Carpe Diem
Time Trial 2k
This is the beginnings of a page, nothing more! SPellign sucks [damn good example
I noticed!] as does grammar and general format, nothign has been paid attention
to! :] Contact me at esoteric@isone.com
for any questions or concerns. This is constantly evolving when i have spare time,
there's just too much to do to wait until it's completd to become available.
For any of you that have found this, this page is intended to be a source of documentation
of my racing for the year 2000. Complete race reviews, scheduled events, photo's,
race diaries and technical illustrations and discussions of my evolving equiptment will be
featured and updated hopefully regularly.
I do wish to thank several people directly on this project-
Steve Katzman, a frequenter of www.cyclingforum.com
for lending me some of his personal time to answer questions on carbon fiber construction
and general engineering.
Bob Maynard, one real cool real old coot that's always got something bad to say but
generally says something nice instead. Supplier of good sound advice on aerodynamics
and women. Well, maybe just the aerodynamics part. Good photographer as well.
Damon Rinard, the man behind www.damonrinard.com
that got my mind going enough to convince myself I could do this and be successful.
Interestignly enough, I met Damon at my first time trial at Fiesta Island as I was beginning this adventure.
Thanks for the great photos, they've been well taken.
What is Time Trial?
Equiptment List Event Schedule Race Photos
Custom Carbon
Lotus Sport 110Mk2 Saddle Fabrication
Aero Bar Fabrication
Misc Fabrication Aluminum Bolts
Future Projects History Training
Race Photos
Race photo's, not much to say now, more to tell when I have time. These are from the
Fiesta Island time trial, the first from February and the others from March. The
March photos are the race debut of the new parts I describe later, close scrutiny reveals
the differences, I'll have everything documented soon, hopefully.
Chainring
This
is the two sides of my "current" chainring. I started with a 50 tooth
Stronglight ring and laminated the outer surface with a layer
of 1oz kevlar cloth capturing a set
of inverted and profiled chainring bolts within the structure. The chainrign was
then slipped over teh crankarm and placed against the crank spider while I bonded a
lenticular shaped cover made of a single ply of 5oz carbon fiber on the inner side.
Bolts were then passed through the covering to secure the chainring in place.
Saddle/Seatpost
The saddle bracket that
accompanies the Lotus Sport is something quite ugly and leaves a lot to be desired.
It looks like an afterthought and from what I understand, it was an afterthought af the
designers to make the bike rideable. For such a sleek bike, the bracket has a clumsy
design incorporating a total of 10 bolts to hold the saddle in position where the typical
seatpost has just two. Unfortunately I don't have a photo of it yet, but here are
several views of the integrated unit I redesigned.
Where all 10 bolts used
were necessary to hold the saddle on [and I have had failures during critical events] I
refined and finessed the design a bit and eliminated all 10 bolts by designing the saddle
and the saddle bracket as a single non-adjustable component to fit exclusively my riding
position and style. Two bolts were added back, but are completely non-structural in
nature, they're only there to keep the saddle down when I stand up to pedal. This
configuration is incredibly light weight, sleek, rigid, and virtually maintainence free.
As you can see by the nose of the saddle, this is actaully based on a Selle Italia
Flite saddle. An old saddle with no padding was used as the form and then
improvements made from there.
Handlebars/brakes
This
is where the goods are at! Rebuilding my aero bars was actually my intent when I
started composite fabrication this year, everythign else was the result of needing things
to practice on and satisfying long time desires in soem cases just to make teh whole bike
a bit more elegant. As can be seen in the iages above with the silver handlbars [ITM
Dual Aero bars], although they're low profile and one of the aerodynamically fastest
available, they're butt ugly. Brake cables sit in open air with no routing, the
outboard grips are just bulbous and huge with no effort made for streamlining them.
I wanted to clean up the airflow a bit and ended up achieving far more than I intended
from the original dream.
The first component I
actually made in this process was that little tailcone behind the bars above where it says
Lotus. Good practice and a bad expereince, it will be replaced, but I thought I'd
make the note.
The handlebars themselves went through all sorts of design changes in my head fro
integration with standard brake levers to my own designed brake levers, cable routing in a
number of ways, honeycomb or truss or hollow internals construction to what it is now-
solid carbon with a thin balsa wood core. Many paragraphs of exchanges with two
frineds in engineering regarding how to retain the structure with bolts only to arrive a
t the conclusion
that bolts are not necessary to hold it together at all. it was an expereince and
it's not quite done yet either. I still have no retention mechanism or padding for
my arms, so riding them is quite "interesting" and actually very tiring.
For their first event I took them without a finished surface just in case there was more
work to do, but there is not. I just need to add arm rests and do the final shaping
and finish coating.
The end result has been a handlebar with an incredibly thin profile and exceptionally
clean presence. At the leading edge where thickness is consistent the bars are
barely 1/3 inch thick and the brake levers go up near 1/2 inch. The component they
have replaced was at its thinnest nearly a full inch thick.
A side note, you'll notice the down tube shift lever on my aero bars. Another
mid-winter innovation....
As an addendum, the picture on the right is more recent, April 30th. Upon close
inspection you will notice a small addition along the center of the aero bar wing,
immediately above the back edge near center. I added two rudimentary arm supports
consisting of a surface to lay my forearms across and little wings curling up on the
outsides to keep me in a narrow aero position. Each support consists of simply three
layers of fiber with a little trimming. The shapes were formed around a couple
bottles of White Lightning chain lube that I had sittign around. I actually have
photos of the build that I need to get processed.
Rear Derauiller
As I was spending a lot
of time learnign a lot of ins and outs of carbon work, I was also spendign a lot of time
waiting. Once I got rolling in my production processes, the resin I was usign had a
cure time of roughly 90 minutes. To keep things moving I would have to interleave a
lot of processes or else I'd have a lot of dead time waiting for things to happen.
One night I was looking around for potential improvements to make to occupy time and
noticed the inside plate of my rear derauiller looked easy to replace [we're talkign real
bored, isolated and lonely at this point people]. In no time I had cut up some scrap
pieces of carbon cloth and had them prepped for my next pass through the wonderful world
of epoxy.
Fabrication was real easy as I just saturated a bunch of carbon, stuck it together and sat
a couple books on it for compression. The following day I removed it, trimemd it
down to a similar profile as the "stock" component with a pair of scissors.
Drilled both holes and tapped them to insure it would work, removed it, slapped a
few more layers of carbon on it with compression for another night, did the shaping and
drilling deal again and it was basically done. I dont' know if it's any lighter than
the old component, but it's about half as thick and it's far less noisy than the old one
that was full of cutouts. I doubt it matters since that region of airflowis
nightmarish to start with, I list this part as simply novelty and the result of idle hands
:)
