As I regard my future third Cinelli MASH frame build and how I might change things up, I’ve been toying with the idea of using an aero lever on it, something I’ve only done with Fix-e (on Nitto stache bars) and Ghostal (on long bulls)… I thought to myself: ‘Self, I’ve never seen that done to a Cinelli X MASH…’And then of course, a day later, here comes one from the motherland:

http://mashsf.tumblr.com/post/3014750082/trainer

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So, Ye Blacke Death has been ride-able for 24 hours now. I mean, it goes and it stops, both reliably.

So, while it’s not yet complete, I do have thoughts.

Test Ride 1 was the coffee run last weekend that saw most of my coffee land in and over the front rack, being unsecured, plus was the ride I learned I had both a high-gearing issue AND a baby seat clearance issue. Subsequently, I swapped out the Nitto moustache bars for big-ass moon bars. This provides the necessary clearance to ride with the baby up ON there. I also swapped out the vintage hood lever for a BMX lever and restrung the brake cable 33 more times.

Test Ride 2: Wraps Run

So the bars are on, the brake strung, seemed to be in order, so i headed out. First thing I noticed was that despite cinchin’ it, the bars still moved in the stem clamp. So I was carrying all my tools in me pockets as I do on test rides, so I was able to really muscle it more and get it tighter. Good. Second thing I noticed was that the brakes were still just a bit too soft. It’s hard to finesse center-pulls like this. You under-do it and they slip, and over-do it and the cable get s smashed and frayed. So I stopped and adjusted again. Little better, not perfect.

I also noticed that riding with moon bars is kind of awkward. It’s fun, but when you’re used to the drops or the bulls, pitched forward, this position is kind of strange. You’re pushing pedals differently too, with your body geometry changing in that position. But as far as the first real RAHHHDE of any distance, it worked. It’s smooth, cushy. LAID BACK.

I brought back some wraps and a salad using the front basket, and used my webbing to hold it down. Worked AWESOME.

Test Ride 3: Commute

So after the ride last night, this morning I was able to do some more brake adjustment (still not perfect) and a few other things, and I was good to go.

Lung warned that my gearing was still likely too high. He’s right. I came down from my accidental 300 inchgear or whatever, but my chain was broken too small now, so i couldn’t get it back up to the bigger ‘pie plate cogs’ because I don’t have enough chain. So I installed the biggest I could fit, which was an 18. That’s still a 78 inchgear. Not terribly comfortable int he upright. Doable certainly in drops, but this is different. Add the short hills to get to my house. Add 20+ pounds of Wee Z! So yep, need a new chain.

I also found that man, it’s hard to adjust to those wide hand-positions. I kept instinctively slipping down to the stem to ride more comfortably as I do on Crook, but of course with a baby seat installed that wouldn’t be possible, so I tried to force myself to stay in position. Overall, fun ride, but need to do more adjustments. Possibly a drainpipe post, as I’m feeling a little forward from where I want to be, just like with Fix-e back in the day. I just happen to have Fix-e’s old one, so we’ll see.

I headed over to the stoe to get some groceries, and to Peet’s to get my coffee. Again with the webbing, this time pushing more of the limits of the reach of the net. Worked great. My bag was about 20 pounds too, and the bike handled well. That’s a good sign. Coffee in there too, nice and snug.

Test Ride 4: Afternoon Coffee Run

Yes, that’s a lot of coffee, i know.
Anyway, this time I webbed the coffee cup vertically close to the stem-side of the basket, and it worked like a dream. Even better than my modified gimbal on wrongBike. Narry a drip spilled.
Little more used to the bars now.

Please note the sweet, sweet sticker I through on here, courtesy of TRDL R3 Lieutenant Akua!

All in all, good rides. I’m heading over to get yet another chain tonight and replacement grips. Don’t be fooled by that red wrap. That’s just the under-wrap to the cork grips. I had to break one off to get the moustache bars off, which was crumbling from some cracks anyway. So more to come.

Onward! Next ride, lower gear, proper grips, bell and BABY! If all goes well…

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1. Bike Build Process Log: Ye Blacke Death – Laid back
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3. Bike Build Process Log: Ye Blacke Death – More Prep Work

Well, Ye Blacke Death is finally finished! Finished in the since, of course, that it rolls and pedals and steers and mostly stops, not that there’s not much more to do. But this was the day that I was able to get it rolling and do some tests. Any build, I’m secretly relieved when it doesn’t explode on it’s maiden voyage. Weirder frames and pieces parts and I wonder a little more about that result. I wasn’t going to throw wee Z on here and hurtle down the hill, but I did want to get out and see what needed adjustment and how it held up.

As you can see, it came together pretty nicely. The bobike fits on a a bracket that seats on the quill, and is removable in under 7 seconds. You can pull the clamp off as well and it’s like it was never there, or leave the clamp on and use the cotter pin to remove the seat. Even on the bike, there’s no interference with the front rack.

The combination of matte black, laquered wood, leather and chrome work well together. It has an old timey vibe, but some new school details. More interestingly to me, it’s the most frankenbike build I’ve done, even more than Fix-e was, and it doesn’t LOOK like it. I think it looks like it rolled new off the assembly line of one of your vintagy commuter bike shops.
Most importantly, it came together how I envisioned it, with the black rims and knobbies, the little gleams on the chrome, the general geometry…

Wee Z even helped with spoke tension inspection. Not at speed.

So, what’s left: well, a lot. Some adjustments are required before it can really do what it was intended to do. See, I tried to hop on it and almost became a eunuch. The Bobike is low and back, so you cradle your precious cargo in your arms as you ride. But for most bikes, that means interference with your riding position. I could get between the seat and the Bobike, but I couldn’t get UP onto my seat. Absolutely no-go if there was a child up in there.

I was sort of resigned to the idea that maybe the seat wouldn’t work out (it was designed for upright commuters in Denmark with adjustable stems and that vertical clearance) and that I’d be putting the rear rack on. But I did some research last night and was reminded, thanks to www.longleafbicycles.com why i got my long quill stem in the first place. I was going about this the wrong way: I thought the clearance problem would be the seat being too much in my face, so I was pushing it farther and farther down the stem, to no avail. As it turns out, it needs to be HIGHER, which is counter-intuitive, I have to admit. That’s where the ginormous stem came in. So this morning, I raised the seat high on the stem (didn’t yet actually increase stem height) and equally-as-important, lowered the SEAT. It made all the difference, and it worked. AWESOME.

Another issue is the brake. I’m a mile from where I started: I have sticky salmon pads, a new center-pull caliper, and I spent a LOT of time stringing and restringing it, which is made more aggravating with this vintage of equipment because of having to use double- wrenches on the hanger nuts. I was too weak in stopping power on my test ride, which was after about three stringings already… and then I adjusted it and am now too tight, so i need to let out about 3mm of cable. But I’m close.

The cork handles, which were kind of an experiment anyway, were 50/50. One went on great, and one shredded like you’d expect thin, true cork to do. Wifebot(tm) suggested glue but i don’t think it’ll hold together very long, so if I keep using these, I’ll be replacing one.

The bars, which LOOK rad, once again may not work, just as has happened on my other rides.

The sweep brings you too far forward, and I think I’ll interfere with comfortable positioning when Z is on there. So i may have to switch to sway, or boulevard, bars. I’ll be looking at that tonight.

Lastly, when I set out on the test ride, I was like DAMN this is a bitch. What is UP. The gearing was higher than I anticipated. I discovered the culprit. Remember how I was messing around with different combinations of cranks and chainrings? I ended up going with a 53, not the 39 I started with. Makes a teeeny bit of difference.

I calculated the inchgear at a gruesome 101. GAH.

I’m putting a 20 on the back tonight, getting it back down to my comfortable low-70s.

All in all though, very exciting and satisfying day.

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OK, I lied. I thought drivetrain would be next, and at the time of this writing I DO have stuff to post about that, but before I do, what I managed to finish yesterday were the wheels. My wee Z got her first bee sting and was high maintenance the rest of the weekend (crying, unhappy, swollen, etc) so I stayed low-key, doing household chores and hanging out with her. I brought the wheels upstairs from the bikeBasemtn(tm) and assembled them in the house while she battered my iPad.

These are Velocity A23 rims, laced to All City fixed/free. The hubs were chosen based on a darker metal finish, in keeping with the look of the build, and the free is on there in case I want to throw it on so wifebot(tm) can ride it. The tyres chosen are an old story made new again. These are Forte knobbies that were purchased and used on Fix-e 1.0 before I pulled them off on that rebuild and gave em to Lung, who had them in the shop for what, years now? I don’t remember if he mounted them, but when I was shopping for fatty, old-timey tread tyres, he remembered them and gave them back to me, in the Lung-Wrongrobot tradition of sharing our pieces parts. Allmost all modern tyres have sophisticated tread patterns, and I wanted something a little retro looking. I was looking at slicks but fat slicks are a rare breed. Anyway, these are absolutely perfect (except for the gross Forte branding, but one must check one’s snobbery sometimes)…

The original concept was to go for that oily black of iron, but after flirting with the idea of using Nightshade and a sealant, I decided it wasn’t likely to last on there. I didn’t want to be painting these parts, so I decided that they could just be what they are. The cranks are silver anyway. So the hubs are a dark anthracite to black color.

The knobbies are perfect! I’m going for that old-school utilitarian bike look, like one might find breezing through sunflower fields, with a front basket filled with cheese and wine and bike grease.

The A23 section is a short, trapezoidal shape. I wanted the rims to be decidedly NOT deep, and look very utilitarian. These came out even better than I expected, thanks to the handy craftsmanship of Joe at 718c.com.

It’s still hard to get a sense of what it will look like completed, with the seatpost and stem so far up and out of the frame, but you can at least see the knobbies in relation to the frame. It’s starting to come together.

Next up: drivetrain. Promise.

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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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My Ye Blacke Death project limps along. Well, limp is a strong term (and a weak term). Rather, it moves slowly. But it’s still moving. I put it on the back burner to work on Crook, since I wanted to ride that one as much as possible before Aids Lifecycle in June. But now that my wee daughter is approaching ride-a-long age, it’s time to get things going.

The YBD project bike is many things:
- it’s an old timey build, angling to be my tweeder
- it’s a Mixte
- it’s a grocery-getter
- it’s a baby explorer when module activateds
- and it’s a fixed-gear

The idea is, ride around with my daughter, do the shopping, mess around… and then pull the baby seat off and have at it on an old-timey ride.

So, the frame is being prepared for painting, and all that’s left to do is disassemble the headset. It was actually recently overhauled and is in great shape, so I’m toying with the idea of leaving it alone (the frame came to me from a friend who built it up as an Xtracycle before going for a beefier build, so the headset is already cleaned up)… that may depend on the details of the powdercoating process.

This Nitto Moustache bar was originally on Fix-e 2.0, then was sold to Lung for a project, now found it’s way back to me again with his blessing, so it’s a perfect fit for the old-timey vibe.

Various needed items, including a Sugino BB, an 8th-inch BMX chain, and so on.
I’m reusing some old road cranks to add to the antiquity.

I was originally going to reuse the stem but I needed a longer one for that baby seat, and also for a funky upright riding position in an old-timey style. This Nitto was the tallest I found. Look at that! 220mm!

Finally, this is the Bobike Mini, which I got from the awesome guys at Long Leaf Cyclery, based on their recommendation. The seat is a European import, and much higher quality than what I’ve seen out and about. It is positioned on the stem facing forward (hence that loooong boy up top) and it’s rad in 33 different ways. The helmet, by Lazer, is really cute.My daughter already wore it for an evening, gnawed the tag, had fun being a mushroom. It’s a funny little miniaturization of a regular commuter bike helmet but with exaggerated foam. Very Super Mario. I’d even paint it such if I wasn’t already going to sticker bomb it.

Anyway, pretty close to being ready. I have everything I need, I think, and next step is paint.

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Today, in between honeydos and home projects and Easter basket assembly, I took a much-needed opportunity and tidied up the bikeBasement(tm) still wrecked from that furious Fix-e 3.0 build a few weeks back. After I got everything on the pegboards and cleaned up, I got to tackle finishing Ghostal’s bulls. I used a second set of white grips I had in house, since the ones on the Taylor bars are staying put. These have caps, not sealed rubber ends, which are fitted with little star nuts. They didn’t fit the bars well enough to use by themselves, so I wrapped them in tape and fit them in there just so, then took Ghostal out for a short spin. The bulls feel GREAT. I have always been very comfortable on them. I positioned these a little high to see how they feel climbing, so we’ll see.

So far so good!

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So, as Lung knows from our ride discussions, I love love LOVE the look of the Taylor bars on Ghostal, which was it’s original vision. But in actual practice, for city riding they remain as uncomfortable as they were on Fix-e when I first bought them. The issue is that the bars drop into the, well, drops, almost immediately, leaving very little at the top of the bars for you to rest on in an upright position. Further, there’s no ‘hood’ position as with conventional bars, so you really have two choices: ride in the drops themselves the entire time, or do like I frequently have, and perch on the crown awkwardly, one hand on the top of the bars and one on the BREAK I MEAN BRAKE itself. This is fine for a jaunt across town, but it’s an awkward position for controlling the bike in the clutch, as per our modern parlance, and frankly, maybe if I was 135lbs the drops would be fine, but that’s too much pressure on my diaphragm, especially with a bag on. Fine for a climbing ride, not so much for riding around town. Meanwhile, I haven’t had my bulls on a bike since I pulled them off of Fix-e for a change-up (putting the Taylors ON, ironically enough)… so I thought hey, this Ghostal is one smooooth ride… how fun would it be with bulls? And so I did. This morning. Squinting at it given the dim light of my bikeBasement(tm) and the lask of near focal capability as my eyes heal from those shark lasers.

Here’s where you come in, dear reader.

Should I keep the Ghostal scheme, and wrap these bulls in white Kierin grips again, or should I use the Brooks wrap to match the saddle, as I have done in the past. I’m of two minds, so I thought I’d see what you thought.

I’ve included the bars as they are now, one-side wrapped, so you can see the Brooks leather tape…

…and here’s a gentle mock-up of the grips.

Let it be known!

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1. Bike Build Process Log: Ghostal – Naked Bulls
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3. Bike Build Process Log: Ghostal – Make it Stop!

Team Lope LA Affiliate member Raully Raul has sent me some photos of Fix-e 3.0 in it’s natural habitat…

Take a look, excuse the cable lock from which it will soon be stolen, and enjoy the awesome…

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Just received this shot from Raully Raul. Fix-e 3.0 now has a black seat, a sick new chain, and a dubious lock-lookalike mechanism.

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