As I have not been able to ride my bike for a couple of weeks I have been busy getting parts for my bikes and sorting out my Worlds bike.
This afternoon I went over to see Gary at Curtis Bikes and ordered my new Racelite 24 frame. I went for a 21.5″ top tube like my other frame but this time I went for 10mm dropouts and a 110mm disk brake setup. The frame will have a wider seat tube to make the frame stiffer and a tapered head tube. I went for the polished finish as I plan to make this my last frame so I may as well get it the classic Curtis look! The frame will look similar to the one below:
Gary will hopefully have the frame ready for me in about 3 months so that I can get some practice on it before I race at the worlds.
In the mean time I managed to get hold of a second hand Chase RST 2.0 Pro cruiser frame which arrived yesterday so I got it built up yesterday lunchtime and took it for a shakedown ride to pick up my Dad’s car from the garage in the afternoon. I love the way the bike looks as it rides really nicely. I am super happy with the Chris King bottom bracket that I got second hand off of ebay last month as it is super smooth and really makes spinning the pedals really easy.
I have to say that ever since I was a kid I have loved Chrome and black bikes and this takes me back to my Curtis Expert that I used to ride back in the day 🙂 I really like how the bike feels and I will take it out later to do some sprints somewhere to test it out a little more. I plan to go to the track tomorrow at lunch time too so that I can test the bike out on the track too before training on Saturday morning. I also need to give the bike a good clean as the parts that I put on it were filthy!
I am planning to drop my Onyx hub off at Crucial BMX to get it built up ready for the first national next month and it is looking like I will have to do that on Saturday morning before training as I will be at the track tomorrow lunch time and I am on call tomorrow afternoon so I will not be able to get to crucial and back in time. Once I have the Onyx wheel built up I will have everything to race the Chase until the Curtis is ready. I need to start saving ready to buy a new onyx disk wheel-set for the Curtis when it is ready. I think that I am going to go all out and get carbon rims and ti spokes as the bike deserves the best parts to go with it 🙂
I also got my NS Metropolis dirt jump bike frame built up yesterday as all the parts arrived apart from the inner tubes which arrived today. I still have to cut off the forks and fit the grips and then its all done:
As you can see from the photo the steerer tube is way too long so once I have fitted the tubes and the grips I will take it out for a quick test ride and then cut the steerer tube to length once I am happy with the height of the bars. The disk rotor is being a bit weird and rubbing a bit so I will also swap it out while I have the wheel off.