I cobbled together the cross frame into a bike on Saturday to give it a test run around the 'hood and to see if there were any tweaks that I needed to make before spending hours and hours sanding and painting.
Turns out, as to be expected, there were. Firstly, I'll say that the bike rides pretty well. It fits nicely, and has cured the dreaded toe overlap issue that plagued my other cross bike. Big feet plus wacky cleat=problems with toes getting rubbed off.
The second thing I noticed was the lack of rear brake stiffness. On the SuperCommuter that I built for Dave a year or so ago, I wrapped the heck out of the seatstays around the brake bosses in an effort to keep things really sturdy. It worked really well there, and with the through-the-tube brake cable, made for some really top-notch brake action. With this bike, I had some issues with flex after my much lighter layup schedule on the seatstays. The braking was a bit on the mushy/ineffective side for my liking, so I ended up taking off the brakes and putting another 3 or 4 layers of unidirectional stuff in both spiral and longitudinal patterns around the stays. I am going to finish putting it together tonight, but overall I'm liking how things are looking at this moment.
I'll put up some pictures after I de-weirdify it a little more.
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