I had to take the wheels off to fit my Pugs in the car, and the salt was caked on my frame and bag so thick, I couldn’t tell what color my bike was. So, I took advantage of the empty frame and gave it a bath.
Once I got the bike stripped down and cleaned, I rewrapped my chainstay with gaffer tape so my track slack doesn’t scrape up the paint when I use smaller cogs. Then I scrubbed down my brakes and seatpost bolt and stuff with a toothbrush to get all the dust and grime out.
I scored an old Salsa setback post with a pretty cool elliptical mechanism off eBay for $8, with $8 shipping. Tore it down, cleaned it up, greased, and reassembled. You just don’t see cool shit like this anymore, I am a huge fan of all the little individual CNC’ed parts. Love it. Don’t ruin this for me by telling me it slips or something.
I had some old bartape laying around, so I wrapped the front of the Jones bar. Swapped my cogs from the 26" fat wheelset to the 29+ wheelset, and pumped them back up. My ghetto tubeless Chronicles were still holding most of their air after two months in the basement.
Cleaned the framebag and overall it’s not looking too bad.
[quote=lwkwafi]Saved myself headaches, blisters, and loud noises by removing these from one bar, putting them on another bar, and throwing some new ESI grips on the fat bike all with a few zip ties and some rubbing alcohol.
Thanks for the reminder on what not to do, new guy.[/quote]
Rode the biek after doing all this grip switch-a-roo. I enjoyed the control/feel of the 35mm race face bars, but they were tall.
Swapping out to syntace vector carbon bars. Stack height on stem put bars lower and all-around feels good.
Planned on riding my LHT to work today but the front tire was flat. Tons of glass on the road lately so not super surprising. Changed my shoes instead of a tube and rode the Pugsley-Plus instead.
I sold the stainless steel Tubus Nova lowrider rack to the guy that bought my Rodriguez so I picked up some Tubus duos from EU.
I ended up using the the upper eyelet on the dropout which makes getting the wheel out of the dropout much easier compared to the Nova (which felt like one of those 3D coffee table puzzles where the tricky solution is extracting the QR from the hub before removing the wheel).
Unfortunately the Elephant’s upper eyelets are so close to dropout that it’s difficult to spin the QR nut since it bangs into the rack tab every revolution. This wouldn’t be as much of a problem if there weren’t lawyer lips but since there are I need to tighten the QR in the dropout and deal with the rack clearance issue.
Adding this to the list of fixes I’m going to ask Cyclefab / Haulin Colin to modify on the frame before repaint.
I also discovered the Tubus pannier loops I had were for 10mm diameter lowriders instead of 14mm. Really wished I added these to my order just in case…they are so cheap… Womp womp
I also discovered the Tubus pannier loops I had were for 10mm diameter lowriders instead of 14mm. Really wished I added these to my order just in case…they are so cheap… Womp womp
[/quote]
I emailed Wayne at “The Touring Store” who serves as one of the US distributors of Tubus/Ortlieb products and he had some interesting info on these:
[quote]Hi Andrew,
I have had tons of customers with the Arkel panniers. Get near a vise if you can, or get two pairs of sturdy round-nose pliers, bend that hook straight, and then re-bend the hook into a curve that will fit around the lower 14mm diameter tube on the Duo. Arkel is not telling customers the same thing. Their hooks are available if you ever want to go back to their original bend. Once you re-bend the lower hook, you have a system that won’t wear out. Check out my attached photos. I put a couple of laps of black cloth athletic tape around the lower tube, and mini 5/8 inch hose clamps around the tubes and tape. The hose clamps keep the tape from sliding, and the tape protects the paint.
If you bend the lower hook into a J or fishhook shape, you can also use them on the lower tube of the Nova. That aluminum fitting on the nova was never intended for lower hooks on panniers. It provided a place for a little leather strap and buckle system to mount – common on some panniers from the 50’s and 60’s.
Note that Tubus says NO to metal clamps on their rack tubes, but they are talking about load-bearing clamps, such as hanging baskets. It is possible to crush thin-walled steel tubes, so if you add the hose clamps, get them snug, but just snug. Resist testing your hand strength and seeing how tight you can get them, or you could damage the tubes. The cloth tape adds some friction, and the hook won’t drift very much, so you might only need one clamp places near the curve to keep the hook from drifting.
I am guessing I have had about 50 customers do this, and many have gotten back to me to say it worked well for them. Hope this helps.
Those plastic bag holder clamps wear out pretty quickly and break, and the screw that holds the loop together is like a tiny jeweler’s screw, and most don’t have a screwdriver small enough to tighten it – and the head of the screw is soft, and the screwdriver strips the head. It is one of the few Tubus parts that I have had bad luck with.
Hope this helps!
Wayne[/quote]
[quote=Andrew_Squirrel]Cool maybe I will give those a try. I always heard Shimano was the gold standard.
What makes the DT so stiff?[/quote]
piques my interest too
[quote=imoscardotcom][quote=Andrew_Squirrel]Cool maybe I will give those a try. I always heard Shimano was the gold standard.
What makes the DT so stiff?[/quote]
piques my interest too[/quote]
The DT RWS skewers for normal 5mm QR work like allen bolt skewers which are bullshit
BUT… these have a few tricks to make them not suck in the same ways
The main one is that inside the rotating handle there’s a super slick compressible plastic thrust washer taking the load, once the skewer starts to bite that washer makes it feel like you’re suddenly using a finer thread pitch to clamp with. Normally with a bolt-on skewer you start bending the 6mm allen wrench before it gets remotely tight, but these feel very different despite the stubby handle.
I don’t think they get tighter than an internal cam QR. The mating interfaces are chunkier than most though, which might effect a stiffness difference.
[quote=Andrew_Squirrel]I wonder if I could use something like this instead of the silver clamp: [/quote]
I did a strip of duct tape, zip ties, more duct tape
It’s very ugly
I just found this a second ago. No idea how/when that happened but I’m significantly more bummed about this than I am about the chainstay. At least that was white. Good luck trying to fix this.
