Fantastic pictures of you fellows and your great ride. I was, as I often am these days, running late to find you at Ferns but am so glad I got to see you on the road (yes that was me in the truck with the little man stashed in the back). Mental note here: clear calendar should SBP organize another ride next spring. I am soooo there!

For now, I'm afraid I'm getting ready to put the bike downstairs for some indoor trainer work. Normally I would still be out there, pushing the 35-40 degree limit but I confess that I'm ready to hang up my shoes a little early for the season. I'll be looking for y'all come April...

Wow it was a great weekend for riding !

Spent Saturday with some of my fellow forum members, and Sunday a solo 48 mile ride.

JM : I would welcome the opportunity to roll out a longer ride with you, maybe a metric century at your pace with a nice lunch and snack stops included.

C : Really enjoyed riding with you, I could count on you chasing me down whenever I jumped away fro the group. Your one strong rider and we'll have
to try a ride together again sometime.

SBP : Thanks for starting this post over a year ago, and for getting this ride together. I always look forward to you posts and it was great to finaly get to
meet you. But most of all to get to ride with you was great, thanks for eveything. When the hills start to call out to you just give me a yell and we'll
teach them a lession.

We'll have to do this again, and maybe we'll get more members along for the ride.

I guess you guys now know my weakness, I've never found an incline I didn't like.

Zero miles since the inaugural Cow Tunnel Classic. I'm going nuts.
I soldered the fan
so it cools the new hard drive
that replaced the one that crashed
that led to replacing the DVD drive, upgrading from XP to Windows7 and reloading Office 2010
Now, to reload all the other programs I dig around in stored files.
Imagine if all this effort went to rebuilding the Raleigh Pro…............
Imagine if I were looking at the old 62 tooth chain ring, 3ttt stem, Wolber sew up glue and Diettro Pietro Numero Uno shoes. Just imagine….
I gotta get on the road.
http://bikeforums.net/attachment.php...hmentid=178601

Down is good. :)

It don't rhyme but it gets the point across anyway.

I've had zero free time since the Cow Tunnel Classic, let alone do any miles.
But I finished putting my GT6's transmission back together.

Query on chains. SRAM has a PC83, PC85, PC870, and PC890. Their website says nothing more about them. One can guess that the higher the number the bigger the price. But what else is different between them? Strength? Weight? Design?

three freakishly warm, yet wet morning commutes this week. Never thought I would still be sporting a SS jersey and shorts in mid-November.

It was super warm, and it was nice to strip down to a light sweater, though I caught a car in Western Ave.'s new bike lane:


which I blogged about

Thehum, that was great video. Maybe it is odd of me but I find it funny that what is so obvious to some of us humans is not to others. Pretty clear bike lane to me.

Good article in the Boston Globe today about the Longfellow Bridge narrowing to one lane to encourage biking and pedestrian traffic. Every bike and walker is related to taking cars off the road, reducing the traffic jams, increasing safety, improving air quality, ...... I have to chant this to get out and ride in sub 32F weather..... It worked!
Nice video again! I'm going out.

Great Day! Made it up to Carlisle, too long a line for soup so I resorted to a gu pack in Concord and a second in Wayland. I was running out of gas from my pre-hibernation reduced mileage. I'm at 40% of summer months so 67 miles today was a big deal. Only a few riders out and those I talked to, like me, were struggling to guess the right clothing.

Comfortably warm at the beginning, mid ride or the end? Comfortable mid ride, really after 20 minutes and a pretty good hill I warmed up. I cooled off in the last 20 miles as I tired. By the time I got home toes were numb.

These were the first gu packs I've ingested since probably May and I've carried them ~50 times. I normally carry a bag of raisins for emergency fuel on long rides.

Waytago, sbp! I'm glad someone got out to ride. Too bad about the soup. It would have been good on a cold day. I got some work hours completed, not terribly productive. Then my sweetie (wife of 33 years) called me, said she'd twisted a knee. Bummer. Beer tastes good now.

Have some bike work to do. Want to measure some axle distances. Got a new chain but new 5-speed freewheels like I'm used to aren't available anymore. (Why would IRD make a 5-speed with 28-24-20-16-14??? Is there a shortage of 17-tooth cogs or something? I spend most of my time on the 24, 20, and 17.) So I think I'm gonna' pull the trigger on the 6-speed conversion. Shimano makes a good combination, I think 14-16-18-21-24-28.)

Have to play a show in Hingham tomorrow. Maybe, just maybe, I can manage a decent ride on Sunday.

Jim sounds like a long day. I wish your canoe partner a speedy recovery.
Speaking of which, a landlubber's view of the Sudbury from todays ride along Water Row.http://bikeforums.net/attachment.php...hmentid=179129 We rode past the site of Haynes Garrison in Sudbury.http://bikeforums.net/attachment.php...hmentid=179131 It was the site of an influencial battle in 1676 to protect the Sudbury Plantation.

Was the 72 the smaller or larger front ring? :-)
Were you 48-36?

BTW, what did you learn about the chain sizing?

Uh, I used to run 82-72 chainrings, but now that I'm a year older I don't have the knees for it. So now I run 48-34 (after running 48-36 for a few decades). I like hills too because I have the gears for them but lower gears means not doing them as fast as Zipp.

Harris Cyclery says this about the SRAM PC-870:
From what I read in BF, the SRAM chains PC-830, 850, 870, and 890 are similar but differ mostly in what parts are nickel plated. The 870 got several recommendations from BF members as the sweet spot in the price range. It also comes with the SRAM Power Link, not a big deal considering how infrequently I separate a chain link but a convenience every so often. So that's what I went with. It sure looks pretty (still in the box), not like the old Regina gold chains but still bling-ish.

50 fast miles up in North Reading on Friday but none over the weekend. I tried to make up for it this morning with a fast ride into Boston.

Cow Tunnel to Cow Tunnel today in perfect riding weather. It is a 75 miles loop Holliston to Carlisle and back. I did miss West Street and back tracked so it might have been 74 miles. I refueled with raisins, water and a baked potato with sour cream and cheese. The sky darkened at about 1PM and I thought it was later so I pushed the pace. After refueling I noodled another 25 and bagged a century for November. My monthly miles have dropped off as we approach winter. Our unseasonably warm weather really was nice for riding. Now I walked the dogs, it's dark and I'm falling asleep at the keyboard. TTFN

I'm jealous. No biking but I did get some wrenching done. I now have a functional 12-speed! Onward into the 80's! Which is to say, 2x6 instead of 2x5. Zipp, cmolway, you guys better stay in shape because I'm gonna' be faster now!
:speedy:

I took the frame to Belmont Wheelworks to get the rear DOs aligned. As I expected one wasn't exactly pointing the right way. The string-to-the-headtube test showed one side about a mm further out than the other, apparently a less than perfect stretching by a previous owner. I can correct for that by dishing the wheel. So I re-spaced the bearing cups on a longer axle, re-dished the wheel, mounted a new freewheel and chain. Haven't ridden it yet but I'm impressed with how quickly and smoothly it shifts with the high-tech teeth.

Of course, I had to shorten the chain by two links (I use only 112), and that super-strong chain broke my chain tool. And another thing - how does one open the SRAM power link once it has snapped closed? It looks to need special pliers or something.

Now to find some free time and good weather.

SBP I only wish I was able to get out and ride Mon. or Tue. with that weather. I did just finish a very cold and windy 30 mile ride today. If the weather is decent for Turkey day I'm planning to hit the Worcester airport, followed by George street to cap it off. I hope everyone has a safe happy holiday.

Dear Chain Skid Muller,
I'm still recalling your epic skid down Sudbury Road.
Did you really re-dish your wheel to align with your "new" 6 speed cluster?
BTW, Welcome to the '80s but stay the heck out of the '90s; that leads to the millenium and then it is nothing but trouble. Chains get ultra, super-douper light, indexed shifting, brifters, 10 gears on the cluster, carbon where you don't want to know. Zipp might actually make you think there is something to epoxy and carbon fiber the way he is forced to brake up hills but wait until you hear about carbon head spacers and Carbon-Kevlar spokes.

Run! Run! Ride for your life and be thankful you got away with 6 spockets, Araya rims and some fancy chain link I could never find and wound up using my chain tool on anyway.

PS did you really assemble a Michelotti Hearld transmission? Seems only appropriate a C&V afficianado riding a sweet Raleigh on rolling Metro West roads should have such a machine.

Good for you for getting out today!
After you've ridden several days in a row, not slept or eaten in a week, have the flu and just re-enacted Jim's chain skid, I'd like to ride the airport and George St. with you. http://bikeforums.net/attachment.php...hmentid=179820We can meet at the Major Taylor statue at the Worcester Library and go from there.

http://bikeforums.net/attachment.php...hmentid=179819

I beg you, don't think too hard. (That chain now occupies a place of honor in my box of discarded parts.)

Yes. Those old 126mm hubs were often the same as 120mm hubs but with longer axles and more dish. I got a sealed-bearing 126mm Shimano hub from southpawboston and sure enough the flange spacing was the same as my current wheel. A new axle and brace of 3mm spacers is a lot cheaper than building a new wheel, so it just needed a bit of dishing. Everything is nicely centered now. And the freewheel really is new, a Shimano with 14-16-18-21-24-28. The 28 is black and the other cogs are bronze. The new chain is nickel. All very pretty but understated. The 90's can wait a while, I think.

Well, it might have been designed originally for a Herald. Specifically it was from a GT6.

Here is my sweetie of 33 years posing on the top of Cadillac Mt this past May, same place as the pic I posted with the bike but looking north instead of east.
http://users.rcn.com/jimmuller/pics/Sharon_and_GT6.jpg

The gearbox internals. That remaining spacer goes between the center bearing (at the back end of the casing) and the lock ring, in case you were thinking I'd left something out. :) That gear at the odd angle inside is the reverse idler before the reverse shaft was put in place. You see, reverse can't go in until the layshaft is in place, and getting the layshaft in is, shall we say, tricky.

http://users.rcn.com/jimmuller/pics/gearbox.jpg

SBP you're more than welcome to join me for a fun T-Day ride. I pm'd my cell phone number, call me anytime you want to try riding together

this morning's wind was brutal. luckily I was on my road bike so I could tuck, but it still took a few minutes longer than normal to do my 13-mile commute.

luckily the wind died down for the ride home

Hey mtalinm,

Wait a minute. We ride the same route, you inbound and me outbound, and we both had a stiff headwind?!!

I guess so. it was brutal, almost fell over once. I think the winds were swirling around, might explain it

come to think of it a lot of it was sidewinds

Hi mtalinm (et al),

Happy Thanksgiving. Thanks for your reply. I wrote about my ride this morning, including a specific comment about our mutual route:

http://www.bikeforums.net/showthread...0#post11839790 post #7169

I usually take the train home from my destination, but I hope to ride the 14 mile return this morning, since I'm "in training" for the Holidays. :rolleyes:

Over in the Roadie Forum they claim the wind always blows two directions at once.

Happy Thanksgiving. Ride safe.