warmth. finally

The weather seems to finally be warming up around here, hopefully we're done with the late season snow...
I got out for a few rides since last I wrote. Last weekend I met up for the ride Thorny and Chef set-up, somehow it ended up being just O-tree and myself. We rolled pretty much everywhere it seemed. I think it was somewhere around 5 hours of fixie riding and remarkably, it felt great. until the next day.

Paid for that for a couple days, then spun some errands Tuesday since it was nice out and I had places to go. The leg's weren't feeling great, but I was out and enjoying it. Thursday I decided to hit some hills and see how that felt on the fixie. Headed down to Cottage Grove on one of my usual hilly rides and that went pretty good, but I kept it short. An hour and a half later I was back at home and my legs were shaking. Guess I have some work to do, but at least I didn't feel like I blew up completely while riding, just afterwards.

I spent a couple of nights this week wresting with my car. It's a good car, but just rolled 100,000 miles in Feb and a few things were starting to show a little wear. First off I knew I needed new tie-rod ends, so those went in Monday night. I quickly learned the price of parking the car on a busy street for 7 Minnesota winters. Every driver's side nut or bolt was completely rusted in place, while all the passenger side fasteners we're easy as pie to remove. The car get's a lot of road spray on the driver's side while parked on the street, causing the excess corrosion.
The tie-rod ends got rid of most of the clunking up front, but there was still a little play due to a bad lower ball joint, so Wednesday night that came out.

Unfortunately I had to grind off all the bolts including the main knuckle bolt due to all the rust. Left a few dings in the control arm which I wasn't thrilled about, so I figured I better fix that. Good move, as I was removing the lower control arm I discovered the sway-arm mounting bolt was broken, broken off in the blind hole in the sway arm! yuck, either replace the arm or do some drilling and tapping. This is about the time it comes in real handy to have a full metal shop at your access.

Drilled out the bolt remains, retapped the hole, replaced the bolt, welded up the damaged end of the arm and reground it to shape. Seems like a lot, but it took less time than driving to the dealer to get a new one (the dealer was closed anyways). I love having tools.

Get it re-aligned today and it should be good as new. Even with paying for an alignment, I think I came out about $500 ahead. Not bad for 2 evenings time.


I've got Billy's bike all ready for paint, hopefully get that squirted soon and get him out riding on it as soon as the trails dry up. Now if Spot would just get me the carbon-drive system parts for this bike that they claimed would be in production Jan 1, I'd be set.

I started in on the next 953 frame as well. Why not, I can use a few more things to juggle around!

20 days till fruita, 8 days till FDM08.

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