Sunday, February 22, 2009

Bicycles and Motorcycle Training






Saturday morning Nanda came by the house to pick the Silvio - a front wheel drive recumbent. It is an interesting bike that pretty cool to ride. It takes a bit of practice to co-ordinate pulling on the handle bars with your pedal strokes, but it is very fast once you figure this out. I had the Silvio at my house to wrap the handle bars. I offered to do something special for one of Nanda's customers, Peter. The diamond wrap turned out okay but I was not able to get the pattern to work the entire length of the bar. I am not sure if it was the tight bend at the drop, the width of the handle bar tape (too wide), or the orientation of the weave. I know it will work - others have used this pattern on their drop bars - I just have to figure out the technique. After the first 3 hours of trying to get the bar wrapped for its entire length I gave up and just wrapped the drop portion of the bar with the diamond pattern and left the upper part of the bar a single color. It turned out okay, but I was disappointed. I will have to work on the wrapping technique!

The rest of Saturday and the first part of Sunday, my wife and I taught a Motorcycle Safety Course at the Santa Rosa Fairgrounds - check out http://www.sr-mt.com/ to sign up for a class (the national site is www.msf-usa.org/). The first day was dry and not too cold but Sunday started off wet and stayed that way for almost the entire time! I have always believed - and still do - that it is good to ride in the rain, it helps make a smoother more controlled rider. All of the students were real troopers, everyone showed up with their rain gear ready to ride; we even gave them the option of coming back another day when it was dry - no one took the offer! Everyone passed the riding portion with good scores.

After class I had my first training session for my Cycle Oregon trip in September and it kicked my butt (more on the training and preparation later).

Sunday evening I laced up a set of Chub Hubs (http://www.bythehive.com/) and Ultegra Dura Ace Hubs, both sets of wheels were built up using DT Swiss spokes and Velocity Deep V rims - I use Damon Rinard's spoke length calculator which can be found here: http://www.sheldonbrown.com/rinard/spocalc.htm. The initial lacing went well but I am still having some difficulty getting the high/low spots out of the wheels. The Chub Hub is for a fixed gear bike, the Ultegra hubs were an old set that had been lying around waiting for some rims.



No comments:

Post a Comment