When we started planning this tour, Rett began asking about various upgrades to her bike, camping and travel gear. My instinctual reaction was to find things that would be cheap and economical since we didn’t know if she’d get sufficient value from higher-end gear. Then I realized that I was still using the same mindset from Rett’s first bike tour, when we had no idea if she would actually like bike touring (or even bike riding!) Now that we’ve firmly established that she loves both, I needed to remember that spending to get the good stuff was probably a safe bet. 

With that in mind, here are the changes we made to her bike since our first tour:

• New gears: replaced the too-high stock crank with a 44/34/22, to make it easier to get up those hills when loaded (kept the existing 11-32 8-speed cassette). Now she can keep spinning at her normal 90+ cadence up some pretty steep hills. 
• New tires: Schwalbe Marathon Supremes (700x37C). The first time a guy ever got his girlfriend tires for her birthday and she actually *liked* the gift! They succeeded at our goal of nearly eliminating the frequent flats she was getting on her stock Specialized Nimbus tires, but as an unplanned bonus, their lighter weight and lower rolling resistance have probably been a significant factor in her dramatic speed increase in 2016.
• New front panniers: Arkel B26. Last tour she had 2 rear panniers and a handlebar bag, but for more carrying capacity and a better-balanced load, the desire for front panniers was one of her first requests after tour #1.
• Custom-sewn hot-pink rain covers to match those from her other panniers (though they’ll need to catch up on UV rays to truly match!) 
• Tubus Tara front rack to hold those panniers
• ESGE/Pletscher dual-leg kickstand to keep the bike nicely propped up with all that new weight on it. 
• Brooks B17 leather saddle: her stock saddle had worked surprisingly well for her, but after doing some longer back-to-back rides, she decided she wanted to upgrade to the bike tourer’s standard. For the first couple weeks we weren’t sure if it was actually an upgrade, but then it started doing it’s magical molding to the rider’s rear end and she decided it’s a keeper. 
• Schmidt SON 28 generator hub: a hand-me-down from my old bike, since my new touring bike has disc brakes and isn’t compatible with the old hub. 
• Hand-built front wheel with 36-spoke Mavic T519 rim, Schmidt hub, and double-butted spokes. My first attempt at wheel-building! It was easier than I expected (I just followed Jobst Brandt’s excellent bible, The Bicycle Wheel). This tour will reveal if that was just naivete on my part though! (but a couple hundred loaded miles in training have revealed no issues). 
• Headlight/phone charger: Busch & Muller Luxos U. Generator-powered, so it’s always available, and can charge a phone with Rett’s human power! 

• Ritchey adjustable stem to raise her handlebars higher. 
• New hot pink Selle Smootape Controllo handlebar tape to replace the worn and dirty Specialized tape (took a couple tries to find the right color since Specialized stopped making theirs.) 
• New photo of Pip on her Stem cap. 

• New chain as a standard maintenance replacement after a load of miles. 
• Black brake noodles to replace the rusty, non-matching silver ones. 

And while Rett’s bike got a large number of upgrades, mine got the ultimate upgrade: an entirely new bike! My Cannondale T800 had served admirably over thirteen years, tens of thousands of miles, and seven bike tours, but the squealing cantilever brakes had worn the rims thin, and I wasn’t going to get a new wheelset only to subject them to the same noisy, brutish, primitive destruction.

So I replaced it with a Specialized AWOL with mechanical disc brakes. Almost all touring bike manufacturers offer disc brakes these days, so I take that to mean the technology is sufficiently mature and reliable for cross-country travel. 

Of course I still had plenty of work to do to turn it into a true touring bike. I originally planned to buy just the frameset and build it up from scratch, but there were no framesets available until the 2017 model year, so I needed to order the base model complete bike and replace what didn’t work for me:

• Replaced the way-too-big road-bike 50/39/30 crank with a super-compact Shimano Alivio 40/32/22 mountain crank (with a chain guard!) I can still propel the bike at more than 25mph with that 40-tooth big gear, so I have absolutely no need for anything bigger. 
• Replaced the Shimano Sora STI shifters with Gevenalle CX shifters: One of the biggest challenges of touring bike construction is to merge the multiple hand positions offered by “road bike” drop handlebars with the low hill-climbing gearing offered by “mountain bike” gears, because “road” shifters tend to be stupidly incompatible with “mountain” gears. Many manufacturers (such as Specialized with this bike, and Cannondale with my last bike) simply give up, and use both “road” integrated shifters/brakes (STI)  and “road” gears, resulting in a bike that will be unable to carry your load up a steep hill. Others use bar-end shifters, which are inexpensive, bomb-proof, and “mountain” compatible, but put the shifters somewhat distant from your natural hand position on top of the brake hoods. I love to shift constantly, and climb big hills, so neither of those solutions work for me. Enter Gevenalle, a small company that grafts downtube shifters (close relatives of bar-end shifters) onto standard road brake levers. I had no idea how well they’d work for me and they’re nothing I could try out in a store, but man, they’re one of my favorite things I’ve ever gotten for my bike. They’re even easier to shift constantly than STI shifters, have reliably simple design and setup, and rock-solid manufacturing. I think it would be a really smart move for a touring bike manufacturer to spec them as a standard part on one of their models. 
• Black V-brake noodles to bend the shifter cables out of the way of my handlebar bag. 

• Shimano XT rear derailleur replaced the Sora model for compatibility with the 11-34 rear cassette that replaced the 11-32.
• Replaced the balloon-y 700x45C tires with more middle-of-the-road 700x37C Schwalbe Marathon Supremes. 
• New disc-brake-compatible Schmidt SON 28 generator hub built into the stock 32-spoke rim (Rett got my old rim-brake one). 
• Tektro disc brake shims to move the rotor out 2mm from the hub. In a “bike building is never easy” reminder, the spokes of my newly-built wheel contacted the Tektro Spyre brake caliper. Argh! A Google search revealed it’s a rare problem, and likely only encountered with the combination of a generator hub with Tektro Spyre brakes, which are wider than other models. Perhaps in admission of this problem, Tektro sells shims that let you move the disc rotor further from the spokes, which in turn allows you to move the caliper further out. Phew, problem solved! (though I had to have the shims shipped to Rett’s dad’s in New York since of course this was a last-minute discovery!) 

• Busch and Muller IQ-X headlight. Super bright with a great beam pattern; the LED-driven advancement in lighting technology has been truly incredible since I got my last then-top-of-the-line B+M incandescent-bulb(!)  headlight 13 years ago. 

After hosting some bike tourers at our house this summer who had much less custom rigs than ours, I’m a bit embarrassed at the level of specialization and detail I’ve gone through with our bikes (since clearly cross-country travel is possible without all this work and cost),  but hopefully it will all pay off with a level of comfort and flexibility we wouldn’t have ever with more off-the-shelf machines. 

This entry was posted on Monday, September 5th, 2016 at 7:49 pm and is filed under 2016 Bike Tour. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.