Feeling the love

I've been commuting to work most of this week on my new Raleigh Rush Hour. The ride into work only takes 3-5 minutes more than driving since it's downhill for pretty much the entire route. Of course that's downhill on a fixed gear which can get tiring. Heading home is a different story - 3.2 miles almost all of it uphill and with the steepest parts at the end. This definitely takes me longer to get home when compared to driving, especially considering I'm dripping sweat and need a shower. I did swap out the 15 tooth stock cog for an 18 tooth Surly cog. 48 x 18 gives me 72 gear inches. Since I'm old, fat, and prefer to spin at a high cadence I'll probably swap the chainring out for something smaller, probably a 46 (giving 69 gear inches)

My Nitto pursuit bars arrived earlier this week and I like them a lot. Pursuit bars don't give as many hand positions as drop bars but then again this bike is mostly going to be ridden on flatter, shorter rides so that's not an issue. The bars reach further forward than drops so I do need to put on a slightly shorter stem to compensate.

I decided not to run a brake lever and instead modified an old SunTour power ratchet thumb shifter. The first step was to remove the power ratchet feature and restore the shifter to pure friction mode. This was easily done by removing the pawl and spring. Next I had to make the 25.4 MTB bar mount fit a 26.0 road bar. This was a little more tricky. Simply using a road brake lever clamp wouldn't work. I tried both Shimano and DiaCompe models to no avail. So I fired up the RotoZip and installed the grinder tool. I carefully thinned down the tabs that hook into the band and the also thinned down the inner side of the mounting piece. This gave me the 0.6mm of clearance I needed. Note to bike industry: why can't you morons make all handlebars the same diameter?!?!?! What advantage is to be had from having 2 standards within .6mm of each other? This is just yet another prime example of proof that the bicycling industry clearly fails to attract the best and brightest when it comes to product design! Still, the combined stupidity of the bike industry wasn't going to deter me from creating a super stealthy emergency brake lever! The final step was to clamp the lever to the drill press and carefully expand the hole originally meant for the button at the end of shifter cable to accept the wider button at the end of a road brake cable. Even though this will be primarly an emergency brake lever it's still not a bright idea to use a shift cable as a brake cable! Later I'll post some pictures and more complete instructions.