Before I started out building my bike I did a fair amount of research on a number of various subjects. One of them being, in what order do I assemble a bike? Luckily I found a guide on Park Tools webpage. One of the first elements to install, according to this guide, was the bottom bracket and the crankset, and so I did.
Continue reading Bottom bracket and crankset
Tag: Cycling
Building a Bike – Selecting a Frame
OK, to build a bike the most obvious part you’ll need is – in my eyes – the frame.
I’ve spent quite some time on the internet looking at cross frames. There was one brand that kept popping up. A Belgian company called Ridley which makes some pretty fine bikes (used amongst others by the Belgian Lotto Bellisol pro team). They had some fine cross frames which was also recommended around the internet, so I narrowed my search down to a Ridley X-bow and a Guerciotti Lyra, mostly because it was cheap(ish) and asked the clever people of feltet (a danish site about everything cycling related, with a superb forum filled with friendly and knowingly cycling aficionados) about their oppinion. Their suggestion was to go with the Ridley frame, and so I did.
However, during my research I found out that a new 2013 model of the X-bow frame was to be released sometime later in 2012.
Here is the 2012 frame
And here is the 2013 frame
On the one hand I was eager to get my “build a bike” project started. On the other hand the 2013 frame was just sooo much prettier. I mean, just look at it! Black instead of white, and then there’s the rainbow stripes. No they have no practical useage, no I will not become a world champion by riding on a bike with rainbow stripes, yes I am familiar with rule 16 but still, they just look so damn fine on that bike.
So…I decided to wait. I had contacted the shop bike-zone.dk where I intended to buy the frame, and was promised that when the owner heard anything about availability of the new 2013 frame, he would contact me. This was late May and so I waited impatiently…until last week where I got a message from bike-zone that the frame was in stock now!
So I ordered, My height is 179 cm and my inseam is 81 cm which converts to a medium X-bow frame. And then I just had to wait for the postman to show up…but that is the subject of another post.
Not dead!
It’s been quite a while since my latest post, almost a year actually.
The reason for this is that things have been quite busy over the year or so. The summer was spent working, being with the family and cycling. During 2011 I rode 3000 kilometers on the bike and took part in two races.
And then there’s work. Last spring I started developing mobile apps, a mobile banking app to be more specific. I started out working on the Android platform, and during the summer I moved to the iOS platform, which meant a whole new language (Objective C), a new framework (Cocoa), a new way of designing UI (goodbye HTML and goodbye Android XML and hello Interface builder), and a new way of thinking/structuring your code (delegates, protocols and the like). I must admit that I like working on the iOS platform a lot. The Cocoa and iOS frameworks are excellent, getting access to iOS features like camera, mail and GPS are most of the time a breeze and things are constantly moving.
During the autumn we started working on the iPad version of our mobile bank app. This has meant a lot of work over the autumn and winter. Many evenings has been spent pushing pixels and scratching my head wondering what the heck my code was trying to tell me when it said things like “unrecognized selector sent to instance”. But now versions 1.0 (1.0.1 actually) and 1.1 has been released and people seems to like our work which is nice.
So…yeah, not dead, just busy, and no sign of that changing in the near future. There’s still a lot of work to do, spring is here again, and with spring comes cycling and then there’s always the family.