Some snow

 Last Friday morning, we were surprised with a nice dusting of snow, here in north eastern central-ish Connecticut.  I decided to take the scenic route to school and I took a few rolling shots.

Of course is all melted pretty much as soon as the sun came up, but it turned out to be a beautiful day and as it would turn out, the snow was just a taste of what was to come.

 

 As anyone on the East Coast already knows, Saturday brought a surprising snow storm, laying down over a foot in some places.  I had to shovel about 7" off my car on Sunday morning.  I didn't take any photographs of the carnage, but carnage it was.  It was an incredibly heavy snow, even on Saturday the branches on trees were hanging quite low, and by the time Sunday rolled around there were power lines down everywhere.

Here's a couple shots from early Saturday afternoon.

  Hopefully, and I say hopefully as an overwhelmingly small portion of the population around here, that this is a precursor to another snowy winter.  Realistically, an extreme event like this will turn out to be an outlier, and can't really be a means of predicting the winter to come.  I did some research though, and NOAA is predicting another moderate La Nina year (like last year) which results in cooler than normal temperatures in the north central states, and a wet cell near the Great Lakes which often translates to snow storms in the Northeast.  La Nina may also mean slightly higher than normal temperatures and lower than normal precipitation in the Southeast states, which I'm hoping means favorable conditions for my Appalachian Trail thru-hike in the late winter and early spring of 2012.  As far as snow in the Northeast goes though, the bigger factor is the Arctic Oscillation, which is less predictable, and can bring large snow storms.

 This storm, for me, has just been a big teaser.  I'm already dreaming about gliding through the fluffy white stuff on my skis.  Perhaps sometime, relatively soon, the focus of this blog will detract from the bicycle trend that it's been on.  The thought of starting another, bicycle-centric blog and naming it "Ride the Gamut", has crossed my mind.  For now, let's enjoy the rest of the fall.

Newbaum's

Somewhat recently, I've become a huge fan of cotton bar tape.  The look, the feel, the smell, the price.  There's nothing not to like.  It's been used for years on vintage bike's and French brand's have long since been available, but in limited colors.  It's also on the thin side and is often way to short to wrap a full size set of bars without going to extremes to minimize overlap.  It's good stuff and I've used it for several projects. 

Sometime early this year I stumbled across Newbaum's on Riv's site.  Newbaum's is a newish company that produces high quality cotton handlebar tape, of all things!  Made right here in the USA to boot, you can check them out here.  This stuff is thick, super nice cotton, it comes in a staggering variety of colors, and it's long enough to handle wide bars or if you like to wrap the cotton over cork tape or something like that.  it's nice and cheap so you can change colors often, or wear out one color nicely.  I decided to order a few rolls to re-wrap the Nitto Noodles on my Trek.  Classy stuff, I wish there were more uses for cotton tape, because this stuff is that nice.  Broom handles, steering wheels?  Hockey sticks definitely.

So rather than tear off the old stuff (also Newbaum's), I decided to wrap right over it.  I liked the idea of thickening the diameter of the bars a little bit, especially with the beefy Tektro/Cane Creek brake levers.  After much deliberation, I decided to go with medium blue.

I finished it off on the ends with twine, which I think looks swell.  It's a classy touch, much more appealing to my eye than the standard electrical tape.  I also decided not to shellac the tape, which is common practice.  I had done so to the layer of tape under this one, and while the look, feel and weather-proofness was nice, the bare cotton just feels so nice.  We'll have to see if I regret this decision down the road.  I suppose I could always shellac them later on.

Cotton bar tape, good stuff.

360 view

 Stumbled across this neat 360 degree view of this guys really messy shop. I thought it was pretty cool.

 Click on it for full screen, it's way better, and if you click on the 360 cities logo in the top right corner you can see more 360 shots.


George from Parts Unknown in Toronto

Here's a cool one from the Vrsic Pass in Slovenia.


Vršič (1737m) in Slovenia

One out, two in.

I took the Trek out a while ago as sort of a last ride before I convert it back to the original parts.  I hit a couple of my favorite dirt roads and headed over the the Depot Campus, which is always pretty spooky, and curious.

It houses the Center for Clean Energy Engineering, Human Resources, a couple other curiously named cottages of unknown function, and Uconn's mutated step-child in the attic, the Ballard Institute of Puppetry.  Yes, form what I've been told, you can in fact be a puppetry major.  A solid plan B for anyone.

 Mostly what is interesting about the Depot Campus is a collection of super old looking and long since abandoned buildings.  Stone and brick buildings, overgrown and covered with ivy, riddled with broken windows and the like, dot still mowed and somewhat maintained lawns.  I found this blog post with some interesting information on the history and current status of the Depot Campus.

  Shortly after the final ride, I started away at replacing all the what I felt were more practical parts on the bike, with the original components.  Off went the 700c wheels and 32mm tires, compact double crankset, tall Nitto stem and bars, making way for all the original goodies, which basically consisted of nice, mid-range alloy Japanese components.  The original catalog from '82 can be seen here.

  I think it cleaned up really well, all I need is the white Trek water bottle.  The only unoriginal components are the brake lever hoods, tires, chain cotton bar-tape and of course tubes, cables etc.  It rides great like this too.  The reason for the leap back in time is because I'm passing it on to another vintage Trek fan in Florida.  It hurts to have to see it go, but that's how it goes.  If I had it my way, I'd pretty much never sell any bikes and just accumulate them, but that's simply not logical.  After watching Rivendell's fabulous bike packing video, I got to work and turned this..

Into this..

 

  Of course this bike, having been my primary rider, couldn't go unreplaced.  

 
  A couple of weeks ago, this big 'ol box was waiting on my doorstep courtesty of Rob at Ocean Air Cycles.  Naturally, I couldn't wait to dive in, utility knife in hand.

 

  The more observant of you will notice that there are not one, but two frame in that box.  That's the old law of n + 1.  For however many bikes you have n, you need one more.  Realistically though, I got a super deal on these frames, and they will effectively replace that 613 and allow me to make some money off the beautiful, largely original example that it is.  To keep this from being long winded, I'll build the 311 (the blue one) with the majority of the parts that were on the 613, and the 630 (the gray one that looks similar to the 613) will be a winter project of sorts.  You can't see it, but the frame is slightly tweaked and I'll have to build a fork for it.  It is a crash victim.  I build the 311 sort of quick and dirty.  Still waiting on shifters, so it's sort of a single speed now.

 

  So one out, and two in.  If you haven't checked out these early Trek frames you really ought to.  Super versatile and the 24" versions are a really great fit for me.  High quality, American made, investment cast lugged, silver brazed, lightweight steel bicycle frames.  How can you go wrong.