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:

Checking in...

Posted by Stuart

Good to see all the prep from other members of the party.  Andy's off to Kos for a week tomorrow to continue his alcohol-based training regime.

I'm back on the bike after the marathon a couple of weeks ago.  Still not training too hard, but I'm getting hours in the saddle in, which is the main thing.

What else?  Not a lot really, just that having been in France for a week recently, riding across there is such a joy compared to the UK.  The weather helps of course, but a combination of considerate drivers and smooth road surfaces (rather than having to play dodge-the-pothole) makes for really pleasurable riding - the Saturday and Sunday of our trip should be great.  Not sure I can say the same about our Monday morning ride into Paris however....

Talking of which, that's the last bit of the route I need to get sorted.  No time like the present.

Maiden voyage complete

Posted by Dylan

At last i got to put some miles on my new bike last night after looking at it for the past 5 days. Only sneaked in 16 miles but it was considerably easier that any other ride i have done to date. Had a fairly decent head wind on the way out which was interesting but it made the journey back a bit easier. Needs a bit of a tweak as it seems the chaps in Halfords had obviously been concentrating on getting to the pub in the Friday my bike was built rather than setting the gears up properly.

It is 100 days to go until be embark on our challenge so still have a fair way to go but i also have a fair amount of training still to do.