Giro Weekend - Catching up on Projects

The Saturday Giro Ride heading out on Lakeshore Drive

The only thing predictable about the weather around here lately is that it will be hot and humid. If you happen to be underneath one of the randomly located rain showers, it's slightly less of the former and a lot more of the latter. There was actually considerably less rain, at least where I happened to be, than I'd expected, though, so that was good. I had a long list of little projects I was hoping to get done over the weekend, so I knew from the outset it was going to be a double Giro Ride weekend for me.

Paola hanging out at the back of
the Giro group probably
wondering what she'd gotten
herself into

I'd heard from an incoming Tulane business school student from Mexico who was starting an exchange semester a couple of days earlier. She was interested in doing the Giro on Saturday, so I sent her all of the usual information, including a Strava link, so she'd know what she was getting into. She had just brought her TT/Tri bike but seemed confident enough about riding in the group. I arrived at Starbucks Saturday morning around 6:30 as usual, and a few minutes later a car, I assume an Uber or something, pulled up and Paola and her bike emerged. I introduced myself and a after a while Noel and all of the usual suspects started arriving. Paola and Noel got to talking in Spanish, so that was good. Anyway, as the group rolled along Lakeshore Drive I dropped back and warned Paola that it was going to get really fast as soon as we came down the second overpass onto Hayne Blvd. It did. In fact, it was a bit faster than usual. That was the last I saw or her, but looking back on Strava I could see that she hung in pretty well until, near the end of Hayne, the speed surged up to 32 mph. It turned out to be a really fast Giro Ride, averaging over 26 mph with a 34 mph maximum out to Venetian Isles. On the way back there was yet another flat, this time Brian Bourgeois, on Bullard. I swear, the Giro has about a 25% chance of making it down Lake Forest and Bullard without a flat lately. I wish the city would re-open the service road.

You can never have enough socket sets.

So after getting home I set about cleaning out the garage so that I could at least contemplate starting to work on the old Triumph. Lots of leaves and stuff blows in under the garage door, and there was a fair amount of other stuff in there that needed to be thrown out or cleaned up or just re-located. The best way to clean it out is with the leaf-blower, actually, so I put on a dust mask and blew out all of the accumulated dust, leaves, and even one dead mummified rat. Once it was cleaned out a bit I took a look under the hood and noticed that the coolant level seemed really low, and since I had some right there, I poured about half a gallon into the radiator before I noticed the steady stream of it running across the garage floor. The end of one of the heater lines had broken where it was attached to the rubber tubing. On the plus side, both carburetor pistons were free and I was able to turn the engine slightly with a wrench on the alternator nut, so at least I know the engine isn't frozen (there's lots of oil, so that's a plus). So I called it a day on that project.

Well, it was more than just a fuse.

I'd received some little fuses I'd ordered from Radio Shack for the NOBC P/A system that blew when we were in Jackson the prior week when it had gotten wet from a sudden rainstorm and Kenny unplugged and re-plugged the speakers while the power was on. The little fuse had blown and I was hoping that with everything dried out I could just replace it and all would be well. No such luck. As soon as I powered it on with the new fuse, it blew. Guess that will require a trip over to Galaxy Electronics to find out what the damage was. So with project 2 on hold, I loaded the big old bike case that I hadn't actually used for the trip to Olympia back into the car and took it back to University Square where TUCA "HQ" is. From there I went over to Lowes so I could make a couple of spare keys to the garage door since I'll likely be leaving tools and stuff in there as I start working on the GT-6. While I was there I decided to pick up a nice little Craftsman socket wrench set. It's been so long since I worked on an English car that I couldn't find many SAE sockets any more. Then, on the way home I stopped at O'Reily auto parts to get a few feet of heater hose and some hose clamps.

Not too bad for a year and a half or so.

That evening I broke down and removed the tape from the Bianchi's handlebar, somewhat afraid of what I would find underneath. Surprisingly, there wasn't much corrosion. I have a replacement 3T Ergosum handlebar on hand, so I'll probably go ahead and replace it anyway. The real reason, though, was to replace all of the brake and derailleur cables. They're actually working pretty well, but the rear brake cable housing is basically snapped off where it goes into the frame at the head tube ferrule. I'll probably tackle the rest of that project tonight.

The Sunday Giro Ride was considerably more tame than Saturday's had been, which is to say the average speed on the way out was a only 25.8 mph.  We weren't even to Chef, however, when the rain started. As has been typical lately, it was a short rain shower, but of course enough to get everyone fully soaked. By the time we were near the end of Chef Highway the street was dry. After the turnaround, I rolled past most of the group that was hanging out under the tree as usual. After a while a little group formed and we rode together waiting for the main group to overtake us, which surprisingly never happened. It turned out there had been a flat and a long delay somewhere on Chef Highway, so our little group rode all the way back without ever seeing anyone from the main group.

There's a significant rain threat in the forecast for the next couple of days, although I got in a nice easy Monday recovery ride this morning, and as of noon it still  hasn't rained despite the threatening sky. Tomorrow we're hoping to staff the Off-campus Move-in Fair in the vacant lot across from The Boot. Any significant rain is probably going to cancel that, however, so it's a wait-and-see thing right now. Then on Wednesday it move-in day for the new students on the uptown campus. I was hoping to get some help from whatever TUCA riders are in town but it's not looking like that's going to happen. I have a ton of USAC national championship brochures and some other stuff, so I may end up leaving that with Adam from Bicycle World who always has a tent in front of Bruff Commons for move-in day.