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….

EWR Project – Phase Two – Cock…pit…check? Yes, okay.

Posted by on 17/08/2009 No comments

Cockpit check?
Yes, okay
Largactil, five milligrams
Largactil, check
Valium, ten milligrams
Valium, ten, check

Haloperidol, five milligrams
Which one’s that?
Little white ones, w, w, w for white
W for white, okay, check
Phenobarbitone, five milligrams
Check

Disipel, five milligrams
Check
Glass of water
Check
Our father, which art in heaven
Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa

I’m doing my best to keep this project Period Correct and it’s frustrating! I am fully capable and aware of what is required, having done so on many previous occasions….anyway….rant over

The original EWR catalogue shows the OWB with Club Roost Go-Fast bars (complete with superflouous add-on brace).

Original Woods Bike in 1994 EWR Catalogue


I figured this
would be hard work until my regular riding buddy pulled out a couple of
pairs from his gargantuan parts bin. Sure they are not NOS but they
will do the job and I’ll get the GOFAST decal reproduced for the brace.


Go Fast !!!



DX Thumbshifters….no man can live without several pairs of these badboys laying around and i’m no exception. Unfortunately I take it to the extreme and have several sets of NOS ones just laying around the place. They are very cool and work extremely well, who needs to be a sheep and fit M732 XT Thumbies anyway?….
I am still using a set of MT62 DX Thumbies that came new with a bike in 1991, they have shifted God Knows how many times through at least 10,000 miles of cycling and not once did I tell them I loved them, in fact they have never even been stripped, just had copious injections of GT85 over the decades and they are still silky smooth. This EWR already has a bunch of M650 DX stuff on it so lets go the whole hog and hang these little virgins in the Cockpit too…

NOS in the box

Smile for the camera children


EWR Project – From the horses mouth

Posted by on 11/08/2009 No comments

Cussing and critique-ing the EWR ‘Cable-stop-noodle-widget-thing’ and then inviting the EWR boys to look at my Blog was probably not a smart move but as a result I now have the answer from Kenn at EWR himself….and it makes perfect sense

from    Kenn <*****@*****.com>
to    ********<*******@*****l.com>
date    11 August 2009 17:33
subject    Re: Watch this (EWR) space….

Hi ****,
That is really cool!  You know, I had totally forgotten about the
cable stop thing-a-ma-bob for that generation of frames!  Glad you
found one though.  We used that thingy because we didn’t want to run
the cables underneath the bottom bracket.  There were two reasons for
this:
1. We do a lot of winter riding here in PA, and that obviously
means snow and ice.  Bikes of that era that the cabling went under the
BB were prone to having the cables freeze.  Not a lot of fun
2. We were trials riders and bashed the hell out of our BB’s with
rocks and they would have certainly been smashed at some point or
another.

 

Keep at it, I really like the follow along.
Kenn
Kenn Rymdeko
EWR Bikes, LLC
610.659.4430
www.ewrbikes.com

Keep coming back Jay and Kenn….any progress will get revealed here…

EWR Project – Phase One…

Posted by on 11/08/2009 No comments

I wasn’t going to post live updates of this build, but figured it might be good to look at retrospectively

There’s some real history with this particular frame and it comes with a fantastic story but this will be revealed elsewhere once the build is finished.

This project is a rebuild of a 1994 Eastern Woods Research ‘Original Woods Bike’. EWR is a small company based in Pennsylvania USA who produced three bikes back in the day and then vanished. In the last couple of years they have started back up and now produce ‘modern’ versions of the Original Woods Bike in 26″ flavour as well as some exciting 29er’s and SS frames (www.ewrbikes.com).

This particular frame is from the ‘2nd Batch’ of OWB’s and was made by Bill Grove of Grove Innovations, it features water jet cut rear dropouts and some of the best mitred joints and pierced tubes you will see anywhere. The frame is plain old straight gauge 4130 Cromoly, no butting and weight saving here, this is just brute strength. Anyone who knows EWR’s also knows they are no nonsense, hard riding bikes with their roots in trials and BMX so this build needs to be functional and reliable as opposed to ‘aesthetics and tinsel’, after all it’s going to be hammered round the woods here in England, just what it was designed for. Ideally the build is going to be as Period Correct as it can be but there will be the odd substitution (for example, who would fit a pair of $400 dollar NOS red Shimano DX pedals then thrash it round a muddy forest?)

The only theme with this will be small touches of red here and there to match with the red decals. I’m not revealing the full build here as things may change but if you’ve seen any EWR’s then you’ll know roughly what to expect

Syncros Revolution Cranks (175mm) with Crank ‘O’ Matics, Shimano SG rings (26, 36, 46,) Shimano DX front mech, DMR V8 pedals in ‘Code Red’


Shimano DX rear mech, NOS Shimano DX quick release, Shimano LX 7sp hubs laced to Campag Mirox rims.

Magura HS33 Tomac Hydraulic Brakes, NOS Syncros Hardcore seatpost 425mm

Dig those fat tubes…



I’m already thinking about not using the Campy rims and switching to some Mavic 231CD’s laced to Shimano DX hubs, what do you think?

Here endeth the search…..eureka moment!!

Posted by on 04/08/2009 No comments

Sometimes the smallest things are the biggest pain in the ass and this is no exception. For reasons best kept to themselves (and not fully understood by this poster) EWR omitted a downtube cable stop on the Original Woods Bike and opted for this weird little widget instead to get a Bottom Pull front mech working as if it were a Top Pull .

Anyways, I didn’t have one and have been trawling the Net trying to find one for the last two months…..well I struck double lucky in that not only did I find one but it was THE widget that was originally attached to the yellow beast below and came as a Karma Present

This does mean I guess that something yellow, heavy and steel might now be unleashed on the world.

The wheels of progress turn slowly….Accu Trax style

Posted by on 29/07/2009 No comments

Been waiting on these pups coming back from my friendly neighbourhood Frame Builder Dave Yates who was turning them from threaded to threadless steerer for me. I used his Priority Book Ahead system to ensure I had a slot and they wouldn’t sit around his place waiting to get done and it was perfect, in fact they contacted me over a week before my slot was due to tell me they had completed my work

I’m gonna be getting them powder coated in a new colour so I’m on the lookout for someone local who can colour match powder…..and quickly!!

The planets are slowly coming into alignment on this little project finally

Give it to me hard and rigid baby….

Posted by on 20/07/2009 2 comments

In 1997 Pace designed the F6, it was another iteration in a long line that went back to the RC100 in 1988/89. That year they also brought out the RC36 Pro Class suspension fork, probably the best suspension fork ever designed by Pace. Supposedly it matched the frame (in that the frame was suspension corrected for this fork) but I have always thought that is was slightly on the long side (axle to crown – 450mm), making the front end light/twitchy.

So…..boredom and experimentation reared it’s head and I ripped off the RC36’s on my F6 and replaced them with a second generation RC30 (axle to crown – 400mm) and the bike rides so much better. Obviously the ride is harsher, Pace’s are a hard ride anyway, let alone fixing them up with a fully rigid front end

The RC30’s look very nice on the frame too, due to their chrome plating and go nice with my King Ti headset

Yes I know my hoses need trimming….