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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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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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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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