Killin' The Creaky

Creaking bikes are the bane of a bike mechanic's existence. Well, one of the banes of his existence. Bike mechanics have lots of banes of their existences. Kids trying out bells, ringing them incessantly on a busy Saturday, that's a bane. Kids crying in the shop anytime. Kids....basically bike mechanics hate kids. They hate installing training wheels and baby seats. Baby trailers are their worst nightmare...

but creaking does suck.

I'll ignore a creak on my own bike until it begins to drown out the Danzig on my ipod. Oh, did I mention that I ran my ipod through both the washer and the dryer? Yup. I was sitting upstairs going "what the hell is that awful clunking?" My ipod dying a horrible death, that's what it was. For a few days afterward I would walk around saying "God! I can't belie—no, no I can believe I did that. I'm an idiot, it was only a matter of time." And that's why the creak that developed on my new bike the, Superfly with the XXs was really buggin' me, no ipod to mask the noise. I hate working on my own bikes, free time is riding time, but this was too much to take, the creak was ridiculous.

This isn't a creaky bike, it's a pretty flower, a Lady Slipper to be exact.

I love seeing Lady Slippers on a ride.

Now listen up, cuz I'm wicked technical and shit. I'm like the love child of a three way between PVD, Todd Downs, and Lennard Zinn. But I'm pretty sure any one of those three dudes would claim that the other two were responsible for my creation. Hey! It's really not as abstract as it sounds. When those guys use the term "making babies," they really mean "building babies," because they are more than capable of doing so. Mecha-Babies.

The Bottom bracket is the guilty party when it comes to the crime of creaking 99.99999 and a one percent of the time. I always start there, no mucking about, just pull it out, re-grease it and re-install. I go nuts when I have to stand by and listen to anyone in a shop telling a customer "Hmm, let's see...maybe it's the pedals...let's tighten the pedals and see what happens. Oh, it wasn't the pedals, hmm, well maybe it's the saddle rails, oh, nope, not the saddle rails, oh well, how about the chainring bolts..." It makes me want to take a socket wrench with a BBT-22 on the end, smash him in the head with it, and then pull out the bottom bracket, grease it and re-install it like he should have to begin with.

Wow, I never get all angsty about mechanical stuff, it feels kinda good.

But here's the funny thing, it wasn't the BB on the Superfly that was all a-creakin', not this time. I had taken out the BB more than once, greased the living hell out of the crank bolt, the spline on the crank arm and BB spindle. The Truvativ system that Sram XX uses is not one I have put through the paces, so I had no idea what part of the assembly might have been causing the ruckus. Today I even went out and bought some plumber's teflon tape, always a sure fire way to kill the creaky, not that I usually have to go that far on my own bikes. "You need the tape for gas or water?" "Neither, it's for a bike." Whoa, was the guy at the hardware store impressed. No, no I don't really think he was.

So I T-taped the living bejesus outta that mammer jammer and...

CREAK - CREAK -CRRR-fuckin-EAK!

You have got to be kidding me! OK, process of elimination, we're going deep, we're going thorough, when we're done the only thing that could be causing this is either a some issue with frame construction (like the old internal tabs on a creaky, creak Cannondale. Fuckers) or a crack. I noticed my King Cage (not a sponsor, just awesome) was just kissing the band clamp on the front derailleur. So I spaced that out with a couple presta valve nuts, those little knurled round guys. Still creaky. I pulled off the front derailleur and applied some carbon assembly compound to the clamp (like I should have to begin with). Still a-creakin'. I applied grease to the inside of my seat collar and more assembly compound to my carbon seatpost. Oh ya, still all creaky. I even hit the saddle rails with some loctite while I was at it, it works, when that's the problem, but that wasn't the problem.

I went after the rear wheel, and that's when I noticed something — when I squeezed the crank arm to the chainstay with my hand, an action that should have produced creaking if the creaking were indeed emanating from that region, but it didn't. Now we were getting somewhere...I said "Rear wheel, what do you want from me!" And the my rear wheel said "Hey vagenius, try using a different quick release, maybe one that's not all wiggly and stupid, and made out titanium." "Naw rear wheel! What kind of asinine crap is that, that ain't...gonna...work?"

It did work. It was a fifteen second fix all along.

And this. This is a Dunkin Donuts in Medford, MA that is closed because of the water main break. If you held your breath and ran from one Dunkin Donuts to the next, you could traverse all of Medford Massachusetts easily. Seeing a closed Dunkin Donuts on a Monday afternoon in Medford is like seeing a Chick-fil-A open on a Sunday anywhere.
(That one's for you McQueen.)

zzz

-t

No Seriously,
Who Did Let The Dogs Out?

Because I have half a mind to sue them.


Somehow I managed to finish the Superfly HTG build last night. (Somehow...I didn't sleep that's how. No some to it.) It went pretty well. It was tough getting used to the fact that the 5mm bondhus-end Allen wrench which generally resides in my right pocket when I'm doing bike-mechanicky-type-things was as useful as a chest-hair trimmer at Tom Selleck's house on this project. (I don't know, chest hair-trimmer...just came to mind, like a bolt from the blue.) Ya see, all of the Sram XX bits utilize a Torx bolt head, a T-25 to be precise. So Mr. T-25 booted Mr. 5mm Bondhus and that was that.

It was like when Daniel Craig took Pierce Brosnan's place as James Bond, no one was complaining really. Everyone knew that the new guy was superior in every way. Except for Remington Steele fans; they were pissed. They love 5mm Bondhus Allen wrenches...wait, what were we talking about?

Oh yes, Superfly HTG. So I did get out for a couple hours on it today and it was f—in' brilliant.





Heading out from the house: I love this time of year. For about four days in the spring Somerville and Medford Massachusetts don't look like total crap. By next week I'll be grumbling and threatening to move to North Carolina again.


I don't know if it's a symptom of getting old or what, but I do spend more time stopping and looking at things during rides these days. Especially pretty things. I just realized, as I'm sitting here writing this, that moments before I took this photo, like maybe two or three moments before, I was attacked by two Doberman Pinschers. I came out into a small park in Lexington, and a guy had two brown Dobermans, off leash. I could tell it was going to go badly by the way he kind of panicked when he saw me. He had some electronic device in his hand, presumably some shocky-torture thing to deter the Lads from devouring cyclists and children, but it wasn't working, unless of course it was meant to anger the dogs further. He was clicking the thing frantically as the dogs surrounded me. Being the dog-loving dope that I am, I held out hope that they weren't going to get all crazy on me: "Hey guys — HEY!" They were really going for me, teeth gnashing at my calves. I pulled my leg away just as one of them brought his jaws together with a sharp SNAP! I swung my bike at them and lost it, just freaking lost it: "GET THE F— AWAY FROM ME! I WILL KICK YOUR F—ING TEETH IN!" No joke, it was pure fight or flight and I was not "flighting." My cathartic, tourettes-like freak out caused the dogs to back off. The owner was stammering: "I got 'em, I got 'em!" "You ain't got shit! Get those things on a leash before they eat somebody's kid!"

Wow, I was mad. Rarr. But as usual, I kept riding (all that adrenaline felt great...until I cracked) and forgot all about it. I did tell M about it when I got home, but I did't get worked up then and I'm not getting worked up now, in fact, I'm falling asleep in my Harpoon Celtic Ale.



The other day I was riding up the totally sick Minuteman bike path when I had to stop to pee. I have a usual spot I where I duck off into the meadows, but there were some folks hovering around that area, so I turned down a different path, and found the trail pictured above. And there was a Superfly stuck between the V of that tree and a decomposing helmeted and lycra clad body in the ditch below, so I took the bike and didn't call the cops, and that's how I got this sweet, sweet bike. That's not entirely true. What I found (after I peed) was a really cool trail along a ridgeline. It only went for about a hundred meters, but I was wishing it went all day.


A couple days later I was riding with my buddy Colin. (Not Rooters, a different Colin, a hairier Colin.) I mentioned the awesome trail I "discovered." He informed me that he and his brother built the trail a billion years ago. Isn't that funny? Well I thought it was funny. Not funny ha-ha, but funny heh, or maybe funny nasal-exhalation-noise. Alright, forget it, I'm going to go talk to someone who "gets me," like this door knob or that cat.



I know this is going to make The Todd Downs' head spin like Linda Blair's in The Exorcist, but something I didn't have at the house was an Avid bleed kit, hence the massive snarl of hydraulic brake housing. Maybe he'll forgive me since I didn't link to his...oh wow, I was going to say "since I didn't link to his dead blog," and then be a wise ass and link to his dead blog, but it seems that Mr. Downs has a new, snazzy web-type-site. Very nice, go check it out. Unlike me, he might actually have something intelligent to say, in fact, I guarantee it.

-t

Superfly HTG...
It's Alive!

The story of how I got my Superfly HTG home and some shots of the build are over on the 29er Crew Site. So get out of here and go OVER THERE.

Um...please.

-t

Hey, Look At These

While I Try to Sleep

and Stop the Bleeding in My Brain

I have nine minutes to do this...
and GO!

My conscious mind told me it was going to go on strike and let my unconscious mind take over full time if I didn't shut it down for at least seven hours tonight. We'll see how that goes. I'll no doubt be up peeing at three in the AM and wide-eyed, anxious, and a-rarin' to go make a wreck of my day by five. But I'll be in bed by 9:45 in earnest.

The above photo? That's the right stuff from Sram. Got me a clamp on derailleur, a X speed chain, and a 1 1/8 steered Rock Shox XX fork. Wow, that's a lot of X's. I will try to get the geared bike rolling at some pint...I mean point this weekend. Actually slipped there. I was thinking about how I might have to bribe someone at the shop to stay late so I can finish building the The Love Removal Machine.

Testing the waters

It was supposed to hit 85° today. It would get there eventually, but at 8:00 AM it was a chilly 53°. That didn't stop me from leaving the house dressed like it was already 85° (because I'm an idiot and I skim weather.com like it's one of Rooter's ski-racing reports). I was damn near hypothermic by the time I got down near the river. A temperature swing like that is pretty crazy for these parts.


The fact that I had to put on my stinking swamp-soaked shoes didn't help matters. My feet were cold...and they freakin' reeked.


Rocking the 20 lb. pack. I figure if I can't drop weight off my body, I'll carry more weight on my person so I will get that much stronger and be able to push the weight of a much larger man. It makes perfect sense.

It's like the whole throw the medicine ball, throw the medicine ball, throw the BASKETBALL...right through the sky light thing. I ride the heavy bike with the heavy pack and then get on the light bike with no pack and...ride it right through the sky light. That's the theory anyway. Joe Friel talks all about it on his blog, it's called "Medicine-ball-0-dization."


This photo? Maybe I'll explain what's going on here tomorrow, probably over on the 29er Crew site.

Ya, that took more than nine minutes. My brain is going to explode.

-t

I Guess I Have Angered
the Single Speed Gods

A while back, probably quite a while back, I started talking about how I would be racing on the gears this year. A couple weeks back I posted a photo of a mysterious box that had shown up on my porch, then I got sidetracked, found better, less sane things to babble about, and said nothing more about it. Well that mystery box contained my Sram XX gruppo...sort of.

I pulled out all the various, sweet-looking little bits and laid them out on the dining room table. First I noticed that I had received a IX, not a X speed chain (I'm under contract to use this vernacular when speaking of drive-trains from here on out). Then I couldn't help but notice that I had been sent a Rock Shox Monarch rear shock. This was not right, the bike I have decided to call Love Removal Machine is a hard-tail. Of course it took me a little longer to notice the direct mount front derailleur and the E2 fork (if you don't know what I'm talking about, it doesn't matter, and I'll only fall asleep while trying to explain).

It's just a box of drive-train

What I'd received was a build kit for a Superfly 100 full-suspension bike...and a 9 speed chain. I'm not sweating it at all though. I still have the Superfly Single-Speed I call Precious Thing to ride in the interim while this all gets sorted out, it's not like I'm suffering a maximum here.

My theory is that the single speed gods are pissed, and they don't want me to ride the gears this season, so they are trying to thwart the delivery of my proper geared bits. Look at the single speed god in the photo at the top of the post — he's terrifying. What's that? Oh...oops, that's a "single speed general," you say, not a single speed god. Sorry, that was the only stock photo the design department had lying around that depicted anything like a high-ranking member of the single speed pantheon. That's General Dejay Birtchside right there. My bad. Well, the design department's bad really. Maybe I'll tell them all to sleep in tomorrow, I think they're cracking up.

I've actually got a great concept for an image of a single speed god...he's got the big beard and everything. I'll tell them to get to work on that stat! Maybe I'll get to post it later in the week.

So in the meantime, while I've been waiting for the right XX parts to arrive, I have been clocking mad, I mean just plain irate miles on my single speed. Like 9 hours last week. That hurts. It hurts me anyway. Full disclosure: at least an hour and a half of those 9 hours was clocked on my Schwinn Varsity cruiser (on loan from the Todd Downs collection) and the only liquids I took in on those rides were brown in color and mood altering in entirely disparate ways.

I never feel this "in touch with the road" when I drink GU2o

XX in X

That's right, I've done gone geared for 2010. And not just geared, SRAM XX geared. That's two in the front (in my case a 26/39, SRAM has 29er specific gearing...sweet!) and ten in the rear. Whatever am I going to do with all those gears?

It's an experiment, a human experiment. Or something. Although the last time I did one of those I wound up with a prehensile superfluous nipple. But how superfluous can such a useful extra appendage be really?

I've thought this through as well as I think anything through.
That would be not all that well. Excuse me, I'll be right back. I have to go wander into the kitchen in my Snuggie (even Mr. Cool Ice likes to be warm and cozy sometimes) to make some hash browns with my Slap Chop.

An opportunity came up, it was time sensitive, I decided to douse myself with gasoline, light myself on fire, and jump off the cliff.

I struggled with the idea of going geared for a few minutes (or maybe it was seconds), then I came up with the shaky justification which allowed me to go forward with the decision. The important thing about my bike is not the number of gears it has (or doesn't have), the important thing is that it's a freakin' bike. It takes me places. I take it places, crazy stuff happens, I have new stories to tell.

I skated when I was a kid. We used to session a curb or a bank for hours. Pushing around in circles in the roughly the same space. Then I got a bike. I would ride around Wellesley College (illegally) and some other assorted town lands on my too-big orange Rockhopper with the saddle too low. There were some real woods about five miles away, over in the town of Dover, the Noanet Woodlands. I started riding over there. I don't recall ever driving over, it was always the "long haul," ten miles round trip with usually at least an hour ride in-between. I would come back shelled. I would pull a chair into a cold shower with a half-gallon of orange juice and sit there trying to stop sweating.

What was my point?

Oh ya — my bike takes me places and that's a big part of why I like it. I don't like downtime in my sports (hence my lack of interest in pretty much any mainstream sport). On a bike you're always rolling. With the right eye you can make almost any terrain exciting.

This doesn't mean I am giving up single speeding. I'll still be riding my single a ton and racing it whenever I can (hopefully "doing the double" when possible). Who knows, once the SRAM guys see how slow I am on gears, maybe they'll tell me to take a hike and I'll be back to constantly whining about improper gear choice. For the time being I'll keep the Blog subtitle "2 Dumb 4 Gears," until we see what happens out there come April.

It's actually more relaxing to think about going to a race with 20 gears at your disposal instead of one. All you have to sweat is tire choice (oh and I will be sweating it).

Don't worry, I have some great ideas as to how to make my life more interesting (miserable) even on a snazzy geared bike.

Bring on the "you're a pansy" comments. I'll have Bronski Beat cranked up so loud, I won't be able to hear you.

Transition

We got back from our no-bike-Costa Rican-honeymoon Saturday night. And while a whole lot of great stuff that is very interesting to my grandmother happened; I don't think it's really going to be of much interest to readers of The Big Bikes. So we're not going to talk about that too much. It was a tough transition coming back. We walked off the plane at Logan and we could feel the 40 MPH winds whipping through the cracks of the breezeway, coming in off the snowdrift-covered runway. I was wearing shorts, a T-Shirt, and flip flops. I was pissed, "why the fuck do we live here again?"

Imagine if Boston had nice weather and was actually a hospitable, pleasant place to live. It would be really crowded and traffic-snarled and the cost of living would be absurd. Just imagine.

No bikes were ridden in Costa Rica, but surfing was learned. Sort of. I felt it a couple times. I also felt it after I got all excited and spent an hour too many out in the hot sun trying to catch waves. That night my nose damn near fell off. I thought I was going to look like Michael Jackson in the morning. It was quite possibly one of the worst sun burns I have ever received. This kept me from surfing during our last two days in Playa Avellanas. Which was too bad. Aside from the obvious awesomeness of riding a wave, the paddling and the position you have to hold while paddling seemed like the perfect antidote to the constant hunching of cycling (or blogging). I've always been jealous of the surfer posture: head and arms back, almost behind the spine, chest out...OK, maybe I'm just jealous that their arms are bigger than my legs.

SSWC 2010 New Zealand

I was away from the internets when registration opened for SSWCs, but apparently it didn't fill up quite a fast as SSWC Durango or Napa. So I registered with no trouble yesterday. I still have no idea how I'm going to get there. I mean, when I punched my address and " New Zealand" into the Google Maps get directions box, this is what came up:

We could not calculate directions between
33 Irvington Rd, Somerville, MA 02144
and new zealand.

I start swim team this Thursday. If I work really hard maybe I can get swimming-fit enough to freestyle my way there. I couldn't find a "get swimming directions" function anywhere on the Google Maps site. I'll keep looking.

There's some crazy stuff going on over here, big changes...big changes. I'm not ready to make an official announcement, but I'll maybe drop a hint — I may have to change the subtitle of the blog for X.