Been a while

Its been a while since my last post. I've been wicked busy with work. Been riding every weekend since October with the exception of January, when it was brutally cold. I've been thinking for a while now its about time for a new bike. I'm planning on going with a full suspension from Giant. My current bike has just about had it. The wheels aren't holding up so well, the brakes are almost gone and the bottom bracket is toast. I guess that's what happens when you put 500+ miles on a cheap type bike. It has served its purpose very well though. I found out that riding is an amazing cardio workout and a whole lot more fun then running. Tomorrow I'm driving to Temple to go and test ride a bike. We'll see how it works out.

Rear Deraileur Adjustment

‘B-Tension’ Screw

B-Tension screw controls the tension of the upper pivot spring. Loosening this screw (turn anti-clockwise) brings the guide pulley closer to the gears thus better shifting. But we dun want it to be too near until the pulley knock against the largest rear gear causing noise and maybe shifting problems.  Check/ adjust this when the chain is set at biggest rear gear and smallest front chain ring. Usually we’ll only need to adjust this tension when we change the chain length or size of rear gear.

Limit Stop Screws

These 2 screws set the travel limits, how far the derailer can move from left to right (biggest and smallest gear position). Basically we want to set the limit stop screws so that the chain does not over shift out towards the spokes or get stuck between the small sprocket and dropout. This can be done by aligning the guide pulleys to the sprockets.

Normally, this is done only when a new derailer is installed or when you change to a different rear cassette. Note: can be used as a temporary field fix for a bent deraileur.

Low Gear limit stop


High Gear limit stop
 

Shifting Adjustment (one click one gear shift)

The click-stops that provide indexing are in the shifters. It sets the length of the cable so that the derailer moves to the correct position/gear to correspond with each shifter click. If a derailer is correctly adjusted when it is installed, this is the only adjustment that should have to be fine tuned overtime to accommodate cable stretch, or when cables are replaced.

Fine adjustment of the indexing can be done using the adjusting barrel located at one end of a length of cable housing. There is also another index adjuster at the shifter itself, just where the cable exits. This allows the rider to do fine adjustment when on the move. Enough bla bla bla …. so how to fine tune.

1. First start with shifter at home position and chain on the smallest gear. Always start adjustment from the small rear gear and big front chain ring.
2. Click the shifter to the first click after the fully loose home position, then turn the pedals forward. The chain should shift to the second smallest gear. If it doesn't, it means the cable is too loose.
3. Turn adjusting barrel counter-clockwise (CCW) to tighten the cable. Start with half a turn, then check again. Repeat until it moves up to 2nd gear.
4. If derailleur fails to shift to next gear after several rounds of the barrel, inner wire may be too slack. Turn barrel adjuster (CW) fully into derailleur body then turn counter clockwise two turns to allow for index adjustments. Loosen inner wire anchor bolt and gently pull on inner wire with a plier to remove slack. Tighten inner wire anchor bolt.
5. After it moves up to the 2nd gear, turn the pedal slowly, observe and listen. Chain may be jumping on the gears at this stage if the cable is still not tight enough (same if over tension). Give it another 1/4 CCW turn a time to stop the jumping. You should hear chain rubbing tick tick noise. Tighten cable until the noise is gone. Continue to tighten 1/4 CCW turn until you get a over-tighten noise.
6. Once the too-tight noise is achieved, turn barrel adjuster 1/4 turn clockwise, to release wire tension, and pedal again to check for no tick tick noise. Continue turning barrel adjuster 1/4 turn clockwise until the noise stops.Viola!
   
   
   

• Click shifter back and forth between home and 2nd gear while slow spinning the pedal to check for smooth up and down shifting. When you’ve got it right, the rest of the gears should also shift smoothly. Shift lever to change gears, and check that no noise occurs in any of the gear positions.

• If you think you’ve way over tighten or totally mess it up, no worry. Just start over. Remember to shift to smallest gear and set the barrel adjuster to a neutral position (turn barrel clockwise all the way in and back up 2 rounds to give some allowance) before you start over. Unless your cable tension is totally messed up i.e. out of range using the barrel adjuster, we dun need to touch the anchor bolt in step#4 above.

• Fine adjustments are accomplished according to the following principles:
  
  • Shifting from small to larger sprockets is accomplished by tightening the cable; if such shifts are slow, the cable is not tight enough--turn the barrel counterclockwise to tighten it.
  • Shifting from big to smaller sprockets is accomplished by loosening the cable; if such shifts are too slow, the cable is not loose enough--turn the barrel clockwise to loosen it.
  If the rear indexing works properly when using the large chain ring but not on the small chain ring, or vice-versa, this is often a sign that the rear derailer hanger is bent.

NOTE: Here assumes that there are no unusual problems, such as bent derailleurs,  or excess inner wire friction from dirt in the housing, or modified components.

Adapted from various online resource. Source1

Afternote:

1. Tuning done but only the 7th gear is having noise. What do I do now?

This may not be the right way but it works for me:

Check if cable needs more tightening: At the 7th gear noisy position, spin pedal slowly. To simulate cable tightening, lightly finger press the RD inwards, or lightly finger pull the exposed inner cable  along the top tube. I prefer the finger pressing more because I get to feel the rubbing when cable is over tighten.

- If noise disappear, cable needs more tightening. Turn Barrel 1/4  CCW until noise disappear.

- If you get more rattling and noise, cable needs loosening. Turn Barrel 1/4 CW until noise disappear.

Run thru all the gears again and re-adjust if required.

Saturday

Headed up to blora tomorrow, going to try and improve the time it takes to make the 8 miles of single track.

Sun Country Bikes

So I went to my local bike shop yesterday. Sun Country Bikes, it's a satellite store here in Killeen off the one in Temple. It was a nice shop, employees were attentive and helpful. Sat and shot the breeze with their bike mechanic for a bit and ended up buying a new set of platform pedals. They have some really nice bikes in there and they seemed to be priced pretty well. All in all it was a good experience. I plan on definitely dropping more cash in that place.

BLORA

So some friends and I went to BLORA today, just outside of Killeen, TX. Not a bad run at all.

There are Beginner, Intermediate, and Expert Trails there. We took all the Intermediate ones since this was the first time for all of us. I was expecting to have to pay an entrance fee to get in but apparently since I'm military I got in for free. Looks like I just found my new hang out. Took us about 3 hours to make it all the way through the 8 or so miles of trails. We were moving pretty slow, due to lack of experience and well to be honest, I have the flu and have no business even being outside right now. I've been planning this run all week and didn't want to dip out due to a little touch of the flu. There were some really great downhill sections we encountered. Pretty much the first 6 to 7 miles of the intermediate trails were very slight elevation changes, which brings me to the last couple of miles. It was pretty much straight up and switchbacks every 20 feet or so. It was a real smoker. The ground on these steep uphill sections was very soft and allowed for a lot of spinning tires. I ended up walking most of the way up. Hopefully here soon I'll be able to do the whole 8 miles without touching the ground on foot. At least its a goal I have in mind anyway. The vast majority of the trails were pretty rocky and some relatively nice drop offs. Nothing too crazy. There were several sections that looked like it was a wash out area that was just all rock. Those sections made for some interesting stuff. The trail as a whole was very well maintained just the occasional low hanging tree branch or stump in the way, but easy enough to get through. This was my first experience on actual single track mountain bike trails. It was an absolute blast. I'm sure the more I ride it the more my skill level will improve and I'll be ready to move on to some more interesting places. I'm completely exhausted but it was so worth it, and its pretty close to home too so that makes it even better. I highly suggest checking this place out if you are close to the Killeen, TX area.

Learing to ride again

So for the last week or so I have been contemplating getting back into mountain biking. I have a couple of friends that do it casually. That's almost giving them too much, they have bikes and never ride them. That would be a more accurate description. I think the whole thing that started this yearning to ride a mountain bike again was a video I saw on wimp.com. 

Its this guy and his 5 year old son at a MTB park. My son is 4 right now and I just thought hey, this would be really cool to do with him next summer. So thus started my arduous search for a mountain bike. I haven't been on any type of bicycle in probably close to 20 years, So needless to say I really didn't know what I was looking for at all. I started scouring the web for information and came across a great site. MTBR.com . Lots of useful information on the different styles of mountain bikes out there right now and a lot of good gear reviews and even forums. So with everything out there, I didn't really want to hold myself to looking for any one specific type of bike. I.E. full suspension, 29er, hard tail, and the like. With my new found information I started searching crag's list. I came across someone getting rid of a twice ridden 2011 Nishiki Colorado hard tail 21 speed for $100. I've never heard of Nishiki, but I figured its been a long time and that may be why. I started searching. Apparently this is a $500 bike. So I was pretty happy with my find. It fit all the requirements that I had in my uninformed state: Aluminum frame, and Disk brakes. Everything else could be upgraded, or replaced. I wouldn't mind having a $2,000 bike with full out suspension and crazy bells and whistles, but for now I think the humble Nishiki will do me just fine. At least it will give me a chance to figure out if I really want to take this farther then just the occasional ride. So then started the negotiation with the current owner. Well a long story short I ended up paying his asking price of $100. So either I'm a terrible haggler or, well I think I'm just a terrible haggler.

Not too bad of a bike if I must say, its got more or less everything I need on it and it is very adjustable from the seat to the brakes, to the bar height. I was stuck at the house on saturday and couldn't go ride so I decided to start researching people's different setups for the different styles of riding and bikes. It took most of the day. Which kindof worked out because I ended up going to a BBQ over at a friend of the wife's that evening. Said friend's husband was a competition mountain biker at some point so he had quite a bit of knowledge to impart on me. He was able to answer quite a few questions for me on random odd things like bar height, and crank length. Now I feel like I'm mentally armed and ready for this whole experience. Next step was to actually see if I remembered how to ride or not. As a matter of fact I do remember how to ride, and I'm not too shabby. The geometry of these new bikes is quite a bit different from the old bikes I remember riding as a kid so that took some getting used to. Once that was all said and done then it was more or less a piece of cake. I was having such a grand time I decided to bomb a hill thats close to my house a few times. It was a rush. Once my ride was over and I got back to the house, I realized something very important. I'm so not in as good of shape as I used to be. Well hopefully I'll be able to get back somewhere close to where I was and not be so damn winded after a ride. Another thing I noticed was I would have been more daring in some of the things I did had I worn my knee pads. I have no clue why but I just feel that way. So next time out I'm definitely wearing those jokers.

Until next time..