Equipment - Tsunami 1.1 (Red)

I haven't put up a recent picture of the now-red Tsunami in race form. I did only race it twice in its full race regalia and twice with a training front wheel due to the gusty wind conditions.

The second "race", if you could call it that, lasted just three laps.

The bike is therefore still a bit foreign to me. I hadn't really sprinted on it, not "ferociously", and I still haven't checked the SRM for accuracy. I mention the former because I wanted to make sure things were up to snuff - derailleurs adjusted, position reasonable, stuff like that - and I mention the latter because the power numbers I'm seeing were immediately 10-20% higher than those I see on the black Tsunami.

I went for a ride on a very close by loop recently on the bike shod with its Bastognes. After some intraweb discussions on wheel weight and aerodynamics I decided to throw on the race wheels to check them out. I'll post about the rides later but the second ride gave me a chance to photograph the bike loaded out in race day gear.

The Tsunami 1.1

First off you'll note some half finished yard work in the background. That's our handiwork. The part you don't see is that there's poison ivy mixed in there. I didn't know either but it's all over me - my arms, legs, stomach, back, neck, even just below my eyes. I must be much less stressed in life because it's not really annoying me, not like it usually does.

Anyway, back to the bike. I have some messy electrical tape holding the SRM cable to the frame. I plan on replacing it with clear tape of some kind.

One thing that you can't see are the parallel honed and faced bearing surfaces (the BB30 bottom bracket and the headset). It's made a huge difference in how the bike works. First off I started riding a bit squirrelly because the bike steered too easily (to me, coming off of some pretty stiff headsets). Second I am saving some decent amount of power because the cranks turn so easily. I would regularly see 5 or 8 watts when soft pedaling on the black bike, and I saw 15 watts once when pedaling with no load. Now it's negligible.

The quick steering and the efficient crank bearings make the bike feel like I'm riding rollers when I'm actually on the road. The bike feels super smooth, super quick.

Very nice.

The frame is much shorter in the rear now, I think 39.2 cm chainstays, so it reacts really quickly if I want it to change direction. They're just a touch longer than the black Tsunami's stays but basically the same.

For pedals I wanted to get the Keo Carbon again but with the metal plate for the cleat surface. Unfortunately the new pedals are absolutely wimpy on retention strength - I can clip out pretty much at will, even with the tension totally cranked. I need to figure something out because right now all my out of saddle efforts are somewhat checked, even sprints, because I'm afraid of unclipping.

For "race gear" I have the HED Stinger 7 front and Stinger 9 rear on the bike. I'll do a post on them soon, I promise. Suffice it to say that they're really wide, they have a rounded rim edge (the spoke side of the rim), and they feel really fast.

Oh and they make that cool "Swoosh swoosh" sound.

The SLR saddle.

I'm trying this saddle because I'm running out of the Titanio that I favor. It seems minimalistic but I rode it to Bethel, a 4.5 hour ride for me (at 14 mph), and it worked out well. I admit I was a bit tender because the different shape resulted in different pressure points but I was also going from virtually not riding to doing a 4.5 hour ride. In addition I started cramping almost immediately on that ride, due to a severe lack of fitness, so I had to stay seated for most of the ride. This literally kept me in the saddle even when I wanted to stand and stretch - the saddle definitely got tested on that ride.

Not only that but even when I was pedaling okay I couldn't pedal hard. This meant I wasn't supporting a significant portion of my weight with my legs, resulting in increased pressure on the saddle.

Even with both those things working against me the saddle seemed to work fine for me. The one thing is that it's more slippery than the Titanio. I don't have a solution at this point.

As far as fit I had to raise the post a bit because the saddle sits closer to the post. I raised it a touch more because the "center" of the saddle, where I end up sitting, is much further forward than the Titanio. This had the effect of shortening the distance from the saddle to the pedals by about 3-4 mm.

Err no you can't see the smudge marks on the seat post.

I took this picture because I could see the smudge marks on the post from where I raised it first for the saddle height difference and then again for the slightly different "center". No worries, it shows the seat collar area well.

The business end of the bike.

The Deda stem is misnamed, in my opinion, as a track ("pista") stem. In fact it only points 3 degrees (70 degrees or -20 deg) down from my regular stem which is horizontal (73 degrees or -17 deg from the head tube angle). I want a 14 cm stem that drops me at least a centimeter more but I can't find one.

The Deda is a 14 cm to try and make up for the lack of reach of the FSA Compact bars. I'm still short 1 cm in reach and the bars are 1 cm higher than my other bars. Due to this I'm almost positive I'm going to be moving back to the lower crit bend bars. Either that or I need to find some compact reach bars that drop 140 mm instead of 120 mm.

Centaur 10 speed shifters

I'm going to post more on this decision later too but I had two reasons for getting these shifters. One, I wanted to see if the new shape works for me. Two, I wanted a shifter that only gave me one shift at a time. The Record 10s shifters I have allow me to dump the chain down a lot. Limiting that to just one cog will hopefully save me from shifting too many cogs at once in a sprint.

GOOP and my PCV (off the Cannondale so the first one I got)

On a side note my SRM has a slight crack in the front "cover", the clear plastic that covers the whole face of the computer head. The plastic alternately bulges and gets sucked in, depending on the atmospheric pressure I suppose, maybe temperature too. It tends to bulge in the summer, get sucked in in the winter. Whatever, the important part is that whatever I used to patch it would need to be flexible.

I used GOOP to patch it up. It's clear after it dries and it's flexible. I've used it to fix the driver's side mirror on the van, gluing new mirror glass to the plastic backing. Someone had hit the van while it was parked on the street and left me with a broken mirror glass. So far it's worked well - about 5 years or so.

Reviewing this post you can see that the bike isn't quite complete. I still need to hone the bar position relative to the saddle or change the bar completely. I need to address the pedals. But overall the bike is great - responsive, agile, and fun.

How To - SRM PCV Battery Replacement

One of the "drawbacks" of the SRM powermeter system is the lack of "user serviceable batteries". To be technically correct it should say "easily user serviceable batteries". The computer head ("power control") and the cranks ("power meter") are both designed to be serviceable, just not with a nickel to twist off a battery cover. You need a bit more than that to service them.

The Power Control 5 (or PC5 or PCV in Roman numbers, and we'll go by PCV since that's what SRM calls it) falls under this "not so easily serviceable battery" bit.

I have two of them, one that came with the Cannondale's SRM system and one that I came with a used SRM system I bought off of an eBay seller.

When I bought the Cannondale the crank battery died almost immediately. SRM very kindly replaced it under warranty - it was maybe a year old at that point and I hadn't used it anywhere near the 15,000 km that it might last.

Since then I've replaced one crank battery. I went to replace the other but when I checked the battery it was fine - apparently the wiring harness was the culprit.

The PCV (remember that's the computer head) battery worked fine though. It happened to fade just about when I bought the used SRM system so I've been using the second PCV all this time.

Now, with two bikes rolling, each with an SRM power meter on them (the cranks), and with each SRM power meter holding different offset values (some variable you have to program into the PCV), it's easiest to use two separate PCV heads.

(To program the offset you have to do something akin to reprogramming the clock on a cyclometer. You can do it each time you switch bikes but it's sort of a pain. This is why I looked for a used SRM system, not just the cranks.)

Now I need to replace the PCV battery in that original, came-on-the-Cannondale PCV. I put it off until I had a rolling bike, meaning I put it off for a couple years. With the now-red Tsunami finally on the road I ran out of time.

Here's a short pictorial on how I did it. It took about 30 minutes total and if I was better it'd have taken 10 minutes or less. I note how much time it actually took to do the stuff in each picture - the extra time came from me being super careful or checking and rechecking too much or overthinking things.

PCV head, 4 screws removed.

Green "drum" is a stack of batteries.

Time: 1 minutes to remove screws, 1 minute to remove battery from silicone glue stuff.

The PCV has clear glue that was holding the battery in place. I popped the battery out with a small flat blade screwdriver.

The new battery to the right.

I wanted to reuse the wires so I saved them off the old battery, cutting them at the solder points.

Time: 1 minute to cut leads clear of battery.

You'll notice the new battery is shorter than the old one. It doesn't hold as much of a charge but unfortunately the taller original battery isn't readily available. I read of one person that got them custom made for him. He was selling them too but I never got a response to my request for a battery or two. I bought some lower capacity batteries from Mouser Electronics. They'll be good for the 6 or 8 hours data capacity of the PCV.

I bought a few batteries while I was at it. One for this one, one for the other, and one spare. 

New battery soldered.

Time: 2 minutes to solder each end.

I soldered the two wires on, red to positive, black to negative. I did check the battery first to make sure it was putting out 3.7 volts and it was.

The black stuff is brush-on electrical tape. It's great stuff, just brush it on. It's sort of like black tubular glue, consistency-wise, and it dries to a semi-hard state. It doesn't transmit electricity so it insulates the connection. In my case I "painted" the whole end of the battery just to be safe. I'm not sure but I think I got the stuff at Radio Shack.

In the picture above I have not brushed the black/negative wire/connection.

New battery soldered, both ends covered with brush-on electrical tape.

Time: 1 minute to brush both ends with brush-on electrical tape.

I got specks of the brush-on electrical tape on the surface below the PCV (and a bit on my fingertips too).

Battery in place.

Time: 1 minute to reassemble.

I decided to use the brush-on electrical tape as the glue to hold the battery in place. The black gunk was a bit wet when I put the battery into place - the battery didn't move so I figured it was okay.

All set!

I'm holding at an angle because the flash makes the LCD screen look like it's not working right.

It's on the charger, as evidenced by the "+" symbol on the right side of the screen. We'll see how it goes.

The second PCV, still going strong.

Note the different color buttons.

If you look closely at both PCVs you'll see there's some "loop" of "hook and loop" on the sides. This was to hold the PCV on the Cane Creek Speed Bars when I used them. I haven't been strong enough to use them recently so they're sitting on a bookshelf waiting for me to get stronger. I hope to have a better solution when I put the Speed Bars back on the bike.

The download cable, fixed with brush-on electrical tape.

The download cable for the SRMs tend to crack and break at the plug end. This is just like any other power plug that connects to a device - think of a DVD player or a toaster or whatever power cord that has to bend a bit.

With the SRM download cable the black bit is pretty rigid and the white cable is pretty flexible. This leads to a conflict of sorts where the two meet. Inevitably the rigid black plastic cracks and breaks, and shortly after the flexible white cable separates from the black plastic, exposing the wires. Eventually the download cable fails.

This download cable, that I got used with the eBay SRM power system, arrived already cracked. Given a bit of time the cable would have failed. I used the brush-on electrical tape, liberally applying it to the area where I could see the wire innards amongst the cracked black plastic. The download cable works fine and it appears to be plenty durable.