heh. my 1975 Motobecane has that exact SuperRecord derailleur, replaced the original Nuevo Record when it was damaged in a crash circa 1979.
For 2012, I've had much more fun I used to go on MTB rides trying to pin it and get through my trails as fast as I was able to. This year, I've managed to slow down a tad, and spend more effort to search for fun obstacles, roots, whoops, sections I can manual/wheelie, little rock hops, etc. This change in mentality has made the sport much more fun, and I'm much more excited to try out new spots. Even learned how to make my 6'8" body & 30lb AM bike scrub Bubba style. I use strava every ride, but just so I can see how many miles/week I'm riding and feel good about it. Also tried lift served DH... :huh If you've never done it, take my word... the videos on Pinkbike do the runs NO justice... those guys are truly insane. I did 6 runs and had trouble standing afterwards. The physical toll that sport takes on your body is incredible. Bikes parked for 2012, can't wait for 2013. Gotta get a mount for my VFR too!
Just threadless adapter. The Cinelli cracked while I was climbing up past Harbor Point. I thought the 42 was my 39. Wasn't. Hurt me. The crank rings and BB are Campy C Record, as are the 32H hubs. Headset is an old Specialized. Brakes are Dia Compe Something er others, team issue stuff. Seat Post is Campy Super Record, Seat varies. The white one is an old Rolles. I killed a couple of Sella San Marco's. The bike has seen a load of miles. This model was our team bike in 1983/84. Alexi Grewal won the Olympic road race aboard a Pinarello but it had aero tubes and the team price was quite a bit more than what I paid for this bike frame only. Oh, and the seat tube clamp bolt is campy as well. Shifters are composite from I don't remember where, I think they were free. When I ran a computer on it I had Avocet and ran the wire down the back of the fork tube and bonded it to the tube with silicone, (electronic grade) so the two wires lay flat against the chrome fork with no ghastly looking zip-ties. It has a ding at the downtube from the brake smacking it when I was blown off a time trial course with a rear disc on at about 40 mph. We hit a tree after rotating around my center of mass in the air so I was upside down looking at the tree. That ended my club record run. I sold the time trial set up, disk radial front sew up and TT bars/controls. It will likely become art in my garage. The threadless is ugly.
How to make a ride more work. Ride uphill. Ride recumbent trike. Mount new studded winter tires and run at minimum pressure to seat the studs. Reride the cat 3 and 2 climbs because you dropped your headband at the top.:huh Finish in the rain with mid 30's temps. Fairing kept me mostly dry except for my face. <iframe height='405' width='590' frameborder='0' allowtransparency='true' scrolling='no' src='http://app.strava.com/runs/31099291/embed/15d33478b9e8f9df7650fe0f97ac890eda4dad8a'></iframe> Some pics of the new ride
man, thats a huge big ring on that tandem.... is that to compensate for a small diameter drive wheel or something?
Those Mockbas were great frames. Is that a Denver Spoke sticker on your forks? You are a brave soul to post a photo of you in the clown--- err cycling uniform.
I think those composite (readlastic) shifters were Ofmega. They were paired with a plastic derailleur and a very swanky, angular crankset. I forget which frame builder but we sold a reynolds 531 frame with that group on it back in 1986 or so. It was a very light group for the cost. You weren't a racer unless you had an Avocet computer. I asked for one at the LBS when I built up this latest bike and the fellow said, "wow. I haven't heard that name in a while." I had the same Giordana jersey, blue with the stripes on the shoulder there. I think there was a photo of Alexi Grewall wearing it here he is riding that frame, it looks, but maybe a chromed fork? These don't look like aero tubes, but what can we tell from this angle? (is that Steve Bauer?) But I knew about him because he started riding for my beloved Panasonic Team in about 1985 or so. PS oddly enough, when you google Alexi Grewall, your (MrHead's) Mockba photo shows up! linked back to this forum Anyone know if Denver Spoke is still in business. I was on the other side of the world and never made it there. I have been to R and A in Brooklyn and Bike Bikyle in Philadelphia
greetings fellow nut jobs! how long have i been an inmate before discovering this thread? i guess an intro is in order,... hi; i'm zouch, and i have a bicycle problem. can't say for certain when it started, but i can remember walking to grade school past a shop that had a Masi Gran Criterium hanging in the window long before i knew what it was, and knew i wanted one. i might have been the only kid in my 'hood that had a 10 speed (with 10 speeds; really!) instead of a BMX-type bike. this was such a point of embarrassment for my buddies that they pooled together spare parts to build me a BMX bike. i still rode the 10-speed more until someone stole it off of my front porch while i was inside making a quick sandwich before fixing its flat tire,... and broken brake cable,... and broken shifter cable,... first lesson in bike thieves; 12:30 in the afternoon, and some dickwad would steal even *that* sub-$100 department store bike in the piss-poor condition it was in. got distracted by many other things (mostly, pretty 2-legged things that smelled good ) before i rediscovered bicycles again when a friend of mine made me take his Nishiki International from him while he recovered from a knee injury. i'd been running cross-country after deciding water polo was unreasonably nasty, so was in fairly good shape; but the sudden ability to be able to cover 15-20 miles in an hour and take things with me as opposed to spending all week trying to run 16-22 miles was eye-opening; i was so hooked that by the time i had to give the Nishiki back, i'd had every available daylight hour blocked off on my calendar to ride, and was shopping for a touring bike of my own. yes, a touring bike. i don't know if there's anything in bicycling less cool to cyclists than the touring bike, but i was hooked on the idea of crossing backpacking with long distance running with something on wheels; taking my camp gear and everything else i deemed worthy of carrying wherever i wanted to go under my own power, and being able to put my vehicle in a bus/train/airplane/in the back of a bass boat behind a pickup truck. months of research and waiting and lay-away payments later and i had one of the best bikes of its kind at the time; a Trek 728. [old fogey mode] yes, some of you kiddies may not know, but back in the early days before they became something ugly, Trek actually hand-built bikes using low-temperature silver brazing and 531 tubes and other things that were worthy of drool of the day,... [/old fogey mode] (i'd actually failed to include tax when i calculated what i thought was my last payment on the bike and accessories and the gear to ride it the day i took the bus to go pick it up and ride it home. by that time the guys at the shop knew me well enough to send me home on it anyway with a promise to bring back the balance when i had it.) i rode that bike all over the place, paved or unpaved didn't matter; that's what touring was about back in the day, so i guess i was doing the MTB/29'er thing before we knew what it was! i ended up working at the shop i'd bought that bike from (2 Wheel Transit Authority in Huntington Beach), and took advantage of a sale bonus to buy another bike on manufacturers incentive while i was there. i had already been looking at buying a nice beach cruiser to have something else to ride when i didn't want to ride the Trek, and picked up a limited edition Stumpjumper SC although i thought Mountain Bikes were a fad that would pass rapidly. complete with mistakes of the day including wide rims with 1.5" Tri-Cross tires, solid axles ('cuz people who hadn't ridden miles of dirt roads with loaded panniers apparently didn't think hollow quick-release axles were strong enough), Biopace chainrings, Magura moto brake levers ('cuz there weren't any for MTBs yet), gears that weren't low enough and seatposts that weren't long enough, this was one of the first bikes to have black anodized bits on it, and that made the whole rest of the thing cool. Suntour made all the bits all the hip kids wanted, like bear-trap pedals you could actually put toe-clips on (if you knew who to sleep with to get the unobtanium necessary reflector mounting brackets), and seatposts long enough for people that actually had legs... narrow rims and wider tires (Ritchey made the best tires at the time) usually came along right about the same time as the Phil Wood hubs and bottom brackets that us touring freaks wanted on everything, but the double-clamp 'slingshot' stem had to stay, no matter what. all this to look cool riding along the boardwalk,... at one point i followed some co-worker friends out to meet up with some other friends who had ridden out to camp in the back-country that was the Irvine Ranch then, and it was about 10 minutes into the ride that i realized how wrong i'd been about MTBs; there was dirt stuck between my teeth from grinning so much! MTBs brought it all together; the joy of being your own power source as running Cross-Country, with all the cycling fun i'd had when we were jumping BMX bikes over trash cans off of sketchy home-made wooden ramps, moving over trail at speed like i did on my dirt bikes, but silently. i was completely hooked. if you weren't riding MTBs back in the very early '80s, it's hard to imagine how different things were; if you spotted another bicyclist on the next peak, you'd ride towards each other just to see if you knew each other already, or to meet if you didn't. the ranch hands we'd meet out in the fields would first interrogate us to try to figure out where we'd parked our trucks because they didn't believe people could have ridden bicycles in to where we'd met them, and then after they came to believe we'd really gotten there under our own power, eventually wish us a good day and ask us to leave the gates the way we found them (open or closed). some time around this i decided i needed a 'real bike'. nothing beat the Trek when you'd put a dozen or more pounds of gear into the Kirtland panniers on its Blackburn Low-Rider racks, but trying to do sporty rides on it with my buddies on their zippy bikes was like trying to autocross your dads Lincoln. i don't remember how i fell into buying a used Pinarello frame/fork set, but that was all i could afford on the bike shop dorks budget. i collected all the necessary bits in a box one at a time while i had the frame refinished (another story in itself) and eventually wound up with a super-steed wearing an extremely smooth Joe Bell white-to-black fade and a full Campy Super Record gruppo. that bike performed proudly for decades afterward. tastes evolved a bit over the years, and riding brought me to the SF Bay area; a ride on a friends room-mates Wicked Fat Chance showed me what MTBs were supposed to handle like, and a Klein Pinnacle relegated the trusty Stumpjumper back to Cruiser duty. met a girl several times by chance who introduced me to Trials while riding the Klein (which has somehow survived to this day) and was eventually bright enough to realize that learning Trialsin' on the Klein was going to cost me in bike and body parts. this led to my first Ibis; a Trials Comp that i tracked down by hounding everyone i could at the bike show in Long Beach. i took that bike to all sorts of improbable places, learning how to ride on or over things i hadn't imagined possible until i had started to learn how to look at things differently. this was the only venue in which i actually competed; ironically one in which there is *no* timing involved,.. but the Trials scene was remarkably supportive of newcomers, and even in competitions people were teaching each other how to clean sections and sharing skills they'd learned. (just an example; a Klein-sponsored rider once loaned me his bike to try. every bit completely hand-built, this was one of only a few that were ever made, but that's just the sort of vibe that was going on around the Trials scene.) i eventually managed to transfer all the skills i'd learned to the Klein and morphed it from featherweight into Trials mode; got tired of having to haul the ridiculously low-geared Trials Comp to places to play with it, and that Trials Comp became the only Ibis i ever sold. not long before its 20th birthday, the Stumpy got stolen out of a laundry room that another dickwad kicked the door of in on the last day of school, and i picked a Kestrel CSX off of a friend when he got the idea that he had to have a Ti bike. (we had a connection with Kestrel back when they were here near the Bay Area, and i knew how this bike had been made.) the Klein took its place in cruiser status while i waited for it to fail, and the Kestrel took its place as the main trail tool. just like how everyone told me that the Klein would be few-season bike before it failed, the Kestrel was put into service the the expectation that a Carbon Fiber Monocoque frameset was to be short-lived. both bikes are still in full service and have performed admirably, in spite of the many scars they both wear. upside to the Klein; i had it built semi-custom and without paint, so it looks just as much like a trash can now as it did when it was new. (bike dorks would ask me why it didn't have paint on it; the looks on their faces was priceless when i'd tell them straight-faced "paint weighs". ) when the Pinarello finally got to where threads on the downtube shifters were so worn that they'd have to be replaced, i decided it had seen enough miles and traded it out for a Inconnu (locally-built custom by builder-of-trust Huey Knox). faultless though that bike was, somehow it just didn't turn me on. through the culmination of a combination of strange events, i had a frame built for me by a guy i'd met at his first show back in '89; John Slawta (Land Shark). that bike caught the eye of the owners of my favorite LBS while it was on display at the NAHBS, and being the local Land Shark dealers, they decided to offer me components at wholesale cost if i would build it up the way they thought it deserved to be built and let them babysit it while i was out of town,... so i once again have a Campy Record bike, decades after the first one. convinced the wife i needed a cyclocross bike for an all-'round bike (everyone does, right?) and bought a nicely set-up Specialized CX. naturally, the bike of my dreams showed up (in my size!) for sale immediately afterward, so i sold the Special'ed to Ricardo (yes, *that* Ricardo), who did what he does; made it something else special. i now have one of the real steel Ibis Hakkalügis set up in Fire Road mode, decked out with all the boutique MTB parts of its time that are my idea of cool. had the same problem when somewhere along the way i decided i wanted a fixed gear bike to tool around on; while an Ibis Scorcher wasn't exactly what i was looking for when i set out, when i ran across one of the couple dozen that was built in my size, i had to have it and managed to be the first guy in line to pick it up. naturally, all the components on it weren't good enough, so they eventually got upgraded to where i had to refinish the bike to bring it up to the level of the components. Scot Nicol (a.k.a. Chuck Ibis) supplied fresh stickers to Ed Litton for it, and while not original, it's more like what i think it always should have been; it's now entirely black, and (except for the Mavic Rims and Brooks B17) wears exclusively Phil Wood and Campy (mostly vintage Pista & Record). keeping the Zouchlet happy is of paramount importance in order to maintain a fleet like this, so the best way to get her buy in is to infect her with the disease too, right? she now does stoker duty on our tandem (another Ibis; a Cousin It set up in drop-bar MTB mode), and actually thinks up reasons to go places on it. most of those reasons seem to involve food... kinda' extreme, perhaps, but some peoples standards, but just my idea of fun. the only thing better would be if i had more time to ride them,... happy trails!
Awww man! A trike? trike?! ...and here I was thinking you were kewl. Me? I did not quite 2hrs last nite with some buddies from the Haymarket shop. What was billed as an easy ride turned out to be something other than easy for all of us but the resident Cat 1. First hour, my legs were SCREAMING at me. 90km on the cross bike the day before (on some of the same roads, just the other direction) meant very tired legs. I did get complimented. I was talking about how tired my legs were: 'you hid it real well. You didn't explode on the hills like X does when he comes out.' As I was thinking 'if you only knew!' He was sayin that the last climb up Bull Run Mtn rd when X shows up, they couldn't even see his headlight! :eek1 I did start feeling better (but not good) after about the hour mark. Till then it was hang on like grim death to C's wheel 'or else.' The trip down Busthead rd was 'interesting. Bout the steep pitch (coming up) there was a washboardy section. Hit that going pretty darn fast and the muscles in the back of my neck got hammered. I wasn't upright enough and so was unable to float myself over the bumps. Neck still hurts this AM. Gonna have to find the good line thru there. Once we got to Thoroughfare rd and it leveled out, I felt better. Thank doG I didn't have to pull thru in the line or I'da asssploded again. All the roads out there except Busthead have been freshly graveled. Made for some fun riding. Traction was iffy at best most of the time. Today: resting Tomorrow: 26ish miles on the mtn bike up Difficult Run with B. I've warned him I'm going slowly. Something tells me he's not listening. M
Welcome Zouch. Some of your sonnet sounds somewhat familiar. When I got into cycling, banana-seat Schwinn Stingrays were all the rage but my parents were having none of that. Instead, I got a 10-speed called a "Londoneer" that was purchased from a department store in Birmingham. They also demanded that we use the safety flags that was purchased with the bike. OK - that wasn't quite the cool image that I had in mind but...it'll do. It had to. From that point on, it wasn't unusual for someone to tell my father that I had been spotted a county away from ours. It was that damn little orange safety flag. Many times, I'd con a friend or a cousin into going for a ride with me. We visited Gilbert SC and one cousin said that riding to their lake house over on Lake Murray would be "easy" for him. I beat him home by a full hour - another 15 minutes and my uncle was ready to look for him. Another guy decided to ride to Payne Lake with us - yeah, it was painful for him. Both of these guys talk about the rides to this day. Touring bikes? Yep - Hill Country, Glacier to Yellowstone, north GA into the Smokies and back and a few weekenders in between. I posted some pictures of my favorite brand a page or two back. Except a recumbent. I guess my parents turned me into something of anti-anything-popular since now, I ride a recumbent. It's either their fault or give up cycling due to neck issues. Well, to hell with what people think. Our local club riders don't bother with the jokes anymore. I think I'm a pretty competent rider, fast on occasion and can even go pretty far by most standards. It's all good!
