Loaded, Suited and Booted

Posted by Neil

A busy day today out in the North Wales sunshine of our backyard.  In preparation for the L2P ride in September I've done a major service on the Bianchi Via Nirone 7 Alu Carbon (snappy eh?) today.  This might seem a bit premature, but the plan is to get a few more 20-30 mile hilly rides and one more 70-80 before we're off on holiday to France(!) for a fortnight.  In that fornight I plan to do a few short early morning rides and then 2 consecutive days of 60 miles per day, one pair per week.

So I thought it wise to do the major service now and get a couple of weeks of use out of the bike before we head off to France to iron out any wrinkles.  So today we have the following:

2 x new Continental Gatorskin 700 x 23 C tyres
2 x new inner tubes
1 x new SRAM PC971 chain
4 x new Fibrax brake pads
4 x stainless steel retaining bolts for brake pads (original chromed bolts going rusty)
New rear skewer fitted with conversion kit for pannier mounting
Bar tape end tapes replaced
All hub bearings checked for play
BB checked for play
Loosened headset, re-tightened and checked for play
Brakes adjusted
Gears adjusted
All bolts checked for tightness
Everything thoroughly cleaned and frame polished

This means that I'm ready for my trial run tomorrow as I've also packed everything (except my passport and stuff like gels, energy bars etc, as they'll be going in the jersey back pockets) into the panniers tonight  and they're mounted up on the seat post mounted rack that Stuart has kindly loaned to me.  It was a bit of a shock how much it all weighs and I'm going to re-appraise everything when I empty them out to see if there are further weight savings to be made (for example, there's a pair of crocs in their at the moment - if its going to be dry I won't be needing them as I'll just be able to wear my Shimano M040 MTB SPD shoes for normal walking.  The lock is a big contributor, but that's an essential item as far as I'm concerned.  Our kitchen scales only go up to 2kg so I can't accurately weigh the panniers.  I would estimate 3.5 - 4 kg each and there's 2 of them.  Here's the bike all ready to go:

Weekend of punctures

Posted by Dylan

The weekend started bad with intermittent torrential rain all day saturday so the chance of getting on my bike on Sunday was not looking good. This was further impacted when i found that my car had a puncture on Saturday evening which meant i had to look forward to a morning sitting in Kwik Fit. To avoid missing out on getting some training i went for a session on the cross trainer. I am very please to report that several months ago 30 mins on the cross trainer was killing me and i managed to complete a 1hr 20min session with no major issues so all this training is making a difference to my fitness level.

After getting back from fixing the car i went to check out my bike to find that it also had a puncture.. :-(. Good news its was Fathers Day and the kids had presented me with 2 nice shiny Continental Gatorskins which i proceeded to install last night. Based on Neil's recommendations i don't expect to get any further puncture issues.

I am looking forward to our trip our next week with an element of worry seeing that i have not managed to get more than 40 miles in a single session but hopefully i have enough training to to get me through. I am in my homeland so hopefully this will inspire me to push ahead and get to the end. Failing that i will bring my tow rope and Stuart can pull me along......