Monday, May 16, 2011

Busy Weekend!

Definitely a busy weekend; starting at 4.30am on Friday! Sebastian was born at 11.20am, Friday the 13th (my little monster), 5lbs. 11oz., 19in. long. All three of us made it home Sunday afternoon, and have survived the first night. Time for a Monday that's different from all the previous Mondays!

More details soon, since I have a tiny human sleeping in one arm, and only have one arm to type with!

Thursday, May 5, 2011

DEFCON 3

Holy shit... today means there is just 3 more weeks until the due date for Magnum Excaliber Skelator to show up. That's a bit frightening.

In the meantime, I've been trying to get a good look at the incredible planet alignment that's going on. Though the weather really hasn't been cooperating. I thought this morning would be good, but it was so cold, that we had a lot of fog in the air. At least I learned I should set my alarm a bit earlier for tomorrow, though getting up at 5am sounds like a horrible idea. Anyway, here is what things SHOULD "look like";

I killed some time last week, building up a pretty cool set of wheels too. I haven't used the Tune Schwarzbrenner 24mm clincher rims before, so it was interesting to see how they built.

They were actually quite nice... a good thing given the pricing! But overall had a great finish and built up round and true, without too much hassle.

It was also nice to build these up with a much more "reasonable" pair of hubs. A pair that you can use every day and don't need to baby. These used Sapim CX-ray spokes, laced to an Alchemy Elf front hub - far and away my absolute favorite front hub. Nothing else even comes close.

The rear didn't have much flash, but that's fine, it was built with a lovely, standard DT-240 hub. No nonesense and pretty much bombproof.

So yeah, I still don't totally get the plan to use a carbon clincher rim on a wheelset like this, given the cost:benefit ratio, but this did build a nice, relatively low spoke count wheel, that was still a very cool weight - just 1,287g for a clincher wheelset.