I spent all day, and I mean literally all day, rebuilding my Argon TT bike. I had got it back from my local bike shop who had finally managed to get the spacers off that had been welded firmly to the steerer tube with my turbo sweat. So I set aside all of yesterday in order to get it ready for today's Charlotteville 50 mile TT.
I had barely serviced the bike over the last couple of years and if had finally failed on a few fronts and needed some tlc.
- New rear brake installed.
- New front chainring installed.
- Headset bearings stripped and re-greased.
- Selcof handlebars installed and the steerer tube trimmed to neaten up.
- All new gear and brake cables installed.
- New chain
- New bar tape (obviously!)
Thankfully, Mrs Wheezy and the cat decided that I was best left to it, that conversation would be useless while I wrestled with the intricacies of the Argon's engineering. This also involved a lot of swearing and a lot of cups of tea. By 6 o' clock in the evening I'd got it sorted and after two months, I had a working bike.
All good, but there was no time to road test the bike save for checking all the indexing. I would have to test the fit of the bike in the following day's time trial at the Charlotteville CC event.
Today's event was one that's been a bit of an early season opener for me for the last couple of years. I'm not sure what I was expecting, but I struggled from the off. It was really cold this morning and I never got warm. Probably on it's own, this would have been fine but I had raised my saddle a few millimetres during the rebuild and this came back and literally bit me on the bum. I ended up riding 2:06:14, which is the slowest I've ridden over 50 miles in a few seasons. The bars were comfortable but they did slip which didn't help. I was some 2 minutes down on Simon, so not a disaster but I need to get my position properly sorted before thinking about the 12 hour in a few weeks time.
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