Friday (May 21, 2010). I decided to follow the Tour of California stage 6 from Palmdale to Big Bear on my motorcycle.


I hit the road at 6am in order to make it to Palmdale with some extra time before the Tour started at 9:30

I arrived with time to look around. As I pulled into town I rode along with one of the pro teams who were riding their bikes from their hotel to the start line. They were riding along them main drag in Palmdale, no bike lane, in a large group, thinking nothing of it. Once they got there they went to the team bus. I took pics of few of the buses.






Not surprisingly the Radio Shack bus was mobbed.




I saw several interviews as I walked around.


I staked out a pretty good place at the start line.


Levi and a few other notable riders line up.


And they are off!

Here is how fast these guys are. You will need to look at Google maps to get an idea of scale. I wanted to intercept these guys at Mount Emma Road and Angeles Forest Highway. I took a few minutes to walk back to my bike, stopped to get 2 gal of gas with no wait, stopped about 1 min to look at a map, made a wrong turn that cost me maybe 2 min, and by the time I got to the intercept point, they had just passed it so I missed them. Now the riders don't have to stop for lights, and I cannot take the same route the do so my route is longer and full of traffic and lights, but even so, these guys are flying. I started to rethink my strategy for leapfrogging them.

I paralleled the riders route. They took Angeles Crest Hwy and I took Big Pine road which was beautiful and a lot of fun. There were a lot of amateur cyclists along Big Pine, too. I tried to find road 4N12 that connected Angeles Crest and Big Pine according to Google. Yeah, I know Google is not that accurate with dirt roads. There were a lot of labeled state forest roads along the way, but no 4N12. The road that I think was 4N12 was gated. I did explore around the area and found myself on single track a few times. So I gave up on that intercept and continued to where Big Pine Hwy intersected Angeles Crest Hwy 2.


This turned out to be a popular spectating spot.


I parked at what I hoped was a good vantage point.


This announcer car came by. The announcer did not seem to be in the car, it was kind of strange. But the announcer was very professional and gave a good race update.


And finally the inevitable breakaway group showed up. George Hincapie was amongst them, and I am a big fan of Big George. Go George!


Then the main peloton. At this point the peloton was already starting to lose some of the sprinters and such and some of them came straggling in after.

I was going to be hard pressed to make to to Big Bear in time for the finish line. I chose to head back up Big Pine, get to Hwy 18 and work my way to the north entrance to Big Bear. This gave me the opportunity to take a short cut and make a real dual sport ride out of this.

Google showed Mescal Creek road as a shortcut. I found a local amongst the spectators who knew of the road. I don't think the locals call is Mescal road, but it was for real.


Back to Jackson Lake


And sure enough, there it is. The paved road was gated. Mescal Road was the dirt road.


There were a couple of recent rock slides that were cleared away enough for the road. Mescal Creek paralleled to road, probably fed by Jackson Lake.


This view let me know I was going the right direction. No, I don't have a GPS. Soon, but not yet. I just carried a bungle of Google printouts.


I had to negotiate a few of these.


The road descends to the desert basin below. There are a few homes along this road as well as local traffic, which included a Honda Civic. I don't think this saved me any time, but it was fun. I made my way to Big Bear knowing I was pressed for time, so no pictures until then.


I got to the finish line with only minutes to spare, so I did not get any good pics of the finish. For some reason, though, I found myself thinking about starting a school for women plumbers.


This is a fraction of the bikes, er bicycles, waiting at the finish line.


There was a big festival atmosphere with lots of sponsor booths set up.


The Nissan Leaf, electric car. Not a hybrid. All electric. After the Honda electric and the GM EV-1 it will be interesting to see how it goes. Maybe the technology, price and infrastructure are there by now.


Camera crews, interviews and cycling celebrities were amongst the mass of humanity.

That was basically it for the day, no more pics. I made my way out through the heavy traffic and back home.

Chumba Racing VF2 / Lefty Build part 3

Today I am feeling a little like Dr. Frankenstein. The doctor, mind you, not his creation.

Bwaahhh hahhh haah ha...Its aLIVE!!!!

Well, sort of. I did install the lefty onto the frame using the adapter. Still a ways to go.

This is a closer look. You can see the upper crown of this Lefty is offset upwards. This is an option Cannondale only started to offer last year. The traditional layout is for the upper crown to look pretty much like the lower crown. The new upper crown option will allow the Lefty to fit many more frames than before. The limitation of the fork is that the head tube plus headset height must fit between the fixed spacing between the crowns.

I created this exploded view to show how it all goes together. In this case I had split the race (make a cut across it) to make assembly possible. It is hard to explain, but if the race has a bigger diameter than the adapter sleeves it must be split. Most races are either small enough or split anyway. But the Chris King race is an example of a race that is both too large and solid so I needed to modify it. It does not affect the performance of the headset.

Chumba Racing VF2 / Lefty Build part 2

The most important piece of the project arrived today, the Chumba Racing VF2 frame, a tapestry of hyroformed aluminum alloy and carbon fiber. (most images clickable).

Ooh, the anticipation has reached its crescendo.

And there it is at last. Like any new project of mine I need to analyze it to death. Which looks to be a lot of fun in this case, this frame has a lot going on. But first things first. I have to weigh it. Not because it is the most important thing, but because I need to do that before I put a single component on the frame. And the frame, fully dressed with quick release, derailleur hanger, shock and all hardware, size medium is 6.1 lbs. A full pound lighter than my Chumba XCL decked out the same way. I am very pleased with that number. In spite of all the marketing claims out there it is hard to find a full suspension frame below 6 pounds, and it usually takes some compromises in stiffness to do it. Only riding will tell for sure, but this frame does feature a lot of Chumba's stiffness tricks.

I love frames that are made with attention to detail. The VF2 does not disappoint.

Lots of frames feature asymmetric chainstays nowadays. The VF2 bottom bracket shell and head tube arrive faced, which is a nice touch. The VF2 uses Chumba's signature wide mounted pivot at the bottom bracket shell. Excellent machining and weld quality are evident throughout.

Chumba pulled out all the stops when it came time to hydroform the top tube and down tube. Their complexity cannot be captured in 2D all that well. The downtube is an amazing design. Many downtubes ovalize to match the bottom bracket shell. This one takes it a step farther: its cross section changes to allow the greatest possible contact between the downtube and the shell. The bottom transitions to a large, wide flat shape on the bottom, allowing a firm embrace on the drivetrain.

Chumba Racing VF2 / Lefty Build part 1

Today I begin the project of building my next mountain bike. It is going to be a Chumba VF2 with a Cannondale Lefty fork and a lot of new components from various manufacturers. I am going to go pretty deep with the build, I have found there is usually a lot of interest in this kind of thing.

Oddly, the starting place for my build is the front hub. The hub is made by this great little company called Project 321. They also made a Lefty fork adapter, a Lefty truing adapter and a Lefty hub cap, which we also carry. But this new hub is my favorite piece so far, at least without riding it. Weight, without hub cap and bolt: 115g. Those caps are 11g.

It has a lot of great attention to detail and is worth a close look. Lefy forks use hubs specific to the fork. They are not QR, 20mm or anything like that. The hub axle is integral to the fork leg, and the hub does a light press fit onto the axle. The result is super low flex, in spite of appearances. I feel the Lefty has less flex than any QR fork. It is in a league with 20mm thru axles. The hub a real gem. I hate to mention Chris King at all, but they are the standard here in my opinion. And this hub being made in the USA with this kind of craftsmanship begs the comparison.

What is interesting here is the way the seal is done with an extra snap ring for a better seal. Lefty hubs all seem to wrestle with the issue of getting a little better seal and this is the best approach I have seen.

Cannondale makes a Lefty hub, but so does Mavic, Crank Brothers, Shimano and others. This is how Mavic, Cannondale and some of the others add an extra seal to the Lefty hub. It is a hard plastic cover. They are known to create drag and not seal all that well.

Compare this with my Chris King headset, which will also find a home on my project. Sorry I don't have a hub laying around to compare with, it may be different. But King headsets feature this extra metal snapring around the whole bearing seal. It is an elegant way improve the seal without extra flanges, o-rings or plastic strips. And Project321 chose to go this route on their Lefty hub. So far, so good. I am waiting on much of the build, including the rest of the parts needed for the wheelbuild. I hope to start that next week.

Electric Century: 100 miles in a day on an electric bike

Since putting together my Electric Kona Ute I have been toying with the idea of a reaaally big one day ride. 100 miles, or a century ride as roadies call it. The idea is simple. You just need enough batteries. You could load a trailer with batteries on any eBike and go. You could recharge during the ride and carry less batteries, but there are only so many hours in a day.

Why? Well, yes because it is there. But more than that, I get lots of people interested in eBikes, but their objection is that the range of the bike is just too short. This is a common objection people have to electric cars and motorcycles, too. And recharge times take too long, too. So I decided the best way to deal with those objections would be to just go and and do a big ride and see what it takes.

I started by doing the math. I had almost enough battery capacity at my disposal. I figure I need a little more than 50Ah of 36V packs. If I kept a pace of about 15mph and added some pedal power it should be no problem. BUT 15mph is boring. And I wanted to include some hills in my loop, and there would be headwinds. So I brought chargers. There are 4 separate packs, which means 4 chargers and lots of charging ability. If I used 4 chargers at 4A each, I could pump 16Ah back into the packs in a 1 hour lunch stop that I would take anyway. That would increase my range and speed options a lot.

Click on images to see the full res versions in our gallery. I planned the route as a combination of well known scenic routes with places to recharge along the route. This is the route, extracted from my Garmin GPS and displayed on Google earth.

I use my Cycle Analyst and Garmin GPS to keep an eye on things as I ride (no bike computer set up on the Cycle Analyst yet). By the time I get to Cooks, this is the situation:

I am using my Ah faster than I wanted to, but there is nearly 1500 feet of climbing to get from my house to Cooks. Since I will eventually descent that same 1500 feet to get back home, I figure I am ok. Plus, Cooks is very cool and has given me permission to recharge there.


Here the bike is sucking down all the amps I can feed it. A full charge of all the packs costs less than a buck. I don't get to keep my creation out front with all the other cool bikes at Cooks. It needs powahhh. And it is very tipsey with all these packs so I prefer that it be out of the way. Besides that, it is not a Harley. Well, ok, its not even a motorcycle.

So I let it charge and have a look around Cooks. First, let have some breakfast. Good news for Cooks fans who happen to be geeks: they have free Wifi now. You don't even have to mess with a password or logging in. In other geek news, I discovered the Skyfire browser for my Windows phone. It is faster than IE or Opera mobile, it lets me browse sites as a real browser, not WAP, and it supports Active X pages perfectly so far. Even IE does not do that, ironically. And the food was pretty good too. The outdoor setting is very nice.
You never know what you will encounter at Cooks. Unless you read their schedule they post on their website, I guess. There were lots of booths being set up from bike clubs and charities, the lot was full early and the weather was perfect.

I make it through Santiago Canyon and stop for a rest at the plaza at Jamboree Road. I don't recharge the bike here, but I get myself a little energy.

I managed to avoid the glare in most instrument pics, but not this one. Still you can see my progress. Another 500 feet of climbing. The Garmin measures cumulative climbing, not net. So if you go up and down a 100 foot hill 10 times,it will show 1000ft of climbing.

The next leg of the trip was down Jamboree, then east on Portola a short distance to pick up the bike trail that continues south all the way across the Back Bay.

Did I mention is was great weather for a ride?

From the Back Bay it is a short, beautiful trip over PCH to Balboa Island. I took the ferry across the harbor to reach the peninsula...and because I love taking the ferry. The big party barge passed in front of us, but I can't really say the got in our way. No one was in any kind of hurry.

The Balboa Fun Zone was living up to its name. There was a lot of activity, including happy kids, even in November.

I passed by the second recharge station, which is in a park on the peninsula, figuring I would use it when I doubled back and came this way again. There was a big pet fair going on and the police department had a booth. There was a police motorcycle parked next to where I wanted to charge. I am still cautious when riding the electric bike. Not all law enforcement officials are aware that electric bikes are legal. And I was pretty sure recharging from an outlet in a public park was OK. But I did not want to have to discuss the whole thing with a cop if I could avoid it.

I hoped things would clear out by the time I passed back there again. I followed the coast to Huntington Beach, where I turned around. The weather was in the upper 60s. Between that and the time of the year, the beaches were almost completely empty. That used to really amaze me when I first moved to California, but I am used to it now.

So I turned around and headed back to Balboa to my recharging station. The pet fair was still going but at least the police motorcycle was gone. The Gazebo was being used for presentations and a sound board was plugged into one of the outlets. That left 3 more outlets for me and I had a power strip. But I was afraid of throwing a circuit breaker. I settled on plugging in the two of the 4 chargers. The sound system did not crash. That was nice. I retrieved some Mexican food from Great Mex - a place frequented by the locals - and joined the fair and ate while the bike charged again. Sorry, no pics of the food this time.

Then I added up the time it would take to finish and realized I would be riding in the dark. I departed and quickly made my way back to San Clemente. I had equipped my lights before I left for just this possibility. I was coming up short on miles as I approached the turn off of coast highway that would take me home, so I rode back and forth on coast highway until I knew I would hit 100 miles as I got home.

Commited to a night ride at this point, I stopped in the flagging light to assess my situation and get in a couple more pics. I figure I have plenty of Ah left. So I don't attempt to conserve any for the final miles. I finish well after dark with my trusty Light and Motion Stella 200 blasting a cone of 200 well focused lumens in front of me. That and the nice evening temps actually make the night ride portion fun, short though it was.

I finally arrive home.

Some final stats.

So my estimates were close. It took a little over 50Ah and I used a little over 18 Wh/m. And the 4000ft of cumulative climbing was more than I figured on. It required some capacity as well. I estimate I had 10AH left or so by the time was done.

I may go for it again after the Ute gets a series of changes, like frame mounted batteries and some other small stuff taken care of.