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Heyco 2590 for Bicycle Accessory Holes

Published July 14, 2013

Along with replacing the rim strips and tubes on my fatbike to save weight I decided to see if I could find a suitable hole filler for accessory mount (eg: water bottle, rack, etc – photo) holes on the bike frame. Some digging turned up Heyco Dome Plugs Part No. 2590 (PDF) and they are a perfect fit. Ordered from Mouser (Part # 836-2950 – photo) they cost $0.13/ea ($0.09/ea in 100 piece quantities) and snap snugly into mount holes. Removing them may be a bit of a pain, but a pick or serrated needle nose pliers will likely pull them right out.

By replacing 13 of the cap head stainless steel screws on my fatbike I cut 45g off of the bike’s mass. (The screws were 46g, and 15 of the dome plugs registered as 1g on my scale.)

While I’m not particularly concerned about such a small savings on the fatbike, I’m glad to find a cost effective item which can be used to fill accessory mount holes and prevent extra snow and water and such from getting in. I think they also look a bit nicer than simply leaving the holes empty, and don’t have the add-lots-of-shiny-stuff look (photo) that filling the holes with screws gives.

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Bye Bye, Rockhopper

Published July 11, 2013

My first real mountain bike, purchased at the very end of 2007 and heavily modified since, was sold this evening. After purchasing the Jamis Nova from Ryan I realized it was a better solution to every need that I kept the Specialized around for, so it was time to sell it. A posting to Craigslist on Monday returned a few hits, and this evening I met up with someone at River Bends who is really excited to get back into mountain bike riding, fit nicely on the bike, and purchased it from me. This Specialized Rockhopper is a very nice bike that saw me through a lot of learning, but I no longer had a need for it. Due to the memory-based object attachment which most of us are familiar with I didn’t want to part with it, but it was for the best.

The person who purchased the bike lives very close to River Bends, and as he and I were talking I learned that he’s regularly out on the trails at River Bends, hasn’t had a mountain bike in a couple years, and is planning on regularly riding it there. When passing through one short, dry section of trail (it’s pretty muddy out there in general) I got the feeling that he really, really missed riding on dirt. It’s some of these very same trails that first made me realize that I liked riding bicycles on single track; exploring the casually-created segments that were eventually incorporated into an official mountain bike route.

In the midst of the project to build trails at River Bends I never imagined their draw would foster the sale of the bike which first got me interested in trails themselves, but it’s really nice to see things come full circle. It feels very complete.

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2007 Jamis Nova

Published July 10, 2013

This past weekend I picked up a cyclocross bike from my friend Ryan. He’d had this bike for a while, but it was a bit small for him and he’d been wanting to sell it. He heard that I’d been looking for a road-ish bike, and one thing led to another and we met at the Tree Farm for a ride and I went home with a new-to-me bike, an almost stock 2007 Jamis Nova.

That afternoon I picked up a TIMBUK2 Bike Seat Pack XT to hold tools, a Topeak Road MasterBlaster frame pump, added a Garmin mount, fitted my preferred saddle and pedals, and set out for a ride on the Macomb Orchard Trail. It was this ride that really sold me on the bike. Before this I had very little experience with drop bars and bikes with smooth tires, but 23 miles of pavement showed me that this kind of riding can be quite a bit of fun and that I’m extremely glad Ryan sold me this bike.

Over the following two evenings I set about getting familiar with the bike, and ended up giving it a very detailed cleaning, replacing the derailleur housing and cables, and getting everything set up for me. I’ve still got some playing (and a lot of reading) to do with the bar position, but for now I think I’ve got it somewhere that’s comfortable.

As mentioned before, this bike is almost completely stock, with the exception of the tires and front shift/brake lever. At one point the front lever broke, and the shop gave the option of either waiting for a new 105-level component (to match the rest of the bike) to come in, or having it immediately replaced with a Tiagra-level part. The Tiagra part was chosen, so the levers don’t match. The feel for the two is very similar with the hoods being practically identical, and being the front shifter any potential difficulties with a lower-level part don’t concern me.

I’m planning on swapping tires to some Clement X’Plor USH tires that Joe Seidl recommended to me, and whose 35mm width, solid center and file tread sides look quite appealing. While I opted for the cheaper 60 TPI version, I hope (and based on reviews suspect) that these’ll do nicely for mixed pavement and gravel road riding.

Everything is now set up as I want it for a longer ride on the bike, so I’m hoping to get out on a 30-50 mile ride before the weekend is out. If things go as planned, I may try to fit this in Friday evening along with picking up the tires from Trail’s Edge. It looks like I’ll be able to ride from downtown Milford out to Island Lake by way of Kensington Metropark. This might be worth doing, should time permit…

If you’d like to see more photos of this new bike, they can be found here: Jamis Nova.

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Removing 1.3 Pounds of Rotating Weight

Published July 5, 2013

Spending less than $30 I was able to remove 1.3 pounds of rotating weight from my fatbike. How? By replacing the Surly Toob and Rim Strip with lighter weight parts. Namely, a Kenda-manufactured Q-Tubes Superlight 26 x 2.4-2.75″ tube and some 2.25″ wide red polyester ribbon (photo). I decided to try these parts out after reading a number of forum threads about fatbike weight savings and discussing it with some local friends. This technique/setup is pretty well tested and should work out nicely.

I simply removed the heavier parts, looped some ribbon snugly over the rim holding it in place with a bit of gaffer tape (photo), and put the wheels back together with the Superlights. The significantly lighter tubes filled the tires evenly and the woven ribbon seems to be doing a fine job keeping the tube away from the nipples and edges of the holes in the rims.

For now I don’t see any reason why these lighter weight parts shouldn’t hold up as well as the originals. I suspect that having lighter weight wheels (especially with the weight savings coming from the outer edge) will be noticeable as well, particularly when accelerating.

Weight (or mass) for each of the components involved in this can be seen here:

Actual Original New Delta
R. Wheel 9.20 lb 8.56 lb 0.64 lb
F. Wheel 7.60 lb 6.94 g 0.66 lb
R. Tube 464 g 227 g 237 g
F. Tube 460 g 229 g 231 g
R. Strip 83 g 11 g 72 g
F. Strip 84 g 11 g 73 g

Calculations based on the mass of the strips and tubes showed that there should have been slightly more savings (0.68 lb and 0.67 pounds for rear and front wheels, respectively), but I figure the difference is from the air put into the wheels. Using the rear wheel as an example Wolfram Alpha shows 36g (~0.4 lb) of air as having 28.2L of volume, which sounds about right, as I had the rear wheel inflated to ~30 PSI (to ensure the tire gets seated on the bead) when putting it on the scale.

Update (May 26, 2014): I experienced my first failure of this system. I’ll keep an eye on it, but there’ll be a little more maintenance required in the future because these tubes appear to fail early on due to exposure or overstreaching. Read about this here.

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Eight Grams of Security

Published June 19, 2013

When riding at Yankee Springs two weekends ago I thought I identified the cause of some bike noise on my Salsa El Mariachi Ti: the rear skewer. After trying out an old Shimano XT skewer from another bike during some local rides it held solid, and Lumberjack seems to have proven it out. I was subsequently able to acquire a new Shimano M770 skewer (so the old one can go back on the old bike) and I’ll use this one instead of the Salsa Flip-Off that came on the bike. This comes at a whopping eight gram penalty (55g for the Salsa Flip-Off vs. 63g for the Shimano M770), which I think is worth it for a more secure rear skewer.

I’m actually quite surprised that I had difficulties with the Salsa skewer as the other two that I own have been very solid. I suspect it has a bit to do with the way the rear triangle flexes, so maybe the different cam design of the Shimano (which I believe to be easier to get very tight) is what’s needed. A through-axle would be another good way to sidestep this, but I don’t have a TA-compatible rear wheel, so I can’t do that yet…

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Garmin Edge 500 Time Issues during Lumberjack 100

Published June 17, 2013

After getting back home from completing Lumberjack 100 I was excited to review the logged data from my Garmin Edge 500 bike computer. A few times during the ride the unit lost GPS signal, but as I’ve had this happen on other rides without issue I didn’t pay it much attention. Unfortunately, it looks like this time the data really went odd. After poking with the data and attempting to correct it in Ascent I downloaded Fit File Repair Tool to see what it could tell me.

As shown in the screenshot above (click to embiggen), roughly 15.52 miles in, at 44.2119°N 86.1295°W, just beyond the Steinberg Road crossing in Road Monkey during my first lap (map here), the recorded time suddenly jumped from June 15, 2013 to October 19, 2019. This explains the strange duration I’d been seeing in analysis software, with everything from Ascent and Strava both reporting an elapsed time of around 55619:03:11, the length of a ride which I don’t quite think the Edge 500’s battery would endure, but which matches the 6-some year offset. Weirdly, Garmin Connect doesn’t show the issue (link), almost as if they filter out this problem.

When this issue occurred my Garmin was running firmware v3.00, something which I was hesitant to change soon before the race. Since the changelog to v3.20 only lists two minor changes which aren’t useful for me (power meter serial number display and a change to support manufacturing) I didn’t see a good reason to rush to upgrade. It’d also worked otherwise well for long rides, so I didn’t anticipate any problems. I upgraded the unit to v3.20 today and I’ll see if similar problems arise, but I can’t imagine I’ll be doing that length of ride any time soon, so it’ll be hard to get an equivalent test.

If any of you wish to review this damaged FIT file from Lumberjack 100 it can be found here: svigneau_2013_lumberjack100.fit.

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2013 Lumberjack 100: Complete

Published June 17, 2013

Bright and early on Saturday morning I set out for my second attempt at Lumberjack 100, a race which I tried last year and failed to complete. Just after 6pm, a little over 11 hours after starting, I rolled across the finish line having met my two goals for the race: completing it and enjoying the ride. After crossing the finish line I picked up my finishing patch from the pile sitting on a chair (the person handing them out was off taking a break), put my bike in the tent with my stuff, and went and purchased one of the nifty plaid Lumberjack 100 jerseys that I told myself I’d get if I managed to complete the whole event.

I finished with an official time of 11:03:10.42, but due to some Garmin Edge 500 issues I had a difficult time getting accurate moving time data. From what  I can tell my moving time was about 10:15:06, which sounds right as I stopped a bit. This was mostly to use nature’s toilet, but there were a few other times to fix mechanical issues, help a couple of folks, wait for traffic on the climb at the start, and deal with an exciting (but thankfully not terrible) crash.

Had I done a few things differently (not crashed, stopped less, pushed a little more on the fire roads, sat on the toilet a little less between laps one and two) I would have have broken 11 hours, but I’m still quite happy with that time. There’s also the chance that all of those things helped make it a fun time. Beating this goal (sub-10 hour would be ideal) is something to aim for if I try the race again in the future. I really enjoy this race, the area around Big M, and most of the preparation / training rides, but dedicating much of another spring doing long, endurance-type rides gets in the way of other things and starts to get a bit stressful.

Continue reading2013 Lumberjack 100: Complete
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Thoughts on Yankee Springs

Published June 9, 2013

Today I rode Yankee Springs for the first time. I did two laps, then a bonus third lap of the warm-up/beginning/first part of the trail which loops back to the parking lot. Random thoughts went through my head about the trail while riding, including…

  • This is rather like Western Michigan’s version of Pontiac Lake Recreation Area.
  • Bald Mountain could be similar to this, if it was developed with more single track.
  • Lots and lots and lots of blind corners with semi-surprising things: roots, drop-offs, things where I should have had more or less speed.
  • Devil’s Soup Bowl (a very deep, steep geological formation) is apparently not meant to be ridden into. Whoops. Good thing I stopped part-way down at the first plateau and hiked out.
  • After becoming a bit familiar with the trail, it’s a lot of fun. I’d like to go back.
  • Riding up plastic matting (photo) is weird and somewhat awkward. The same with rubbery water bars.
  • Southeast Michigan trails are mostly hard pack clay and gravel. Wester Michigan trails seem to be light sand over a firm bed. It’s different, but nice.
  • Trails through needle-covered ground in stands of Red Pine mixed with green foliage are beautiful.

I also identified the source of a rather irritating sound at the rear end of my bike: the Salsa skewer. If I didn’t stop and periodically tighten it a loud tick/knock would develop at the rear of the bike. I’ll try replacing it with an XT from my first proper MTB. Hopefully that fixes it, and then I can pursue a more permanent replacement.

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Petrol-Gel as Specialized WaterGate Valve Lubricant

Published June 8, 2013

The burst valve design of the Specialized WaterGate lids for their bottles are quite nice, and as one can twist the valve gently to remove it for cleaning they don’t suffer the buildup that plagues CamelBak bottles. However, after a few cycles of removing the valve and washing them the o-rings become dry and the valve is hard to reinsert and doesn’t move very slowly.

I have some Petrol-Gel lubricant for maintaining beer dispensing equipment, so I figured I’d give it a go on these seals. It worked great; a very light application to the o-rings and the inside of the valve seat in the lid restores the original smooth action of the valve. This makes the lid work like new.

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First Stan’s Booger

Published May 28, 2013

After cleaning the drivetrain on the El Mariachi Ti I was poking around with the bike, and when spinning the front wheel on the workstand I could hear something tumbling around inside of the front tire. It didn’t throw the wheel off balance, but as it was likely a Stan’s booger I figured I should remove it. After deflating and popping the tire off the bead, the ~4cm coagulated clump of latex was easily removed from the tire.

Once the tire was popped back on the rim I was able to reseat it using a hand pump, which made it very easy to get the wheel back together. With another ounce of Stan’s Sealant added into the front wheel to replenish what was lost, all is back to normal, and now there’s no rattly-tumbly sound when the wheel spins.

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