On the spectrum of attitudes toward gear quantity on a cross-country bike trip, I’m a Lotsagear Guy.

I’m a Lotsagear Guy because I prefer to travel alone more often than in a group. (When you are in a group you can distribute some of the gear among the riders. Not everyone needs a chain tool, a cassette removal tool, or a spare tire…..as long as someone has it.) I’m a Lotsagear Guy because I intend to camp more often than stay in a hotel. (Nothing wrong with staying in a hotel. But you can pitch a tent most anywhere, and that gives you more options as to where you can go.) I’m a Lotsagear Guy because I like to cook my own food…..even if it is pretty basic. Which means carrying some kind of stove, some utensils, some food, and maybe a box of wine. Okay, definitely, a box of wine. I’m a Lotsagear Guy because I want some comforts. (Books, notebooks, wine, audio devices, the soprano recorder I’m going to try and teach my unmusical self to play.) And I’m a Lotsagear Guy because I want my daily expenses to be low. (Although this is the most debatable point of my approach. Yes, I save on camping vs. hotel. Eating from grocery stores and fruit stands vs. restaurants. And from not having to replace my mechanical equipment prematurely…..I can wait until a worn tire is absolutely ready to go because I’m carrying my spare with me. If a Notlotsagear Guy is near a bike shop and he thinks his tire is on the way out, he needs to replace it then and there so he doesn’t get stranded. On the other hand, the Notlotsagear Guy can save money in other places. His bike doesn’t need to be as heavy-duty, because he’s not carrying as much gear. So he can use stock racing parts, which are cheaper, because more ubiquitous. He should be able to cover more miles in a day, because of the lighter load. And he should put less wear on his bike….particularly on spokes, brake pads, tires, and the chain.)

But here’s the thing.  Notlotsagear Guys are big fat jerks.  I don’t know why they don’t just travel on electric bicycles.  Or, better yet, Wii bicycles.  Or even better, have their lackeys provide them with summary reports of videos of other people traveling around on Wii bicycles.  My friend John Piela says it isn’t even good enough to bicycle.  To see the world, you really need to WALK.  And while this is anathema to me (I can’t even put my smallish mouse mind around it), I do embrace some grain of truth in it.  You can’t see the world unless you first converse with it.  And to converse, you must be going slow enough to listen and slow enough to be heard.  How do I get there from here?  What is good to eat?  Where may I pitch my tent?  How may I most quickly hole up in my hotel room and settle my tired dogs before this here cable television?  It just doesn’t sound the same.

Oh wait.  Not only am I not wooing you over to my way of thinking, but I digress.  I was going to talk a bit about the beefy bicycle which I have prepared for this trip.

When I did my (Mahsa made it as far as Tuscaloosa) trip from Atlanta, Georgia to Alpine, Texas (the frame of my bike broke irreparably eight miles outside of the town of Alpine, I hitched a ride in on a cattle trailer with a rancher named Bit), I used a B.O.B. trailer.  I had a lot of gear.  Really.  Seriously.  It was disgusting.  Some of it due to my still-present heavy-packing ways, and some of it due to the conditions.  It was quasi-winter.  I was in the South.  Sometimes warm, sometimes snow.  Literally.  This time I expect that I’ll be able to pack lighter, but I still want to carry a fair amount of junk.  I didn’t like how the B.O.B. handled.  [Think mountain descents.]  And my dad is probably not wrong in thinking that it directly contributed to the destruction of my bike frame.  So this time I opted for an Xtracycle Free Radical.  The Free Radical is basically a frame extension which fits on your existing frame.  It moves the rear wheel back and gives you extra space to mount gear inside your wheelbase.  The thought is that the long wheelbase will make the bike very stable.  I’ve only taken it on a few short test-rides, but so far, I like it a lot.

I’m using my commuting bike from 2005 as the platform.  It’s sort of an oddball frame.  (This is the frame I received as my warranty replacement after the death of Jamis Aurora outside Alpine.  It is marked as a Jamis Nova, which was a sort of cyclocross frame.  But it also says it’s a 59cm frame (a size that didn’t exist for the model year it is supposed to be) and has several over-painted areas where the paint dripped.  So I really think it is a frame on which they were teaching the new guy how to paint.  As well as several thousand miles of all seasons commuting, it has a dent in the top tube from where I must have dropped it once and a puncture in one of the seat stays where I tried to use a bolt which was too long in one of the rack eyelets.  I hope this doesn’t come back to bite me that I’m not starting with a fresh frame….but I’m figuring, worst case scenario, should it break on the ride, I can hide out somewhere for a few days and order a Surly Longhaultrucker as a replacement.  You know, assuming it doesn’t come apart on me as I’m making a descent in the Canadian Rockies.

So I stripped the frame of everything, and gave it a much needed bath.  Installed a new pewter-colored Chris King headset (not as flashy as the blue one I’d been using) and new carbon-fiber fork (one of the few weight savings on the bike).  Now that I don’t need a front rack, I can go with something that doesn’t have rack eyelets.  Installed the Free Radical.  Built up two new wheels.  One around a new Chris King hub and 36-hole Mavic A719 (I love this rim!  Built to really high standards) using double-butted spokes.  And one around a 48-hole Phil Wood Shimano-cassette hub which I’ve had for a couple years.  On the Phil Wood hub I’m using triple-butted spokes (difficult to find these days in road sizes) and a Velocity Dyad rim.  (Not a lot of choices in 48h rims.  I used to use Sun CR-18s, but they tend to have a lot of wobble in them before truing.  I’m hoping the Dyad’s are more like the Mavic’s.  So far so good.)  I’m also trying out Velocity’s Veloplugs…..which are an alternative to rim tape.

Installed a new set of triple cranks with outboard bearings (Shimano 105 level….I like aluminum here, less worry about wear) with 50-tooth top gear and a 22-tooth granny gear.  Fenders from my old bike.  New cheap V-brakes.  A new low-profile SLX rear derailleur.  An Adventure Rack and Tek Deck from Xtracycle.  (These are the items designed to make the Free Radical pannier friendly.)  A new front derailleur and a front derailleur deflector to handle the big shifting range I’ve got going on the triple.  V-brake compatible drop bar levers (from Cane Creek).  And two stems.  (One at the top of the uncut fork, angling up at 130° and one an inch or so below that angling slightly down at 88°.)  The top one holds my actual handlebar, brake levers, and shifters.  The bottom one holds a partial handlebar (the last remnant of my 2001 Jamis Aurora), which is acting as a light bar.  This will hopefully be more stable than Minoura Swing Grips, Topeak Bar X-tenders and the like, and will also give me maximal free hand positions on the bar…..while still giving me lots of space to mount lights.  I decided I wanted bar-end type shifters for their simplicity and reliability.  I’ve mounted the rear 9-speed shifter in the right bar-end.  While the front-shifter is mounted using a Paul Thumbie up by the stem.  (I always find it kind of hard to make a big front shift with a bar-end shifter, and this also keeps the left bar-end free for a mirror.)

Wow.  This post is long.  But at least it is uninteresting.  You, former reader, would have been better served if I had actually listed the model number of each part I put on the bike–sort of a praxis review/expected haul should some internet surfing Manitobans decide to jack-roll me–OR if I had just said, “I put a bunch of new stuff on the bike.  Here’s a photo.”  So far, I like how the bike rides, though it is taking a little adjustment both to get used to using the bar-end shifters instead of brifters, and to stop needlessly cross-gearing.  (Transitioning from a double, where it didn’t matter/I didn’t care/it was more necessary.)

The rear hub has given me a fright.  I had a problem back in May where the axle nuts where spontaneously loosening up.  I had cold-re-spaced this frame to 135mm and thought maybe I was a milimeter or two off…..and maybe this was creating the problem.  So I shipped the hub back to Phil Wood for bearing replacement and inspection.  (They were really fast and communicated really well throughout.  Which somewhat justifies the priciness of their products.)  When I got it back, I built it up into the new wheel.  But the new wheel, when mounted on the bike, was giving off a tiny bit of lateral play.  This is the kind of play I’ve come to associate with poor adjustment in a cup-and-cone type hub.  It’s the kind of thing which only gets worse until it destroys the races.  I played around with a variety of fixes.  Including double-checking the drop-out spacing of the hub and Free Radical, tightening the quick-release skewer to hand-busting levels, torquing the crap out of the axle nuts.  None of these seemed to work.  Or they’d work, but the problem would quickly come back.  So I emergency sent the whole wheel down to Phil Wood for diagnosis.  (Again, they were extremely quick and communicative.)  I just got it back.  They replaced a lightly damaged sleeve and a couple washers.  As well as replacing the bearings again.  The play is still there.  Mark at Phil Wood politely suggested (didn’t come right out and accuse, just suggested as a possibility) that the amount of play in the hub was normal… that I had damaged the washer and sleeve by over-torquing the axle nuts… that there was an outside shot the bearings had been incompletely pressed upon service by them.  I’m willing to buy all this.  At about $600 for a new wheel plus my labor, I have to believe all this.  Another comparable wheel is too expensive.  But it does blow my mind a little bit.  As this much play flies in the face of everything I know and would expect from a properly adjusted hub.  But they know their product, and really, they can’t be wrong about this.

I had expected that they either wouldn’t be able to reproduce the problem as I experienced it….or that they would, but that the damage was so serious already, that the only real solution was a completely new hub.  And in either of those cases, my plan was just to ride the current wheel into the ground and then replace it with something as it became absolutely necessary.  Now I keep with that plan, only with a slightly improved confidence level that I’m not riding the wheel into the ground.  Rather, just riding.