Well I wasn’t going to do it… but I got it all setup and rode it today and it felt great. Andrea and I rode out to RB’s and put our bikes on the scale… both of our bikes with our heavy clincher wheels weighed in at 16-1/2 pounds. Mine was 16.5 lbs., hers was 16.4 lbs. I figure that would put my bike at less than 16# with my Zero’s on it….
So… I am planning to race my new Felt FC down at Barber Motorsports Park (Ride to Live race) .
Picked up my Felt FC frame from RB’s on the way home and brought it home to start the build….
The build kit I had from last week….
The first hour was spend trying to match up my new bike to my old and cutting the fork, etc…
On the frame was about ten stickers such as these….
Here is the bike at about 1 hour after unboxing…
Andrea came over to work on her bike (we cut her cable housing a bit short on her bike…so she was a redoing her cables and housing). Since her Red-Blue build was the first SRAM build I have done/helped with (my Kuota was shop built) there are definitely some things that more tricky for doing the cables and housing (getting length correct for the under the tape routing). And as she found out replacing the derailleur cables on the SRAM shifters is pretty tricky… The cable must be threaded through a pretty small hole in the side of the shifter (maybe that is why SRAM ships the shifters already cabled…?)
After a dinner break, I finished the build. I will do the final adjustments and tape up the bar tomorrow….
First ride will be tomorrow…. first race will not be Saturday!
Well my Felt FC frame is finally coming in. This evening I will start putting my Red components on my Felt frame. I expect to get most of it done tonight and then finish it in the morning (I have Good Friday off) and then take it for a ride.
On Saturday, I am going to race the P123 Ride to Live race at the Barber Motorsports park down in Alabama. Andrea and I will head down there as a day trip (it will be a long day). Even though my Felt will be done (most likely), I am not planning to take it down there since I want to ride a couple of times before racing it.
I just completed the rebuild of my old Trek. I used the stem that I had and it is too short… I will have to replace it (7cm) with a 10cm to get the position correct. Here is the finished product..
I also put together my new handlebar, stem, and SRAM Red shifters….
Can’t wait to build up my Felt this week!
Well, I got my SRAM Red groupo on Thursday. Building it up and riding it will have to wait however, since I won’t get my Felt FC until late next week. So for now, all I can do it weigh it and imagine…
Looking up some weights they are listed as:
It is funny how some are higher, some are lower…..At the same time, I bought the Ultegra 10 drivedrain used from Andrea since she recently upgraded to SRAM Red herself. I am putting in on my Trek (after giving the frame a good wash and wax, long overdue) and got started on the upgrade tonight. Here is how far I got….
I also washed up all my wheelsets… I definitely have a lot of training wheelsets…
…and a crowded, cluttered workspace….
…but it works for me….
The crazy weather continues in Memphis today (extreme weather perhaps..what could possibly cause that?). Last Saturday, I was racing a few hours away in Little Rock with 75F temperatures…. Today, the temperature dropped along with a winter storm giving Memphis the first real snow of the year. As I write this there is about 2″ of snow on the ground and the temperature is dropping below freezing.. So it is not looking good for riding tomorrow morning. So rode as long as I could stand on the rollers (which today was about 45 minutes).
Last night, I helped Andrea put her new groupo on her Blue bike that she got in the fall last year. She got her new SRAM Red groupo yesterday. Due to the weather, the maiden voyage will have to wait, but it sure does look good. I am still waiting for my Felt FC frame (expected this month) and my own SRAM Red group. I have been riding Force since I got my Kuota last April. I am looking forward to the improvements over Force. After getting a chance to handle the parts during the installation makes me all the more excited to get it myself. From everything I have heard, the demand has been great for this group. I think it is well deserved. Shimano and Campy should be worried.
Really it has been a crazy week in Memphis starting off last weekend when someone decided to slaughter a household of people. This “Lester Street Massacare” is giving Memphis another black mark after a number of recent “worst of” lists which put us up there in “fattest” (pork ribs anyone?) or just a bad place to do business (no citation, sorry). Aerotropolis? That is the concept that Memphis is pushing to be to get something going to leverage the air freight trade in/out of Memphis Airport.
But in the end, living anywhere is what you make of it. Memphis is not the best place I have lived, but I would say that life here is not that bad. It has it’s problems, but they are manageable.
The next post will be #100. I started this thing last April as an experiment to see how it would go, as a creative outlet, and a place to post up photos.
I am slowly piecing together my TT bar setup… I now have my aluminum Vision Tech one-piece and my SRAM shifters and brake levers. Now, I just need my new Felt frame & build kit and I can convert my Kuota to a TT rig…
After getting home from work, Memphis has been and continues to be in the middle a tornado watch / warning. As one of the larger cells passed through the area, I sat down under the stairs in my garage and worked on my TT bars and waited….
So far, so good and I think the worst has past. I haven’t lost power (yet?) and decided to blog my TT shifter installation. All I need is for my frame and build kit to arrive (mid-Feb?) and then I will convert my Kuota to a TT bike…
Here is a quick overview (WMC TV5). Today it was in the mid-70’s and now a cold front is moving through creating some pretty extreme weather. This is the sort of stuff that climate change doubters can’t explain, but are all too quick to say something when there is a winter day in the 20’s. Averages and temperature differentials….
I am starting to execute my plan to convert my road bike into a workable TT machine… This is primarily due to the fact that the Memphis Velo racing team frame manufacturer will be Felt. I liked my Kuota and it will serve nobly in new life as my time trial bike after I get the Felt built up.
One of the parts that will pull all of this together is the Zipp 900 disc I ordered. I picked it up today from Rod at RB’s Cyclery. I had some Tufo tires at home so I went ahead and started to stretch it over the wheel… Just to see how it would look, I put the wheel (without cassette) on my Kuota…
The colors even match… it must be destiny.
Andrea got her Zipp’s today as well… what a coincidence…
This week has not really been that restful…. I started my winter weight lifting program. The first day was Tuesday with a lot of quad work including back & front squats. Adding in bench press / incline press & various rows and the soreness was all around. It meant I was limping around on Wednesday. A trail run on Wednesday night was probably insult to injury…. and Thursday I rode a solid 30 miler on the road (no way I could have handled a cross ride as planned.) Tonights weight workout hit the other sides of things for the most part and at this point I feel okay.
I was even able to work on my cross bike earlier this evening. I installed the single ring setup up front. I took the opporuntinity to install a 9-speed Ultegra crank (upgrading my 105 crank / bb). I am curious how it will do on the trail. I will have to run it though its paces at Shelby Farms. It doesn’t bounce off there, it probably won’t racing…. As part of this change I was able to remove the front derailleur, the cable, and the housing up to the left STI lever. I don’t know if it will make a difference, but I do know that I rarely used my 46 tooth racing (I had 39-46 before). Now I have a single ring at 42 with 12-27 in the back. We’ll see how that does….
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