Another Dumb Bike Blog: Here's the Current Mountain Bike

There she is. On a nearly barely ride-able but photogenic gravel path, propped on a bag full of CDs. Hey, quality bike bloggers still listen to those. Or so I'm told. The biggest improvement to the bike at this point is the removal of 7 grams of stickers from the rims. Much better. Faster too, I'm sure.

The cabling is still a mess in this pic with the cables dragging on the top of the fork and otherwise all over the place. Then there was that unfortunate NDS crank arm loosing that messed up an otherwise fine ride But after having had some quality miles I gotta say, I approve heartily. It still weighs more than I'd like, but there are parts arriving to help that. And, so do I so there's that.

The seatpost that is on there, a somewhat used and tatty looking Forza took off 100 grams all by itself and it went on just to get a little more setback. The saddle got a notch of downward tilt after this photo and is now where it belongs. Oh, and that stupid warning sticker is gone. The poor bike was lousy with warning stickers all over the place. Just infested.

The fork works. The spring is a little light for my just (finally) under 200 pounds, the lockout works, the rebound damping definitely works and it tracks just fine.

The brakes needed to be switched; I've been riding with the rear brake on the left since I was a kid and am not going to change now. When I made the swap I shortened the rear brake hose a bit and used the $10 Tektro bleed kit. One thing that wasn't perfectly clear or that I skipped over in haste, is that the compression ring ("Olive" in the slang of bike savvy people) has a tapered side that goes toward the nut - not toward the cylinder as I'd suspected. The failure mode was one that I was happy to see on the stand and not on the trail. Got that sorted, got them bled and they work perfectly. No drag, noise or any other unfortunate tendencies. I did wipe the rotors with acetone before going anywhere.