Valoria II: Disc brakes

To go along with my white frame, I decided I wanted white cables. Zach found some great cable housing for me, and I managed to stumble my way through the rest of the work.

Did you know that brake cables and shifter cables use different housings, with different diameters? I sure didn’t.

Brake cable housings have a metal lining made out of one long spiral of steel that wraps around the brake cable.  Shifter cable housings also have a metal lining, but it’s made up of many little straight threads of steel surrounding the central shaft where the cable passes through.  So, brake cable housings are thicker and stronger, and shifter cable housings are stiffer and smoother.

Everything you need, to do a half-assed job cabling your bike.

Can't work on a bike without a beverage...

That pointy thing in the above picture is called an awl. After you cut the cables with your crappy non-custom set of heavy pliers, you can use the awl to widen the hole back out again, making it much easier to thread the cable.

I ran seven segments of cable in total. Three for shifters, and four for brakes. Partway through I ran out of brake cable end caps so I had to order more. (I already had plenty of crimp-on cable tips.)

Of course, it was amateur hour: I had to re-do two of the brake cables because I cut one too short, and the other too long.

As I was doing that, I had to re-thread the rear brake cabe a few times, and it started to unravel. That was a very bad thing. A single strand got pushed out of alignment, and as I was testing the brake the problem got worse until the whole cable was messed up:

That just sucks. It’s also why professional bike builders use special cutters on cables to keep them from unraveling.

The rear brake cable on a recumbent is extra long, and replacement cables are almost never long enough. Eventually I found one that was almost 3 meters long and installed it. Turned out to be even better cable than what Bacchetta gave me. An embarrassing mistake, but I made it right.

Valoria II: Lighting and power

Valoria II: Frames and durability

I debated for quite a while over whether to get a bike with suspension. The fact that Giro does not offer a suspension on any of their bikes was a big factor — I liked their relatively simple frame design.

In the end I ruled a suspension out, because I was too worried that it would slightly reduce the energy I was able to propel into the bike while climbing hills. (I knew I was going to spend large amounts of time slowly climbing hills when the recumbent was loaded for touring.)

Valoria II: Custom gearing

An afternoon poking around online led me to this Shimano Deore 2-piece 9-Speed Mountain Bicycle Crank Set, model FC-M590, with 175mm arms and 22/32/44 gearing.

You know a product is often sold to do-it-yourself types, when it comes with a warning like this printed on it!

I know how to do a fair amount of stuff to a bike, but installing a crankset properly is still beyond me. When it arrived, I handed it over to Zach, and he did all the work:

In retrospect, his advice was excellent. Now the smallest gear is even smaller, and the largest front gear actually serves a purpose. (On my old Giro with the stock cranks, I almost never used it.)

The only thing left for me to do was install the chain. To make sure a chain is the right length you need to place one end on the largest gear at the front, then thread it around like it usually goes, running it over the largest gear on the back, so it comes back to the underside of the front gear. Then you take up the slack on the bottom (pulling the chain tensioner forward almost as far as it will go) and then place the other end of the chain on the front gear.

Where the chain starts overlapping itself on the gear is where you need to shorten and join it.

There are chain tools you can get that are small enough to bring with you on the road, and you can use them along with your hex wrenches to remove a chain, replace a broken link, and rejoin the ends, in only a few minutes.

It’s amazing how easy this stuff is, if you’re willing to read a few directions!

Valoria II: Custom colors

Over the following weeks, I barraged Zach with questions about customizing the Giro 20, forming a plan of action. The first thing I asked about was color:

This is what a Bacchetta frame kit arrives in.

Here are the parts I want to re-coat. That’s the main boom with all the decals removed, the fork, the kickstand attachment plate, two segments of handlebar riser, and the cap that screws onto the end of the riser to attach the handlebars.

The boom of a Giro 20 is made of aluminum, but it comes with metal spacers that attach to the rear dropouts. You can get these in a couple of different sizes, to match different wheels. When re-coating this frame you need to make sure that you don’t coat the inside area where these spacers connect, because the fit has to be precise.

I called and emailed a bunch of different places in the Bay Area, and eventually paid a visit to West Coast Powder Coating in South San Francisco. Just a brief look around at their current projects convinced me that they knew how to properly coat a bike frame.

I dropped off the parts, and in about a week, I came back to find them coated. In general they did an excellent job. The new coat was actually more precise than the original factory one:

Before ...

... After

Everything that was threaded was left bare, as it should be. The one exception was the spot where the steering column passes through, a.k.a. the “head tube” on a regular bike frame. They’d coated it all the way through:

I wasn’t sure if this would be a problem later. But, I didn’t want to demand a re-do of a job that was already so close to perfect.

So I wandered over to their work area …

… and pilfered a couple of large rubber stoppers from their bin!

It’s possible to remove powder coating with paint thinner. You just have to be very careful to make sure that the thinner only contacts the area you want to remove. It’s also quite toxic. You don’t want to get any on your skin, even for a short while, and the fumes are intense.

I wrapped the stoppers in tinfoil, to keep the paint thinner from dissolving them, then plugged up both ends of the head tube and filled the area inside. The idea is, you let the paint thinner do all the work – softening up the coating – so you don’t have to work so hard scraping it away afterwards.

About an hour later, I pulled out the stoppers, thoroughly rinsed the head tube and everything else, and with only a little bit of poking from a wire brush, the tube was clean.

I also had to remove some of the coating from the curved handlebar stem, because it needed to fit inside the straight piece. I did that by brushing on a few narrow stripes of paint thinner, peeling off the strip that came loose, and cleaning it up with an X-acto knife.

And there we go! A Bacchetta Giro 20 frame in a custom color!