Renewing the MTB

Oh my god! It's been two years!!! (though the post will be dated retroactively, for completeness sake, today is July 17th, 2011).

That day (June 28th, 2009) I finished to "re-do" my mountain bike. I actually started to write a post about it back then that I never finished (shame on me :-) ), but sure I'm gonna use most of it here hehehehehe.

This bike has a long story. I bought it in January 2004, right after I came back to cycling, basically it is mostly its fault :-)

I had bought a simpler bike before, just to see "how it would be" and after 2 months I changed it to this one.

The frame was the only 20" frame I could find in town, for an affordable price. A Caloi Elite 27, made in Brazil. It was on this friend's store and he had also a simple long course front suspension and a full group and parts to it, all in an affordable price.

Great! I had a reasonable bike and managed to evolve quite quickly with it.

Soon I've got a better front suspension. A Pro Shock 100mm. Simple, with elastomers, made in the city (only suspension's factory in the country, that I know).

Changed the front derailleur for a STX RC, perfect gear, never fails.

At the end of 2004 I brought the bike to Germany and it has served very well since then, but there was no further big maintenance.

So! After a long time I decided to renew my MTB. More the 3000 km and the same transmission and almost 2000 km from the last revision (since the total cleaning before packing it for the big flight)!

Chain was waaaay gone, the middle crank (32T) was gone and the cassette I was not sure, but at the end it was really gone, though I tried to save it.

Thought about changing the whole transmission, upgrading it to a 9-speeds, but that would imply a full crank set change and also a back wheel, that would make me change the front one also ... the price of doing that would be more than we paid for Fernanda's new 9-speeds bike (ok, no Mavic wheels, but they do the trick). So, just changing what needs to be changed.

Also new tires, for MTB not semi-MTB tires, since the use now is MTB and no longer MTB/road/city.

It took me a couple of months to do the whole thing, changing parts, disassembling the whole bike and reassembling it. A professional does it in an afternoon :-))


First wheels, the back one had 2 or 3 cracked nipples, that required a professional to do the job and also I don't really like to true wheels, it takes too much time to leave them the way I like. So a professional was a great time-result-price relation.

Anti-flat band, new tubes and new tires.

Hubs needed servicing. I hate finding the right point for cone bearings hehehehehehe but I managed. Careful cleaning, nothing lost. The tracks are a bit worn but they will survive until the rim gets too old and I need a new wheel set anyway.

Freehub serviced, as much as possible, Shimano freehubs are not meant for servicing. It's clean and working, but now bearings cleaning and greasing.

Chain gone, crank set out, derailleurs and breaks out. Didn't touch levers and shifters (too much work to find the right position afterwards). Drive train was left alone, I was not feeling any problem there. Also the bottom bracket was left alone.



Washed the frame, cleaned all the parts (derailleurs and breaks), lubricated, placed back with new break shoes . Derailleur pulleys also needed replacement, got a pair with sealed bearings, and middle crank replaced also. Crank set back, chain ... pedals needed servicing also.

Yep, not trivial, also not really meant for servicing. I like my Wellgo WAM-M919 pedals, so I tried to save them. Not easy to have a cone bearing with a locking nut where you can place wrenches to lock them ... after some trials, some that locked my pedal and left the other side loose, I guess I managed using a small plier and a clamp and a bit of glue.

Pedals back, new cables for everyone, tuning, all accessories back and ready.


First ride showed cassette really needed replacement, some gears where jumping, and pedals were as I said before (that was before the glue, I guess I tried it a couple of times before the desperate measure). More servicing and back to the road with new cassette. 15 km ride, left pedal still locking, and gears and breaks need fine tuning due to cable stretching.


After the trial I also got the courage and tools to open and revise the suspension. Nothing major, just grease and chance some elastomers and it was fine. It was never an amazing suspension, but it was always good enough and reliable.


After the bike was revised and tuned we went on vacations, a nice trip to cycle with my family in south France and north Spain.

The trip was great and revising the bike was a lot of fun!!

I miss the basement of my old apartment!!!

Garmin Training Center and EDGE 705

GPS is pretty cool for cycling. It tells you the grades of your usual climbs, all the information about your ride (speed, cadence, where have you been) and allows you to collect this information in a organized fashion and compare rides.

Garmin EDGE 705 has a barometer inside, so it should get altitude information from it and from satellites (minimum of 3) and check that. I don't know what happens, but every time I go out for a ride I leave home in a "different altitude". So its the only instrument which you go for a round trip and come back to the same place, but some floors higher or lower than you left hehehehehehe You can see that in the figure below :-)) Usually the altitude of arrival is the same, so I assume it's the right one :-)))

Hint for Garmin users.

Garmin Training center, is up to now a nice tool to use. The info is that it doesn't work properly in other languages than English (at least not in portuguese - I tried).

It gives no information about cadence, so you have to install the version in english, what is not trivial since the installer finds out your computer's language and do it automatically.

I wrote Garmin about it and they gave me the information below, which I couldn't find in their website before (they promised me they would put it there now, but I didn't check).

Follows their e-mail:

This is a known issue with non-English language versions of Training
Center. This is currently being worked on by our software engineers, and
I apologise for any inconvenience caused, but in the mean time you can
run the software in English to solve this problem. To do this, please
follow the instructions below:

Please locate the following file:

C:\Garmin\TrainingCenterPTB.dll (you can find this via My Computer)

Click on this file and press Delete on the keyboard. When you next run
Training Center it should run in English and may work correctly. As I
mentioned, we are looking for a more permanent solution to this and will
let you know as soon as we have one.

More than one year after :-)

I'm back here, not abandoned, but left resting this blog. Now I'll try to be here more often!

The last year was not exactly a good year in terms of training and sports in general. It was a very complicated year. As I said on the last post, last year, a baby at home and working 600 km away from home is not exactly an easy task.

Matheus, my son, is a great kid, the kind of kid that makes you feel how lucky you are! Since every he sleeps the whole night, except for some phases where he starts to wake up in the middle of the night or doesn't want to sleep, even though he can barely stand and so on ... none of those phases lasted longer than a couple of weeks.

Working in Munich and living in Göttingen was very complicated, despite having an easy kid at home and a good boss that didn't care if I only show up one each two weeks.

About sports, well, I didn't race the Tour d'Energie, as I told before and also didn't race the "innerstadt race" (a urban 800m circuit race, criterium like). Training was a difficult thing also due to this time sharing family/work. The week I was in Munich, Fernanda had to stay alone with Matheus and I tried to rest and be as efficient as possible at work and in the following week, I tried to take as much care of Matheus as possible, so that Fernanda could rest and work, so that training got as a secondary thing. Other sports like running, climbing and skating got 100% left behind.

To try to cycle as much as possible I took my race bike to Munich and bought a new one to leave in Göttingen. So not having a bike wasn't an excuse anywhere!

This time I tried to be more "professional" on the bike. So no triple dish, a double compact 50/34 dish with a 11-27 in the back to compensate not having a 30 in the front. No need to compensate the missing 52 in the front since I'm not "that fast" :-))) Light aluminum frame (carbon is still too expensive and too much for my poor legs), Shimano Ultegra 10-speed, to be more up to date and to have better results, not that the previous 105 were bad.

A Trek 1.9 with Bontrager wheels. Cool bike!

(see the photo!)

The Munich region is flat ... flat flat flat ... you can see the Alps, but you need a train to get there (or a car) and the only altitude changes around is passing above or below the "Autobahns" (german motorways), so speed would be the focus there, and in Göttingen trying to do a bit more non-flat training ... Germany is a flat country.

Within working late and taking Matheus to the babysitter and the LOUSY summer of 2008 and some injuries, mostly caused by the lack of sport and a kid getting heavier everyday you can imagine how efficient training was ...

One thing I tried a couple of times was taking Matheus to the babysitter and go straight to the road, or come from the road already to pick him up, as you can see below ...

I did what I could :-)

Then it gets colder and you still don't have time or the oportunity to train indoor ... since it's impossible to do it with Matheus awake, actually it's dangerous since he wants to touch everything!

Also I had some contract problems (basically the funding agency decided not to renew it, since ESO, the institute that was hosting me is suppose to have a lot of money, so they don't have to pay another post-doc there and then they put lame scientific excuses to justify it ... ) so we decided to try a permanent position in Brazil, good chance, positions in the same university (yeah, living in the same city!!!), months of preparation for the examination (yes, we have examinations for professor positions in Brazil - written, didactics ...), that represent no training AT ALL. Well, the exams didn't go so well, I'm happy a good and dear friend's got the position.

This year I didn't race the Tour d'Energie, again, no training (same reason as last year) and we came back from Brazil two days before it ... I took some nice pictures of the arrival, I'll make a post about it soon ...

Then I decided to start my season, doing basis in MAY!! Now I'm still trying it, but my back injury is back ... and I'm still fighting with the bike sit. Got a San Marco SKN Pro Titanium, with leather cover ... too hard ... too professional for me :-) Then I've got a Selle Italia Flite Gel Flow ... a bit better, still getting used to it :-)

I'm back to gym also!!

We went to Italy to see (among other things) the arrival of the 13th stage of the Giro d'Italia! It was VERY COOL!!!! I'll post about it with pictures later on ...

To make life funnier and freakier I've got myself a bike GPS! A Garmin Edge 705! It's very funny!!!

But the year was not a total waste on sports! Since the end of 2007 I'm writing a column in a brazilian cycling website, from the VO2Max Magazine. The column is in portuguese, and it can be found at the "Prologo" website.

This year the column also started to appear on the printed magazine, pretty cool! :-))

I'll try to translate/adapt some of the material and post it here sometimes!

Also we started a podcast about cycling (also in portuguese) the "Radio Corsa". Also pretty cool and funny!! In this podcast we basically talk about anything and everything we think is nice on cycling ... it's starting, but it will go on!

Also renewed my MTB!! That's also for another post!