Equipment - Tsunami 1.1 or "The Now-Red Orange Frame"

For over a year I've been wanting to get this frame back online. It started out as my original Tsunami frame, with the now-standard-for-me geometry - 40 cm seat tube, 56.5 cm effective top tube, 75.5 degree seat tube angle, 73 degree head tube angle, and designed to be used with a 43 mm rake fork.

The original bike, shortly after I built it up in SoCal.

This makes for a long bike to fit my long torso. It's not very tall though, to fit my not-very-tall legs.

The original Tsunami (version 1.0) had industry standard 40.5 cm chainstays and that's where it faltered. Even coasting in fast corners the rear tire would chatter or slide across the pavement. The unusually long front end meant I had too much weight up front, leaving the rear wheel to fend for itself.

This, along with my short-lived upgrade to Cat 2, instigated the second Tsunami, the black one. Geometry-wise I wanted the same bike but with "as short as possible" chainstays. Those ended up measuring 39 cm in length.

The black Tsunami (version 2.0 if you will) also had some aero features. I wanted the narrower tubes with the thought of racing with a CamelBak. This would eliminate the very bulky bottles from the bike, allowing me to take advantage of the aero tubing.

My CamelBak idea faltered because I didn't like the way it worked (can't toss an empty CamelBak, can't empty it all the way, pain to refill, warm in warm weather, harder to breathe, etc). I resorted to using the bottle bosses, literally an afterthought in the build process.

"Might as well put them on although I don't plan on using them."

The black frame worked well although the nut that held the seat down (aka "the rider" aka me) wasn't as good.

I started thinking of combing my favorite elements from both bikes into what would be a Tsunami 3.0 - internal cabling (easier to clean), short chain stay, regular tubing.

On the off chance that Joseph (aka Tsunami Bikes) could alter my orange frame I contacted him. He told me no problem, he could put new chainstays, seatstays, and a brake bridge on for me. I didn't realize it's just trimming one tube; he'd have to rebuild the whole "stays" area.

I decided it was worth sacrificing the internal cabling to save 6/7 of the money a new frame would cost me.

Joseph sent the frame back unpainted (per our agreement) and I had a local car nut paint my frame the same color he was painting his Mini. It happened to come out red so fine, red it was.

I also invested in some frame prep tools, specifically 1 1/8" head tube facer/reamers and a BB30 reamer, ordering them through Expo Wheelmen sponsor Manchester Cycle. These cutting tools, combined with Manchester Cycle's cutting tool handles, would give me a perfectly finished frame. The frames arrived unprepped and the headsets were always a bit tight and the bottom bracket was also. Bob, the owner of the shop, did the work himself, and the red frame (Tsunami 1.1) came back to me ready for assembly. This would save me a few watts turning the cranks - it's bad enough that I can see wattage numbers pop up on the SRM when I'm soft pedaling (i.e. not keeping up with the wheels)

That process dragged on for months while I realized I was missing this piece or that piece. Minor things roadblocked the build, like a front derailleur hanger, or cable housing (I ran out of Nokons), or trying to figure out what stem would work with the FSA Compact bars I wanted to use.

Finally, before the April 7 2013 Criterium de Bethel, my bike was ready to ride. I wrapped the bars at the prior March 24 Bethel CDR Gold Race, rode it on the trainer before April 7, and did my shake down ride during the April 7 Cat 5 clinic.

It seemed to work okay so I put the race wheels on it.

Tsunami 2.0 to the left, 1.1 to the right.

Note the different shaped bars. The Compact FSA bars on the red bike are 3 cm shorter in reach and 2 cm shorter in drop. To accommodate this discrepancy I have a 2 cm longer stem (so 1 cm shorter overall) with about a 0.5 cm drop (so the drops sit about 1.5 cm higher).

For the Cannondale SI cranks I have two sets of arms, 175mm and 170mm. The 170s came with my Cannondale (Team Replica blah blah blah bike). I bought a used SRM setup that had 175s. In the past 10 years I've had much better results with 175mm crank arms, I think due to my lower general power.

170mm and 175mm crankarms on the Cannondale.

Picture taken in SoCal just before I moved the parts to the orange Tsunami.

What's nice is that you can change the crank arm without changing the spider (that holds the chainrings).

However I chose to install the 170 mm crankarms on the red bike. The shorter arms give me an extra 0.5 cm in saddle height. The resulting net height difference is about 1 cm less drop to the drops. More significantly the drops are about 1.5 cm higher relative to the bottom bracket. When I'm sprinting out of the saddle that's the height that matters. We'll see how it goes. If it doesn't work out I'll revert to the old style crit bend bars and I may have to go buy a second set of 175mm crankarms.

A final change, but I'll expand on that more later. I'm using a lower end brake lever, one that doesn't allow multiple shifts into higher gears. It's one click at a time, no more dumping 2-3 gears when I jump. I'll explain this move in a different post.

I accidentally used my last name rather than the Sprinter Della Casa sticker.

I want my name to go on my hubs and helmets. SDC goes on the bike.

Note the smoothed out finish around the seat cluster. It's a combination of gentle filing and an expanding primer. The primer puffs up when applied and then hardens. The guy who painted his Mini showed me the roof - when he started it looked like someone dropped a bucket of golf balls on it from a couple floors up. When he was done with the expanding primer the roof was perfect. I bought into the expanding primer idea.

Deda 14 cm Pista stem.

"Pista" is misleading here. I wanted a 65 degree (-25 degree) 14 cm stem but I couldn't find one. I felt the reach (14 cm) was more important than the height (65 degree) because I was already compromising my reach by going 1 cm shorter. Going 2 cm shorter with a 13 cm stem would be really significant because I tried it already. I figured by using shorter cranks I'd have an extra 0.5 cm in saddle height. Therefore I sacrificed the drop to get the 14 cm stem. The Deda "Pista" stem is only 70 deg so about -20 deg. It barely drops 0.5 cm.

In order to have 100% clamp surface for the stem I left the steerer tube too long and used spacers on top of the stem. This way the whole height of the stem clamps the steerer tube, not all-but-the-top-5-mm.

Close up of tire clearance.

The chainstays are about 39.2 cm. I have to measure them again because I keep forgetting what they measure but they're just a touch longer than the black bike's 39 cm stays. There's plenty of fore/aft clearance. To the sides it's bit tighter.

The head tube area. Note how smooth it is compared to the first picture in this post.

It's a bit smoother than before, primarily due to the expanding primer. I put clear frame protector stickers on by the cable housing. I had to stretch the black Nokon housing by adding extra blue and silver segments. I'd have run out otherwise.

The headset is a super low stack Cook Bros headset. It's a bit of a pain to install but Manchester Cycle did it fine. I installed the orange bike's headset in my basement using unofficial tools. The black frame got its headset installed by a SoCal shop during that year's SoCal training camp. I use the same type of headset on both bikes, just the black one got a steel headset and the red one has a stainless one.

Not exact but you can see the drop/reach.

Wire sticking up is for the SRM, two wires carefully taped up into one.

The bars drop more with the old crit bars and they reach more.

SRM wire is hanging forward and down. I need to rewrap that, it's unraveling.

If you look at the two bars you'll see that even though the FSA Compacts on the red bike are longer on the drops (I wasn't as aggressive when I cut off the excess bar) they obscure more of the front brake. They don't drop down to the tire also.

The black bike, with my standard position, shows how the old crit bend bars drop down more and reach out further. Keep in mind that the black bike as a 12 cm stem, 73 degree (-17 degree). The red bike has a 14 cm stem, 70 degree (-20 degree). Due to the FSA Compact bar geometry I lose both reach and drop even after using a longer and lower stem.

You may have noticed a lot of barrel adjuster showing on the red bike. This is so I don't have to unclamp the brake cable when I switch between the "wide" clinchers and the wide tubulars. The clincher rims are only 23 mm wide but that's the "wide" size. Normal is 19-20 mm.

The tubulars, on the other hand, are close to 28 mm wide. I bottom out the barrel adjuster to clear the tubular rims. It's about 5 turns difference between the two.

I have normal 19 mm wide clincher wheels but they're far too narrow if I want to use the wide tubulars. They've been relegated to the basement.

I have new-to-me wheels but I'll cover those later. Right now they've become my default race wheelset.

I've only ridden the bike a few times now, once in a race, once for a few laps in a Cat 5 clinic, and three times on the road. The biggest thing I noticed is that the bike seems to move more freely. It's due to the reamed/faced bearing surfaces - the bike steers eagerly and the cranks turn easier, even if I'm soft pedaling down a hill. It feels a bit like riding rollers - the bike wants to skate around a bit. It's not a bad thing to have the bike feel more eager to go, that's for sure.

The other thing is that the top tube is a bit lower on this bike. It means I can't put a frame pump under the top tube - the space is too tight for the Park pump I have. It does fit on top of the top tube though and it's where I had it the last time I rode. I may rig up a front-skewer-to-bar thing or a rear-skewer-to-seatpost, depending on how easily I can set one up.

I have a few good scratches on the frame already. The bars turns hard into the downtube when I was building the bike - no tape, no bar plug, a coarse hacksawed bar end. The downtube has a good gouge/nick in it now. And yesterday, when I finished my ride, I sat on the frame pump and it scratched the front of the seat tube above the top tube.

Ah well.

It's now a race bike because I raced on it. And it's a training bike because I trained on it. Such things will happen.

Equipment - Red Tsunami Thoughts

As I said before I seem to go through a cycle every year. At the beginning of the build up for the new season, typically Dec or Jan, I'll refresh everything. I'll check tires, wheels, tape, chain, cassette, whatever. Every year or three I'm building up a frame so everything gets refreshed automatically. Part of this refreshing is to check whatever computer I have on the bike. Since 2008 that's been an SRM, and in the ensuing years I've had to install (solder) batteries in the spiders and one in a headunit (the SRM PCV).

As the season progresses results come more from what I do in a race rather than training, fitness, and other stuff that happens outside of the race. In other words it's more about tactics (for me), especially in the last few laps. Whatever numbers I put down is kind of irrelevant. This means that stuff like SRMs take on less importance.

Therefore, as the season goes on, as I get that accumulated fatigue, as I start to have equipment run down, I tend to lose something relating to the SRM. It might be a battery in the HR strap, losing the strap after a race, maybe a magnet dropping off a wheel, a wire failing on the harness, or even a battery failing in the spider or the computer head. Depending on my fatigue level I'll just let it slide.

This results in, at the end of the year, absolutely no data. I think for a couple months in 2010? I ran with just speed. I had no cadence, no power, no HR.

Still, though, I like looking at what I did in a race. In 2012 I didn't ride as much so I never experienced the big equipment wear drop - in fact all the equipment had remained the same since the beginning of 2011 which was my last refresh period.

I hope that at some point I'll have seasons where I'm racing and riding enough where I start accumulating that fatigue again.

Even without that equipment fatigue I have one big project in place for 2013: put together my now-red Tsunami.

I have the black bike and it's basically all together. I mean I can go and ride it right now if I wanted to, and I ride it on the trainer. Okay, it has crunchy BB30 bearings and a less than nicely aligned headset (it steers very stiffly) so I want to get those surfaces redone. I'll refresh the chain, cassette, and tape. I may do the cables but I did them last winter and barely rode this whole year.

Generally speaking the black Tsunami is usable.

But the other bike... now we're talking. The frame is a lot lighter at 1200 grams, over 450 grams lighter than the black frame and 200 grams lighter than it was before, and the new ENVE 2.0 fork is about 100 grams lighter than the original fork. This should cut about a pound off my race bike weight compared to the black bike and about two thirds of a pound off the weight of the then-orange Tsunami.

Since I'll be building it up with virtually the same parts the rest of it should be the same. I have a few bits and pieces to cut some weight but the majority of the parts will be the same as before.

Of course this means I have to build the thing.

The only things I have installed on the bike are the bottom bracket bearings, bottom bracket spindle, and the headset. The rest of it is still sitting in boxes and such, waiting to come together. I made a last minute decision to put new Nokons on so I ordered them the other day. When they arrive I'll start assembling the bike.

Although it won't come in at any world shattering weight, it should hit about 16 pounds with race wheels on it, about a pound lighter than before.

If it comes in lower than that I'll be totally psyched but I don't see that happening. I'll see how it goes.

Tsunami - 1.0, Take Two (1.1?)

A while back I got that first wonderful custom-fit frame from Tsunami Bikes.

It changed my world.

That year I found I could train longer, race harder, and, for the first time ever, managed to get a Cat 2 upgrade.

Even so I found a few details that I could change. The biggest was the chainstay length - with a front end so much longer than before, the geometry unweighted the rear wheel significantly. I found that going through corners under power I could almost always break the tire loose. On particularly fast laps I could break the tire loose even without pedaling.

Okay, fine, I could move my weight back a bit and anchor the rear wheel more, but after seeing a few pictures of me cornering I realized that it would be better to bring the wheel closer in to the bottom bracket. If Mohammad can't go to the mountain, move the mountain to Mohammad.

This led to the second Tsunami frame, the black one. Although its aero styling made it look different, it fit exactly like the orange frame. Out back, though, the stays were shorter. 39 cm for the chainstays to be exact, the shortest the builder could do without massive tire rub.

It's tight. I'm going to file/sand it down a bit.

(I get some pretty horrendous sounding scraping going when I ride over sand and such - the sand sticking to the tires scrapes the frame, jamming into it. I can feel the grit jamming my tire and frame, slowing me down. It's that tight.)

The second frame gave the nod to aerodynamics over weight. I asked for it with the thought of running just a CamelBak, i.e. no bottles, and trying to get more aero by eliminating the big clunky things in the frame. Real world experience led to me installing two cages - my aero bike experiment failed, mainly because I found it so cumbersome to take a sip of water with the CamelBak on.

The experience made me look at my lighter (by over 200g) orange frame with a different eye. I wanted the slightly lighter frame back but with the shorter stays.

This is where Tsunami Bikes made the difference.

Joseph Wells, the welder behind the name, agreed to modify my frame with shorter stays. He'd have to cut off and replace the seatstays to accomplish this, in order to relocate the brake bridge. He would be sending the frame back unpainted (I asked him to strip off the rest of the paint).

Just unpacked after it arrived.

After several weeks I got the frame back. Shorter stays, no paint, and looking admittedly a bit sad. No glowing Candy Orange paint, no decals, no battle scars.

 I weighed it out of curiosity. Without a rear dropout, without the cable adjusters, no bottom bracket cable guide, the frame weighed in at 1210g, a full 230g lighter than in its original form. I'll weigh the small pieces but I don't think they'll break 50g, leaving the frame at about 200g lighter. I'm guessing the shorter tubes will count for about 40-60g (based on the 30g I saved by cutting down my heat treated aluminum bars), so the luscious paint probably weighed about 150g.

After talking with a few people I decided to make some unauthorized changes to the frame. I started by drilling holes in the bottom bracket shell, swiss-cheesing the dropouts, and even the back of the head tube. I also honed the inside of the head tube and bottom bracket, thinning the tube diameters. Finally I acid etched the tubes with muriatic acid to thin them out.

(pause)

Okay, I didn't do any of that.

I did start filing down some welds, shaping some of the cable stops, and and basically trying to get rid of any superfluous material. I gained a new appreciation for the artisan frame builders; I also realized that I could do this shaping stuff for a long, long time and not be satisfied until it was perfect.

(I realized I was paralleling another rider's experience, albeit in a slightly different way. When Chris Boardman was laid up for a while after breaking a bunch of bones, he whittled away at a Mavic crankset. It looked beautiful when he was done but, based on seeing and feeling others done the same way, it was probably super-flexy. Nonetheless the idea of "honing" a finished product appeals to me in some way, I guess the same way I want to mod a brand new car.)

I've been filing a little at a time, after my trainer rides, maybe once a week. I weighed the frame after a few filing sessions - 1190g, or 20g lighter than before. I wanted to get rid of any excess weight but not reduce strength. I even looked at pictures of the frame bits before they got welded (I looked them up) so that I'd have an idea of what I was working with.

A friend happened to be painting his Mini a bright red color. He is doing part of another project for me, and when I realized he was painting yet another Mini (this is his fifth one), I asked if he could maybe shoot some paint on my frame. Since I had to work around his schedule I had to accelerate mine - I dropped off the frame at about 80% complete.

My friend promised me some miracles, using a really heavy (gulp) primer that puffs up and fills stuff out. He'd then sand it down. I must have looked a bit alarmed because he looked at my face and mentioned that he'd try and keep the weight down.

(On an aside I realize now that I could have spent months filing and sanding the frame, and if I were selling the thing under my own name I'd feel somewhat obligated to do that if the finish was an issue.)

With Junior occupying my time a bit, I kinda sorta forgot about the frame. Then I realized, oh, he's probably done with it. I went to call him and saw that I had a missed call on my phone.

From him.

"Dude, your frame's all set."

I headed over.

With Junior in the car too, of course.

 Frame hanging up.

Mini is in the background, with "Actual Size" already in the window. Right now he's doing the jambs and stuff, the stuff that isn't visible until you open doors.

Painter is off to the right.

My painter friend said he brushed on the primer around the joints so as not to spray too much of the heavy stuff on the frame, then went over it with a bunch of different sandpaper, then shot the whole frame. I haven't weighed the frame yet so no report on the total paint weight.

I had to take this shot. Expo Wheelmen's sponsor Manchester Cycle sells Bell helmets, and because of Expo I now race in a Bell. That Bell sticker is on the Mini.

The frame is now red. It happens to be a Hyundai color (I think).

Originally my friend was going to paint the mini a Viper red. Even though that would have dovetailed nicely into my "what car should I buy" post because I briefly contemplated a Viper, ultimately it was his choice. If he picked yellow my frame would be yellow.

 Note the smoothed out welds.

 I also filed away at the base of the cable stops. I wanted them to be more "formed" than just triangular blocks.

 Another view of the front end, with the formed cable stops on the downtube.

 The bottom bracket got cleaned up a lot.

So did the welds around the rear drop outs.

The Missus said "Wow" when I opened the door holding the frame. I'm psyched to build it up now. I have all the frame's small parts downstairs (dropout, seatpost collar, stuff like that), a lighter fork, and the actual parts kit. I also have a second SRM crankset, including the special 104mm spindle, for this frame.

I hope to incorporate a couple pieces off other frames - I have a Ti seat collar, for example, that I'd like to use.

We'll see how it goes. It's not that I don't have the stuff to put the bike together - it's just finding the time that'll be the trick.