While browsing through my image library, I found this shot of yet another bike of mine, my Peugeot Ventoux. It’s a nice, classic steel road bike from the early 90s and I keep it at my parents’ place for whenever I’m in Germany. Not terribly light, a little small for me but I love my Peugeot anyway.

Okay, here are the promised pictures of my DIY mud flap. Required skill level: only slightly above 0. Tools and material: box cutter, steel ruler, zip ties. It’s a bit tricky to get straight cuts on the curved shampoo bottle; thus my mud flap ended up a bit smaller than intended. But, as I’ve said: it does work and it makes a big difference when riding in the rain. ...

Whereas US Mythbusters usually tend to blow up stuff or do alcohol-related experiments, the BBC’s Bang goes the theory demonstrated how much energy an average British family consume per day by having 80 cyclists generate that energy. Unfortunately, you can’t watch the whole program if you’re not located in the UK, but here is a small snippet about one of the more evil devices, the electrically heated shower.

As mentioned yesterday, a lot of boxes with bike parts arrived. One Ultegra crankset, one FSA crankset, 105 rear derailleur, stem and handlebar, Mavic Cosmos rear wheel, a couple of tires, and a Selle Italia Flite Gel Flow saddle. Still no luck with brifters or brakes. Frame is scheduled for delivery on the eighth.

According to my accomplice, ebayed bike parts have started to arrive at our place. Frame is scheduled for delivery on the eight! I’m quite excited. Side note: Brifters are much more expensive than I imagined. Wolfgang, my Cross-Check, has bar-end shifters that I really like. But for Gunnar I think brifters are more appropriate (and bar-end shifters plus brake levers are somewhat pricey as well). I hope ebay will produce something affordable soon. Odo Wolfgang: 2684 km ...

I made and installed a DIY mudflap, made out of an old shampoo bottle, yesterday. Instructions (in German, but you don’t really need them anyway) can be found here. Of course, today it was raining, and therefore I can say: they do work. They look a little goofy because they’re Fructis-green but finding a black shampoo bottle is not exactly easy. Function over form. Pictures will follow shortly.

So I’ve already briefly mentioned my latest ebay purchase. Here are some more details: It’s a 2002 62cm Gunnar Roadie frameset. The price was just under 400 dollars (including shipping) and this was as much as I was willing to pay. Right now–of course–I’m making plans on how to build it up. For lack of funds, I’ll go the used-but-good route and have already spent a large part of the day on ebay. Some decisions have been made: SPD pedals to match my current shoes. Shimano 105 or better for the drivetrain. I already have a front wheel and will build up the rear wheel with a used hub on a new Mavic Open Pro rim. But the rest is pretty much unclear still. 9 or 10 speed? Compact or triple? Saddle? Handlebars? Brakes? Brake/shift levers?? Lots of choices to make. But I’ll go slow as I definitely have more time than money. ...

I’m not a big fan of winter (especially of the kind of winter we have here in Upstate NY) but I must admit that riding in the winter does have its appeal. I went for a quick spin out to Trumansburg yesterday and worked for a while at Gimme. By the time I started my way, via Enfield, it was totally dark and riding through the night on quiet backroads is pretty cool. The experience is quite different from daytime riding because you focus almost exclusively on riding. Something I tested for the first time yesterday were chemical foot warmers. I have serious cold/numb foot problems and so I thought I’d try something new. The combo of wool socks, foot warmers, summer cycling shoes, and neoprene booties was pretty good. I still ended with numb feet but it was much better than usual. I might buy more. On a different note: I bought a new frame on ebay! More on that later. ...

My first flat with the Conti GatorSkins. Last Tuesday I was riding to the Cornell Orchards and hit what probably was a little pebble. This was followed by a clearly audible hissing sound and to both me and a pedestrian standing nearby it was immediately clear what had happened. Pinch flat. Fortunately I always carry a spare tire and so this was not a big deal. I even made it to the orchards and back to a meeting in time. Unfortunately, three days later I realized that my tire was somewhat flat again. I didn’t have time to check it and just put in more air. So this morning I checked again, and yep: it was pretty flat. My immediate suspicion was that the first flat maybe hadn’t been a pinch flat after all and that I had missed something in the tube. But the water test showed that this was not the case. Instead, the valve was slowly leaking air. This really sucks, as it was a brand new tube. I’m now down to no spare tube and will ride out to the LBS on Monday and see if they’ll replace the tube and/or get new ones. Odo bike 1: 2601 km ...

I had set up this blog a year ago or so, thinking I’d blog about my riding and other bike-related stuff. Well, obviously it didn’t happen. So this is a new start, with a more limited goal: keep track of my maintenance, new acquisitions for my bike, kilometrage. My total kilometrage count is somewhat off because I accidentally cut off the wire of my bike computer and it took me a while to get the spare part. But now all is good an running. Latest maintenance: ...