Cycling Coast to Coast

Last weekend, my trip leader Jose was in town visiting his girlfriend and he awesomely decided to hold “shop hours”. I showed up with my bike, and we chatted about the trip and he taught us how to fix and patch a flat. If you’ve read his blog, then you know that Jose is a knowledgeable guy when it comes to cycling, and he cares a lot about good bike fit.

He helped me adjust my shoe cleats, saddle height, and then we were going to move my saddle back about a centimeter.

Most bike saddles have two rails on the underside running from the nose to the rear. A clamp on the top of the seatpost clamps onto these rails, securing the saddle to the rest of the bike. There are different clamping systems, and on my bike, there are two bolts that hold everything together. It looks like this:

And a side view:

If you look carefully though, you’ll notice there’s something wrong… there’s no second bolt! To adjust my saddle position, we needed to loosen these bolts, but as Jose did this, I heard the words that no one every really wants to hear, “…oh shit… um… I’m sorry…”

It appeared that whoever assembled the bike in the first place over-tightened the bolt. When Jose tried to loosen it, the bolt snapped in half, leaving part of it stuck inside the threaded cylinder. Without a second bolt, my saddle wasn’t properly mounted to the bike, and so it wasn’t safe to ride.

However, with some zip ties to the rescue, we managed to jury-rig something so I could ride home at least.

Thanks to Jose for these photos.

Yesterday, I took the T to Landry’s to see if they could fix the seatpost for me, or if they had a replacement part. With some effort, they managed to get the broken bit of bolt out of the cylinder, but the bad news was that the cylinder was completely stripped. It’s actually quite impressive; I’ve never seen anything stripped so badly, and the guy at Landry’s said he’d never seen anything like it either in the 20 years he’s been there.

The additional bad news was that Specialized doesn’t sell individual replacement parts for the seatpost; if I wanted a new bolt and cylinder, I’d need to buy a whole new seatpost. A new seatpost would cost $125, almost half of what I paid for my bike.

In desperation, I called up Jess, who’s a mechanical engineering major, to see if she could machine me a new part. After all, it’s just a simple threaded cylinder and a bolt.

The happy ending to this story, however, is that I called up Zane’s today, and they will be sending me a new seatpost, at no charge, and I should get it by Thursday.

Finally, about a week late, the promised post (and photos) of my new bike.

As I mentioned in my last post, I was out of town two weeks ago from Wednesday to Sunday for a fencing tournament. Thanks to UPS, I was able to track my bike made its way from Zane’s in Connecticut to my dorm in Cambridge, MA…

…where it arrived on Thursday, when I wasn’t in town to pick it up.

When I got back to campus early on Sunday morning, I traipsed down to the front desk and picked up my package…

The unopened bike box, in front of my dorm room.

As you can see from the box label, it’s a Specialized Allez Elite Compact.

The opened box, with my bike inside.

My bike came almost fully assembled. All I had to do was re-attach the seatpost, handlebars, front wheel, and pedals.

Here, I’m adjusting the tension for the front wheel’s quick-release.

Unlike any other bike I’ve ridden, this bike will have clipless pedals. My friend Omari had an extra pair of Time ATAC pedals that he’s letting me use, so I installed those instead of the platform pedals the bike came with. Omari (on the left), is fitting my cycling shoes with cleats.

I also outfitted my bike with a cycling computer. In addition to measuring speed and distance traveled, this computer also has a cadence function to measure the speed at which you pedal (measured in revolutions per minute, rpm).

The cadence sensor is attached on the outside of the left chain stay, near the cranks. It works by detecting a small magnet that is attached to the inside of the left crank arm. With each revolution that I pedal, the magnet passes by the sensor, and it uses the time elapsed between each event to calculate my cadence in rpm.

My fully-assembled bike, ready to ride.

I’ve fallen behind in my blog posting, because I’ve been very busy the last week. In a nutshell, classes started, I was gone from Thursday to Sunday for a fencing tournament at Duke University, my bike arrived, and I made and sold hundreds of truffles. I’ll post about my new bike later, but for now, let’s talk about chocolate.

When I decided to do Bike & Build last fall, two of my friends at MIT, Devon and Jess, also signed up for the same route, and we planned on doing a lot of fundraising together on campus. For our first fundraiser, we wanted to put a spin on the traditional bake sale. I love making desserts, so we came up with the idea of making and selling homemade truffles for Valentine’s Day.

We spent all last week making truffles. 1,100 of them. My hands smelled like chocolate for days. We have 8 flavors: raspberry, orange, peppermint, chai, Bailey’s Irish Cream, toffee, dark chocolate, and balsamic, and they’re all delicious.

We sold the truffles in a box of 3 for $5, and also offered to deliver them to any MIT affiliated living group (dorms, frats, sororities, etc.).

The lovely Jess, working booth.

A close-up of our sign. Felicia, who’s a student at MassArt, made it for us.

Felicia also made some awesome buttons for us to sell.

Jess, again.

Making change for a customer

The entire time we worked booth, we were busy making boxes and lids. I’m now very skilled at eyeballing a box and being able to fold a lid to fit it perfectly.

Our most popular flavor was chai, followed by Bailey’s. Both sold out on the second day.

The truffle sale was a lot of work, but it was also fun. The final result? We made a profit of $1,349.50!