Further to last Friday’s post, a lot has happened on the Spinergy front, and a lot continues to happen:
[Well this hasn’t happened…at least not yet. Extreme Normcore!]
I will of course fill you in when I have a better idea of what’s going on, but in the meantime all I’ll say is please do not attempt to obtain any Spinergys on my behalf because the carbon-bladed wheels are very much in motion.
Meanwhile, this coming weekend is the Five Boro Bike Tour–sorry, the TD Five Boro Bike Tour:
[The TD stands for “Tour de”]
And if you’re riding it this year you’d better watch out for me because I’ve been training and I am going to fucking destroy you:
Just kidding:
In fact, even though I made a promotional video in which I had to say the date of the ride repeatedly, I kind of forgot about it until I was driving The Car That I Own on the highway the other day and on one of those signs where they flash updates and stuff there was a warning that a bunch of roads would be closed soon for the Five Boro Bike Tour. (Nobody reads these signs and then everybody freaks out when the roads are closed, even though the ride’s only been going on since like the 1970s.)
Then I forgot about the ride again, until this past Friday when I was on a ride and the sights and sounds of spring reminded me once more that it was nigh Five Boro Bike Tour time:
I admit I’d be lying if I also thought to myself, “You know what would be better about this ride? No dirt and 30,000 other people.” But I’ll be there, because not only am I the Five Boro Bike Tour’s official spokesman*, but only an idiot would turn down this many bananas:
*[Bike New York wishes it to be known that Bike Snob NYC a.k.a. Tan Tenovo is not the official spokesman TD Five Boro Bike Tour, and furthermore that they disavow themselves of any relationship with him beyond the annual Making of the Video, and even then only when he wears a helmet. And if he shows up with a cargo bike and attempts to resell our bananas again they will press charges. Also, it’s not “spokesman;” it’s “spokesperson,” or else “spokesentity” if they have transcended not only gender but corporeal existence altogether.]
Of course the big question is: “What bike to ride?” I’ve already sought and attained vengeance with a bike curated especially for that purpose:
So do I load up the basket of the Platypus with sundries and make a day of it?
Or do I slice and dice the ride expediently astride a full-blown Fred Sled?
Speaking of which, riding it this past weekend I became aware of a creak, which I found to be emanating from the boutique ultralight crabon crank, and a cursory inspection revealed the arms to be loose. Upon returning home (does anybody actually carry an 8mm Allen key with them?), I tightened both bolts as much as I dared, though the play remained in the left arm. I’ve been enjoying this bike very much and did not want to subject it to unnecessary downtime, so rather than attempt to further diagnose the problem I figured a transplant was the most straightforward solution:
The crank uses the ISIS interface, which is the object of more or less universal derision:
I have no idea if the play is the result of worn or damaged splines or something else:
I also have experience with only one other ISIS crank, which is the one that originally came on the budget singlespeed that now lives with a reader in California:
I replaced it early on, since as I recall the bottom bracket seemed prematurely worn, which I think is the big problem people have with ISIS. I then dug it out of the parts bin and stuck it on the Softride after picking all the good stuff off of it before giving it away:
[Photo: Arlo Weiss]
This reminds me that the recipient owes me an update; I will have to check in with him. Hopefully he has not discovered that riding a Softride beam while pedaling an ISIS crank will open a portal to Hell.
As for the remaining parts in the aforementioned bin, among the various cranks in there was this Race Face road crank, which I decided to use for the LeMond because it’s the same length and BCD as the Zipp which meant I could use the same chainrings:
It’s an outboard bearing crank from the mid-aughts, and when it comes to those there’s Shimano, which is by far the best (until they started bonding their cranks, obviously) and then there’s everyone else. Race Face’s not-so-bright idea was to attach the spindle to the left arm and then put the fixing bolt on the drive side, which one contemporary review claimed was a “potential environmental benefit:”
I don’t know about that, but I’m sure it’s a lot cheaper and easier to stock, pack, and ship. (My parts bin is a testament to that. Have you ever tried to figure out how to store a Hollowtech II crank? It’s surprisingly challenging.) I’d also imagine that’s at least part of the reason–if not the entire reason–that lots of companies (SRAM, for example) use a similar system. It certainly seems inferior to the Shimano system from an engineering standpoint, since as I understand it (though I readily admit I understand technical things very poorly) the spider is where most of the stress happens on a bicycle crank, which is why those old Campagnolo Record cranks (a pair of which I’m currently riding around on) apparently tend to crack there. Indeed, the Race Face outboard bearing cranks of this era had a reputation for failing (the splines would wear out and the crank would become useless) and I had a Race Face mountain bike crank that died in exactly this way–though I never had a problem with either of the Race Face road cranks I’ve owned, including this one. (The other one is, as far as I know, still working fine on a bike I gave to a friend.) Really, the only problem I had with the road ones was that the Race Face bottom bracket that came with it was complete garbage, though I remember at the time it was advertised as containing “Phil Wood grease,” which is kind of like saying it had Sony guts:
Fortunately the crank also works with Shimano outboard bottom brackets, which last forever, so that solves the problem.
As for why I have had so many of these inferior-to-Shimano cranks, the reason is that my stable of bicycles was experiencing rapid growth in the mid-aughts, while my wallet was not–and these cranks were very cheap even when new, probably because they were not very good. But as I say, the road ones served me just fine, and this one seemed a good fit for the LeMond, so I moved the rings over and put it on the bike:
We’ll see how it holds up.