Tuesday, March 20, 2012

Monkey Bars

The primary tenant in my frontal lobe these days is this cross-state tour madness. I have roughly 3 months to get ready and I'm nowhere near even close to being ready, so it's really put up or shut up time. I still feel like I can pull it off, but it will have to become *the* main focus of my extracurricular life and I will have to somehow manage my work life a little better so that it doesn't suck every last ounce of energy out of me.

And then there's the back thing. I'm cleared to ride (yay, truly), but at a level that puts only "moderate stress" on my muscular and skeletal systems, for the time being. And oh yeah, I was told that I should not be riding drop bars, for now.

Translated and filtered through my bike brain, that meant that I should be doing utility riding on not-too-hilly terrain on a flat bar bike. To the shop nerd within, it was welcome justification for modification to existing equipment, in order to directly comply with doctors orders and optimize the healing experience, of course. The victim of my enthusiasm was my Karate Monkey:

Before

After

Before

After (Salsa Bend 2's)

Of course I have no free time in my life right now and so I fought and fought to carve out a few hours to line up stuff and put it together, and so this would naturally be the optimal time for additional problems. Like my second Busch and Muller light failing at the mounting boss. (First was here.)


Both light housings failed weirdly - the plastic didn't just fracture, it sort of crumbled into many pieces. The material selection is suspect in my mind, as it seems to lack ductility and toughness. I'm not spending any more money on your dumb ass plastic-housed lights, B&M, so take that.

But I wasn't about trashcan the busted light, either. I'm too cheap, and I have crude metalworking skills, and therefore I can (attempt an industrial fix).




It's held on with double-sided foam backed sticky tape and screwed together in four places on top of that, as you can see. Little bastard's not going anywhere, guaran-damn-teed. It is a little heavier, though.

So with all the technical excuses problems out of the way, I guess it truly is time to put up or shut up.

5 comments:

Alan said...

That Frankenstein light is gnarly. I'd hate to see what'd happen if something like your frame broke.

Jonathan Eberly said...

Sweet light fix Pat. I know who to go to when/if my same light breaks.

If those bars are on the market let me know. I need another set of dirt drops. I loathe the moustache bars currently on my surly.

Unknown said...

On what basis were you instructed not to use drop bars?

Pat S said...

andrew, we didn't get into the specifics of why, but in his general terms he wanted me on a "mountain bike" and not a "road bike" for the first bit, so that I'd be in a more upright position.

That made sense to me because what he's having me mainly work on right now is gradually building flexibility and core strength and in theory, getting back on the bike in a little more upright position will put a little less stress on range of motion limits and core muscles that aren't where they need to be yet.

Either that or it was just a convenient excuse for me justify swapping out some bars that I've not been all that crazy about.

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