Big Bikes

Built to Spill (The Blood of my Competitors)

Whoa I drink pots and pots and pots and
pots of strong black coffee
Trying to keep my sleepy soul awake
But the sleepiness still comes along
and when it does its fast and strong
I end up with a bad case of the shakes

- Jared Mees and The Grown Children

Not much time to write. Spent the day building up The Superfly SS and then riding it despite the fact that I have a nagging shoulder injury (Fine! I'll do the frickin' dishes shoulder injury). It's like the fat kid said after he ate his baby sister "I couldn't help myself".

Ran into a snag with the 140mm rear rotor. The caliper mounting system doesn't allow the caliper to move far enough down to fully engage the rotor. I found that if I placed the wheel as far back in the drop out as possible the caliper/rotor relationship was fine. This isn't ideal though, it would prevent me from swapping out chainrings and cogs at will, I would be locked into one chainring/cog combo. Wouldn't work for this gear ratio geek.

As far as I can see there is no way to run a 140mm rotor on this frame (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong) so I threw a 160mm rotor and the appropriate adapter on and I was ready to roll.

The official weigh in - 20.5 Lbs. Kind of nuts. That's three pounds less than my last two race bikes and two pounds heavier than my road bike (I don't have a light road bike).

The pink bottle cage. Now Precious Thing, you are mine, all mine.

Below. Big Bike, shot so monumentally. DT RWS Thru-Bolt. I'm going to do a full on, gushing report tomorrow but I'll give you this preview - the RWS skewer worked great, absolutely flawless. It did not budge under heavy torquing in a large gear. It works like a SUPER Wing Nut. The fact that it works at all is the truly amazing part.

More on the conversion to this system HERE.

XTR Crank. I went there. No holding back on this build.

Avid Juicy Ultimates. They feel better than clean sheets after a bath.

Another snag I hit (a pretty foreseeable one) was the tires. I tried to mount up my new Bontrager XR1s Tubeless. They are non-tubeless tires. It did not work. I may try again. They are a super-light tire with a great tread for fast, dry conditions. Problem is, I won't race non-tubeless. Just won't. They'll make a great training tire if I can't make the tubeless thing work on my next attempt.

I wound up using the Jones XRs. They're a great all around, high volume tire and they mounted up Tubeless supah-easy.

Like I said, stay tuned for a full first ride report tomorrow. Thank you for reading the all Superfly all the time News.