Before working on the Ritchey I took the bike ride I've been wanting to do for the last 3 days. I did another West Seattle loop from home. I got some forest action in Lincoln park.
And some sound and mountain views on beach drive. I made a mid point stop..
..to fuel up on iced coffee and yogurt with handmade granola. That helped ready me to tackle Avalon hill again....
but this time the granniest granny gear stayed clean, I used the next cog in which is getting me closer to being able to use any bike in the fleet to do this ride. The Miyata has gears nearly as low as the Passage so if it was ready I could ride it on this route now. If I can ride Avalon in the next gear down, 3 cogs in, then I can use the Handsome devil on this route and if I'm able to get 4 cogs in I can use the Motobecane which has a 40t "small" ring, might need to see if I can find something smaller that will work with the crank on the MotoGT. Yes, I was geeking out with Sheldon Brown's gear calculator.
A bike forums member who also had an '86 Miyata trail runner was kind enough to pull his seat post and send me the size which is 26.8 and today after recovering from my 21 km ride I headed to the Co-op and found the Laprade above in the correct size - you can see it under the max height lettering if you enlarge the photo.
Where I left off about a week ago with the Ritchey was a self-inflicted torn brake hood. I gave a try to pulling the hood up the lever and over the front of the housing but that wasn't working, so I took out the cable, took the lever off the handle bars and got to work.
Going from the back of the housing forward I had the replacement hood mounted in no time and then reversed my process to get the lever back on the handle bars.
Since I had decided to route the cables in areo mode I needed to tape up the housing.
After figuring out the slack needed to make sure the brake cable didn't interfere with turning I used some blue painters tape to hold the housing in place.
I needed to trim some excess cable housing to fit the housing into the brake caliper.
Whenever I am trimming the housing I like to back the cable way off so that I don't end up cutting it by accident.
Everything appears to be working with the rear brake so I capped the cable and called it a night. I now have 3 things left to do on this bike before I can list it;
- route the front brake cable and housing
- figure out why the front derailleur cable keeps coming loose
- wrap the bars
Really hoping to get the Ritchey sorted in the next few days before I head down to Portland. And then I can start finishing a few other half baked projects.
Ride. Smile. Repeat
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