Brentani’s Cycling Blog

The next source of much contention on the new bike: wheels. My current wheels (Ritchey WCS Protocols) suck ass. Well, sort of. They haven’t been too bad, but i have broken nipples on 3 occasions, and recently ran over a nail that put a hole in the rim. The bike shop gave the go ahead to ride on the rims with the hole, but I really don’t trust the alloy nipples any more (in the back, anyway). All in all, these are not wheels I want to rely too heavily on. But, they did have the nice advantage of being both cheap and relatively light (around 1500 grams). So, lets just say in an ideal world, I’d like a wheel that I can use on both bikes. And, given that this bike will be used off-road and on some bumpy terrain, I’d like something sturdy. And I want something light since I’m using these for hill climbing. And cheap (meaning, also, that I only want ONE set of wheels for all this – I mean, in an ideal world, I’d get new race wheels for the current bike and a pair of handbuilt training wheels, and then do the same for the new bike for shimano hubs. Like maybe 2 pairs Reynolds KOMs or 303s, and 2 sets of ultegra/record hubs w/ open pro rims…yeah, not happening until I get a real job and University profs start making over 6 figures).

New bike will be, for reasons stated in previous posts, sramano. So here are some options:

1. Handbuilt DT Swiss with swappable freehubs could be run on both bikes. with the right rims, and the right spokes, this could conceivably be both light and durable. Cheap? No.
2. Reynolds with swappable freehubs. The Solitudes fit two of the criteria. They are cheap (especially with the team deal!) and they’re pretty light (around 1500). Unfortunately, they don’t seem much different from the Ritchey’s and I’m afraid they might end up having the same sorts of nipple popping problems, etc.
3. Ultegra hubs w/ open pro rims. I can get a good deal on these, and they’d nice and strong. Weight would be within range (though I’m not sure what the exact weight would be) and I would not be able to use these on my current bike.

And now, what I think my decision actually is. (drum roll…) Mavic Ksyriums. I can get a good deal on these (not through competitive cyclist, btw, they just have nice pictures). I can get an even better deal on the Equipes. (Or, they’re cheaper, whether it’s a better deal remains to be seen.) According to gewilli, they’re used a lot in cross, so they’re durable. Mark on our team is a big fan, and he’s at least 50 pounds heavier than I am. Elites are 1550 grams, Equipes around 1750. That makes the Elites LIGHT in my book, and the Equipes aren’t too shabby either. And Mavic sells a replacement freehub body as well, so can run this on either bike if I get the freehub! win, win, win. The only question now (assuming someone isn’t going to rain on this parade and tell me that the Kysriums aren’t all they’re cracked up to be) is whether to go with the Equipes or Elites. The weight difference is enough and the price difference isn’t enough that I’m leaning towards the Elites. But if the weight savings on the Elites comes at the cost of durability, then I’d have to think more seriously about the Equipes. Anyone care to chime in on the relative durability of the two wheels? Any other advantages/disadvantages I should know about??

Oh, and I’m going to rebuild the Ritchey rear wheel with Brass so that I’ll hopefully have a decent and more durable wheel for general riding on my current bike.

For Khalid and Marcus, here’s another idea:

I got out the paint templates and colored pencils today while Jude was playing with some blocks and put a couple of ideas down on paper. After toying with the idea of doing orange and green (the colors of a jersey I picked up in Prague several years ago…really nice) I’ve about decided to stick with the same colors on my current bike, but in a different formation. For those that don’t remember, that is orange, baby blue, and dark blue for the lettering. These two are basically the same, with orange and baby blue inverted. The inspiration for this bike came from this one that was just featured on cyclingnews. That should make Khalid happy. Except no fade between the colors. (I don’t love that anyway.) I didn’t do a great job (since my pencils weren’t really sharp enough) of drawing the transitions between the colors, although picture number two is definitely better in that regard. They should be sort of parabolic curves, coming to points at the sides of the tubes. (Hopefully Brian won’t tell me that’s a complete pain in the ass.) Enjoy!

I was going to post this in response to Doug’s comment on my last post, but figured it’s interesting enough to get it’s own post. My main two reasons for not wanting to swap front (and rear, for that matter) derailleurs are twofold: 1. I’m cheap, and I don’t want to buy two components, 2. I don’t like taking apart the chain. Looking at the road derailleurs that’s not a problem, since they have screws to slip the chain out. No such luck with the XX front derailleur.

I just stumbled onto this. I don’t care about the adapter itself, but it seems from what they’re saying, the XX cranks should work fine with the Force derailleur. The only question now is whether we can find the sweet spot for mounting the braze-on bracket so that it accommodates a maximum large front ring of 50 and a minimum of 39. Talking to Brian, we’re already planning on using a bracket with a wider range than what they normally put on a road bike.

Just when I thought I had all hills in the Providence area mapped out…I found another one today. I was just finishing moderately difficult 30 mile ride. I had planned on going back via the Blackstone bike path, but ice diverted me elsewhere. So I decided to check out a little hill I had seen a while back. It’s right next to Whipple. There’s a little dead-end street named Hill Street, and I’d noticed a little path or driveway going up at the end. Not knowing whether it was a street or just a driveway, I’d always left it to investigate another day. Approaching it, I still wasn’t sure, but I asked a guy sitting on his porch and he assured me it was a “road” and I could go up it. It’s no wider than a bike path and only fits one car. Surface is pretty bad, but not bad enough to affect climbing. It’s also pretty short and just comes to an unsatisfying dead end. It kicks up steeply at the beginning, but really isn’t very difficult. The map below is my best guess. Veloroutes was showing something like 25% for the first section of Hill St, which is definitely wrong, so I just left if off. it might be 5% at most.

To update on the last post, it seems my plan of swapping XX and compact cranks is moderately workable. The confusion was due to the fact that I had asked James whether I could swap cranks and use the same Bottom Bracket. (That, for the record, might be possible if you add spacers to the road BB, but the internal sleeve would no long seal and you wouldn’t be able to run that configuration in wet or muddy conditions. But since adding the spacers involves taking off the cups anyway, there’s really no benefit to not swapping road cups for mountain cups anyway.)

The only bit of a sticking point is now on the front derailleur. I’d rather not have to buy/swap the FD’s and James thought the road derailleur would work (spacing seems to be the same between XX and rival cranks), it just might be a messy shift. So, the plan there is to just give it a shot. I’ll start with the XX and Rival cranks and a rival front derailleur. If the shifting is acceptable with the rival FD and the XX crank, I’ll stick with it. If not, I’ll just have to swap the derailleurs too. I’ll have to do some checking, however to be sure that the braze on bracket is in the right spot for the direct-mount version of the XX Front derailleur, or use clamp-on front derailleurs, something I’m not particularly keen on. Otherwise, my plan from the last post seems to be workable.

One of the benefits of being friends with the cyclingnews technical editor is that apparently I can have him shoot down any dumb idea I come up with. My dumb idea, which I probably would have just written here- and spread all sorts of misinformation – was to swap between the new SRAM XX crank (likely in the 39-26 configuration) and a regular compact crank. This was going to give me 4 different configurations to run, depending on the terrain. Unfortunately, this was ignoring the fact that Mountain cranks are designed around 73mm spacing, as opposed to 68 for road. So no dice. Since I liked the gearing options that I got from that hypothetical setup I’ll run through it anyway, and hopefully find another way to get close to something similar:

The cornerstone of this whole setup is still the XX rear derailleur. By all accounts, this derailleur works with road shifters, and can handle cassettes up to a whopping 36 teeth.

Setup 1: Compact Crank, 11-28 cassette. This would be similar, though noticeably lower than my current road setup on the Circle A. It would give me the same top end, but give me almost the same low gear that I have used for Okemo (34-29…keep in mind, that gear is slightly too big for me at Okemo) This would be a setup that I could ride in most situations. It would be fine for riding and even racing in RI, and for the dirt roads in RI (with the possible exception of Woonsocket Hill Road).

Setup 2: Compact Crank, 11-36. This still gives me the same top end, but gets me lower-than-1:1. Ideal for things like Lincoln Gap, or Okemo (because of the flat section at the beginning). And just generally for tackling odd and unknown fire-tower roads and the like (which is the real reason I want this bike to begin with.)

Setup 3: XX 39-26, 11-28. This ends up being very similar to setup 2 except that I lose the top end, and gain much closer gear spacing. This would likely be the setup I’d want to use for most, if not all, the New England hill climbs. however, it’s close enough to setup 2, that I could probably do without it. especially given that the XX 11-36 is actually LIGHTER than the mid-range SRAM road cassettes.

Setup 4: XX crank and 11-36. gives me a low gear of 26-36. I can probably disregard this setup in terms of planning the bike around it. I mean, I really want to take this bike up Scanuppia and Mauna Kea, which are the two places where these gears are probably necessary. BUT, there are other ways to achieve this, and I can burn that bridge when I get to it. The one thing to add, however, is that it isn’t as simple (as it was for Ascutney last year or it would be for Washington) to just put a single-ring on the bike. I’d need something that I could at least ride comfortably around on the flats. (that’s where the 39 on the XX comes in handy.) But for that, I suppose I could even construct myself a “super compact” 42-26 (I even have the parts for such a crank lying around), as long as I either used a clamp-on front derailleur or made sure the braze-on bracket placement would accommodate both a 50-34 and a 42-26 setup (but that was going to be an issue with the XX crank anyway).

I think I may have answered my question. so for those of you (probably all of you) who zoned out. to sum up: XX rear derailleur, 11-28 or 11-36 cassette, compact crank, and (for extreme situations) a hobbled together 42-26 “super compact.” yes?

This blog has been languishing for a bit too long now. Given it is winter, there’s not too much to report anyway, since I don’t think anyone cares to hear that I climbed Jenckes for the bajillionth time. However, at Christmas I directed a portion of my Christmas money to Circle A for the new cross bike mentioned previously. It remains to be seen whether I’ll be able to pay for it when I finally make it to the top of the list (sometime in May), but I’m starting to think about how I’m going to build the thing up, so I’ll start using this blog to go through some of my ruminations.

Today’s topic: what I’ve already decided.

1. Deda Zero tubing. I’m kind of just assuming. If Brian recommends something else I’d probably defer to his expertise. I had been considering stainless for the chainstays, but have now decided it isn’t really worth the added expense, just to protect the paint job. More importantly, I’ve been unable to come up with a paint scheme I like built around the stainless stays.
2. Cyclo-Cross bike, but set up to match road geometry as much as possible. This isn’t really a problem since many, if not most cross bikes these days are pretty close to road geometry. In general, however, I’ll be making most decisions about the bike based on how it will ride on the road, with skinny tires, and trying to match my fit on my current Circle A. The main places I’ll be using this bike are for long rides with huge climbs (see below and presumably many an upcoming post about gearing), some hillclimb races, long rides with extended dirt sections (things like D2R2, but also riding the back roads near Carrie’s parents’ A-Frame in Maine), and unpaved (or partially unpaved) climbs like Mount Sunapee or (some day, maybe…) Mauna Kea.
3. Ritchey WCS Carbon Fork. Painted of course. the WCS features one of the shortest rakes, which will help the mission to make the bike as road-bike-like as possible.
4. Gearing. Nothing decided in terms of actual equipment to be used, but I want low gears, and I want to be able to get them easily and still have a bike ridable for a long ride. i.e., let’s say I want to do a 50 mile ride including Sunapee. According to Doug, I’ll need knobby tires for the climb and at least 1:1. There are many ways to accomplish this and I’m sure I’ll discuss them all over the next couple weeks. I’d also like to be able to do Scaunuppia on this bike some day, a hill which likely requires lower gears than anything on the planet (for the first 3 KM, it AVERAGES 24.5%). Getting there is likelier than you might think, seeing as it’s only about 2 hours from Venice by train, and odds are pretty good I’ll need to do some archive work at the Luigi Nono Archive before my dissertation is done.

As always, I’m happy to hear your suggestions!

Over Thanksgiving weekend, I had intended to drive out to Western Connecticut while spending the weekend in Manchester and hit a few hills I had heard about in the Northwestern corner. However, I had a mild cold, my toddler had a mild cold and was having some erratic sleep and my wife was having a full on “man cold,” so I found sitting on the couch and eating Pho to be much more attractive options. While I was on the couch I did manage to find some more hills in the area, which got me even more excited about going out this weekend. There had been some discussion of the “meanest mile” in Connecticut on Doug’s recent post about the meanest in MA. The most emphatic post from fredzilla said that Dibble Hill was the meanest. Based on my calculations I was skeptical. Valley Falls/Hatch Hill, though not quite a mile averages a significantly steeper grade and scores 383 vs. Dibble Hill’s 351. Swaller Hill in the same area averages 11.6% (equal to Hatch Hill) for exactly a mile (BRENTACOL: 405) and Great Hill Road, which averages 9.7% nets a BRENTACOL of 416. This means that Swaller Hill is the steepest mile in CT, but as we all know, steepest does not equal hardest. And Great Hill would be the “hardest” according to BRENTACOL rating, but one never knows if the rating/gradient map is accurate until you see the hill in person.

Last weekend, another family discussion found me two more hills to try, which then led me to find a couple more, including Swaller and Great Hill. My brother-in-law is a little obsessed with haunted places and was discussing an abandoned (and off-limits) ghost town in CT named Dudleytown. Some suggest the town’s demise was hastened by pig demons and that the residents went mad, died, etc. Wikipedia is much more sober, but I was intrigued nonetheless. Ghosts or not, abandoned towns and roads are always a draw for me. Looking at the map, the road that gets you closest to the settlement is the sinister sounding Dark Entry Road, and what do you know? It’s a hill, and a pretty decent one it seems. Google maps also showed a road going up Bald Mountain, which looked suspiciously like it might be dirt, as did the Eastern approach, Dudleytown Road. Given that the weather forecast was good for this weekend, and Western CT gets considerably more snow than the rest of the state, I figured this weekend was my last chance until the spring thaw.

Unfortunately, the forecast turned to rain Saturday, which then became snow. Shit. Hoping it would thaw quickly (the roads were already clear in Manchester by 9:00) I decided to head out there anyway. Roads were decent most of the way and I thought I might just sneak in a decent ride. But as I neared Cornwall, the road conditions got much worse. I passed Dibble Hill, and it looked pretty snowy, so I thought I’d check it out in the car and then ride it if it wasn’t too horrible. It was quickly apparent I wasn’t riding Dibble Hill today. When I was almost near the top, I saw a wall I was not expecting, and wasn’t even sure the car would make it up with the snow so I turned around before the steep stuff started. The 25% on the gradient map is for real. The case for Dibble Hill as hardest in CT was improving.

My route was supposed to start just up the road at route 7. I drove up Route 7 to Swaller Hill. The conditions were better on that hill, but still pretty messy. That road seems easier than Dibble Hill Road, but it’s of course impossible to tell. Thinking my day was over, I figured I should at least drive down to Dark Entry and see if I could find some pig demons. By the time I hit Cornwall Bridge, the roads were pretty good, and when I drove by Dark Entry, I was surprised to find it was clear, at least at the bottom. I parked, and rode up it. That’s a nasty little climb. According to BRENTACOL it is slightly harder than Blue Hill and slightly shorter. I agree. It’s gradient is very inconsistent and there are some small sections of really steep (probably 20% or so) that really hurt. I wanted to shift into the 24, but I couldn’t get the chain to drop down, so I was mashing in 36-26.

From there I rode up Warren Hill Road, which is the biggest hill in terms of elevation gain in the area (894 feet). Nice hill, with some steep sections. On the way back down, I turned up Bald hill and was pleasantly surprised to find it was paved all the way to the top. And that one is real kicker as well. Combining Bald Hill (which is 1/2 mile long) with the first section of Warren Hill and it might be in the conversation for meanest mile in CT. I was happy to call it a day and drive to check out the other hills.

• Dudleytown Road: Over on the other side, I drove up Dudleytown Road. This one seems like a really nasty hill, and approaches the abandoned Dudleytown from the east. Very pretty and narrow, but paved. The pavement ends at or near the top, which is where I turned around. It didn’t look like there was much more up left at that point. Veloroutes data is horribly inaccurate so don’t pay attention to the gradients or the BRENTACOL rating, but you can take a look at the map, if you like here.
• Great Hill Road: Not as hard as BRENTACOL says, because that section of 23% and 19% is pretty definitely bogus. Still nothing to scoff at.

I’ll be back in the spring.

After two attempts I finally managed to do Harmony Hill. I had high hopes for this one, which were eventually completely dashed. According to the “similar hills” function on brentacol, Harmony Hill should be just slightly harder than Waterman (see comparison), which is a fairly difficult hill. According to Google Maps, Harmony Hill Road runs between Douglas Hook and Absoloma Hill Road. On Monday I rode down Douglas Hook before I finally realized that I had passed Harmony Hill a long ways back, and that it was an unmarked dirt road. Great, I thought. Maybe this is finally the difficult dirt road hill I’ve been looking for. So I came back today, turned onto the road. It is not really appropriate for a road bike. Lots of soft dirt and ruts. I ended up walking quite a bit and turned back after maybe a mile. (It would be pretty nice on a cyclocross bike.) From there, I went back to Absoloma Hill Road and figured I’d just start from that end, which is the top of the climb. At that end, it turns out Harmony Hill Road is actually just an entryway into Harmony Hill School. It might be possible to find the dirt road on the other side of the school, but I wasn’t in the mood to find out. So I turned around and went back up the “hill.” I know a hill in a city center will always seem steeper than a comparable one in the country, but I’d say there’s no way that Harmony Hill Road is as difficult as Waterman, and the 20% shown at the beginning is definitely wrong. And of course, the climb is paved, so you don’t even get that added challenge. Oh well.