So the new to me RockShock Pike U-Turn forks arrived on Wednesday and on the way to my parents house on Wednesday lunch time I swung by the track and picked up my BlackMarket Contraband 24″ Jump bike from the container.
While driving to the track I got a call from Gary at Curtis Bikes and he is going to make a 24″ Cruiser that works with dirt jump forks and he asked if I wanted one as I had been talking about getting one made up as my wrist if constantly messed up! So I said I would have one 🙂 We are researching forks at the moment so see what is about then we will get some and build the frame from there.
I then took the forks off of the BlackMarket and found that the headset bearings had fallen apart and also the bearing race was really tightly on the forks too so I gave up on putting the forks on the bike and took the DMR Sect 26″ to gates at Andover instead as that was fully functional!
Gates were fun and I got used to the DMR a bit BUT the seat is way too high for me so I will not be riding it much once the BlackMarket is done anyway and I may well sell it. I also got a new learn of a pump/jump on the step-up on the first straight by accident then I did it a bunch of times as it is way smoother than the manual on it 🙂 Other than that thee wasn’t much to do as it was a bit windy for jumping 🙁 When we got back to my friends house I drove back to my parents and picked up my stuff and the BlackMarket, did the washing up then headed home.
Yesterday (Thursday) I got the forks fitted on the BlackMarket:
I left the Steerer tube long for now as I want to test the forks before cutting it but the bike looks good and with the new headset I found in the parts cupboard I was able to drop the stem and bars by a good 20 mm. I left the higher rise bars on there for now and I will decide about bar height later. I also reduced the travel on the forks to 95 mm from the 140 mm they came with as the forks have a handy travel reducer on them which is why I bought them in the first place. At lunch time I removed the raggedy BlackMarket stickers and made up some new mat black ones and put them on the bike.
At 5 pm I headed to the track to setup for gates and took the BlackMarket with me to test it out. The bike rode amazingly other than the bars are still too high but it manuals so well its amazing! The forks felt really good apart from the fact the front wheel kept coming loose so I need to get an allen key and tighten the axle a bit to keep it snug. I only did a few laps as my wrist was sore from all the riding the night before at Andover so I didn’t want to push it.
This morning I woke up at 4 am and I was wide awake so I decided to order some new 20 mm x 100 mm cones for my front hub to make certain that the wheel is setup for 110 mm and also a pipe cutter so that I can cut the forks down and also I have a couple of seat tubes to cut down too. I also put a bid on some 20 mm rise Gusset Open Prison bars that were on eBay to see if they lower the front enough!
The lunch time I will go to the track and swap out the bars on the BlackMarket for my 35 mm rise Gusset Open Prison bars and also sort out the front Axle and then give it another test ride on the 3rd and 4th straights for an hour or so! I may also do some sprints to test out the Skilz Timing System again. I figure that riding the BlackMarket and doing sprints on it too will speed up me getting used to riding it 🙂 Sprints will also help me get used to the riding position out of the gate too which will help as it felt really weird out of the gate yesterday!