Brentani’s Cycling Blog

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!