Monday, September 7, 2009

Tubular Life Part 2


So I let the tires stretch, and stretch, and stretch. I was little nervous about gluing them and was having trouble balancing all the competing methods and practices.
I had originally planned to go with the full CXWorld belgian tape method. My cross guru brought up a couple good points against it, and that had me going back to the drawing board.
I decided on 4 coats of glue on the tires and rims-no tape. The next point of contention was the drying time between coats. Even with only a handful of reliable sources, there were variances of 23 hours. The shortest time between coats was 20 minutes. The longest was 24 hours.
Since I had already gone with my cross guru on one point, I decided to follow his methodology which was a coat of glue per day.
So ready to go I prepped my primitive work stations. I used a front fork to glue the rims and did the tires on empty wheel boxes. Ghetto fab.

Gluing was a four day fiesta. Although it was much more solemn-maybe a four day rite. The only problem was with only one coat per day, you don't spend enough time to work up into the full glue fueled extended ecstatic state. No time to crank up the Sunn and jump into the Park Tools robe. Doing a coat a day was pretty much 30 minutes a night until the grand finale. Only about an inning or so of sub par Red Sox action.
Day four was the day of reckoning. Would I end up glued to the tire? Would there be glue everywhere but where necessary? Would I lack the muscle to properly seat the tire? What would go wrong that I hadn't even thought of?
Properly stretched,the tires mounted pretty easily. Rookie jitters had me spooked, but the whole process was not to bad(this is subject to a post test ride review and inspection by those more skilled than I).
Let them dry and aqua sealed them the next day. Just have to put in some tire sealant and throw on a cassette and they are good to go. Took the front tire out for a spin and returned without incident.
Ready for Suckerbrook with 2 races to test them on.
Cannot wait to race these.
Ride review of wheels/tires/my mounting job will be up on Sunday after the Quad Cross race. Hopefully it will not be co-sponsered by the Fail-blog

1 comment:

TerryG said...

Sunn 0))), the sound of glue drying. Nice.