Great success and great failure

Well,  raceday was yesterday. I managed to get the bike in reasonable condition by Friday night. Although far from perfect and really untried, I decided to give the "Storm the Trent" elite category race a try. I knew this was pushing the limits of an untested, homemade bike. The first event was the 11 Km kayak, I did reasonably well in that leg, finishing around the middle of the pack. I then transitioned to the first biking leg which started with a fairly long road leg through two checkpoints. After about four hours of racing and two hours of biking, the course started to be offroad on some ATV trails and power cutlines. Things were going relatively well until I started applying more force to the handlebars while working on the hills and the rougher terrain. While heading out from one of the checkpoints I pulled on the bars as I was accelerating and heard a loud crack from the front end. I immediately knew that I had cracked the modified headset that I had rebuilt with epoxy, aluminum, fibreglass and CF. I hoped there was enough strength left to get me to a road as at that time I was a fairly long way in the bush with just trails leading to roads. Luck wasn't on my side as a few hundred metres later the steering mast came right off. At that time I was about 5 hours into the race.

The fibreglass that released from the aluminum

The aluminum that wasn't prepared with etching acid before applying the epoxy. All my other aluminum/epoxy joints were prepped with West System etching....so far so good.

Now the fun really began as I had to figure out how I was going to get "Mad Max" out of the woods with no way to steer the front tire other than hunching over and steering by the remaining knuckle at the top of the fork tube.....this worked for a few hundred metres before I decided I would need to carry the bike on my shoulders. I had around 2-3 Km to go out, once the bike was up on my shoulders it wasn't too bad, although climbing some of the sandy hills was a bit of work, it wasn't as hard as Melissa was working as she had carried on with the race and eventually completed in just over 9 hours, winning first place in her division. She is an awesome athlete!!! It took about an hour to make it out to the road where I met up with another rider who had just lost his teammate to an injury. Watching the ambulance pull away made my broken steerer seem quite minor. We waited in the rain for about an hour until we got rescued by one of the racer recovery trucks. Overall the race was an excellent experience for me, I learned lots about race preparations as well as about my bike, which I am happy to say worked quite well. Overall, I am extremely proud of my accomplishment so far. I am sure the bike will never by finished, so I will continue with modifications and always make it better.

Mad Max as I her carried out of the woods. Spare bungy cords kept the loose
steering mast from flopping around.

So I am back to the drawing board with my steering. I am going to temporarily rebuild this piece so I can at least ride to work on the roads a couple of days a week, but will need to get a proper piece from Terracycle. My friend Richard is now using the Terracycle glide on his bike and it seems to be working quite well. He was the winner of our division at the race yesterday. Congratulations Richard!!!

The modified part before the race

Reworked Rear Suspension=SUCCESS

Last night I was depressed with the sag in my rear shock. It was causing problems with bottoming out the shock, chain management issues and poor gear shifting. Tonight I decided to move the rear shock mounts from underneath the swing arm to the top of the swing arm. My hope was to raise the back of the bike and create some more clearance so I wouldn't bottom out the shock. What happened was the angle of the shock changed from almost straight up and down to a lower angle. The shock works perfectly now. Obviously these shocks are designed to work on an angle instead of straight up and down. Another lesson learned!

The seat is quite a bit higher now, but it feels really good and the shock works as it should. I have a lot more confidence now that I will make it through the ride portion of the race with the bike working as it is now.

I do need to add some epoxy and CF to the bottom bracket, it isn't strong enough yet. I will work on that tomorrow night. Things are on track for Saturday, with no spare time for any more problems.....I know they are coming anyway!!

Oh yeah, I think the name of this monster will be "Mad Max". I am thinking I should mount a machine gun on the front!

Finished???

I am nearly finished. The last several weeks have been extremely busy with selling the house, going to Florida to find a new place to live and visit the kids' new schools. I have been trying to balance construction time with getting fit enough to race......oh yeah, the race is six days away!!!

The good news is that I finally got the bike out onto some trails today. It rides alright, but I have some tweaking to do this week as well as a bit more epoxy work for the bottom bracket.

I have major rear suspension sag problems right now, it is causing me to bottom out constantly and is causing havoc with my chain management. I will recheck the air pressure in the shock tomorrow and work on some adjustments. The lockout lever is due to be delivered tomorrow. Once I have that installed I should have good control over stiffening up the rear end. I hope so anyway, as it is not good the way it is now. If all goes as planned with that tomorrow night I will get the epoxy finished Tuesday night and then tweak the derailleurs Wednesday. Time is tight, but things will work out.

Oh yeah, I will be trimming the end of the steering mast as well, that piece sticking down by the front tire is just waiting to ensure I have the length right.