To the Shop

It's sunrise season for the morning rides

A couple of weeks ago I put on a new chain, which I try to do every 2,500-3,000 miles. Every time I do that, I listen carefully the next morning when I go out to ride, and check to see if the new chain is skipping on the more worn cogs, which are usually the 14 and 15 in my case. What I heard, and felt, was a little different and I knew immediately what it was. I'd been looking around for replacement chainrings for my older 11-speed Campi crankset without much luck. They made those particular ones for only a couple of years before changing the inner ring so that they were threaded, thus doing away with the "nut" part of the chainring bolts. A couple of years after that they went to the newer 4-pin crankset with the smaller bolt circle. I could get the threaded type chainrings, but then I'd need the bolts as well, and with the chainrings were generally in the $100 and up price range - each - so I'd been reluctant. Anyway, it was getting obvious that something had to be done since I could now hear all those wasted watts every time I pushed on the pedals. Last week I just happened upon an eBay listing where a shop was obviously getting rid of some of the older Campi cranksets, and at $200 for the whole crankset, with bearings and chainrings, it looked like a great deal and easy solution. So on Monday evening I went down to the basement to do what I thought would be a really easy and simple crankset replacement. Unbolt the single bolt holding the two halves of the crank together, pull the old cranks off, clean things up a bit, put the new cranks on, re-install the bolt and torque to spec. Easy-peasy, right?  Well things were going fine until I pulled off the non-drive side crank and heard the sound of metal pieces falling on the floor. The "wavy washer" was broken into pieces and the bearing on that side was completely worn out. I'd noticed some play in the crankset, so I wasn't too surprised about the bearing, but the wavy washer situation was going to be a bit of a problem since that's something that comes with the BB30 cups, not with the crankset. I figured that under the circumstances I might need new cups as well, so I called Adam at Bicycle World and rushed over there with the bike before they closed at 6 pm. to see if perhaps they had a washer lying around or something. Not surprisingly, they didn't, so I left the bike and the crankset with them so they could order the appropriate parts and put it all back together since I'm a little reluctant to use the wooden block and hammer method of pressing in bearing cups with a carbon frame. Anyway, looks like I'll be riding the old Orbea for a while until that all gets sorted.

Here we go again.....

It's that time of year when the early morning rides feature sometimes spectacular sunrises, either on the lakefront for the WeMoRi, or along the levee bike path. It's also the peak of Hurricane Season, and sure enough, there's a tropical wave heading in this general direction that has rather suddenly gotten a lot of attention. Nobody's predicting it to be a major hurricane, if indeed it even gets that strong, but then again it's still a long way out and this time of year these things can blow up really quickly. The track models are kind of all over the place, which is to be expected, but at the moment it's looking like we could see some impact around the weekend. Or maybe not. Who knows?

The 6 am Tuesday and Thursday rides have been kind of different lately. Some of the riders have been going pretty hard from the start, but then turning back either at Williams Blvd. or The Dip, leaving just one or two to do the whole distance out to Ormond. Although that makes the average speed slower, it definitely increases the amount of work! With a bigger group, I might be taking a pull once every two or three miles, but with only two, it's obviously much more frequent. I guess that's a good thing, although I've ended up alone for the last six or seven miles a few times and when I'm alone I usually have trouble pushing myself as hard as I should. Yesterday I ended up with just Dave after the Dip, and although we pushed pretty hard out to Ormond, after we turned around we were in conversational mode most of the way back, and then I was solo after he turned back to go home.

This morning's WeMoRi seemed fairly fast, but I wasn't feeling very aggressive and was just following wheels most of the time. I can definitely feel the difference riding the Orbea, which currently has 25 mm Gravel King tires on it. Hopefully the Bianchi will be back in action fairly soon. We had the Tulane Cycling introductory meeting on Tuesday and had a few new members sign up, so that was good. They're gearing up now for Six Gap in a few weeks and I guess I'll be riding that again, possibly setting another record slow time. If it's not looking like rain I'll probably try and use the new carbon wheels just to see how they fare. Will the aero advantage on the flats and downhills outweigh the extra climbing weight?