this morning I woke up at 5 am, showered, got dressed and then went for my morning walk before work. I left the house at 5:30 am and it was already light so I went along the 2 tunnels and did my usual 2 tunnels loop that is about 5000 steps so I am currently on 5110 steps for the day so half way to my 10000 goal for the day and its not 7am yet 🙂
I couldn’t find my ear buds so had to use my old airpods which are super quiet so the walk wasn’t as chill as it would normally have been and my back was sore too but its feeling better now so I’m glad that I started walking this morning!
I am heading to the track at lunch time to meet my friend and do some gates and probably have to meet the toilet people so that they can empty and clean the toilets before they get picked up again but I haven’t heard anything about that yet so lets see!
When I got home from my walk I bit the bullet and bought a new driver for my rear hub so that I can get the Black Market Contraband 24″ working so that I can start learning to jump.
I am going to wait until next week to start weights to give my back time to heal a bit before stressing it out with weights again. I will start riding in the evenings again though as I think that will help the back too so its a good idea. It also means I will start to get the weight off again so is worth doing.
Tomorrow I will start riding the road bike at lunch time as well then I can start to drop more weight and build a fitness base so that when I start back on the track I should have some kind of fitness to make track sessions less traumatic 🙂
I have been looking at the Black Market Contraband 24″ and I think that the Manatou forks are set to 130 mm travel not 100 mm so the front end is 30 mm higher than it should be. I have decided to swap the forks out for my Identity rigid forks instead until I can get the Manatou forks adjusted to 100 mm. I have bought some qr adapters for the front hub and a set of halo qr skewers to make the wheel work with the forks.
To be honest the rigid forks should make the bike feel more like a race BMX and the bigger tyres should add a bit of cushioning for my wrist so it should be better to train on than the race BMX at least. We will see once its all built up I suppose 🙂 I should have all the parts by the weekend so I will be able to build the bike up and test it out at the tack over the weekend 🙂
I have also bought a couple Ride Now 24″ x 1.5-2.0″ TPU inner tubes from Waller BMX to try as a couple of friends are using them and say that they are good and they are 1/2 the price of Tubolitos which makes them worth a try! If they are good then I will buy a load from alli express as they ar 1/2 price again from there. I will replace the duff Tubolito in the front of the Black Market with one of the new tubes and keep the other one as a spare for now until the Tubolito on the back lets me down which it invariably will 🙁
So I am currently waiting on the following parts to finish the build:
Halo Supa Drive Driver
Halo WideBoy 20 mm adaptors
Halo WideBoy QR adaptors
Halo Hex bolt QR Skewers
Ride Now 24″ Tubes
Hopefully everything will be here by the weekend and I can get to ride the Black Market over the weekend and test it out 🙂
So I rode at lunch time and my back was sore and I had to stop after about 8 gates so not a complete waste but not a full session either.
When I got home I got the Identity rigid forks from the garage so I have them for when the adaptors arrive. I have just put them on the bike and the steerer tube definitely needs cutting down a fair bit:
Other than that the forks look good on the black Market and they are at least 30 mm lower than the Manatou Circus forks so I think that the bike will ride much better as the geo will be how it is supposed to be. I think that the forks will also make the jump bike ride more like a bmx bike too 🙂
I have just got a notification that the QR adaptors and QR skewers and my free Halo race top will be arriving tomorrow sometime so I will be able to get the front wheel on the bike at least by tomorrow evening so then its just waiting on the new driver to arrive then the bike will be rideable 🙂