My new favorite trail. With two feet of snow in the Fort, we found a relatively dry ride for our ANNUAL BIG ASS RIDE. Last minute plans brought us to do the Heil to Hall connector. Awesome ride! Here are some of my pics (you can click through to see the rest on flickr):

Most chainrings are not perfectly round. Some are worse then others.

For singlespeeders this can sometimes make achieving correct chain tension a trick. To do this you approximate the tension, then rotate the crank to find the “tight” spot, then set tension from that position.

However, this assumes you didn’t forget to center the chainring in the first place! I learned the hard way and didn’t think about it when I originally threw on the chainring (sort of a SS noob). The variance was too much, either it was too loose and bounced off, or too tight and would bind some with each revolution.

I dropped a chain again recently… finally got off my butt and took the time to better center the chain ring on the crank spider/mounts. Maybe its just Salsa rings, but the fit is quite loose and it took some trial and error to get it fairly center.

Good to go now though:

Just found an awesome video detailing a rebuild of a FOX RP23… this is great:

In this case “rebuild” meaning replacing the air-sleeve seals and new lube.

I forgot to post up this one.  From a MBM ride earlier in July on the Ginny Trail with Ryan and Dave:

The last couple times we attempted this trail we started late forcing us to descend early due to lack of daylight.  We were again pushing it this time for daylight, yet crested the top just in time to catch the sunset.

BTW, other MBM postings are over at our still in progress project site: cotw.

Two summers ago JJ and I went for a mountain bike ride up the Old Flowers jeep road.  The highlight of this ride was that on the way down we were flying along when all of a sudden J’s tire rear blew out with a vengeance.  Upon inspection we found a full utility razor blade lodged in his rear tire.  Somehow a razor blade was on the trail, probably falling off some jeep or truck, and J happened to ride over it just so that it sliced the tire wide open.

Fortunately at the time we were close to the bottom, made a crude repair with a new tube and my handy athletic tape to patch the sidewall… good enough to get back to the car.

We laughed about the event saying “Man, that’ll never happen again!”  What are the odds of picking up a razor blade!?!

Yesterday was bike to work day in Fort Collins.  Yes, I biked to work…. took the road bike for speed (I’m always late).  On my way home, I was heading west on Drake between Timberline and Lemay.  I was heads down and cruising at a good ~20mph pace.  I caught the glimpse of two razor blades for a split second before POW, CLANK, Pah-CHING …  and quickly came to a stop.  A razor blade lodged in my back tire, hit the rear brake caliper and shot out the sided.  My sidewall was slashed wide open and it nicked the tube.  Fortunately I was able to patch the tube, had CO2 with me, and used the ‘ol dollar bill trick to patch the sidewall.  It was good enough to get home.

The amount of broken glass and goat-heads are bad enough in the Fort, now watch out for razor blades!

Second big MBM session of ‘09. This was also a new one to me and Ry. J used to ride this years ago but hasn’t checked it out in forever… also close to his new house down in Littleton.

We rode the dirt road 7-8 miles or so to where we could pick up the Colorado Trail. Along the way, we goofed around a bit:

And saw this:

The Colorado Trail was sweet riding. In fact, I’ve almost covered the majority of the Colorado Trail now and its always good stuff. Here we are stopping for a quick breather:

I need to get a camera with higher ISO speeds for action shots, but was playing with taking shots while riding on the dirt road back to the car. Here’s one of the MTBNINJA in fighting form:

Over-the-shoulder shot of J:

Click through any of the photos to go to our flickr page. Cheers.

MBM got out to a bit of a slow start this year.  Both Ryan and J had their bikes at the shop for a few weeks, plus the daily rain/hail storms have made riding difficult.

Although not as much mountain biking has occurred until this point, we have gotten together for 4 or 5 Music-Band-Monday’s instead, and a trail jogging session that crippled us all for about a week – that one was J’s idea.

But here we are, first big MBM excursion was to start exploring this super secret private singletrack nestled in the foothills by J’s new house.  All I can say is that J signed up for some trail work and got us a pass into this place…. and its fuggin’ awesome, hence “JJ’s Goldmine.”

Here are a couple highlights:

We rode through dusk and broke out the lights for the last leg of the downhill back to the car whooping and hollering the whole way.

Ryan had a dramatic flat finish rolling up to the car, pretty funny:

Saturday I got out for a good long solo ride on the Surly:

The trails were barely dry enough, I had to walk a few sections so not to damage the trail.  But still a fantastic ride, it felt great to get out.

Took the Surly because I’ve been lazy about tending to my mountain bike’s rear wheel.  The rear hub had developed some side to side play as well as a loose spoke (thanks Michaud..).

With another round of MBM coming up, needed to fix it.  My initial goal was to just fix the side play, bare minimum to get it back rolling.  I found this handy link as a reference for servicing a  Hadley 72-point rear hub:  LINKY

The service calls for a 21mm cone wrench and pin-spanners to remove one of the axle end caps.  I have pin-spanners, but no 21mm wrench.  Instead, I just used adjustable curved pliers with some rubber on the teeth to prevent marring.  The end caps aren’t supposed to be super tight, and since mine was loose already, the non-drive side spun right off practically by hand.

After removing the axle, the freehub body, pawls, spacers, needle bearing all pulled right out.  Used a rag to clean everything, bearings are good, re-greased it all with super-slick, reassembled, tightened the end caps and voila!  Done.  Took all but 15 minutes for a overhaul.

Really makes me appreciate the simplicity and design of the Hadley hubs, not needing special tools, or being overly complex to reassemble.  They are bomb proof hubs, and excellent value (sorry King).

After that, tightened up the loose spoke, minimal truing… ready to roll.

MBM is in Denver today, lets hope the rain holds out.