Condor grows teeth….
May 28, 2007
One for the bike geeks here I’m afraid…. You may or may not be aware that I’ve been campaigning my Condor track bike around the local time trial events this year… and it was all working out rather well so I took a deep breath and threw a few (read “a lot”) £££ at it, gave it ‘teeth’ so to speak… and here it is.. that’s the arty shot there on the left, the sensible pics are below.
Looks rather spangly even if I do say so myself. All I need is a decent set of legs come the next event and with a bit of luck we’ll be flying.
I could bore you with the details…. ah, actually I will bore with the detail, heck you don’t have to read it… The rear wheel is the best bit if you ask me (or even if you didn’t)… a 90mm deep HED carbon rim built onto a jewel of a hub from Royce Titanium – aside from being all shiny and generally rather lovely the bearings are incredible, it feels as if it will sin forever – as close to frictionless as you’ll come this side of a superconductoring magnet and bucket of liquid nitrogen. Spokes, all 24 of ‘em, are bladed affairs from Sapim. I know the style police will be after me for having a non-matching front wheel but it seemed a little pointless to spend another £500 when I could just borrow one off my Storck for the races. I’ve kept the cocpit nice and simple… a ‘modified*’ Profile base bar and Oval carbon extensions, the aero fork came courtesy of a nice chap in Belgium, it’s new but cost me significantly less than the proper retail of near £300 (cheers Pieter!). I won’t be bothering with an aero profile seatpost or other ‘fashionable jewellery’. The airflow is dirty enough back there such that it would be a waste of ££ for no advantage whatsoever.
Stay tuned and I’ll let you know how we get on, first flight is scheduled for next Sunday… how good my legs will be though I have no idea as I still seem to be clawing my way back out of a pit of post-viral fatigue.
**2008 update.. for an update on this bike have a look here: http://mikesimagination.wordpress.com/2008/05/06/condor-its-finished/
[...] it to be a different story with though with large rings carrying around 55 teeth that I use on my Condor. Even top quality spangleware from Campagnolo hasn’t been quite round enough for my tastes [...]
[...] me… Yesterday said Fairy brought me a 9omm deep carbon front wheel to match my rear on my TT bike. I didn’t really ‘need’ it given I was using the Mavic Cosmic Carbone off my [...]
[...] steel framed Condor Pista EOM (admittedly kitted out with some nice jewellery) which I wrote about here… and here [...]