Today Ryan and I worked on putting his new Ridley together. I helped some with the assembly (taping BB threads, installing crank & RD, and some catchy bar tape, of course), but mainly worked on finishing up the Surly’s 1×9 conversion. The final chore was to put the tubeless tires on another set of wheels- which turned out to be a great move, because even though they were a bit harder to get inflated on a set of Zero A028s, they seemed to not have the burping issues that the Mavic wheels experienced. I didn’t think it was possible, but I think that the Zeros could be a few grams lighter as well.

Once we did some test riding in the cove, we changed and headed out to Shelby Farms to really put the spurs to them…
The only issue I really had was rear wheel slippage. Even though I thought I had the skewer reeeeeally tight, I still had a couple of slips under stress in the horizontal rear dropouts. I’m going to have to find a harder clamping skewer before Southern Cross!
I’m not sure if it was just having gears, lighter wheels, more fitness, etc. (maybe a a combo of all 3), but I was hauling some freakin’ walnuts today! I felt like having gears was cheating. I wonder what would happen if I were on a bike that didn’t weight 22 pounds?