Sunday, October 22, 2023

Shifting Priorities

Lots of stuff going on. New appliances showing up. Passports that needed to be renewed. Daily bike rides. Weight lifting. Losing my checkbook and having to get new bank account numbers. Fixing numerous electronic fund transfers with the new account number. Errands. Shopping. Cooking meals. You know, life stuff.

My modest goal for the weekend was to get the shifting set up. Mission accomplished.

As I mentioned before, everything is Eagle GX except the cassette. Because these are older Deore XT hubs, I had to go NX for the cassette because of the HG cassette body.

I have been a Shimano guy for decades, which means there are numerous wheels floating around on my bikes with HG cassette bodies. I prefer Shimano, and I would have been cool with using XT 11-speed forever, but Shimano is making it tougher to get now. When Shimano moved to Micro Spline cassette bodies for their 12-speed offerings, that kind of sealed their fate. Ironically I moved to SRAM because I have so many Shimano wheels and they at least provide a pathway to 12-speed while still use HG bodies.

Nothing earth shattering about the GX Eagle setup save for a couple new wrinkles introduced by full suspension. The chain length needed to be calculated when the chainstays are longest, which for this bike (and most others) is when the shock is fully compressed. The B gap needs to be adjusted at sag. This is really a two-person job, so with all the air out of the shock I estimated sag. Close enough.

The routing on my aluminum Salsa Timberjack really soured me on internal cable routing. Wide open spaces that you had to fish around in and sharp edges on the entries and exits made it difficult. In the end my cables look like a cat chewed on them.

The routing on the Hightower is fully tunneled and easy. Mark one in the "pro" column for carbon fiber on this one.

Hopefully I get out there again this week and finish this damn thing up.

Later.

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