Basso Loto Rebuiild

On Thursday, December 19, 2019 at 4:30:16 PM UTC-8, Tom Kunich wrote:
On Sunday, December 8, 2019 at 7:09:03 AM UTC-8, Tom Kunich wrote:
The label maker in Britain finally made the last year Loto decals and I received them and installed them. Yesterday during the rain I clear coated the frame but ran out of Clear before doing the fork. I have a new can but if you wait too long you have to go for two days before shooting again.

It is looking so great I can hardly believe it. I expect that the bike will look factory fresh when I'm done. Since the base coat is powder coat I don't have to worry about scratching the frame. The biggest worry would be not getting the clear coat good enough and getting a decal to raise.

The group is Campy Record with FSA Gossamer crank. I weighed this crank and the Super Light carbon fiber one and the weight was so close that it was ridiculous to spend almost 3 times as much for cranks.

I have a new pair of 55 mm Tubeless wheels that will go on it. While Hanbini can go on about aerodynamics since that is his specialty he admits that if you simply drop your head you make up for any drag in the entire bike except for the wheels.

My testing of tires has shown that Vittoria tires are MUCH faster and more directionally stable than others and with very low rolling resistance. But they wear poorly.

Continental GP5000TL's are a little tricky - the traction on them is so good that every bit of the road causes them to wander around so you really have to get used to them. But they wear really well.

Hambini recommends 23 mm tires on the front but I can see that his roads are a lot better than here and he is a small and light guy. I ride 25's both ends as the only thing that you can stand on the roads here and 28's actually feel a lot better.

The roads here are now so bad that where I used to descend at 40 mph I can barely hold 30. And that is tricky with all of the patches threatening to throw you off course or new potholes threatening to break a wheel or spoke. This is what we're paying an additional 12 cents per gallon of gas to get - better roads.....

I got the decals and put them on. They really look great. I painted them over with clear but the weather is so cold the clear ran a bit here and there and after the weather warms up I'll have to repair that.

I put the bike into the shop so that he could use the shop tools to press in the headset and clean the Italian threads out with the tool that keels both sides perfectly parallel. He said that he would clean out all of the metric threads while he was at it.

So of course he got a ton of high paying jobs in before he could do it so I'm waiting in line. He did give me some tubeless tire large hole seals and a couple of pump seals so I can't argue.

Got the bike back and have been putting it back together. Now the older parts look pretty poor and I had to file the paint off of the inside of the rear horizontal dropouts for the wheels to go in.

Now I have to find a compact braze-on front derailleur. The low end Campy stuff isn't very good. It wears out much too fast so it has to be Chorus or Record.

When I installed a new rear shifter cable into the Lemond 2 days ago I eye-balled the adjustment and as luck would have it when I rode it yesterday the shifting was absolutely perfect. Hope to get all of the bikes that good now. That's the fist time I hadn't had any jumping in at least one gear. Tomorrow in the rain I'll pull off the wheels and true them up - they are probably 2 mm out of true on a spot on each. I won't if I hit something hard on the rain ride. I can't remember.

On Sunday, December 8, 2019 at 7:09:03 AM UTC-8, Tom Kunich wrote:
The label maker in Britain finally made the last year Loto decals and I received them and installed them. Yesterday during the rain I clear coated the frame but ran out of Clear before doing the fork. I have a new can but if you wait too long you have to go for two days before shooting again.

It is looking so great I can hardly believe it. I expect that the bike will look factory fresh when I'm done. Since the base coat is powder coat I don't have to worry about scratching the frame. The biggest worry would be not getting the clear coat good enough and getting a decal to raise.

The group is Campy Record with FSA Gossamer crank. I weighed this crank and the Super Light carbon fiber one and the weight was so close that it was ridiculous to spend almost 3 times as much for cranks.

I have a new pair of 55 mm Tubeless wheels that will go on it. While Hanbini can go on about aerodynamics since that is his specialty he admits that if you simply drop your head you make up for any drag in the entire bike except for the wheels.

My testing of tires has shown that Vittoria tires are MUCH faster and more directionally stable than others and with very low rolling resistance. But they wear poorly.

Continental GP5000TL's are a little tricky - the traction on them is so good that every bit of the road causes them to wander around so you really have to get used to them. But they wear really well.

Hambini recommends 23 mm tires on the front but I can see that his roads are a lot better than here and he is a small and light guy. I ride 25's both ends as the only thing that you can stand on the roads here and 28's actually feel a lot better.

The roads here are now so bad that where I used to descend at 40 mph I can barely hold 30. And that is tricky with all of the patches threatening to throw you off course or new potholes threatening to break a wheel or spoke.. This is what we're paying an additional 12 cents per gallon of gas to get - better roads.....

Last night in an attempt to be able to test the bike today I threw the bike together. Old bar tape etc. Going through my collection of inner shift cables I didn't have one that would work until I stumbled across one that was JUST long enough. Using the tensioner tool I got it to work though it did break a single wire when I clamped the wire end on. I have to find the correct tool for installing those things. The crimping tool on the back of the cable cutter is difficult to use on the front derailleur so I use an electricians crimping tool. That makes an ugly crimp. Someone must make the proper tool since factory cables have that really nice circular crimp like a line..

Coming home I had to order new bar tape, and a pack of new stainless inner shift cables. I had ordered four packs of then but they were improperly ordered because of the idiot way they were described and I ended up with brake inners. Well, I needed those too so no loss.

I had to change the front derailleur and then figure out what that damn noise was. The crank was touching the odd shape of the front derailleur each revolution so I had to fix that.

I had bought a set of Vittoria Rubino Pro Endurance tires and when they came in I was somewhat distressed that they had a deep tread on them. But, no problem. they didn't have any noticeable drag as the tire tests seem to indicate. And in the wet roads you could actually tell a reduction of drag as you went from dry areas to wet.