclipped the brake and so on and tried to lift it away and sprannnnnnng, it bounced out of my hand, because… you know… it’s cabled to the frame in three other places, hahahahaha. Shows I’ve been working on fixed gears for too long.

Anyway, fohhhhwahd! I have the service diagrams for the Dura Ace group (gah!) and all I have left to procure is a replacement derailleur cage from my recent calamity, and I think I’ll be good to go. Oh, I should mention, new tyres. I LOVE the red slicks but Villain isn’t a red tyre bike.

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Related posts:

1. Bike Build Process Log: Villain 3.0 – Completeds
2. Bike Build Process Log: Villain 3.0 – Swappery
3. Bike Build Process Log: Villain- Ergo Post, Bars and Coggery

Lung and I snuck in one final spin in before Lifecycle next weekend. We’re both taking the week off to be fresh for the week following (though I can ride to work a pretty mellow pace and distance, he’s going to go cold turkey and sit on the bacterial cage we call MUNI)… I got the SRAM Courier cranks and bottom bracket on last night, though I didn’t have time to swap out chains today before I left, thanks the machinations of wee Z. It was a cooler day then yesterday, at least so far, though it was plenty hot out in Corte Madera. We benefited from little wind and a lot of tree cover, between most of the Paradise/Strawberry Loop and the detour up Chapman.

Though we were going to take it easy (tekkit teasy, as my Swiss cousin-in-law would say) we ended up mashing quite a bit of the Tiburon stretch of Paradise. Fsst pace! Speaking of mashing we crossed the MASH gang themselves going the opposite direction, in those new histogram kits and on road bikes. Other item of interest: we saw a fox sitting in the road. When he got up and trotted off as we passed, I was surprised how SMALL foxes really are.

Other than the mildly alarming smell of grease, the ride went without a hitch, which for me is kind of a record lately. The only thing that was weird was that I was spinning on the new chainring faster than I anticipated… it felt like a 46, but it really was just a 48, only one tooth down from the 49 it replaced. Talk about psychosomatic.

Anyway! Next stop, Lifecycle!

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Related posts:

1. AIDS LifeCycle 7, 2008
2. AIDS Lifecycle: Thanks to Everyone Who Has Donated So Far
3. AIDS lifeCycle 9, now featuring the team lope tyre clubbe

Here’s a shot of Crook in it’s tweed variant edition.

I’ve seen a few ridiculous big gear chainrings in those shots from the early 80s where someone is drafting a Fiero or something out in Ojai… but this is olllld school knee-bustery!

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Related posts:

1. Bike Build Process Log: Villain- The Magic Gear
2. The Tweed Ride That Got Away [With Grenades]
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the back part of a chainring bolt (the nut, in other words) is juuust wide enough to preclude the use of all but the largest of flathead screwdrivers. as such, i’ve used everything from the back of a knife blade to the rim of an abandoned pop can to hold them in place while i tighten the front. but thanks to our friends at URBANVELO (pittsburgh, pa, REPRESENT!), we’ve now got another option. grind down one of the small, freefloating rings of an old cassette and viola!

of course as noted, a proper chainring bolt (nut) tool is only a couple bucks, but hey — what fun is that?

i’m on it.

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Related posts:

1. Surreal Chainring Gallery
2. awesome tech tip for single-bolt quill stems
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Our man Raully Raul, my college roomie and one of my bestest pals, came to visit us this weekend. Raul is an active, crafty fellow: he climbs mountains, he climbs effing ICE, he surfs, etc and he works with his hands, from woodworking to photography. It all makes him a better architect, and an interesting guy, in my opinion. And he loves to try new things. So, on his arrival, I showed him and a few other friends the bikeBasement and my stable of excessive velocipedes. Later in the evening, he noted to me ‘hey, I’d love to try and ride one of your fixed-gears…’

Now, from someone else, that might have been the Akavit talking, but not Raul.
I was stoked. So, we made plans to check them out in the morning. The next day, I brought out wrongBike for him to try. I figured it was the most upright positioned build, with an easy posture, a light gearing, and was a good first try for fixie business. We headed down the hill and across the street to some flat area, went over the basics about fixed-gears: fixed drivetrain, no coasting, brake location, back pedaling, don’t lose concentration and try to stop pedaling, and so on. Soon, he was ready to go. And man, he took to it faster than I did by a MILE. Soon, we were up in the Scotts Valley side of MV, and off to the bike path. We took the bike path end to end a couple of times, and he grew stronger and more confident. We tried different pacing, so he could observe the relationship between pace and effort: too slow and it’s muscle work, too fast and it’s heart work, but 80rpm and it’s the perfect balance. Anyway, it was a colllle and windy day, so after awhile we headed back to the house. We saw a LOT of ALC training riders on the path as well, and I believe Cyclomania may have passed us or just missed us.

Once home, I gave him each of the other bikes in turn, so he could compare. Now that he had a sense of fixed riding in general, time to try different morphologies of the builds: different gearing, different bars, different ride positions. He liked the drops on Ghostal a lot, and got really jazzed by Crook.

In fact, he was the first person to ride Crook other than me, and thankfully, no deaths.

Anyway, I thought this was a GREAT spiritual mission for Fix-e. This was once my first single-speed and later fixed-gear and also my first build. Lung walked me through the entire bike. So the bike was decommissioned late last year when I gave Lung the wheels, and I had shelved it for a time, deciding what it wanted to be, now that I had more bikes to ride on a regular basis. But Raully Raul was now committed. He enjoys a car-free lifestyle in LA, living near the beach and walking or bussing everywhere. So he was pretty excited about getting a bike again for the first time in years. So, I thought, here’s Fix-e’s new home.

There were several things I loved about that night’s build:
- We got to work on it together, mirroring what Lung and I did on this same bike
- I was able to build a functional fixie entirely out of parts in the bikeBasement (a point of pride for lung and I both)
- Raul was stoked to do it, and man, he is crafty as I mentioned, so we were tearing apart the brake and effing with the wheels and so on like as if he’d been wrenching bikes for a year.

It was a great time!

Fix-e 3.0 consists of the original frame and cranks, which were still intact. In fact, that’s how we were able to assemble the bike in one late evening: the cranks and headset were still together and good to go. I used a Dimension arc bar, which Raul liked the position of, being a longer version of what he rode on wrongBike (though he may go old school drops eventually) and one of the Vista’s breaks I mean brakes, from before the wrongBike build, but with new modern rubber. We strung it to a chrome Odyssey lever, and this is perfect Raul right here: he solved Fix-e’s annoying cable hanger problem in like 3 seconds.

The cable hanger is OEM and has an open slot in the front so that the cable can be removed from the hanger, right, but it is designed for conventional 10-speed brakes and cable housing arrangement: with a BMX lever, the cable and it’s little cable stop still want to jump forward and out of the hanger if you really slam on the brake. This was a safety problem I struggled with throughout my riding this bike. I tried all sorts of things in the past: mangling a cable stop, adding a washer to the hanger, changing cable and brake lever positioning, etc. Raul? He proposed bending the shit out of the hanger at an upward angle. BOOOOOM. SOLVED. I was stupified. I never considered taking pliers to the damn thing.

I used my IRO wheelset from the rapidly bone-picked Villain build on Fix-e 3.0. Those are awesome wheels, and a large part of why this new build came out so well, I think. They’re smooth, clean and black. We used a 15t cog to compensate for the chainring’s relatively small size, trying to get close to wrongBike’s inchgear. The chain I had on hand JUST fit, but that was with the back axle just entering the dropouts, which are the old lateral kind that you enter from the BB side of the wheelstays. So I recommended he probably would want to get a longer chain and rechain it at home. I mean, I always like a fresh chain on a bike regardless.
Clip/platform spikey pedals (my ole AnkleBiters, in fact) and my trusty yellow seat that used to go with Toro, and the bike was ready to go. A final safety check, and we were done, at 12:03am. Not kidding.

Raul was excited.

Next day, we waited for the rain to break, and wifebot(tm), who was pretty into the new build and wanted to see Raul ride it, kept watching for optimum weather, which never really came. So in the afternoon, we headed out and Raul took his inaugural ride. Here you can see he represents the Team lope and TRDL brands, and enjoyed TLTC SAG support.

Raul FLEW up the street. Wifebot(tm) even exclaimed ‘whoa he’s flying up that hill!’
I think the foot was good and everything worked out. It was so awesome to see Raul, who 24 hours prior had never ridden a fixed gear, now was riding around on his OWN fixie. SOLID.

We took the wheels off, crammed it into the trunk of his rental car, and they were off to LA.
He’s already changed out the chain, and next step?
SURF BOARD rack.

3 gets you 6 he learns to skid stop before I do.
In fact, he may already know how by the time of this writing.

Welcome to the Team Lope family, dude!

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Related posts:

1. Bike Build Process Log: Villain 3.0 – Swappery
2. Bike Build Process Log: Crook – Prime Assembly
3. Bike Build Process Log: Villain- The Magic Gear

The prime assembly for the Crook project occurred Monday.
I think this was my most anticipated build. Except for Villain, wrongBike and Ghostal. I guess I’m pretty much generally uniformly enthusiastic about such things.

I have to say, some builds are harder than others. Full conversions like wrongBike are multi-day builds, from the stripping of old to the prepping for the new, to the painting, to the cleaning and repurposing of original parts, to the problem-solving when things go wrong on the assembly. Others, like Ghostal, are snap-together affairs with some minor delays here and there. Bikes like Villain are somewhere in the middle. I’d say Crook, so far, has been one of, if not THE easiest, build. For one thing, I’m working from almost entirely new stock, and the reuse of old parts wasn’t that onerous. For another, I had a lot of time to sit down there and think through everything and plan ahead a bit on some things that would have stalled me out had I not. Lastly, I think because the vision was consistent throughout, I didn’t have a lot of question marks going in about how things would work. I’m using same brands and same parts I’ve used on other bikes, and I knew what I wanted. I didn’t finish, but I got damn close.

Plus, I have to say, when you work and have family obligations and a young baby, just getting out there to wrench for a few hours is a wonderful thing. A few more and that bike would have been on the road today. But all in all, a wonderful build day.

One item to note was that, like Lung’s Leaser, this is an aluminum frame with a pursuit geometry. That stiffness means two compromises: creaks and discomfort. On the creak side of things, the infamous creaking bottom bracket was already plaguing Lung. We both did some research that indicated some additional lubery between bracket and cups, not just cups and shell, seemed to be recommended. Lung also had a cracked plastic cup on Leader, which he replaced with aluminum when he overhauled the BB recently. Leader is now whisper smooth.
So, I followed the same process, lubing up both the inside and outside of these cups. I’ve used the same Miche BB on Villain, and one frustrating problem, as of yet unsolved, was that the entire assembly rotated inward into the shell, away from the drive side, over time on that bike. I don’t yet know why. Stands to reason it could happen here too. So, I’m still looking into that. But for now, we’re in good shape.

On the discomfort side of things, I ride a Brooks saddle which is supportive, if not cushy. Other than the all-important rider’s triangle adjustment of bar reach to seat, the only other thing I can do to mitigate that ride discomfort on this frame is to double up on the gel padding on the bars. Padding, double upped! And if I have my way, TRIPLED up, for science, pending sourcing another gel kit. With two layers, it’s already buttery But you know how THAT goes. Not the same feeling on mile 60, 70, 80…

The front end came together very quickly, as I’d done the legwork on the headset and test fitted everything like 33 times. Not that it’s intended to be HARD, with an integrated headset and all. But I had some things to work out, largely me tricking my own self into over-complicating it, and me believing blatantly outdated marketing materials from Cinelli. But we’ve already covered that. Liberal lube of all bearing parts and the lower half of the steerer, and everything came together nicely. I won’t be cutting the steerer until i can get out there and feel out the ride position. I also have mismatched black spacers, so for science I’ll probably make them all uniform, once I determine the proper stack. Good to go! Also, Lung recently pointed out a great trick for stabilizing the front end in the bike stand involving a sock or an arm warmer. Since I use these big plastic clamps, this is how I do it: the clamp handles act as the stabilizers over the top tube.

What took the longest? Would you believe the CHAINRING replacement. Tole you what, I’ve been looking for a table-mount vice grip for awhile, which I think Lung looked for for me as well, and I sure could have used it yesterday. Chainring bolts are allen keyed on one side and have a receiver on the other side that needs to be secured from a slotted groove. OK, two hands, already required. Now, hold the crank securely in order to bear down. Crap. So, I spent a good amount of methodical, frustrating energy gripping the crank arm with my knees and working at the bolts with my hands. So much so that my legs are SORE from it. The worst part? The receivers take a flathead screwdriver to that slot to hold them in place, if you happen to have one big enough (which I didn’t) or a special tool. I must have muscled for 45 minutes all tole, getting all but one free, and then had to put it down. This bolt would NOT break free. Miche loctites them, I suspect. Anyway, on a lark I went over and reviewed my handy Spin Doctor kit and YES, of COURSE… there was the tool. It’s not marked such. it was just one of the only tools I’d never used. I actually went over looking for something to use as a jury-rig solution, looked at this tool, and felt like an idiot. Well, it wasn’t easy, but that last bolt came off finally, using, Cthulu forbid, the proper tool.

I moved up from a 46t to a 49t ring. Not a huge difference visually, but a big one on the road.

Lubed and applied, quick snap! Pedals on! I was going to use new pedals, but I cannibalized Villains’ pending what happens with that project. Vy nott, as my mother-in-law would say!

I’m using a sweet cog retainer system from Sugino in this build. Similar to designs by Miche and White Industries, it involves a carrier, a lock ring, and grooved cogs that fit to the carrier snug. This means that on the road, you unscrew the lock ring and pull the cog right off. Couldn’t be any faster. The Sugino system uses a curvy sine-wave shape to that connection, to maximize efficient bearing surface. It’s a beautiful, beautiful set up. The only drawback is that it requires a Shimano-compatible BB tool to adjust it, which is a new tool for the ride kit. But man, SWEET stuff.

Here’s a money shot of the back end. Check out the gold cog with the gold hub. I’m pretty pleased. It really has the effect I wanted.

These wheels Joe built for me are wonderful, and that’s a DEEEEEP section. Check that out against the wheelstays, for scale.

I think the second longest part of the build day was the cockpit. I’m using FSA K-Wings and they offer an internal cable routing design. Let me tell you, routing stiff cable housing from a hood a short, inflexible distance to enter the bars and come out farther down, very difficult. FSA have an ingenious helper tool, though, which I definitely made use of: it’s a strap of nylon that you push into the wider exit channel, then open wide, creating a loop. Push the cable housing through, snare it with this nylon loop, and pull it out the exit channel. Brilliant! Still not EASY, but I couldn’t have done it without it. This process was time-consuming because of the measure twice, cut once philosophy. Actually, make that measure thrice. You have to get the cable housing measurement just so, then route the cable itself, and get the brake strung, and if anything doesn’t measure up correctly, you have to start over. Tool long and it wouldn’t work. Too short, and, well, more housing required. Worse, I have 33 feet of black housing, but of COURSE I’m not using that on this build, so my stock on hand was less bountiful. Overall, it worked find and is all good to go. Gel on, brake strung, just waiting to wrap the bars until I confirm hood alignment position.

:::

The build as it stands:

Here’s the bike as a whole. Not great pics, in low light conditions down in the bikeBasement, but you should gleam at least 33% of the awesome from these pics. It looks EXACTLY as I visualized it. I’m so in love.

Here’s the front end, with most of the detail obscured, of course.

Here’s from the vantage point of the haters behind me. GORGEOUS.

What’s next?

- I need valve extenders. Badly. My long-valve tubes have valve lengths of 48mm. The rim is 42mm section. I was able to gain purchase on the rear tube somehow with my pump and inflate it, but just barely. The front, however, eluded me several times. it recedes a bit into the rim section. It’s clear that if in a controlled shop condition it’s this much trouble, on the road it’d be far worse, so I sourced some black valve extenders and I’ll pick them up shortly. They’ll be looooong and jangy, but get the job done! I don’t mind that. I like some distance from the rim.

- Once the front is inflated properly, I’ll do some test fits and ride around, checking the angles and stack height. That will tell me what spacers I still need, if any, and then I can cut the steerer and cap it.

- Brake adjustment, of course. Hasn’t happened yet. Just threw the wheels on this morning for the photos.

- Final wrap of the bars pending verification of the hood positions.

- Of course something critical is uninstalled: the chain! But it’s here, ready to go. Solid BMX half-link beastie. See, without loud clackity Campy freewheels, Lung and I need SOMETHING to warn you we’re approaching from the rear…

-Final step: beautification. i have some custom graphics and bar end work underway.

Oh, one final note: This is my first time using a Thomson post and I’m sold. I love it more than those Ergo posts on the Look frames, as light as they may be. First, it’s a FAT section. But also, two bolt adjustment for seat positioning, fore and aft. It’s never been easier to quickly align seat angle. So awesome.

Follow this topic in the R3 Forum here!

Related posts:

1. Bike Build Process Log: Crook Type 3 Conversion
2. Bike Build Process Log: Fix-e 3.0
3. Bike Build Process Log: Crook – Assembled and Ridden

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