Off the Air

 Been a while since I used this platform. As I have often groused bandwidth has been a problem depending on where I am located.

I could never get any useable speed using Verison and the sucky Samsung Android. My son Dylan gave me a iPhone after he upgraded and I switched to T-Mobile. Wow what a change. 

Hot Weather Riding

 Riding in August can be fun and frustrating. If you leave early you can beat the heat but while you are out riding it is getting hotter. The closest trail head from the house is three miles of riding. My Nissan has a rack on the trailer hitch and I used it earlier this year when my son was visiting.

The house is located off the county ride and the driveway connection is gravel. If I use a road bike it is slip and slide trying to get traction on the uphill after crossing the creek. 

Once I get to the road it is a half mile up hill then a downhill with some rollers until I reach the State Highway #179. Then it is bike lane or sidewalk with several round a bouts to the trail head. Total distance is 3 miles. 

The First trail head has a parking lot and if it is not too hot lots of visitors. Earlier in the year when the pandemic was getting heavy the Park department closed the National Forest here.

 The above map shows the trails off of Highway 179. As you can see there are quite a few and not all are shown. There is one Loop called VOC Loop 

that is right above my house and can be seen if you know where to look. Several trail review state it is the worst trail there is. I can get to it by taking a short cut over a fallen fence gate. It is steep and narrow and basically only used by horse riders.

I have several bikes to ride and it is hard to make a choice. My hybrid is basically a go to market bike that is a road bike frame with 700cc wheels and knobby tires.

Flat bars and a 40 tooth on the 9 speed cassette and a single 36 tooth chain wheel. 

It has a carbon fiber fork and one day I am afraid I going to crack it but I have another spare fork in the house.

The first time I took it up a trail I kept getting pedal strikes as the bottom bracket and long cranks were not made for the trails that are not smooth.

I have used several apps over the years for bike riding and now I am trying a new one. All of these maps show where I start and where I end.

I do not put my bike on the rack on my Nissan. I ride where I want to go. If I wanted to sit in a car I wouldn't need a bicycle. 

Lots of talk about gravel bikes. All my bikes are gravel bikes because that is all we have around the house and the county road can only be reached by riding on the cobbles. 

Mountain Bike Thoughts

 Writing is not an every day event.

But I try to ride everyday except lately it has been hard to do with the hot weather. Temperatures in the shade here can reach a hundred and it doesn't cool down much until the sun starts to set.

Many moons ago I was living in El Toro, California which now is called Lake Forest. After I moved from Huntington Beach to El Toro I was involved with motorcycles and didn't do much bicycle riding although I still had my old Schwinn Paramount that I did ride in Huntington. 

There was a bicycle shop in El Toro on Muirlands called Bicycle Etc.

It then was a small shop ran by a husband and wife.  I did buy a Motobecane Road Bike with sew-ups with Stonglite cranks with 10 speeds. Getting a pair of leather shoes for riding was a chore and I think I remember getting the cleats mounted at a shoe repair shop. The nearest bike shop of any size then was a really nice place in downtown Santa Ana.

I did buy a set of rollers there and later a mini ten speed for Beanie (France Jean). I also later purchased a nice Motobecane ladies bike with clincher tires. There was also a bunch of Stingrays left over from the beach. Several times we would pile into van and drive to Newport and ride along the beach. My riding then never got very serious and I started running and playing tennis almost everyday and sometimes twice a day. 

The running became nuts and I was running twice a day too. Every Tuesday and Thursday myself and three others would meet at the tennis club and play doubles. One fellow was a perfume salesmen and worked for Bonnie Bell. He would bring me Runners World magazines (they were in black and white) and that fueled my running addiction. 

The four of us all lived close and Tony later decided to start running also. He then became interested in Iron Man but he didn't have a decent bike so he came to my house and I gave him my Motobecane for training. He kept it and for repayment bought a new Schwinn mountain bike for me. I rode it but it wasn't a big thing. I took the Schwinn to Bonneville to ride around the pits during the week of racing. When I returned home I set it in the garage and when I went to ride it again the chain was frozen solid with rust. I took the mess to the bike shop and had it fixed,

The Schwinn never got much use then and we even had a horse/trail behind our house. Then the county opened up a wilderness park called Whiting Ranch in Foothill Ranch. At this time mountain biking was exploding and El Toro went from one shop to 5 shops. With one placed next to the entrance of Whiting. I started riding by bike up to the park and back and it was fun but I never went overboard. 

There are some jumps and gaps in this blog so please bear with me. I never stopped the running and on Saturdays I would go to Laguna Niguel and run around the park (10k) with several other runners. Then to help with the training I started riding a bike to the park, run and ride back. A good friend of mine who worked at Hughes in Fullerton and lived on Balboa Island blew up in weight and got to 220 pounds. He saw me at a 150 pounds and decided to loose weight. He changed his diet and started jogging at lunchtime at the Hughes rec park. We had a party went Hal reached 200 pounds, He kept on with the program and was soon running marathons with me.

One day I had to go to work in Santa Monica and stopped at a bike shop just to look. The next thing I was doing was loading my new Bob Jackson into the rear of my Corvette. Then I was living next to a golf course at the top of a hill. Hal decided that we should enter a Iron Man Contest as a team. I was the bike rider. 

We were in the 40 and over class and finally after a few tries finished first,

I couldn't decide where to live and moved back to El Toro. My office then was in Laguna Hills and I would ride or run at lunch time. The Iron Man races got me interested in bike racing again and then riding in Southern Orange County was too bad.

Santa Ana College had a few instructors that were interested in starting a bike club with racing but at a different level that older established bike racing. They had races for free at Hof Mile Square in Fountain Valley. It was a lot of fun racing on the old Marine Corp. runways. They even had a century semi-race from the college to San Diego that was a blast. 

At the Saturday races I met an old friend named Rudy that had worked with me at Autonetics in Anaheim. Rudy after the riding at Santa Ana College also got serious and moved to sanctioned racing as I also did. Rudy went over board and actually quit working in electronics and got a job working at a bike shop. 

My attempts at a higher level of racing wasn't that great as I was training enough. I was fit enough to win motocross races but not hang with the fast roadies.

Enough for now and I have barely started running my mouth off about mountain bikes.

All of the above photographs were taking with a handle bar camera riding in Red Rock Country in Big Park, Arizona.

NEEDS EDITING

Mountain Bikes Mysteries

Working on bikes can be rewarding and frustrating. 

Blogger has change things so this post is a relearn. 

Pictures of trail riding were taken by Bell Rock and Court House Butte Trails where the trail head is located off of Arizona #179 six miles below the Sedona City Limits.

My experiences lately have been a learning lesson. When I was living on a sailboat in San Pedro I had several shore lockers to store bicycles, tools and parts. I had my S-Works with Fox suspension and a Hybrid that I used for gathering things at the market. My road bikes were basically complete and I my track bikes didn't need any work. 

When I was on the sailboat my neighbor was also a bike nut. He like to ride for transportation and fun. He also was always building something new. Something always different. He built a 29 inch and kept telling how it was the greatest thing since sliced bread. So after I moved to Arizona I started looking on E-Bay for a 29 inch bike. I found a hard tail that was from Nashbar and this was before they went out of business. This was being sold from someone other than Nashbar and was offered for $500.00 below the normal price, 

It arrived via a UPS truck in a normal cardboard bicycle carton. 

The components were low line Shimano/Suntour and was a 3 chain wheels  x 8 cog cassette set up with disc brakes. The tubes were paper thin and the tires were goat head magnets. The front forks lacked in air and were very flimsy. Since I have had very good forks in the past I started looking for an upgrade.

Suntour offered an upgrade for $100.00 for a $400.00 fork so I bought it. First mistake is not knowing what you have and what you are getting. Big difference. The new fork had a tapered steering tube and the Nashbar frame was made for a 1 1/8 tube. I searched the internet and then went to one of the local shops in the Village. I tried to explain it with drawing to the shop mechanic but he said to bring the bike in and he would look at it. Well there is no way I would show my Nashbar POS to him so I went back to my drawing board. I actually have one and a decent t-square.

So I made a bearing out of copper wire for the headset lower and with plenty of grease actually made it work (kinda). 

This led me to start for a search for a frame that would accept the taper. I found a bare Marin hard tail frame on E-Bay and subtracted from my meager bank account. The new build would be all new stuff using only the Suntour fork upgrade. It took a while to find the exact lower bearing but Jenson had it and the part really fit correctly.

The last time I raced cross county at a Norba National in Fontana on my S-Works lots of riders were using these giant rear cogs and tiny front chain wheels. That was all too strange for me. So when I ordered new bottom bracket for the Marin I went with 3x9 not knowing it was no longer in favor.

It took a while to get pedals, seat post, bars and brakes. The wheels took a while as they came from China. The Marin frame had blue  high lites so almost everything that was added were blue. When the bike was ready to roll I left off the remote handlebar lockout for the forks as it was disassembled and looked like too much work to figure out. 

So after riding the Marin for a while I changed the rear cassette for a bigger set. Then I took off the triples and left just a single chain wheel. The shifter was also removed. Now it was a 9 speed but still not geared low enough show  I went shopping for a 46 tooth in the rear. With the pandemic it took for ever to get the part and when I did it took a while to get shifting and keeping the chain on to get past the mail box. Finally it shifted smoothly and reliable. 

But the remote lockout remained in a dish in my tool/parts cabinet. So I took the plunge and tried to install it. Getting the cable to go through the fork cap was driving me crazy. Finally after a day of going nuts I quit. Later in the middle of the AM I woke up and restarted the chore. Then I went on-line and found a YouTube DIY video. My problem was I had not realized there was a hole in the cap for the allen wrench to tighten the locking slug that depressed the ball bearing that controlled the fork pressure. 

I could not get the lock switch to return to normal so I increased the cable length and add a return spring to the cable end as shown. So how when climbing a hill I can depress the lever which lockouts the fork to stop wasting energy in bouncing. It actually works and snaps back to normal with a simple touch of the release lever,