Category Archives: Main Page - Page 8

Mr K’s Day in the Peaks – RetroBike Meet

Posted by on 01/10/2009 No comments

Mr K’s Day in the Peaks came around again for another year and despite initial scepticism about numbers, around 23 vintage MTB’s turned out for the 22 mile ride in Derbyshire’s Peak District. A good day was had by all and no serious injuries were incurred. I took my Pace RC200 as it seemed the perfect choice for the terrain, plus my EWR wasn’t quite ready

The Pace has Gore RideOn cables to keep all the mud and shit out, excellent brakes and 22-32-42/11-32 gearing for all them big hills
It got ridden hard all day, getting airborne more times that I would have liked and ridden over large rocks, tree roots, loose gravel, streams and anything else that got in the way.

Lots of comments and pix can be found HERE and some great photo’s can be found HERE.

Below are a few pix of my Pace in action…

Nearing the end of the climb to the Radio Mast near Brough (Gus, me, Mark and Ned)

Amphibious Pace….

Meet the local wildlife

Mam Tor heading for Hollins Cross

Jaggers Clough

Summertime, and the living is easy…Fish are jumping, and the cotton is high

Posted by on 22/09/2009 No comments

Well almost……actually we never got much summer here but Friday was a rest day for me so to contradict the term I went out and nailed 30 miles of local trails on my Pace RC200.
Lyveden New Bield is a bizzarre thing to stumble across in the middle of knowhere (Aldwinkle St Peter) and is an unfinished Summerhouse built for Sir Thomas Tresham back in 1604. Nobody knows for sure why it never got finished but it looks very surreal in the surrounding landscape. The route took me 2 hours 45 minutes and I never saw another human on the trails, instead I watched Red Kites gliding and calling to each other in the midday heat, saw squirrels and rabbits going about their business and enjoyed the silence….

Lyveden Way Trail

Lyveden New Bield

Bearshank Track (Green Lane) – Red Kite territory

Byway near Aldwinkle

EWR Project – Phase Four

Posted by on 21/09/2009 No comments

Sorry for the lack of recent updates, have been busy and got a little sidetracked on riding bikes instead of building them

I’m still on the hunt for some NOS Mavic 231’s to lace to the NOS DX hubs I have in transit but in the meantime I’ve switched back to the Campy rims I was playing around with before. They were drilled for Presta but a little encouragement with an 8.5mm drill and now they fit my stash of Schrader tubes.

The idea with this stage of the build is primarily to find out where the bottom bracket height is as I want to re-create the exact ride experience the bike was designed for. As a result of this I have grabbed the first pair of tires that came to hand that are going to be similar in height to the end product. I don’t think it’s quite where it needs to be as it currently measures 12.5″ to center of BB axle and I think the measurement should be to the base of the shell (I’m just checking this out with Kenn and Jay from EWR). I figured I would be about 20-25mm out with these forks anyway so it’s no real surprise.

This is the first time I’ve been able to throw my leg over this bike since I bought it and its great to have gotten this far. I’m part way through setting up the brakes and next on the list after that is fitting the gear cables and chain and taking her out for a test ride

It’s bike shaped Jim, but not as we know it

The sun sets over my yard….my OWB basks for the first time 🙂

EWR Project – Phase Three and a half :-)

Posted by on 09/09/2009 2 comments

Not much to report today, ran into several problems that I need to resolve before I go any further

The tyres I had down for this are too big (certainly for the back anyway).
I bought some Mavic/DX wheels from RetroBike and when I fitted them they were very badly out of true .
So I tried a spare set of Campy/LX rims I had stashed in my shed but these were Presta drilled and all my tubes are Schrader .
Also my rear hydraulic hose is about three inches too short so I’ll have to make up some fresh hoseline and bleed the rear brakes.

All this is a drag because I was planning to take it for a test ride this Thursday in my local forest……..you don’t mind while I scream a bit do you?

I’m off to find some Zen like calm (and some more bike parts…..)

My big steel pig is putting on weight…

But doesn’t she look cool…?

NOS DX Thumbies and Magura ‘Tomac’

Overcrowded looking Answer Accu Trax

EWR Project – Phase Three

Posted by on 08/09/2009 1 comment

Finally after a few quiet weeks some progress with the EWR Project

The temporary Accu-Trax are now fitted and I want to see where the Bottom Bracket height ends up once it gets some wheels on, then take it for some test rides and see how it handles. The steerer has intentionally been left long for now so I can try out a few different stems and bar height combinations, then I will cut it again when I have picked a stem/bar height. Apologies for the poor pictures, I was losing light rapidly, wanted to avoid using the flash and the camera produces poor pix when you turn it off

Steerer/spacer mock up prior to trimming the steerer

Saw guide time!!

‘Test’ stem configuration (lots more to be cut, don’t worry!!)

Handlebars…..finally !!

 

EWR Project – Answer Accu Trax Re-wired…

Posted by on 07/09/2009 No comments

If you’ve been following this you will recall I wanted to use an Answer Accu-Trax fork on this build. I wanted a rigid EWR and I believe this fork suits the frame well as it has nice chunky legs and is made of the same 4130 Cromoly as the frame, another thing I dig about Accu Trax is having the offset in the dropout as it gives a nicer ‘straight’ look to the forks, as opposed to the alternative which was a Kona Project 2 which have the offset at the crown.

I picked these up from the USA via eBay and got them for a great price as they are 1″. Also they were threaded so I had a bunch of work to do getting these converted to threadless (see HERE FOR DETAILS) . The whole thing is a temporary fix cos the EWR is 1 1/8″ and is suspension corrected so these 390mm forks might drop the front end too much.

Long term I will get the geometry/BB height 100% with a cunning plan….

I got a fellow RetroBike member to strip and repaint them yellow so they matched the frame better, I didn’t leave the frame with him so all he had as a reference was a tiny chip of paint. The result, plus some repro decals is ok for me and when I go for the permanent solution I will leave him the frame so the next set of forks can be matched 100%.

Some progress shots of the work:

Back from Dave Yates Cycles with ahead steerer conversion

Sandblasted ready for repaint

First coat of yellow over white base coat

Finished article with repro decals

Karma visits – Kamma Niyama rears it’s head…

Posted by on 26/08/2009 No comments

Although not adhering to any religion I run my life by my own rules based on how I see the world…..In a nutshell I’m nice to people and I give lots of stuff away, help lots of folk where I can and generally spread the love.

Last week I had a little accident and ran over a 36h Mavic X517 laced to a Hope Ti Glide hub in my car……and I was lucky…..instant death only fell upon the Cook Bros ‘Dog Bone’ Ti skewer and the wheel ‘seemed’ to still be smiling…………..well it wasn’t and it had gotten out of shape, though not by much.



Anyway, I took a trip to a new bike shop that’s not long been opened in Stony Stratford in Buckinghamshire and they guy there jigged up my rim, found the fault and had me ‘true’ within five minutes. When I asked “How much?”, he says “No charge”

How cool is that? In truth he recognised me from another LBS he used to work at but I don’t know him and only used to go in there maybe once a year, he also happened to have built these wheels last year too.

Anyway, big up to Alan at Twenty3c, he runs a great bike shop and is a VERY accomplished mechanic and wheelbuilder…..please check them out if you are in their area.

Twenty3c
5-6 Swinfens Yard,
High Street,
Stony Stratford,
Milton Keynes,
MK11 1SY

Sunday Road Ride – Feel the pain…

Posted by on 24/08/2009 No comments

Trying to build up the quads so took a painful road route yesterday on my Pace, It’s Loop Three on my personal list of stuff near to where I live that I can ride from by front door with no driving involved. The route runs into Rockingham, through Caldecott to Uppingham and up to Rutland Water in Rutland then back home.

Some boring facts…Rutland is the smallest County in the UK I believe and measures only 18miles by 17 miles, has only two towns and perhaps the coolest of all, its the only County in the entire United Kingdom with no McDonald’s restaurants

There’s some serious gradients on this route, the worst being in the last 10 minutes of the ride where the road passes Rockingham Castle, the climb runs from 171ft to 446ft in 0.87 miles and had my heart trying to punch its way through my ribcage like Alien

I really should have a road bike but they suck so this was done on a Pace RC200 F6 with 2.1 mud tyres

Them hills

Rutland Water

EWR Project – Phase One…Remixed with Bonus Tracks

Posted by on 21/08/2009 3 comments

A Groundog Day update, didn’t I just do all this shit a week ago?

EWR Project – Yard Trauma Compact vs. Standard paranoia story (see below) now put to bed
A quick switch to a 122mm BB cured all the woes. Everything from Phase One has been stripped, replaced and rebuilt, nice clearance now on the chain rings…..my Q Factor looks ok so I won’t end up walking like John Wayne and pedalling like a duck on valium…… The Magura spares I was short on last week arrived in the mail so the rear is complete and the front set are prepped and ready. A sweet Chris King ‘Classic’ headset has just been freshly pressed in and the elusive cable-stop-widget-thing has been attached to the Front Mech so I don’t lose it…..

No chainstay on the breakfast menu today


Fit-Kit graduation….My Q-Factor is ok, is yours? (Macro shot disaster…)



Mmmmmmm Chris King


Jay DeJesus killed my downtube…(I’ll forgive him)


Magura’s with new Cool Stop pads

More Magura

Even more Magura (fronts ready for forks)

EWR Project – Yard Trauma

Posted by on 19/08/2009 No comments

Ahhh the joys of retro builds, one minute your are Soaring Angelic and the next you are Fathoming Hell when you hit a glitch, still, these seemingly insurmountable obstacles are there to be overcome…

This particular bogey is perhaps to be expected, my frame is 1994 and therefore on the cusp of the transition to Compact Drive (or MicroDrive if you worked for Sun Tour ) from the long established Standard Drive 5-bolt 110 mm/74 mm BCD.

Me being a dumbass goat didn’t factor this in and blindly specced some nice 110 BCD Syncros Revolution cranks (see pix below), lovingly spent an hour putting together the chainset from a bag of bits, offered them up to the sufficiently long enough BB (118mm where Syncros Revolution’s should only need 117mm), tightened up the Crank O’s and….BUMMER, the rings wanted to eat the chainstay . Overlooking the obvious (well I am a goat ) I showed this to my buddy and we came to the conclusion that the chainstay ‘indent’ (what the hell is the official name for that?) is positioned for Compact Drive 5-bolt 94 mm/58 mm BCD

This was confirmed by offering up a 22/32/42 chainset which fitted nice and snug in the indent with sufficient clearance. So, the search is now on for a very rare beast indeed, Syncros Revolution Cranks in Compact Drive. I’ve only seen two sets for sale in as many years so this could prove a difficult task…..onwards with the search!!

On a plus note I’ve managed to score a wheelset more suited to this build, sure the Campag Mirox were nice but not really EWR material. The current replacement is a set of Mavic 231CD’s on Shimano DX hubs with 7sp cassette.

More build pix coming soon….