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Thursday, February 25
The tide has turned...
by
Billy Goat
on Thu 25 Feb 2010 13:43 GMT
There's been way too much 'Goods Inwards' over the last 2 years and My Cup Runneth Over as they said in the Hebrew Bible so, three months later than planned the first items have left the Goat Shed
 This week this lovely Syncros Cattleprod quill stem left my 'stores' where it has sat untouched since I bought it back in 2007....'just in case' (  ). The neat thing is this....the guy I bought it from three years ago was looking for one last week on RetroBike so I sold it back to him  .There's a big bunch of top drawer parts soon to be leaving the Goat Shed in the next few weeks, including bike frames, 2010 is the year of the cull     Thursday, February 18
Frank, it's a Revolution...
by
Billy Goat
on Thu 18 Feb 2010 09:31 GMT
Todays post is just for my 'virtual Buddy' Frank who lives in Canada and is a lover of vintage Canadian bike components, as is yours truly!!
I owe him some information and am famously slow at performing tasks like this so I figured, surprise Frank and also do a little piece on these, my most favourite of vintage MTB cranks. The Revolution Crank first showed it's face in the 1991 Pro-Series Component Group (as far as I can remember) and it stayed around for several years with Syncros eventually making Road and Compact Drive versions. Material wise the early Revs were made from tubular Columbus Nivacrom and weighed 400g, which at the time was pretty damn light. Later on they were constructed from Tru Temper OX4 and tipped the scales at 410g. The cranks were cold forged at 125 ton pressure which was supposed to make the metal even harder and stronger. Syncros Cranks are either loved or hated, after all they are rather bland and boring looking when compared to something bright and garish like Kooka trash or Grafton etc, but they do the business and are very strong. They don't look good on every bike but are a good match for any early Rocky Mountain, Brodie, Offroad Toad etc and they also look kind a neat on my EWR  For some unknown reason the value of these has gone sky high in the last year or so and its not uncommon for these to change hands on eBay for insane money, in fact a NOS set sold in Germany with the elusive Crank 'o' Matic crank bolts for nearly £400 just after Christmas 2009. I am lucky to have three pairs of these, well in fact when I started typing this post I only had two pairs but I've just received news on closing a deal for a third pair so I now have two pairs in Standard Drive (110bcd) and one pair in Compact Drive (94bcd) So, Frank....to get back to you, here are some pix for you, take note of the inner chainring bolt pix. The bolt is 14mm long by the way, let me know via RetroBike if you need any more info      Monday, February 15
RetroBike Thetford Meet - 13th February
by
Billy Goat
on Mon 15 Feb 2010 12:30 GMT
22 RetroBike riders braved the weather for the first official RetroBike Anglian Area meet on Saturday, lots of cool retro machinery on display and getting used properly. I had a great time but my fitness is off (again
) so the day ended with tired legs for me, the EWR rode like a dream and no technical issues and the SDG Ti Comp Kevlar was very comfortable. (In fact it looks so similar in profile to the Flite that I really must take some precise measurements to compare them).Here are some pix from Saturday, all taken with my new Panasonic Lumix TZ6, there is many more pictures from me and other riders over at RetroBike in THIS THREAD Nice Grello  Is it a Transformer? Is it a scaffolding experiment?....no its a Cockroach!  Orange Elite  Day Glo alert  Call Me The Breeze  Pork Pie  'Ange'  Name those parts  Yeah right....   Friday, February 12
Honey, will you pass the lube?
by
Billy Goat
on Fri 12 Feb 2010 21:36 GMT
Call me old fashioned or maybe even call me wrong but I've been using GT85 to lube my bike chains since the early 90's, somebody back then must have told me it was a good idea...
Anyway it seems things have moved on in the lube world quite a lot since then so its time to get with the times. One of my riding buddies (Chris) talks highly of Rock 'n' Roll lubes, specifically Extreme Chain Lube which is some strange, gloopy blue stuff so I thought I'd give it a go so the Rohloff SLT-99 has had a nice bath in the stuff and tomorrow i'm off to some really shitty (mudwise...) forest down in Suffolk that has some nasty gritty sandy soil that really gets into the chain and mechs so this will be a good test! Man sized, Extreme lubrication   So, once the chain had a birthday I gave the whole bike a check over and paid some attention to something that many people leave untouched....the saddle clamp. If you think about it this is an important piece of kit, you have your ass sat on it for long periods of time but it gets blasted with crap off the trail and probably doesn't get cleaned real well. So I stripped mine down, coated all the threads and brass inserts with Anti-Seize Compound, put a big bunch more on the rail clamps and put it all back together again....nice smooth bolts and no more creaking Ti rails Cleaned and greased Syncros clamp   As the Flite Ti was taken off the bike to clean up the saddle clamp I figured I'd swap in the SDG Kevlar Ti Comp that I got from the USA, I've been curious about these (as mentioned in a previous post on here). To be honest the profile doesn't look much different from a Flite but its gonna stay on for two big forest rides tomorrow so I'll report back later... Nice rails   So the bike is more or less ready for tomorrow, just gotta get some air in the tyres.....watch this space for a ride report over the next few days  Monday, February 8
Shot down in the night...
by
Billy Goat
on Mon 08 Feb 2010 13:24 GMT
Back on topic with a bike related blog post after all this Home Cinema stuff getting in the way, been trying to amass a bunch of stuff to sell recently but had to score these couple of items when they were dangled under my nose.
SDG Comp Ti Kevlar - I've always been a Ti Flite man but my curiosity has been aroused by my 'virtual EWR buddy' Utahdog's obsesession with these things so I thought I'd try one out. It arrived last week fresh from Florida but so far I've not had time to mount the thing and try it out, maybe this will get done for this coming weekends RetroBike forest ride. Pic gratuitously stolen from Utahdog  Another thing I've had on my Hitlist for ages is an original 1st Generation Answer Alumilite DH bar and I had all but given up looking when one cropped up in Germany, complete with the all important 'golden shims'. I had it mind this would look neat on my EWR but in hindsight it might not look so cool as its bare aluminium and everything else on the bike is currently black. These bars have the most amazing wall thickness and weigh an absolute ton  |
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