3 projects

Maddie and I spent our first night in the treehouse last night. It was a success.
I've got three bikey projects going. Well, I've got more, don't we all? But these are the most immediate projects. It's distracting to have these all in my brain right now. And I'm waiting for parts on all of them. So I just have to have them mumbling around up there for the time being.

In order of complexity:

#1 Minor changes to the RB-T CX
I'm putting new Tektro CX cantilevers on it. Just a general upgrade. I've wanted to try these brakes for a while and I got a good deal on them. I'm also going to put brifters on this bike. You can shift ok out of the saddle with bar-ends, but I think it will be much easier with brifters. I have some old Shimano 600 8-speed brifters from when I bought the yellow RB-1 a few years ago.



#2 Build up the mystery bike.
It's a Kogswell P/R. Standard drop-bar, compact-crank (the original "compact": 44/30), canti-brake, Hetre, build. I wish I had a live-in mechanic for these kinds of builds. Ugh. I hate the thought of spending a couple hours doing this.

#3 Mountain-bikify the Rawland.
I've got all sorts of crazy notions going on with this one. I'm putting Fox suspension forks on it, flat bars, indexed 9-speed shifting(SLX), and hydraulic brakes. There's a lot of stuff here I've not dealt with before. This is turning out to be an expensive project. I don't really want to admit how much this will cost, in case Liza reads this, but just so you know dear, I am getting stuff that I can reuse on different bikes in the future.

A fish out of water. I took a wrong turn. Turns out that west-bound Scribner ends at Cheney-Spokane Road. Regardless of what Google Maps might say.
I got my first intro to the religious nature of suspension forks. (Of course ALL bike genres and sub-genres are deeply religious. And like god-based religion, you have your fundamentalists at the fringes of the bike genres. There's an idea for a set of essays that would be fun to read.) Anyway, I was talking to a mechanic/rider yesterday that I really respect. I was asking about the ability to "lock out" forks for climbing. His fundie comment was (and this is a close paraphrase), "the ability to lock out suspension is a mechanical solution for a lack of skill." The other mechanics and standers-around all nodded in agreement.

Goats. At the new PEACH farm.
So there it is. I really respect skill at anything, but cyclists that are really good at their thing -- whether it's racing, jumping, trail riding, downhilling, urban riding, or whatever -- really get my attention. And I like the idea of becoming more skillful at riding, but I think I still want a remote lock out lever. We'll see. I'll ride for a while without one and see if I can develop the smooth spin and we'll go from there.