August 8 – 23, 2014:  Jerry and Odette biked from Fairbanks to Dawson (over the Top of The World Highway) then continued on to Whitehorse and Skagway on the Klondike Highway.  A ferry ride to Juneau completed the tour.

Odette surprised me with a Christmas present of a bike tour in the Yukon.  I didn’t think that she would volunteer for camping way up north, but it was her idea.  She said she wanted to try out bike camping in a supported environment before we took off for a long self-contained trip. She remembered me really wanting to hike the Chilkoot trail and thought that this would be a way to see that country without the boulderfields.   Pedalers Pub & Grill, the company that operates the tour she chose, guides trips mainly in Asia but they run three or four trips a year in Alaska.  We put a deposit down early in 2014 and then started riding our tandem hard to train for it.  We wondered if the Ibis would be a better bike for Alaskan roads, but we were told the route would be all paved.  A few weeks before we were supposed to leave we got an email saying that the chartered plane from Fairbanks to Dawson wasn’t running any more, so how did we feel about being driven or biking to Dawson and could we start a day earlier to allow time to cover about 300 extra miles.  We responded that it sounded good to us, we were flying into Fairbanks a couple of days early anyway, and that we wanted to bike as much of it as we could.  Apparently at that point all of the other people booked on the tour backed out, because it ended up with just Odette and me with the owner of the tour company as our guide.

Here is a Google Maps diagram of the route

Here is my journal of the trip:

Friday August 8.

did laundry and packed,  decided to take winter shoes.  checked the weights of the bike cases and stuffed some more things into the lighter one.  took Shuttle Express to the airport – sitting interminably on Westlake waiting to turn left onto Mercer.  Luckily I-5 wasn’t backed up.  security had to rescan my laptop.  the agent at the check-in desk made us take our bike cases to oversize.  stood in line at Starbucks to get a sandwich.  boarding seemed to be a free for all.  plane ride was long and cramped.  still light in Faribanks at 11:00.  good times.

Saturday August 9

after a breakfast that wasn’t my favorite, assembled the tandem.  no issues – chain went together easily.  had to start over on the rear rack.  met Tom from Pedalers as I was finishing the bike.  talked for a while about the tour and about his business.  rode around the block with Odette to confirm that shifting worked then took a shower.  rode to the University and did the museum – which was fun.  watched a movie about the aurora borealis then had lunch there.  tried to ride to the big animal research station but kept going exactly the wrong way.  had trouble remembering that the stoker is always right.  got there too late for a tour.  forget to turn on my cyclometer for the ride back to the motel.  the bike wasn’t shifting right so I fiddled with the cable runs and got it slotted in the right places.  rested for a couple of hours in the room then rode to pioneer park for the salmon bake.  the bike was shifting okay but we had some more 180-degree off experiences before eventually getting there (Fairbanks is just figuring out bike lanes – google maps kept sending us back and forth between frontage roads on either side of Airport way and they all seemed to end on sidewalks signed “no bikes.”  pioneer park was signed “no dogs or bikes.”  the food was okay but over-priced.  Odette got us a pitcher of beer and that was actually quite good..  we improvised a route back to the room which was better than the route out.  it sprinkled on us but we had raincoats.

Sunday August 10

same breakfast process as the day before, then hauled bike and bags out to the street.  had to unpack to retrieve the bike lock keys from yesterday’s pants pockets.  drove to delta and walked around a roadhouse – got mosquito bitten.  exceptional views of the Alaska Range and of various big braided rivers.  drove on to Dot Lake, had lunch and started our ride.  the van waited for us every 15 miles.  The   terrain was rolling hills with lots of stunted spruce.  played tag with rainclouds but never got wet.  about 12 miles out of Tok we picked up a bike path.  it had a lot of gravel on it and I couldn’t decide whether it was better or worse than the road.  ended up riding just under 50 miles but it didn’t really feel that far.  got to the campground and Tom suggested we go into town before setting up the tent.  We checked out the visitor center, emailed Will and bought some fudge before returning.  pitched the tent, had dinner, charged phones.  ate more than I should have

Monday August 11

lots of bacon at breakfast.  packed up and got in the van for a ride toward Dawson.  mlles of stunned spruce burned over by forest fires.  lots of badly maintained unpaved road.  Saw the town of Chicken and the mining relics (including a dredge.)  started biking where the new pavement started.  pavement ended at the border after a long hill.  the Canadian customs guy gave us a little bit of  a hard time but let us in.  lots of ups and downs on mainly unpaved roads.  we got tired after 45 miles and rode in the van for 20 mostly flat miles, then biked on into Dawson which was another 20, mainly downhill.  last segment was really muddy & slippery .  crossed the Yukon river on a very small ferry.  showered, had a very big burger for dinner.

Tuesday August 12

late breakfast.  walked around Dawson and visited museums.  City/federal places were really good; Holland America attractions, not so much.  skipped lunch and rode out to Dempster Junction and back.  flat, paved, pretty scenery lots of dredge tailings.  I’d like to drive up the Dempster and see the Ogilvie mountains.  got rained on coming back and then had a flat. tried to just pump it up but pump wouldn’t work so used c02, that lasted five minutes.  changed tube and used another co2 cartridge – that lasted ten minutes.  mad it back to town on the third co2 cartridge.  borrowed a pump and figured out that both of the flat tubes were pinch flats – then discovered that I also had a flat on the rear tire.  changed that and patched all three flat tubes  – still not sure exactly how I did that but know that R+E didn’t put new tubes on when they changed tires.  Ate dinner at the HAL restaurant and were the youngest people in the place.  I had liver & onions.  tried to get decaf but the power was out for the whole town…

Wednesday August 13

breakfast at the hotel then rode in the van to Dempster junction.  10k of roadwork that they wouldn’t let us ride so we shuttled most of the way through the construction zone.  in the next 10k we had three more flat tires and definitively broke my pump.  After that the ride picked up – no more flats for the rest of the day.  saw lots of poplar, lots of big vistas, low mountain ranges and far off rivers.  no people.  very few cars.  some up and down but no really steep hills (only got into the big ring a couple of times and only got into the small one once all day long.)  started to rain just before we go to the Moose Creek campground.  kept it up all through dinner.  climbed into the tent early.

Thursday August 14

woke up to no rain but cold.  had breakfast then rode to Stuart Crossing.  hit some construction and rode several small sections of gravel – got to a longer construction site and they wouldn’t let us ride and said they couldn’t shuttle a tandem.  we waited for the van and missed about three miles of our ride.  for some reason my gps kicked out at that point.  rode on to Pelly Crossing for the night.  lots of poplar, lots of spruce, lots of big vistas.  not a lot of traffic and not a lot of people.

 Friday August 15

after a warm night with lots of drive buys and barking dog packs we rode from Pelly Crossing to Carmacks.  headwinds all day.  spectacular views of the Yukon River.  at this point we’ve moved into forest and away from tundra – it feels more familiar.  played tag with a german sleeper-bus.  had several stretches of unpaved road – 10k of recent chip seal with one fast descent…  one bridge rebuilding project where the road was exceptionally rocky.  overall a slow day because of the winds but a good ride and no rain.  one flat tire – a quarter mile after the 10K stretch.  camped in a commercial campground with boaters and RVs.  shower felt really good.

Saturday August 16

rained a little over night and was cold in the morning.  started off with lots of clothes on and left most of them on all day.  forgot to start my cycle meter.  had a headwind again for most of the afternoon but only a little rain.  the riding was easier than the last couple of days but the wind still made us slow.  one section of construction but the loose gravel really didn’t make a lot of difference in our speed.  lots of lakes today,  out of tundra and into northern forest.  huge vistas, little streams and tarns that never stopped, cat & mouse with the Yukon River, historic sites, still very few settlements which made the ones we did encounter (Braeburns) seem more memorable.  low mountains across the lake still have snow patches.  got cold as soon as we got off the bike – had dinner and then crawled into the tent at 7:00

Sunday August 17

started raining during the night and was going good in the morning so we delayed breakfast.  got up, packed, rolled up a wet tent, ate a Braeburns Cinnamon Bun, then biked to Whitehorse in full cold-weather rain gear.  stopped raining after about 10 miles and midway I shed a layer.  it was really interesting to come back into cultivated fields and civilization after several days of wilderness.  the Alaska highway has more traffic and more shoulder (even if it was more cracked) than the traffic lane.  took the bike trail down 2-mile hill.  got to the motel before 2:00 and found we were already checked in and our stuff was in our room.  the showers felt good.  the bike store in town was closed for Yukon Days but we found the local sporting goods store and bought a patch kit, two tubes and a blackburn airstick.  ate too much for dinner.

Monday August 18

Discovery Day in the Yukon so we didn’t ride.  most stores were closed, most restaurants, too.  had lunch at Tim Hortons.  Dinner at the Klondike  Salmon Bake, again.  walked around the shipyards trail and out to the SS Klondike.  visited the McBride museum.  walked to the Yukon Brewery, but no tours or tastings.  didn’t start to rain until about 7:00 in the evening.

Tuesday August 19

raining at breakfast but mainly stopped by the time we took off.  Alaska Highway out of Whitehorse has good shoulders but a lot of traffic; Klondike highway is chip seal.  interesting collection of buildings at Robinson Roadhouse.  miles of dense northern forests and the beginnings of mountains with patches of snow.  rain off and on, but never had to put on rain pants.  got to camp at Carcross at 2:00 –  missed the turn and got cross-chained so I had to fix it by hand.  Set up tent and then went into the old town, did part of the walking tour and looked at the burned steamboat.  rained some more at dinner time.

Wednesday August 20

sprinkles at the campsite but quickly took off rain gear.  rolling hills with dense forest out of Carcross.  miles of lakes and then views of peaks and snow.  lots of avalanche area signs and evidence of rockfall.  broad valley that reminded me of the Enchantments with exposed rock and subalpine vegetation and little tarns and streams – went on for ten miles.  one more flat and I booted a slit in the casing with an inner tube patch. skipped the log cabin for big views at Fraser then a climb to the actual border.  rained on while stopped but not enough to interrupt a fast descent to the US Customs.  Then more winding descent into town.  dodged tour ship passengers to the motel and broke the bike down and packed it.  Then walked the main street and looked at the shops.  Skagway is a tourist trap – themed like Winthrop or Leavenworth but without their charm or integrity. (for some reason it was full of jewelry shops selling loose diamonds)  dinner at the Skagway brewery and a short sleep before a 5:45 AM wake-up (for an 8:00 ferry)

Thursday August 21

early trip to the ferry and then all day on board.  Alaska state museum is closed until 2016. walked around Juneau and had dinner at a Tracy’s Crab Shack – best food on the trip.

Friday August 22

good breakfast at The Sandpiper. walked to Juneau city museum which was closed because of a power outage.  took the shuttle out to the Mendenhall glacier visitor center and walked to the falls.  had lunch then killed time until we could get a ride to the Alaska Brewery tour.  visited the city museum which featured a tow-gripper from Meany.  went back to the room and repacked, then had dinner at the Wharf.

Saturday August 23

flight back to Seattle at 8:20 was notable for the early check-in time and the views of the water and islands around Juneau on takeoff.  had remarkable views of the BC Costal Range as we got further south.  the word “reservation” doesn’t mean what Shuttle Express thinks it does – the trip home from SeaTac took longer than the flight from Juneau to Seattle.

Here are the GPS maps of our rides:

• August 9 – Fairbanks
• August 10 – Dot Lake to Tok
• August 11 – Top Of The World Highway
• August 12 – Dawson – Dempster Junction (out & back)
• August 13 – Dempster Junction – Stuart Crossing
• August 14 – Stuart Crossing – Pelly Crossing
• August 15 – Pelly Crossing – Carmacks
• August 16 – Carmacks – Fox Lake
• August 17 – Fox Lake – Whitehorse
• August 19 – Whitehorse – Carcross
• August 20 – Carcross – Skagway

Here are some materials scraped from the Pedalers Pub & Grill website.

• trip description pdf
• final email
• Klondike
• equipment
• camp rules
• checklist

Here are my photos and here are Odette’s

Here are the Garmin records

• August 9 – Fairbanks
• August 10 – Dot Lake to Tok
• August 11 – Top Of The World Highway (partial)
• August 12 – Dawson – Dempster Junction (out & back)
• August 13 & 14- Dempster Junction – Stuart Crossing – Pelly Crossing
• August 15 – Pelly Crossing – Carmacks
• August 16 – Carmacks – Fox Lake
• August 17 – Fox Lake – Whitehorse
• August 19 – Whitehorse – Carcross
• August 20 – Carcross – Skagway (recorded, but not retained)

 

Lessons learned from 600 miles and 35,000 feet of elevation gain:

The highlights of the trip for me were the Top Of The World Highway with its huge velvety treeless expanses and the summit at White Pass – the beginning and end of the trip.  Doing it over I’d spend less time on the touristy stuff and more time on the wilderness.  The ferry to Juneau was a great experience but I could have done without the second day in Juneau – and probably could have done with less time in Dawson & Whitehorse as well.  However, we got tired after three or four days and a rest day was welcome (as were motel beds and restaurant meals.)  Charging batteries is something I need to pay more attention to – the laptop worked fine but we used it up after a couple of nights.  Also need to pay more attention to tires.  We had nine flats in twelve days, six of them coming within 20 miles.  My theory is that I got a cut in the tread of the tire in gravel on that first out & back and if I had booted the cut at that point I could have avoided most if not all of the rest.  I need to rethink frame pumps, too.  a broken pump left me unable to figure out where the hole in the tube was and I had a limited number of CO2 cartridges (cartridges which Odette woke me up in the middle of the night in Juneau to make me throw away because she felt guilty taking them on the airplane.)  The bike did well but Odette and I both need to work on bringing less stuff.  (It’s like backpacking, you need experience to know what you can get along without.)  The camping gear the guide supplied was not sexy but it did a very good job – I was impressed by how dry and warm we were able to stay in the tent compared to what we would have experienced in my climbing gear.

We drank a lot of beer on this trip – one or two a day while in camp and more than that in town.  I think that everything we drank was either from Yukon Brewing or Alaska Brewing and they are both pretty good.  I prefer stouts and porters that taste stronger than theirs do, but in the circumstances I wasn’t complaining.  A midnight Sun after a long day of riding hits the spot quite well.

Breaking the bike down and packing it is not nearly as big of a deal as people think it is.  For what it is worth, here is an MKV file of the instructional tape Rodriguez provides for customers.  It is 30 minutes long covering both parts of the process for a single bike, but you’ll get the idea.

I would do this trip again. I would do the Alaska Highway or the Dempster Highway, too.   I would do a tour with Pedalers again (we talked about Tasmania.)  I would seriously think about a van-supported tour for less exotic routes, like the west coast or transamerica.

 

June 7 – 23, 2012

Odette, Will and I rode a loop beginning and ending in Aberdeen

Here’s the itinerary:

Depart 7th June (Thursday) – arrive mid-day June 8th Friday Aberdeen Scotland

Saturday and Sunday – Aberdeen

Monday 11th June cycle from Aberdeen to Ballater 44 miles
Tuesday 12th June Ballater to Pitlochry 60 miles
Wednesday 13th June rest day Pitlochry – cycle to Blair Atholl, Glen Errochty and Loch Tummel 37 miles
Thursday 14th June cycle to Killin 39 miles direct route or longer option via Glen Lyon is 67 miles
Friday 15th June cycle to Callander 25 miles
Saturday 16th June rest day Callander. cycle to Loch Katrine, sail to Stronachlahar – cycle round the loch – return to Callander 44 miles
Sunday 17th June cycle to Stirling via Aberfoyle and Drymen 47 miles
Monday 18th June cycle to Perth 33 miles
Tuesday 19th June cycle to Montrose via Dundee 63 miles
Wednesday 20th June cycle to Aberdeen via Stonehaven 54 miles
Thursday 21st June – 23rd Saturday – Aberdeen

fly home am Sat 23rd – arrive pm June 23 SAT

 

I’ve been thinking that it would be nice to get a new bike. My main ride is a 2000 Fuji Touring and it isn’t going to be long before I have to replace significant parts (the bottom bracket has some play, the headset shifts, etc.)

I thought about getting a carbon “go fast” bike but then I got a new tandem instead. I spent enough money on that to feel like I didn’t want to put any more into a bike so I held off another year. I’ve also started commuting and the noises and hiccups of the Touring are more memorable when you encounter them every day. (My other ride is a fixie – not much to go wrong but an old frame and not something I’d take on most non-commuting rides I want to do.)

Before we went to Scotland we got Will a Rodriquez touring bike with a custom frame. I rode it a little and it felt a lot like the tandem we got from them – light, smooth, solid. This spring Will asked me to get it tuned up while he was at a conference and I took the opportunity to ride it to work five days in a row. I was sold and decided that it really didn’t make sense to spend money on a road bike when most of my riding was either going to be the commute or longer country rides.  Here’s more or less what it looks like from the R&E website:

 

So in the middle of April I put down a deposit on a Rodriguez Adventure Plus. here’s what they have to say about it:

Rodriguez Adventure Touring Bicycles – from $2,399 as a frame only from $1,199

Utility, Touring, Adventure…

When you say “I want room for fenders and big wide tires, mounts for rear and front racks, a bomb-proof frame and fork, mounts for 3 water bottles and a custom frame made in the U.S.A”…. What I hear you saying is that you want a Rodriguez Adventure. This is a comfortable, American made, steel, classic touring bike with modern day and old school conveniences plus hand-built wheels with a 3-year warranty.

At Rodriguez, we’ve been building custom Touring bikes since 1973 (not many builders can say that). We started offering lower cost options when the bike industry gave up on making well designed touring bikes. Just like our custom 1970’s Rodriguez Touring bikes, the Adventure is a hand-crafted bike that is a class act right down to the stainless steel bottle opener on the seat stay. Whether you are planning an extended bicycle tour like Kurt M., or commuting to and from work like Matt, this bike is for you!

What about the frame you ask? All of our frames are custom hand-crafted right here in Seattle, one at a time from only the finest steels. Our frames are custom fit to you perfectly, and guaranteed to be the most comfortable touring bike you’ve ever owned. We build all of our bicycles with ISO compliant standards to ensure long life too. We offer a selection of different component set-ups, all with a triple crankset, and handbuilt wheels with a 3-year warranty. Starting at just $2,399, the Rodriguez Adventure the best value on a custom built Touring bike in the industry today.

Don’t Waste Your Money
Why buy a heavy, uncomfortable, poorly designed touring bike made overseas? For the same price, you can afford a comfortable, custom Rodriguez Adventure built just for you, from a company that’s been building them in Seattle for almost four decades.

Sizes: All of our bikes are offered in 18 production sizes . If you don’t fit one of our production sizes, a custom size frame in any model is just $200 extra. Plus we are offering every bike in our line-up with any choice of 4 different paint options at no extra charge. Custom paint jobs or colors are also available. If that’s not enough, we have 9 different decal options to choose from as well.

For those ready to tour the world, we’re offering the Touring travel version ($700 upgrade) that uses S&S couplings and fits in a 26″ X 26” suitcase.

The Rodriguez Adventure – from $2,399

The Rodriguez Adventure is a fantastic hand-crafted touring bike for an unbelievably low price. Now you can have that custom Rodriguez performance for half the price of other manufacturers!

If you look around, I think you’ll find that no other manufacturer has custom touring bikes built right here in the U.S. that are a better value than a Rodriguez.

I went in to buy a bike on a Saturday afternoon with no appointment. I kind of tailgated another customer but they already had my measurements and I really just wanted to put down a deposit. Smiley made me take a test ride – of a Rainier (not the bike I was buying) and without my shoes & pedals – but that was mainly so that he could get me out of the way while he closed the deal with the other guy. (I took their bike and rode a block south and then back to Ravenna and then I went over the hill. As I got to the first turn on the downhill side I found out that the front brakes weren’t engaged and I missed the turn and almost hit an oncoming car – but I managed to avoid anything more than a scratch on my shin from the flat pedal and the bike was really cool on the climb back up.)

I opted to upgrade to carbon bars and Phil Wood bottom bracket (both of which I got on the tandem) and I paid the $700 extra to get S&S couplers. it comes standrd with Rodriguez’ proprietary caliper brakes – which I like – and with SRAM 9-speed cassette & chain. As with the tandem, the only thing not nailed down is the gearing. I told them I wanted something with more high end than their 28/38/48 standard. The Fuji I’m riding now is 30/42/52 and the tandem is 28/44/56. As long as I get a big ring above 50…

I don’t get to pick it up until the middle of June. I can’t wait.

UPDATE

Been riding the Rodriguez a lot, but with the addition of the Litespeed it isn’t necessarily the bike of choice for a road ride.  Before the trip to Pakistan I mounted Continental Speedride tires that were 42 mm wide.  I left them on after returning from the tour and have been using the bike for gravel.  I installed MKS EZY Superior sockets and generally have been using Lambda pedals (better known as “grip kings” when sold by Rivendale.)  I drilled out my set and pinned them and they’re almost as good as clips.

It currently has an Avocet saddle and a Nitto rack that were stolen from my Fuji.

We planned to take a tandem trip to Italy this spring but a couple of months before our flights Odette wasn’t feeling it and after a bunch of back-and-forth we visited Rome without bikes. As part of the trade-offs we agreed to a bike trip in 2026 that we didn’t have to fly to get to. As we got further into the summer we debated a trip to the Selkirks or the Okanagan or even just Bellingham without finding something that worked for both of us. Finally we agreed on a trip to Eugene.

We planned to drive down on September 20th without time for a ride that day. We would have five days of riding and a drive back to Seattle on the 26th, another day with no riding. The first week in September I booked us a hotel (the McKenzie Orchards B&B at 34694 McKenzie View Dr in Springfield.) and got to work on routes.

We’d been having trouble with our helmets not charging properly and not lasting all the way through a 4- or 5-hour ride. I kind of thought that it was a faulty port on the charger, but as it got worse I had to admit that we needed new helmets. Sena doesn’t make strictly bluetooth intercom helmets any more so we got the simplest ones they offered where both our sizes were available. When they arrived Odette couldn’t wait to adjust the straps so that they met her standards of tightness – and promptly broke the sliders on both sides or her new helmet and on one side of mine. We had a good time dealing with customer service, sorting out terminology and forwarding photos etc. Finally, just in time for Eugene and as shown in the photo above, we got a replacement for her helmet and I applied duct tape to mine. They worked fine and if we ever have a need for mesh networking on the tandem we’re now fully capable.

Here is the Travel Oregon website that we used when we visited Bend in 2024. They have four scenic bikeways out of Eugene which is comparable to the set up in Bend. I noticed that where the Bend rides were all loops, most of the Eugene rides were longer one-way routes. Simplistically, we can just ride the first 25 or 30 miles and turn around for an OAB route, but it would be better to find alternatives to get back from the midpoint to avoid seeing the same scenery in reverse.

Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be a scenic bikeway between Eugene and Florence and it’s a 70 mile drive over to the coast. (Florence, and specifically the Rogue Brewery in Florence, was a big part of the motivation behind a trip to Eugene since we couldn’t get their beer any more after they closed their pub in Issaquah during the pandemic, Unfortunately while planning this trip I learned that they were now out of business altogether, and that this spring they had a big sale disposing of their property in Florence.)

I did pretty much all of the planning for this trip on line – mainly leaving myself notes on an earlier version of this page. I figured that as long as I had internet access I could get to my page and as long all of the various maps and links were saved there I would be all set. The week before our trip started my site stopped loading and the error message basically blamed the host:

I emailed Will who said his upstream ISP had gone bankrupt but that he had thought he had a workaround. I figured we’d manage whatever happened and the site started loading again a couple of days before we left.

We (or rather Odette) drove about five hours from Seattle to Eugene. Now that we’ve got a new bike we need a new car to carry it around:

That’s crab apple juice baked onto a 2009 RAV4. I tried the pressure washer and we ran it through the car wash several times, to no avail. I tried a detail guy who looked at the photos and then ghosted me. After we got back I tried simple green and I’m optimistic that it may be the answer. The real answer is probably to get a new car.

We didn’t debate much about which bike to take for this ride. The Litespeed climbs better but the fit still isn’t totally comfortable. Additionally, I was worried about the Di2 battery dying after three or four days of riding. Odette prefers the Rodriguez and only gets on the Ibis if it’s wet or unpaved out. We wanted to have the Rodriguez serviced before Dubrovnik so I took it into R+E on the 15th and their schedule pretty much committed us to the Litespeed for Eugene. (A couple of days later I got a call from R+E saying that there was a crack in the rim of the rear wheel so the focus shifted to getting the bike a new wheel set in time for the Dubrovnik trip in late October. ) I had been locking out the pivot on our tandem carrier using two bolts with wing-nuts because the pivot bolt was so loose that we had a disturbing amount of sway. For this long of a drive I didn’t trust the wing-nuts to stay tight and replaced them with regular M-6 bolts and nylock nuts. This meant that I had to lift the bike into the carrier instead of pivoting on the front fork – something that seemed feasible given how light the Litespeed is.

I remember loading the Burley that way before we got a purpose-built tandem carrier – and it weighed in at something like 50 lbs.

The carrier worked fine and stayed tight with no sway for the full trip. I loaded / unloaded it ten or twelve times and figured out that I kind of needed Odettes’ help to get it up and down gracefully. (Next time I’ll pack a step-stool in the car.) Eventuallywe’ll have to get a new carrier if we’re going to keep doing this.

When we got there we found that the B&B was amazing. We ate dinner at an Italian place in Springfield where they got very confused about our reservation.

Here are our rides:

9/21 – McKenzie Pass – 38 miles. The map on the bikeways’ site starts east of the pass so I cut it in half and reversed the route in RWGPS and here is the route we planned to take. You start from the other end and turn around at the mid-point so the distance ought to be the same, right? Here’s the ride we actually did – 45 miles with 4,000 feet of climbing. The flaw was that we intended to turn around at the summit, not the mid-point – and that we didn’t focus on the fact that the western trailhead was about 1,000 feet lower than the eastern one. Here’s the car route from the B&B to the start of the ride at Belknap hot springs (55 miles – about an hour.) There was a sign at the Belknap road for a bike shuttle suggesting another approach to day tripping. The forest was gorgeous. The road had almost no traffic. There was one section where the grade was a lot steeper, but it only lasted for six or eight switchbacks. We weren’t very fast (split speed under 5 mph on the steepest part) but we completed the ride in good form and were in pretty good shape after a fast descent. We had dinner at a fast-food Mexican place which I wouldn’t return to.

9/22 – Lorane Valley Wineries – This route was taken from RWGPS because it was under 50 miles and only 2,600 ft. of elevation. It’s 12 miles from the B&B to the start in Eugene. For whatever reason this ride felt harder than McKenzie Pass the day before. The route started and ended in downtown Eugene and the urban riding was kind of fun. The hills were both long and steep. Odette’s opinion was that the hardest climb was the driveway up to King Estates. The forest was different than McKenzie Pass but also very pretty. We ate at a burger place that shared a giant parking lot with an Appleby’s. I wouldn’t return there, either.

9/23 – Covered Bridges – starts in Cottage Grove and is a 36 mile loop. Here’s the car route from the B&B to the start of the ride – 30 miles. Here’s how we did the ride. Cottage Grove is a small town with lots of homeless people camping at trailhead park. (I don’t get the attraction compared to Eugene.) About 20 miles of the ride was on a rail-trail next to Dorena Lake and the Row river – we were riding upstream but it seemed to be totally flat. At the end of the pavement there was a sign commemorating Buster Keatons’ “The General” – the iconic train wreck in that film having been filmed here. In addition to one serious hill, the route back on the other side of the lake took us by a couple of covered bridges but they weren’t open to ride through. There was a loop in town at the end of the ride which took us to a couple more covered bridges – these were recently restored and open for passage. We ate at a small place in downtown Eugene (Purlieu) which had good food and the kind of atmosphere we’d missed the last couple of nights.

9/24 – Willamette Valley – We originally planned to start before Corvallis and ride to Albany and back. At the last minute we decided to start at the beginning of the official ride (maybe five miles form our B&B) and to ride to Brownsville and back.The original plan was to end at Burgerville in Albany which advertises NW (Wallowa) grown, grass-fed, beef – and coincidently was the chain we ended up eating at in Lake Oswego on the way down. On this day we turned around at the city park in Brownsville. The hill before Brownsville was more of a climb than we expected. The farmland was really pretty and we saw a lot of raptors and signs opposing the Muddy Creek solar farm. (We couldn’t identify the raptors, but they were very large and black and looked more like vultures than like bald eagles.) We didn’t stop in Coburg either coming or going but it looked like fun. We ate at a sushi place (Akira) in Eugene featuring big rice bowls and kangaroo – it was quite good.

On 9/25 it was supposed to rain so we blew off riding and drove the car around to three or four farm stands looking for hazelnuts. We finally found a bulk bin like in a regular grocery store and Odette bought a whole $2 worth of nuts. We followed the hazelnuts with a drive out to the wineries we’d seen on our second day of riding. Sweet Cheeks was a good tasting and we bought a case of wine. King Estate was a bust – they require a reservation to taste – so we called it a day without accomplishing a whole lot. It never really got around to raining, either. Dinner was an Indian place that wasn’t anything special.

I wanted to explore downtown Eugene more, but between going out to eat and our start on the wineries ride we probably saw everything I needed to see. According to Alder at R+E, I didn’t need to worry about charging the Di2 battery. (He would expect to get 500 miles on a full charge.) I brought the charger and an extension cord anyway and plugged it in for a few hours before our last day of riding. The guy at the B&B insisted that we bring the bike indoors at night which gave me a couple more opportunities to lift the bike each day, and which did facilitate charging the Di2 battery.

We headed home the morning of the 26th and about half an hour after we got onto the road we got a text from the B&B guy saying that he’d found Odette’s pants on the bed in our room. We turned around and drove back to the B&B, collected the pants, and headed out again. The only other excitement on the drive home was a stop for gas / lunch in Kalama. The TLDR version is: don’t stop there, go on to Longview.

Here are the photos

Thoughts:

• The B&B was really nice and the owner (Tom – in his late 70’s and formerly an environmental consultant) was a good guy. Lots of deer and turkeys. Breakfasts were early and really good!
• I spent a quarter in Eugene in 1972 (!) but didn’t even bother trying to figure out where any of the places were that I might have remembered from back then. The last time I was in Eugene was for my sister’s PhD ceremony in about 1990.
• We climbed pretty well the first day but had trouble repeating that. We turned in splits of 12 – 13 mph on the flats, almost like old times.
• The covered bridges are more of a tourist bait than a real cultural element.
• We need to figure out a better approach to lunches on the bike and dinners in town.
• Ride planned for 9/25 but cancelled because of threatened rain: Aufderheide – An OAB ride on a forest road – here is the route we planned to take. (Probably don’t want to go much further than the 30 mile point since it starts dropping after that and you’d have to climb back up.) Don’t see any other roads to make it into a loop, but it is part of the series of connector routes so there may be options I didn’t discover. Here’s the car route from the B&B to the start (46 miles – about an hour) which you’ll notice duplicates most of the drive to get to the start of our McKenzie Pass ride. You evidently need to talk to the hotel before parking there.
• Extra back-up ride: drive to Florence (72 miles – an hour and a half – here’s the car route) and ride toward North Bend. Turn around before the climb (over Bass Arms) and return to the start – then do 15 or 20 miles out-and-back on the route toward Newport. (I would do a regular RWGPS route combining the two maps if we were actually going to do this ride.) Or we could just do 25 miles OAB on the Newport map. The big downside to this ride is that the whole thing is on the coast highway which has a bad reputation for cyclists.

Small Steel-Framed Touring Bike

2003 Rodriguez Stellar.

48 cm frame

650C wheels with Sun Venus rims.

Son Delux dynamo hub and E-Delux headlight and Bausch & Muller Toplight Plus brake/tail light.

Paul Component Engineering Touring Cantilever brakes and cross levers.

Campagnolo drivetrain:

• Mirage levers and deraileurs
• Veloce crankset with 165 mm cranks
• Record rear hub

Set up as a 9-speed triple with 53/39/30 in the front and 13-28 in the rear

Gilles Berthoud stainless fenders

Currently configured with a stem extender and Panaracer Pascella – 28 tires.

 

Small Titanium-Framed Road Bike

2000 Litespeed Tuscany

47 cm frame

650C wheels with Mavic CXP-14 rims

Campagnolo drivetrain:

• Record-10 levers, brakes and deraileurs
• Long-cage Titanium rear derailleur and Ti cassette
• CX10 carbon crankset with 170 mm cranks
• Veloce hubs

Set up as 10-speed double with 50/34 in front and 12-29 in the rear

Gilles Berthoud Marie Blanc saddle

Currently configured with a stem extender and Continental Grand Prix 4000 – 23 tires

 

 

That’s us in 2023 at Birds & Bicycles in Castro Verde, Portugal.

 

While planning for Scandinavia in 2024 I realized that we had done ten tandem trips to Europe!  Lot of fun and we’ve learned a lot.  We’ll see how many more we can do.

2025 Danube

2024 Denmark

2023 Portugal

2023 Netherlands

2022 Alsace & Berlin

2019 Catalonia

2019 Corsica

2018 Andalucia

2018 Provence

2017 Burgundy

2016 Languedoc

2012 Scotland

 

back to bike stories

 

From 6/13 to 6/27/2016 Odette and Jerry travelled to Montpellier and Paris, France

We flew Iceland Air to Paris, stopping in Iceland for less than an hour.  We caught a domestic Air France flight to Montpellier and walked around the city that afternoon.  We explored some more there the next day and in the afternoon assembled the tandem.  We took a short ride the next morning to confirm that everything worked and then walked around until the shuttle came to take us the St. Guilhem Le Desert.  We took a long hike to the hermitage that afternoon.  We rode out of St. Guilhem the next day combining two loops.  We did a hilly loop the following day and visited the Clamouse cavern.  The next day we rode from St. Guilhem to St. Mathieu de Treviers.  We stayed in a place out in the fields and didn’t get any dinner.  The next day we rode a loop back through St. Martin de Londres and then on to Sommieres.  An out-and-back to Nimes followed, mostly on bike trail.  The last day of the tour was the short ride from Sommiers to Montpellier.  In total we rode the tandem for about 250 miles and the only mechanical difficulty was a blown sidewall that took three flats to identify.

We dissembled the tandem the afternoon we returned to Montpellier and the next day we visited the Fabre museum and then flew to Paris.  We spent three more days in Paris, visiting museums and monuments, eating and drinking, and introducing Odette to a city she’d never visited.  Then we flew back to Seattle.

Here are maps of our rides:

6/22 – France Day 7 – Sommiers to Montpellier.  Here’s the map.  23 miles on the tandem with Odette

6/21 – France Day 6 – Sommiers to Nimes Out & Back.  Here’s the map.  19 miles on the tandem with Odette

6/20 – France Day 5 – St. Mathieu de Treviers to St. Martin de Londres to Sommiers.  Here’s the map.  58 miles on the tandem with Odette

6/19 – France Day 4 – St. Guilhem Le Desert to St. Mathieu de Treviers,  Here’s the map.  49 miles on the tandem with Odette

6/18 – France Day 3 – St. Guilhem Le Desert Vineyard Loop.  Here’s the map.  50 miles on the tandem with Odette

6/17 – France Day 2 – St. Guilhem Le Desert Gorge Loops.  Here’s the map.  47 miles on the tandem with Odette

6/16 – France Day 1 – Montpellier Out & Back.  Here’s the map.  11 miles on the tandem with Odette

Here’s our itinerary

Here’s a Bicycle Quarterly article about riding out of St. Guillaume Le Desert

Here’s a gallery of photos.

here are Odette’s photos

 

My main ride for a lot of years was a 54 cm Fuji Touring that I bought new from Recycled Cycles in late 2000.  It had a steel frame and a Tiagra groupset – Deore RD and Tiagra FD (with 52-42-30 in the front and a 9-speed 11-32 cassette) Tiagra hubs and Avid brakes with Tiagra brifters.  The BikePedia entry says that it should have had Sora components but the 2001 entry matches my bike pretty well except for the headset:  (The frame geometry matches the 2000 image but the colors are 2001.  The hubs say Tiagra, though, and have 32 holes, while both years’  entries would have you expect Sora with 36 holes.)

Frame & Fork Frame Construction TIG-welded Frame Tubing Material Fuji Custom Butted Cro-Moly Fork Brand & Model Fuji Aero Road Fork Material Chromoly, double butted, aero crown Rear Shock Not applicable Components Component Group Touring Mix Brakeset Avid Shorty 10C brakes, Shimano Tiagra STI Dual Control levers Shift Levers Shimano Tiagra STI Dual Control Front Derailleur Shimano Tiagra, bottom-pull/clamp-on 28.6mm Rear Derailleur Shimano Deore Crankset Cyclone Forged Road, 30/42/52 teeth Pedals Wellgo road w/clips and straps Bottom Bracket Precision Sealed cartridge, 113mm spindle BB Shell Width 68mm English Rear Cogs 9-speed, 11 – 32 teeth Chain KMC Z9000, 1/2 x 3/32″ Seatpost Zoom Superlite, 26.8mm diameter Saddle Fuji Dura Flex Crator Superlight Handlebar Profile Hammer Handlebar Extensions Not applicable Handlebar Stem Fuji SuperLite Aluminum Road Headset 1″ threadless Full Speed Alloy Aheadset Wheels Hubs Shimano Sora Rims Alex AL-DA22, 36-hole Tires 700 x 23c Ritchey Tom Slick Spoke Brand Stainless steel, 2.0mm straight gauge Spoke Nipples Brass nipples

I did a lot of excellent rides on this bike – several STPs, Ramrod, RSVP, Washington Pass and a ton of local tours.  After a few years the brakes got changed out for another Avid model that was shaped as a triangle where you had to go into the center to change the brake pad using those mountain bike pads with a nut on the post.  I also commuted on it and mounted partial fenders for those rides.  In 2012 I got hit by a car while on my way to work and the rear wheel got mangled.  I replaced that but didn’t do anything else to the bike (the handlebars were asymmetrical afterwards and the rack had a bent stay) and instead got a new bike.  I kept riding the Fuji as my “rain bike”, but it was no longer a commuter after I stopped working in 2013.  I rode it enough in the rain that I knew I wanted to have it serviced before the 2013-14 rainy season, even though it had less than 1,000 miles since the last tune-up.

When I took it in to Greggs Cycles for service I got an attitude about how old and beat-up it was and was told that the rear wheel wear indicator was showing and that they didn’t want to work on it unless I was willing to replace the rim.  Considering that I’d replaced the rim (at Greggs!) a year earlier, and had ridden it maybe 600 miles since then, I was not particularly happy – but I ended up having them build two new wheels for me with Mavic rims on the Tiagra hubs.  The handlebar tape had a gap in it and I asked them to put new tape on it – they said it was in “good enough” shape but that they would be glad to re-wrap it for me.  They also sold me on a “cartridge” kind of brake pad where I only had to change the rubber not the whole assembly.  Of course when I picked up the bike and asked to be shown how that worked the guy on duty at the time had no idea what I was talking about and told me that I still had to buy a regular brake pad and mount the new post.

A couple of months and maybe 500 miles later I was hearing scraping noises from the rear and sure enough there was metal showing through the brake pads.  I was fed up and as it happened I was taking a tandem into R+E at that time and on impulse I bought a set of the cantilevers they fabricate.  I didn’t change the brake cables but just mounted the brakes and hooked them up and discovered that I loved the way it rode again – no noise, plenty of stopping power and a solid feel in the lever.

The original Fuji saddle had worn out long ago and I was riding on a Burley saddle salvaged from our original tandem.  When I installed the R+E brakes I decided to raise the saddle so that it felt the same as my other bikes, and re-discovered that it was already at the maximum line on the seat post.  I got a 400mm Origin8 seat post from Amazon and when I was at Recycled Cycles a few days later I bought a $15 used Avocet saddle.  It was a funny “X-Country” shape with a broad kind of shelf in the back to facilitate sliding on and off the saddle during mountain bike races, but I like Avocet and the price was right. I rode it quite a bit and put a lot of energy into the fore/aft and up/down adjustments as I tried to get it dialed in properly.  It’s overkill inasmuch as I’m not going to use the carbon shell to steer the bike on technical downhills and I could probably get along without titanium rails, but I told myself that the shelf in the back would keep my wedge bag from getting rained on.

 

As I continued to ride (in the rain) I discovered that every time I shifted in the back I needed to trim the front derailleur or else it would make noise.  I fiddled with the derailleur and with the cable tension and only made it worse.  I decided that I wanted to replace the front derailleur – but I wasn’t sure if the problem was there or in the brifters where I couldn’t adjust anything.  All of my other bikes had bar-end shifters and I found myself reaching for the end of the bar a lot on the Fuji so I decided that I would both change out the derailleur and swap the brifters for bar-end shifters to be certain that I fixed the problem.

Since I was going to have to mount new brake levers (and since the handlebar tape had come apart again) I figured that it was the right time to trade out the drop bars that had been bent in the accident and to go with the FSA carbon bars that I had on my new bike and on the custom tandem.  As I thought about putting all those new components on the Fuji I realized that I probably ought to replace the rear derailleur as well so that I had a matching set –  and I started thinking about 10-speed drivetrains.

I hadn’t really committed to this project (or to spending a bunch of money on a 15-year old Fuji) when I read an article about the Rene Herse cranks sold by Compass Bicycles.  I have a fondness for Compass because of the prose Jan Heine writes about rides terminating in North Seattle, and I share his opinion of “protected” bike lanes.  I was struck by the design of the Rene Herse chain rings and decided that they would really look good on the Ibis.  It seemed to me that eventually I was going to want to replace the Ibis drivetrain (which I’d left intact when I rebuilt that bike) with a 10-speed set up, and the Rene Herse cranks would really add a kind of elegance to that conversion.  I liked the idea that I could do the conversion on the Fuji as a trial run and figure out what I liked and what I didn’t – before I committed to doing it on the Ibis. (I buy the idea that three bolts are adequate and it’s a cool way to get a smaller BCD so that you can go with smaller chainrings and a single set of chain ring bolts.)

Besides the elegance of the design, what sold me on Rene Herse cranks was the fact that they aren’t ramped and pinned.  Maybe it’s the retro-grouch in me, but Jan’s description made a lot of sense to me and confirmed what I knew from the guys at R&E and Sheldon Brown:

These features [ramps, pins and hyperglide sprockets] help improve shifting, and make rider skill less important in shifting, but none of these features is actually essential to the functioning of any system.

So, the plan became “convert my 2000 Fuji Touring into a 10-speed with carbon bars and bar-end shifters using Compass’ Rene Herse cranks & rings.”  I had a quill adapter and a 1 1/8 inch stem that I could use with large diameter handlebars. I’d already replaced the brakes and saddle/seatpost, so if I replaced the drivetrain all that was left was pretty much the headset and bottom bracket. Compass recommended the SKF bottom bracket (that they distribute) so I figured I’d go with that instead of my usual preference for Phil Woods.  Considering how much I was upgrading the bike I decided I’d spring for a Chris King headset.

The next stage of the project was a bunch of indecision about cranks and cogs and derailleurs.  Compass said a regular triple front derailleur wasn’t suitable for their triple chainrings but that a front derailleur designed for a double would work just fine.  They recommended the Shimano CX70 because it had a flat cage (unlike the stepped cage intended for ramped chainrings.)  I was tempted by the idea of a 10-speed double because I rarely use either the biggest or smallest ring on my triples.  I didn’t really mind giving up the top gear since I believe the concept that you go faster downhill by getting into a tuck position than by pedaling.  I was reluctant to give up the bottom couple of gears, though, and read through the articles and forum posts about using mountain bike cassettes (with a low end of 34 or 36) with road shifters.  The consensus was that it used to work but on 10-speed components the road brifters didn’t work and you really needed a long-cage rear derailleur which Shimano didn’t offer in a 10-speed.  The solution seemed to be a 9-speed long-cage rear derailleur and the CX70 in front – but it wasn’t clear to me if I needed to do that at all since I was going to be running bar-end shifters not brifters.  Eventually I decided that I wanted an upgrade and that if I was touring with a load I would take my new bike.  That meant that I could stick with a conventional 10-speed cassette and a standard rear derailleur.  I decided I’d go with the CX70 in front (because I read good things about it) but this approach would give me experience with the Compass cranks, experience with a 10-speed drivetrain, and would result in a lighter back-up bike that would be fun to ride.  I decided to go with Ultegra components since the CX70 was listed as “Ultegra quality” and since that was a step up from what was on any of my other bikes.  Then I needed to decide between compact and standard chainrings for the front…  (I’m still not sure what the difference there really is and I settled on 52/36 because the 52 was the largest available and 36 was 16 teeth – the limit for most derailleurs – down from that.)

At the end of February 2015 I had Amazon send me FSA K-wing bars, a Shimano CX70 front derailleur, Tektro RL340 brake levers, Shimano DuraAce shifters, a Shimano 6700 rear derailleur, a Shimano Ultegra 6700 10-speed 11-28 cassette, a Chris King 2Nut 1″ headset, and a Wippermann 10 speed stainless steel chain.  (The chain was overkill, but if I continue to ride this bike in the rain it would be nice to have a chain that doesn’t rust.)  I had Compass send me a 52/36 crank & chainring assembly, an SKF bottom bracket with a 110 spindle and, on impulse, a $200 Compass 1 1/8 inch stem with a 31.8mm handlebar clamp and 100mm of offset.  I also had them send me the special wrenches for the cranks and the bottom bracket.

I went to Recycled Cycles for cables and handlebar tape and got a torque wrench so that I wouldn’t over-tighten stuff on the carbon bars.  I also got carbon assembly paste and extra Wippermann 10-speed master-links.

When the Compass shipment came I found that they’d shipped me a 100mm Nitto quill stem instead of the Compass threadless one I’d ordered.  I notified them of the error, not mentioning that I’d put a slight rip in the Nitto box, and they agreed to send me the right one and cover the postage for the return.  I volunteered that I’d save them the postage  by dropping the Nitto stem off at their mailing house since it was only a couple miles away.  (I did a loop around West Seattle one morning and came back over the locks and dropped the package off.  I confused the mailbox guy, but evidently it got to where it was supposed to.)

Once I had all of the components I disassembled the bike.  Everything was fine until I got to the stem and couldn’t get the quill out of the fork.  I spent several days with penetrating oil and pry-bars and ultimately got it to shift slightly but I was clearly going to spring the fork if I kept levering on it so I hauled it down to Recycled Cycles and asked them if they could get it out for me.  They couldn’t. They levered it and used penetrating oil and heat and couldn’t move it any more than I did.  I finally had them cut it off with their bandsaw – which meant sacrificing the fork.  (They told me that the fork was misaligned so that they would have recommended replacing it even if they had been able to get the stem out.)

They had a similar steel fork and extended the threads down lower on the steerer tube so that it would fit the Fuji.  (I was under the impression that I could stick a 1 1/8 fork in a 1 inch head-tube just by changing the bearing races.  They showed me that I was wrong on that and made me realize that the Ibis rebuild – where I had gone from threaded to threadless – was 1 1/8 to start with.)  Given that I couldn’t use a 1 1/8 inch fork, and given that I had gone to some length to get a 1 1/8 inch stem, I was committed to a quill adapter – and the one I had left over from the Ibis project had a 1 1/8 inch quill.

I ordered a new adapter (and a brake cable hanger since the old one hadn’t survived the trip through the bandsaw.)  The bearing races on the new headset went in with a little persuasion from a hammer on a 2X4.  The bottom plate went onto the steerer tube with the help of a cold punch.  Actually the headset was easier to install and adjust than any other threaded headset I’ve used – I guess you get what you pay for.  However, leaving the steerer tube long meant that the lock-nut wouldn’t screw down against the other nut because it had a lip that kept it from going beyond the end of the steer tube.  I had a 1″ spacer and was lucky that it with my cable hanger took up the right amount of space so that I could tighten the locknut without running into the end of the tube.  I was concerned about having the spacer below the locknut and figured that before I got done I’d need to cut the tube to length –  and then wondered where I would put the cable hanger.

Before working out cable hanger issues I needed to get the handlebars into the stem and the stem onto the adapter.  The clamp on the stem was the right size for the clamping point on the bars, but to get it there I had to go over some much bigger and oddly-shaped sections and around the bends that define drop bars.  I stuck a couple of skinny bolts through the clamp holes and worked nuts onto them.  I got a dime in-between the end of the bolt and the other side of the clamp and then by tightening the nut I could spread the clamp.  I got it around the first bend that way (with no scratches) but had to insert another pair of bolts into the opposing clamp holes to push against the other side of the dime in order to spread it enough to get around the final curve and over the flats.  Once I knew I had it I smeared carbon paste on the bars before taking the dime and the screws out and the clamp came back to shape and tightened down just fine.  I used my new torque wrench the first time I tightened the clamp, but I trusted my wrists for the subsequent adjustments.

The quill adapter went in just fine – with a lot of lube so that I would be able to get it out again. It turned out that the collar on the stem was about 3/4″ longer than the shaft of the adapter and when I matched the adapter up with the top of the stem there was nothing behind the pinch bolt and I couldn’t secure the stem to the adapter.  Consequently, I lined it up with the bottom of the stem which meant that there was nothing for the cap to tighten down against when you set the quill.  It tightened okay against the stem, but I didn’t like the void that was left  under the cap, I didn’t like using the thin walls of the stem that way, and I didn’t like the fact that the cap didn’t have anything to center itself on.  I figured that a 1″ spacer would fit inside the stem and that I could bevel the top if it to match the bottom of the cap, so I put that on the list of things to talk to Recycled Cycles about.

 

The brake levers went on easily and with nothing to make me think about using the Torque wrench.  I had plenty of cable housing left over from the Rincon project.  The shifters came with their own cables and housing and they went in with little fuss.  I couldn’t figure out how to use a torque wrench inside of the shifter, though.  I re-installed the brakes and threaded both brake and shifter cables through the channel in the bars and hooked up the brakes.

The bottom bracket went in much easier than the Phil Woods’ went into the Ibis.  I spent some time on the internet trying to confirm that the alloy cup went on the non-drive side but nobody seemed to think that would even be a question.  The cranks were no problem and the bolts tightened down just like they were supposed to (simpler than using self-extracting bolts) but the quarter-inch drive on my torque wrench didn’t support a socket large enough for the bolts (and it would have needed to have been a very thin socket anyway.)  The chainrings were already installed on the drive-side crank so I didn’t have to worry about getting the chainring bolts tight enough.

 

Getting the cassette off of the hub took a little muscle but the new one went on cleanly enough – I had read that a spacer was needed to mount a 10-speed on a 8/9 -speed hub but since there was no spacer in the box I went without.  The rear derailleur went on with one bolt and the cable connected just like it was supposed to.  As I went to install the front derailleur I discovered that I had purchased a top-pull mech and my bike was set up to run the cable under the bottom bracket.  I kicked myself for not asking more questions – I had seen a comment in an online forum remarking that it was good to see a solid top-pull FD again and when the item description said top-pull I just went with it.  At least it was only a $45 mistake.  I ordered another derailleur but decided to get a regular Ultegra model 6700 (2×10)  instead of the CX70 so that I would have an entirely Ultegra drivetrain – and because I wasn’t certain that “bottom sprung” meant the same thing as “down pull” and I didn’t want another surprise.  In the interim I put the Tiagra FD back on and mounted the chain so that I could set the limit screws on the rear derailleur.  When I got the new FD I broke the chain again, put the new FD on, and set the limit screws on it, too.

I took a short ride (10 miles up to Shoreline) and found that the handlebars wanted to rotate and that the rear shifting wasn’t right.  I tightened the bars (by feel) and fiddled with the cable tension but just succeeded in making it shift less well.  I put bolts in all of the open braze-ons and took the bike to Recycled Cycles for an inspection and consult.  They supplied a length of 1 1/8″ steerer tube to fill the void in the stem.  They replaced the 1″ spacer with a set-screw type nut and a couple of thin spacers.  They fiddled with the brakes until they felt they were good.  They straightened the derailleur hanger and adjusted the indexing until they felt it shifted pretty well – although they still noted some issues with the smallest cogs.  They tightened the crank bolts but said everything else was fine.  They were impressed that I got the stem onto the bars with no scratches.  I bought a set of full fenders and when I got home I installed them and a bracket for a handlebar bag.  (The home-made cable supporting the bracket was too long so I had to cut off one end, which meant going to TrueValue to buy another screw-terminal.)  The guys at Recycled Cycles had evidently loosened the bars because the drops were rotated forward; I opened it up and rotated them back again without resorting to the torque wrench.  I mounted a mid-fork headlight mount.  I mounted a carbon bottle cage that I bought for Will’s bike and which he didn’t want.  I replaced the original 15-year old Time Atac pedals (that got scorn from the guy at Greggs) with a set of the X-Country model – XC6 – I bought in 2014 (had to match the saddle.)

 

I took a longer ride (Mercer Island loop) and found that the chain wanted to skip in the two smallest cogs when I loaded it hard. I also found that the rear brakes squealed.  When I got home I cleaned and lubed the chain (the ride was wet) and fiddled with it enough to see that the skip happened when the master link passed the cog.  I also adjusted the brake pads to toe-in more.  Another short ride confirmed that the brakes no longer squealed but that the chain still skipped.  A google query reminded me of this advice from Leonard Zinn:

As always with a Wippermann chain, I would first check to make sure that the ConneX master link is not inverted. It happens all of the time… one side of the link is concave and one is convex (i.e., it is taller above the connector hole). If you let that convex, or taller, edge be facing your cogs, it will lift the chain out of the tooth valley wherever it rides up on the spacer between cogs. On most cogsets, this only happens on the smallest cogs, but on machined SRAM Red cogs, this high spacer situation exists between every pair of cogs, so you will get skipping on every cog.

Orient the ConneX master link so that its taller convex edge is away from the chainring or cog. Another way to think about this orientation is to notice that the pair of connected holes on each plate (into which you push the pin) forms a heart shape. When the chain is on the top of the cog or chainring, make sure that the heart is right-side up. Either way will ensure that the taller, convex link edge is facing outward from the chain loop.

I flipped the link and the skipping stopped.

I taped the bars, then unwrapped them and taped them again to put more padding under the hoods.  Then I decided that was too bulky and that I’d be better off if the tape came closer to the center of the bars so I unwrapped them and taped them over again.

I may get a new rack if I ever use this bike in a way that requires panniers again.  If I ever have to replace the rims again I’ll probably spring for a whole new wheel set, maybe with Chris King hubs.  I think that I may need to replace the straddle cable in the front – the adjustable stopper seems to have its socket stripped out. Someday I may take it over and get it powder coated.

What I like:

• shifting into the lower ring and still having a lot of cogs for shifting down into
• short jumps between gears
• smoothness of headset, bottom bracket & shifters
• lighter weight
• drops at the right height
• bar-end shifters
• brakes that work and don’t scrape
• full coverage fenders that don’t rattle
• stealth value of expensive components on an old frame

What I don’t like:

• chain threatens to hang up when I shift down quickly in front while in a small cog in the rear
• brake levers have a little too much play
• headset stack is too complicated
• handlebar bag bracket flips up

In any event, my “rain bike” is back in service and it feels like it’s brand new!  I’m more convinced than ever about converting the Ibis drivetrain to a 10-speed Rene Herse set-up.

 

Here are some photos of the bike from the second real ride after the rebuild – a March loop around Lake Washington on a sunny day (plus some shots outside our garage.)

Here’s the final build list:

Frame & Fork Frame Construction TIG-welded Frame Tubing Material Fuji Custom Butted Cro-Moly BB Shell Width 68mm English Fork Brand & Model Generic unicrown Fork Material Steel Components Brakeset Rodriguez “Big Squeeze” cantilevers Brake levers Tektro RL340 Ergo Shift Levers Shimano Dura-Ace bar-end Sl-Bs79, 2×10 Front Derailleur Shimano Ultegra FD 6700 G Rear Derailleur Shimano Ultegra RD 6700 Crankset Compass Rene Herse, 36/52 teeth Pedals MKS Nuevo Clipless, rinko (Time Atac XC6) Bottom Bracket SKF, 110mm spindle, JIS taper Rear Cogs Ultegra CS-6700 10-speed, 11–28 teeth Chain Wippermann ConneX 10-speed SS Seatpost Origin8 Pro-Fit, 400mm, 26.8mm diameter Saddle Selle Anatomica NSX (Avocet AMPD X-country R) Handlebar FSA K-wing compact Handlebar Stem Compass (Nitto) 1-1/8″ threadless 100mm, 31.8mm clamp Stem Adapter Profile Design 1” quill to 1-1/8″ threadless Headset Chris King 2Nut 1” threadset Wheels Hubs Shimano Tiagra Rims Mavic A-319, 32 holes Tires Continental Gatorskin 700 x 28c Spoke Brand Generic stainless steel Spoke Nipples Brass

UPDATE

After this was written I tweaked the set-up so that the rain bike could travel.  I replaced the pedals with MKS US-B Nuevo ezy superior rinko pedals so that I didn’t need a wrench to unmount the pedals. (The most frequent use is to mount platform pedals when I need to be someplace in street shoes, but it would make it quicker to put the bike in a case, too.)  I cut all of the cables (except for the front brake cable) and installed cable splitters.  I bought new slotted barrel adjusters and had the braze-ons slotted. (I tried to do this conversion myself and broke a tap in the braze-on and had to be bailed out by the guys at Recycled Cycles.) I replaced the Avocet saddle with a retro-style Selle Anatomica NSX.  I bought a Nitto rear rack but ended up using it on another bike.

Over the course of a year I put about 3,000 miles on the Fuji and I still really enjoy the way it rides.  I had to replace the drive-side crank because it apparently bent warping the chainring enough that the chain wouldn’t stay on the large ring.  (I thought it was a chainring problem but when it wasn’t bolted to the spider the chainring was perfectly flat and a new one didn’t fix the problem.) The Compass guys emailed me

The original Compass René Herse crank arms were made from 6066 aluminum, which is softer than the new 2014 alloy. It is very unlikely that you’ll be able to bend the new crank spider (the spider/tabs are where the previous bend most likely occured, not the main arm), so your rings should run true. The alloy of the rings, 7075, is even harder and very difficult to bend. You can read more about the new alloy and crank lengths here: https://janheine.wordpress.com/2016/02/25/rene-herse-cranks-177-and-165-mm/