To follow up on yesterday’s post concerning this past weekend’s Very Small Rocks outing, the top speed of a mosquito is as follows:
I guess I’m slower than I thought if I can’t avoid them on climbs, though they don’t say whether that’s a laden or an unladen mosquito.
Also, unfurling saddle roll aside, the Farbman performed impeccably and I didn’t have a single complaint about it, so naturally I started tinkering with it pretty much as soon as I got home:
Specifically, I decided to change the tires–even though they had plenty of traction on the Very Small Rocks sections while also feeling surprisingly fast on the road. These tires are a very good fit for the bike (they’re cyclocross tires and it’s a cyclocross bike, funny how that works), so I’ve been telling myself I’d leave them on there until they wear out; however, they’re easily over 25 years old, and the sheer age of the things has been preying on my mind. Plus, I go back and forth between really liking the way they look (cylcocrossers of a certain age will fondly recall the distinctive Michelin hue) and really not liking the way they look, and right now I’m in a not-liking-the-way-they-look phase.
So on Sunday morning I headed out for a ride on the newly-installed black tires, and I flatted almost immediately, but not immediately enough to be able to simply walk back home and switch bikes in less time than it would take me to repair the flat. So I went to do just that, only to discover the puncture was on the rim bed side of the tube and seemed to have been caused by a slightly exposed spoke hole. I wasn’t about to peel off the rim tape and reapply it lest it lose its adhesion in the process and leave me rim-tapeless and just far enough away from home for the walk to be really annoying, so I patched the tube, inflated the tire, rode the bike home, and got another one.
This one:
And yes, it absolutely did occur to me when all this was happening that if I put nearly as much time into important things as I do riding bikes and tinkering with bikes and switching between one bike and another and deciding which one of my many bikes to bring on vacation with me then I might actually be successful in life.
But that would be a lousy trade-off, since what good is success if you don’t have time to ride?
In any case, with a fresh bike under me I was once again ready to ride, but the city didn’t want to let me go, for the path that takes you out of the park was strewn with fallen trees from Friday night’s storm, which were still down as of yesterday:
You can tell how well traveled this path is by how quickly a fully packed-in trail formed around it:
Then yesterday I returned to the Farbman in order to fix it properly, and as I was peeling the tape off the rim bed this fell out:
That’s a piece of the socket that sits in the spoke hole, and I’ve seen plenty of reports of them breaking, but I’d never experienced it myself until now:
I know nothing of the history of these wheels, having bought them used sometime last year from a non-profit bike shop. All I know is that they were perfectly true when I got them and they remain so even now. I also don’t know if this is an “Eh, whatever” problem or a “The spoke’s about to pull through and you’re about to die” problem, though my suspicion is it’s closer to the former. But if you have experience with failed Mavic Open Pro eyelets I encourage you to Fred-splain in the comments, and in the meantime I’ve re-applied the tape, re-mounted the tire, and marked the compromised spoke so I can keep any eye on it. (There is no visible cracking around the eyelet as of yet, and for all I know that eyelet’s been broken for years already.) For now I’ll keep riding it, and eventually I’ll replace the rim, but if someone can convince me I’m about to die maybe I’ll stop riding it and replace the rim sooner.
As for the Roadini, I’ve been back on it for the past couple of days, which has afforded me an opportunity to make a side-by-side comparison between it and the Farbman as the Vacation Bike Showdown continues:
Apart from being so well sorted out that even I can’t convince myself to continue tinkering with it, the Roadini is the logical vacation choice if for no other reason than it’s so stable thanks to the longer wheelbase and other geometrical factors–not that the Farbman is even remotely unstable, but it is a bike that was designed for riding really fast through twists and turns in grassy fields, whereas my vacation riding consists of riding up and down what in New York State do qualify as actual mountains, and the Roadini is objectively better suited for that. Yes, now that I’ve triple-ized the Farbman and double-ized the ‘Dini I’ve got lower climbing gears for the steepest Very Small Rocks climbs, but really this should be low enough:
Oh, I did do one little bit of tinkering, because after I originally put the rear tire on I noticed I installed it “backwards,” which couldn’t possibly mean anything on what is essentially a slick tire. But just in case, while I was in tire-swapping mode yesterday, I flipped it around to the “proper” direction:
Incredibly, the decrease in rolling resistance and increase in cornering grip was immediately noticeable.
Just kidding.