Weekend riding, and the resurrection of another long-time bike

After helping with the Bicycling for Louisville office move yesterday, we had thought to ride out to Bluegrass Bicycle for the Saturday afternoon club ride. However, Jenn just wasn't up for that, so we wandered a bit on the way home from Second and Broadway, stopping for some browsing at Kathy Schmidt's Crescent Hill Trading Company, and what became a big grocery shopping trip at the Kroger on Hubbards Lane (good thing we had the two trailers with us...). Once we got home, we decided to have a date night of sorts and went out to eat at Taj Palace on Goose Creek near Westport Road. It had been a while since we had eaten there, and we enjoy their food.

We had also thought about riding the Honest Abe century out of Iroquois Park this morning, but neither of us was ready to deal with the wind for a hundred miles today. It's one thing to ride into a ten- or fifteen-knot wind (at ambient temperature close to freezing) for an hour en route to work, but quite another to ride into it for half of a hundred-mile day. We opted to ride to the 2:00 PM Heine Brothers' ride instead.

Before riding to that, I went out alone to get some dog food, cat litter and bird food at Feeder's Supply and some odds and ends at Whole Foods. I got home in time to change metaphorical gears and prep the tandem for the three-mile hop to Saint Matthews and the twenty-two mile club ride.

Once home from the ride, I spent some more time tinkering with my Bacchetta Strada. I had not ridden this bike since its right shifter broke in September of last year. I've had the parts to fix it for a while, but hadn't gotten around to doing the work. Last weekend, I decided it was time to have that bike back on the road, so I installed the new handlebars and shifters I had sitting in various parts bins (I had installed the new fork a couple weeks prior).

To clarify a bit: My Strada was built from a frame kit late in 2002, using Campagnolo components as much as I was able. Since I was, even then, a shop guy, I bought Record Ergo Levers, derailleurs, crankset, hubs (eventually an additional set of Centaur hubs for the spare wheel set), headset and bottom bracket. The bike won't accept Campagnolo brakes, so it has a set of Tektro Mini-V brakes on the rear and the proprietary Bacchetta brake on the front. I had broken a right shifter lever (the downshift lever, inside the brake lever) near the end of Ride Across Indiana in 2005, so when it happened to me again last September, I knew exactly what had happened and what I was going to have to do about it.

Since most of my club riding is done on the tandem with Jenn, I waited to get the parts until a month or two ago. I also started thinking more about changing from the Ergo levers to bar-end shifters and Avid Single Digit levers. I have a Bacchetta carbon fiber fork from a Corsa that was scratched in shipping, and the Bacchetta Fine Tune headset adjustment system to replace the B-Pivot I've had on the bike since the first one broke in 2005. The idea was to make the front end a bit lighter, and get away from the Ergo levers (which were chosen largely as a proof of concept thing when I built the bike in 2002). In conjunction with the Ergo levers, I was using a Campagnolo ErgoBrain computer--that had far more features than I ever used--that was integrated with the shifters so as to give me a visual indicator of what gear I was using at any given moment. It was cool in a gee-whiz gizmo sense, but was starting to be problematic and sometimes inaccurate in its information display.

Since I have almost fifteen years of experience with bar-end shifters on my Ryan, I decided it was time to try them on the Strada. I figure that I can sell the Ergo levers on EBay or something and recoup some of my outlay for the new shifters.

So, now, the bike has a stiff riser instead of the B-Pivot, regular brake levers and bar-end shifters instead of the Ergo combination levers, and will have a different cyclometer. As part of the conversion, I changed the brake and shifter cables and most of the casings.

I took the bike out for a couple of blocks as a brief shake down run, and was pleased. I have a little bit of minor adjusting to do with regard to the brake lever placement and cable routing, but I'm largely pleased with the new controls. I've ridden Jenn's Giro some over the last month or so, and have always felt it rode much like my Strada, but I am looking forward to putting some real miles on this bike again.