Bike decision made for the rest of the season!
Over the National weekend and at the Bristol Summer Series Round 3 on Wednesday night I had found that I was not gating very well on the Curtis RaceLite 24″ running the 35×15 gearing! In fact at the National I only managed to gate under 3 seconds in my 3rd moto which is crazy as at the Reginal at Decoy last month I was out of the gate in between 2.8 and 2.9 seconds so that is a lot slower especially as the national riders were gating at 2.7 seconds or less 🙁
People have also commented that I look way faster and more relaxed on the FTB than the Curtis, I can only put this down to the gearing as I feel way smoother on the Curtis and I feel way more comfortable on it too!!
I decided that I am going to ride the FTB Revolution that I was going to lend to my friends son with the 37×16 gearing on it and I am not going to lend him the Curtis for the rest of the season.
The main reason to ride the FTB apart from the fact that it allows me to ride the 37×16 gearing that I prefer, is the fact that it has 10mm dropouts so I can get a 10mm Onyx wheel which is much better out of the gate and rolls way faster than the profile elite hubs that I have at the moment. As the Curtis has 20mm dropouts it will be harder (almost impossible) to find a second hand Onyx wheel set anywhere and the 20mm rear hubs are more expensive too! I am going to have a chat with Gary at Curtis about getting the dropouts changed on the Curtis to 10mm at the end of the season as I think that the 10mm dropouts will make the bike way easier to find wheels to fit going forwards! I have no end of issues finding 20mm hubs to work with the Curtis as the dropouts on the chrome frame are much thinner! In fact the best fitting hubs that I have found so far are 10mm Profile Elites with a 20mm adapter on them! so swapping it to a 10mm rear dropout makes more sense as the majority of wheels are 10mm axle anyway and I have 3 sets of 10mm wheels already!!
When I was riding the Curtis over the last couple of weeks I had been noticing that the wheels were binding while free wheeling almost like the brake was rubbing which I know that it was not as I disconnected it to test that it wasn’t causing the issue and it most definitely was not as the binding continued with the brake pads too far away from the rim to touch!!
Unfortunately I did not get a chance to take the hub apart before the National weekend so I put up with it and I didn’t want to take it apart before the summer series race in case I didn’t get it back working again! I finally got the wheel off and found that not only was the driver really gunked up with what looked like dirty old grease! 2 of the wheel bearings were only turning 3/4 of a turn before locking up!!! That will explain why I have been getting slower out of the gate and also struggling to do a full lap and feeling really slow 🤣
I took the driver out on both Cruiser’s back wheels and cleaned them all and ordered new bearings for my wheel as the bearings were fine in the spare wheel so I put it straight on the Curtis and built it up for my friends son with his cranks and grips. I then let him know that it was ready to pick up but kept it a secret that he was getting the Curtis to ride for the season 🙂
I then got my wheel as good as I could get it by cleaning the bearings and re greasing them so and full cleaning out the driver and it now spins better and is OK to use until the new bearings arrive. I then built up the FTB for me to use for the season but didn’t have time to get to the track to test it out as it was too late once both bikes were built up.
I plan to take the ftb to the track in the morning to test it out. But as I have ridden