Fruddled Gruntbugglies

Category: Biking

  • The Joys of Winter Biking

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    Took my first fall of 2009 yesterday.  We were coming off two straight days of rain, it was 7:45am and the temperature was right around freezing.  All of that adds up to (you guessed it) ice on the road.  Most of the roads were treated and in pretty good shape, but in my infinite wisdom I decided to extend the ride with a lap through the State Park.  And in the park, the roads were..  not good.  Long story short, I was coming down a hill, braking a bit, hit a previously-unseen patch of black ice, and the bike promptly came out from under me.

    Falls happen so quickly and suddenly that it’s often hard to tell right away what happened and if there’s been any damage.  Sometimes it doesn’t become apparent until you try to get back on the bike and resume the ride.  In my case, I ended up completely undamaged (yay for slippery ice and multiple layers of winter clothing) but my front wheel was knocked out of true.  Turned out to be a loose spoke.  A quick twist with a spoke wrench got me back on the road.  I also had to re-position my front fender, which I did after the ride.  So apparently my front wheel must have taken some kind of impact, although the fall was so smooth that it’s hard to picture how it could have happened.

    I guess I should count myself lucky that this was such an easy fall and it happened in the park where there’s no traffic.  It’s been north of 20 years since I last did any regular riding in the winter, but this was enough to remind me of the perils of icy roads..

  • Fenders on a Road Bike, Part 2

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    This is part 2 of my story about how I put fenders on my road bike.  Read about my motivation for doing this in the first installment.

    There are a couple types of fenders made for road bikes.   “Full” fenders cover the back wheel all the way down to the bottom bracket, and the front wheel from below the cranks to just past the front brake.  There are also “clip-on” quick-release fenders made specifically for road bikes.  An example of these is the SKS “Race Blade.”  These work, but they are smaller and provide less wheel coverage than full fenders. I knew that full fenders would be a bigger job to mount on my bike, but I figured if I absolutely could not get them to fit, I could always fall back on the clip-ons.  With that in mind, I went shopping for a set of full fenders.  The two biggest names in inexpensive road bike fenders seem to be SKS and Planet Bike. I read up on both, and eventually decided to go with a set of Planet Bike “Cascadia” fenders, which I ordered from Niagra Cycle Works.  The fenders arrived after a few days and I went to work putting them on.

    Full fenders typically attach to the bike in two places.  The top of the fender attaches to the front fork or rear brake bridge, and the back of the fender is supported by struts that attach to threaded holes in the bike frame near the hubs.  The rear fender is usually also attached to the “seat stay bridge,” a short horizontal piece between the bottom bracket and the rear wheel.  On a road bike with caliper brakes, the fender goes between the brake caliper and the tire, and typically shares the same mounting hole with the brake.  So, to accommodate fenders, the bike needs:

    • Adequate vertical clearance underneath the front fork and between the brake calipers and the tire
    • Threaded holes on the front fork and rear seat/chainstays, near the hubs
    • Some way to attach the tops of the fenders to the front fork / rear brake bridge (possibly sharing the brake mounting hole)
    • A seat stay bridge piece to attach the front end of the rear fender

    My bike met some of the criteria.  All of the clearances were adequate, and it had a seat stay bridge and the necessary mounting holes for the rear fender (although I was currently using them for my rack).  The problems:  It had no mounting holes on the front fork, and no easy way to attach the tops of the fenders to the brake mounts.  So I would need to work around these limitations somehow.

    I began by mounting the rear fender.  I unbolted my rack and attached the fender struts underneath the rack supports.  Conveniently, the rack’s mounting bolt was long enough to accommodate both the fender struts and the rack supports, so I bolted them both to the same hole.  The front of the fender attached easily to the chain stay bridge using a zip tie.  For the top, Planet Bike uses a snap-on plastic clip.  The clip has a bolt slot that’s intended to mount behind the rear brake, but as mentioned above, there’s nowhere there I can bolt it; the rear brake is attached with a recessed hex nut that does not have threads to accept a fender bolt.  However, I was able to use zip ties to attach the mounting clip to the seat stays (this is covered in Planet Bike’s instructions), so problem solved there.  This mounting method does slightly reduce the fender’s clearance underneath the brake, though, so it may not be usable on a bike with extremely limited clearance.  Once the fender was mounted, I adjusted the struts until it didn’t rub the tire, and I was done.  That was pretty easy.

    The front fender was more of a challenge.  My fork doesn’t have holes to mount the struts, so I had to improvise.  A couple of web sites recommended using metal or nylon p-clamps, but I can’t use these on my fork because its arms are not round enough.  Instead, I opted to just zip-tie the struts to the fork.  This is not an ideal solution, but it works well enough.  the quick-release skewer caps keep the ties from slipping off the fork, and the ties seem to stay in place otherwise.  But I’d still like to come up with something more elegant.  On to the top.  The front fender has a permanently-attached metal bracket instead of a plastic clip.  The front brake uses the same type of recessed nut as the rear brake, so there’s nowhere to attach the bracket behind the fork.  But unlike the rear, there’s nowhere on the fork to zip-tie the bracket either.  So my only option was to remove the front brake and mount the bracket between the brake and the fork (actually behind the lock nut that retains the brake spring — otherwise the bracket didn’t clear the steering tube).  I did this, and wasn’t happy with the results.  It made it impossible to adjust the fender’s position without also affecting the brake, and it also made it impossible to easily remove the fender.  I needed a better solution, so I went web surfing again, and found out about Problem Solvers Sheldon Fender Nuts.

    Sheldon Fender Nuts replace the recessed nuts that hold the brake calipers in place.  The difference is, the Sheldon nuts are slightly longer, so they protrude outside the brake mounting hole, and they have a thread to accept a fender mounting bolt.  The front fender can then mount behind the fork as intended, and the fenders can be adjusted independently of the brakes.  The nuts come in sets of 2 (one for back and one for front).  I ordered a set from Jenson USA.  The front nut was an extremely tight fit in my fork.  Initially, I had to tap it with a hammer to seat it enough to mate with the threads on the brake, but eventually it “broke in” enough that I could thread it on and off the brake without too much trouble.  I was worried I’d torque it apart or otherwise destroy it, but it turned out to be pretty sturdy.  The mounting bolts that came with the Cascadia fenders did not fit the thread on the Sheldon nut — I had to scrounge up some matching bolts and washers from my parts drawer.  After that, though, the fender went on easily and was a snap to adjust.  So far I’ve only used the Sheldon nut on the front fender.  Eventually I’ll take the zip ties off the back fender and remount it with the Sheldon nut, but the nuts were worth the price just for the front.

    Initially, I couldn’t get the front wheel to stop rubbing the fender.  No amount of fiddling with the fender seemed to help.  Finally I figured out that my wheel was not properly centered in the fork.  I undid the quick release and centered the wheel, and suddenly the fender no longer rubbed.  There’s not a whole lot of side-to-side tolerance with these fenders, so buyer beware.  I’m a little worried at what might happen if I break a spoke..

    After the fenders were on, I didn’t have to wait long to test them out.  I took the bike out shortly after a storm, and the fenders worked like a champ.  I hit my first puddle and watched all the water squirt out the front of the fender, instead of up on the bike, my clothes, etc.  In normal riding conditions, I don’t really notice the fenders except for maybe a rattle here or there when I hit a bump.  The fenders don’t get in my way at all.  The instructions warn that my foot might touch the front fender during slow turns, but I haven’t had that problem.  All in all, even if the installation was a bit of a pain, the fenders were well worth it and I highly recommend them for all-weather commuting.

  • Fenders on a Road Bike, Part 1

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    I’ve been an occasional bike commuter for a little over three years.  My commuter bike is a 2001 Giant OCR-1, a road bike with an aluminum frame and a carbon fork.  Back in the big 1980s, I spent my teen years delivering newspapers, and went through a seemingly-endless string of cheap 10-speed beater bikes.  I rode the bikes year-round in all kinds of weather conditions.  Every one of them had fenders – the big, heavy, metal kind that start to rust after a couple days in the elements.  The fenders may not have been stylish, but they did their job, keeping mud and grime off the bike and its rider.  Of course, back then I didn’t appreciate them.

    Flash forward to the 1990s.  At some point, bike manufacturers stopped putting fenders on bikes.  I bought a mountain bike in 1994 – no fenders.  Ditto for my road bike, bought in 2002.  Nowadays, most bikes in the U.S. are sold for recreation.  Road bikes, in particular, now seem to be mostly geared towards racing and weekend club rides.  And indeed, when I bought my bikes in the 90s and 00s, I first used them for recreation.  I took the mountain bike out on trails, and used the road bike for weekend club rides.  I only rode the bikes in good weather, so I never missed the fenders from my old bikes.  Somewhere along the way, I forgot about the more utilitarian uses for bikes – commuting, errand-running, etc.  I had a college degree and a desk job, and no longer needed a bike for work, or so I thought.

    Flash forward another few years.  With young kids, I no longer had as much time for leisure riding.  I wasn’t in quite the shape I was a few years before.  I wanted to find a way to do some more riding, so I decided to try riding my bike to work.  Gas prices were high at the time, so I figured I could save some money on gas and improve my fitness at the same time.  My ride to work is only about 8 miles, which is long enough to get a decent workout, yet short enough that it doesn’t take too long (with small children and a busy family life, time is at a premium).  I tried commuting by bike a few times and discovered that I enjoyed it, so I kept it up for 3 years.  At first I rode only in the summer, and then only when it was sunny and dry out.  It wasn’t until 2008 that I took the plunge into all-season bike commuting, and it wasn’t until then that I missed fenders.  Summers here on the east coast tend to be pretty dry, with occasional thunderstorms providing most of the precipitation.  That all changes in the Fall, when we have lots of damp, misty, drizzly weather.  After my first couple of wet rides, my fender-less bike (and most of its cargo) was completely covered in mud and other junk that splashed up from the road.  Not only was this bad for the bike (bottom brackets don’t like road grit), I had to spend an hour or so after each ride hosing the bike down, wiping off the grime, and re-lubing everything.  It was a major hassle, and I quickly reached the conclusion that cold-season commuting wasn’t going to happen regularly if I couldn’t come up with a better alternative.  That’s when I remembered fenders.  If I could somehow retrofit fenders onto my bike, they should solve most of my problems.

    My next post will describe the process I went through to research, choose, and mount a set of fenders on my road bike.  It was a tricky and occasionally frustrating exercise, but the end result was well worth the effort.

  • New road bike tires

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    Last Friday I broke a spoke on the back wheel of my road bike.  Murphy’s Law #1 of broken spokes says that they will always happen on the back wheel, so you have the extra fun of removing the gear cassette to replace the spoke.  But that’s not really my point..  Since I had to take the tire off the wheel, I seized the opportunity to install a new pair of Vredestein Fortezza SE road tires that I picked up at Performance Bike a couple months ago.  The tires had a lot of good reviews, and the price was right, and my old tires were pretty badly worn down, so I couldn’t resist.

    Mounting the tires was a mixed bag.  The back tire went on easily, but I had to use my “Quick Stick” plastic tire lever to help get the last bit on the front.  Never had to do that before, but it could just be that the tire was new and still needs to stretch out a bit.

    My old tires were a mismatched set.  A Hutchinson on the front and a Specialized “Armadillo” on the back.  I ran the Hutchinson at 110psi and the Specialized at 120psi.  The Vredesteins are rated at 160psi max, which is considerably higher than my old ones.  I decided to try the rear at 140 and the front at 125.  So I pumped them up and headed out for my first ride, a short 8 mile commute to work.

    During the ride, it seemed apparent that the new tires had a lot less rolling resistance than the old ones.  It seemed like I was going faster on straightaways and not getting out of the saddle as often.  I didn’t really turn it loose on the downhill sections..  new tires and all that, I need to give them a couple rides before I fully trust them.  At the end of the ride, I checked my computer and I couldn’t believe it..  I was almost full 1mph over my usual average speed.

    This is my first set of new tires on this bike.  The old ones have been on the bike since 2002, but the bike has seen only occasional use (under 500 miles/year) up till this year.  But I really had no idea a new set of tires would make that much difference in overall speed.  We’ll see how well they wear, etc., but they certainly seem nice after one ride.

  • Bike-to-work milestone

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    Today I biked in for the 22nd time this year, which matches my total for last year (and this time last year, I hadn’t even started riding in yet). I haven’t been riding with quite the frequency that I did last year. Most of last year’s rides were concentrated in August and September, and this year’s have been spread out over April, May, June, and July. However, most of my missed rides have been for legitimate reasons (illness, travel, family issues, rain, extreme heat, appointments/errands, days off to work on projects, etc), as opposed to laziness. I hope to pick up the pace as we enter the second half of the riding season. My goal for the year is 40 rides, which I don’t think is unreasonable.

  • Lots of fun stuff

    Lots of fun stuff

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    A smorgasbord of various topics today.

    I biked in for the first time since 6/21 today. A week of bad weather at the end of June, followed by a 5-day Independence Day weekend, then more unsettled weather the following week, all combined to keep me off the bike for a while. Our boiler job starts tomorrow, which will potentially affect later rides this week, so I figured today was do-or-die if I’m going to get back into a routine. So, I did.

    I also signed up for online bill-payment through our brokerage, now that they’ve kindly made it free. I haven’t used a bill payment service since the late 90s, and I’ve heard they’ve come a long way. I hope to try it out later in the week — I need to wait for some material to arrive snail-mail first.

    And, lastly, I’m going to do a bit of computer shuffling..

    [More:]

    Currently, I have

    Name Location CPU OS RAM Disk Use
    sonata office P4 2.4ghz Linux 512mb 150gb Desktop
    concerto office P3 450mhz Linux 576mb 8gb Server
    doze office P3 700mhz Windows XP 384mb 20gb Windows Desktop
    snorkelwacker home P2 300mhz Linux 384mb 16gb Server

    Now that I’m running Remedy on a centrally-maintained Windows 2003 server, and I’ve switched from SQL Navigator to Oracle SQL Developer, I no longer need a full-time Windows desktop in my office. I actually will only need Windows when I’m watching my son, so he can play games. So, I’m thinking I’ll take the 700mhz box, add some memory to it, and make it my office server box. It’ll run Linux full time and dual-boot into XP on the rare occasion that Michael is here. Then I’ll take the 450mhz box home, make it my home server, and put my ancient 300mhz box out to pasture. That will buy me a bit of extra performance at home, and more memory (the 300mhz box is maxed out at 384mb).

    For the future, I’m moving away from Linux on the desktop in favor of OS X. So, my next new desktop computer will most likely be a Mac, which will then free up the 2.4ghz box. Then, the bubble-down process will begin again. Fun fun!

  • Bike to work: the month of May in review

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    I was only able to bike to work 8 times in May, due to a variety of reasons.. early in the month, I caught a cold, and various obligations at home made it necessary to take the car on several days I otherwise would have biked. Later in the month, I had a week where I couldn’t drag myself out of bed in time to get moving (it’s amazing how much a single late night out screws up my body clock nowadays). I also had this mysterious dry cough that came out of nowhere and persisted for about 4 days. But, now it’s the end of the month and I seem to be back in a good routine. Despite the relative infrequency of my rides, I managed to ride in at least one day each week of the month. My average speed is now consistently over 14mph. This morning I averaged 14.8mph, my high for the season so far.

    This past weekend, I picked up two new pairs of biking shorts on sale at Performance. One has the standard chamois padding and the other has this gel stuff. The price was the same, so I figured I’d try ’em both. I’ve ridden once with each pair now. The chamois pair is fine, but the stitching on the gel pair bothered me a little bit. I’ll see how it goes as they break in, but so far I’m not crazy about these.

    I’ve also logged almost 1000 miles on my cyclocomputer, a Cateye Astrale. Verdict so far: It’s nice, and I especially like the cadence feature. However, I wish it gave some kind of audio feedback when starting/stopping the timer. There have been a lot of times where I’ve thought I’ve started it but it wasn’t actually running, and vice-versa, and as a result I haven’t gotten any statistics for a particular ride. Forgetting to start/stop it is one thing, but it’s really annoying when I’ve actually made a point to do it, and still don’t get my stats. Otherwise, though, I really like it. Cateye has come out with a newer model since I got mine, so I wonder if they’ve addressed this problem.

    June will start out with a week of no biking due to my business trip. However, I hope to get right back into it afterwards.

  • Quick Bike-to-work Update

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    Well, here it is May 1 and I’ve biked to work 6 times now (well, 5-1/2 times actually, since I’m at work now and still have to ride home today). The weather has been almost perfect for biking. It’d be nice if it were ever-so-slightly warmer in the mornings, because then I could lose the jacket. But other than that, it’s been hard to complain.

    This past weekend I fiddled around a bit with my front derailleur. For more than a year now, it’s had this habit of occasionally dumping the chain when I shift to the smallest chainring. Every time it did it, I swore I was going to adjust it, but I never seemed to get around to it. Anyhow, all I did was tighten the inner limit screw about 1/4 turn, and it seems to have done the trick. Today it was very consistent shifting into the granny. Only thing now, is it seems to “hunt” a bit more when I shift out of the granny into the middle chainring. However, it’s still within the limits of what I’d consider acceptable, so I’m going to leave it like this for the time being. After the season, I’ll take it to the shop for a complete tune-up, and they can worry about it at that point.

    Today I did find a good article on derailleur adjustment, so if I’m feeling up to it one day, I might fiddle with it some more.

    On another topic, today we found out when our health benefits open enrollment starts at work. So soon, we’ll find out how much more the state is going to spank us for benefits in FY 2007. Cue up the “Imperial Death March” theme now..

  • Bike to Work

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    The summer ritual officially began today: I rode my bike to work for the first time. I’m admittedly a fair-weather biker; I bike when it’s warm, sunny and light outside. So, today was my first time on the bike since, oh, last October or so. Combine that with two weeks or so of relative inactivity while I was home helping care for our newborn, and well, suffice it to say that I didn’t break any speed records getting here this morning. And then there’s the ride home looming, with its dreadded mile-long grind up Lawyers Hill Road. But I’ve got 8 hours or so before I have to worry about that.

    With gas pushing $3 a gallon, the financial incentive to bike in (and avoid driving) is stronger than ever. The commute to work is about 15 miles round trip, and my car gets roughly 30 miles to the gallon (actually that’s being generous, it’s probably more like 25-28), so I save about 1/2 gallon of gas every time I commute by bike. At $3 per gallon, that’s around $1.50 extra in my pocket for each ride. And the more expensive gas gets, the bigger the payoff gets.

    Last year, I biked to work 22 times, but I didn’t start doing it until early August. So hopefully this year I can do it a lot more. This year I plan on keeping a log so I can track my times, average speed etc. At the end of the season we’ll see how I did.