Casseroll to Go...

Got a call a couple weeks ago from Revolution Cycles in Clarendon. Seems Salsa Cycles¹ decided to step up to the plate and deliver on my frame warranty issue. So, I dropped by the shop last Monday on my commute home from work to pick up the frameset, trying hard not to focus too much on the fact that I’d have to get the Casseroll frame and fork home—a distance of five miles, some in heavy traffic—via bike with no obvious means to secure them but the Osprey Daylite pack on my back. Yeah, I'm the king of proper planning.

But, never underestimate the funtionality of sturdy compression straps and a single wisp of plastic commonly known as a zip-tie². The guys in the shop—all fine folks, by the way—had looks of mild skepticism on their faces as I grappled with the frame, trying out different positions in the hopes of finding the sweet spot that offered adequate security and clearance. I secured one compression strap around the top tube and the other up high around the seat tube, then fed the zip-tie through a pack grommet and around the seat tube near the bottom braket. Three points of contact. To keep the whole works from flopping around like a drunken flounder, I pulled the pack bungie lace over the end of the seat tube and around the bottom bracket cluster. The fork went inside the pack, with the steerer tube jutting out 10 inches like a periscope. I used a mini 'biner ("not intended for climbing use") that hangs on my pack to keep the zipper heads tight against the fork, weaving it through the zipper pulls so that the pack wouldn't gape under load.

All set with the packing, I gave my thanks, paid for the shipping and handling, then bid farewell, deftly negotiating my way through the twin doors of the shop to avoid banging my new set of "wings".

Out on the bike on Clarendon Boulevard, things went smoothly. When you're riding on a busy street during rush hour with what amounts to outriggers extending from either side of your torso, well, people give you room (the ones paying attention, anyway). Got home safely and examined the frame and fork. Beautiful. Same color, but with a newly designed decal package that is either more or less fancy than the original, depending on your tastes. The predominant decal color is the same, a maroon that nicely compliments the ginger-beer paint. Gone, however, is the white background that showcased the framemaker's name. Some filigree work has been added around the down tube and the words "Ride & Smile" now appear on the inside of each chainstay. Flip the frame over, and the catchphrase "IF IT AIN'T MOTO, IT'S WORTHLESS" flows across the down tube near the bottom bracket shell. Overall, a nice, classy-looking esthetic, as elegant as the original. Oh, and a bonus: Salsa included a black Lip-lock seatpost collar with the frame and all the water bottle cage bolts...nice.

Have to say I'm excited to have this hot little dish on the menu again. Nothing left but to garnish it with some quality components.


1. Kudos time. Big thanks to the warranty department at Salsa for ruling in my favor on a decision that could have gone either way. It's not clear how the crack originated, though a small dent appeared along the fissure near the underside of the down tube, suggesting perhaps that a stone or other solid object made contact with mean intent. Regardless, the Salsa folks deemed it ambiguous enough to front me the new frame and fork. I'm a happy customer, not just because I dig the Casseroll's ride and handling, but because of this level of customer service.

2. I once transported a Kona Unit (sans fork) from Ashburn, VA, to Vienna, VA, this very same way.

Utopia Deferred...1

Okay, so, after dragging my ass for a couple weeks, my Salsa Casseroll frame and fork are on their less-than-merry little way back to Bloomington, Minneapolis, without benefit of Santa’s sled. Dropped off the spavined frame on a Sunday two weeks ago at Revolution Cycles² in Clarendon, only to get a call the following Monday morning asking for an invoice as proof of purchase. Dug up the invoice, delivered it later that week, then got another call later saying the fork was required. Sunday morning, I removed the crown race from the fork, tossed the fork into my Chrome Ivan, and pedaled over to Revolution to reunite torso and forelimbs one last time.

I’m hopeful for a full replacement, but this may be empty optimism. It appears there’s a very small indentation on the down tube that is bisected by the crack, which may or may not have been the genesis of the fissure. It’s so small and smooth that I’m inclined to believe it’s a crimp caused by the folding in of the tube edges against one another as the tube failed for whatever reason. That, or a very small, very soft stone leaped up somewhere sometime and left a very powerful impression. I’ve had the frame for about a year, but I didn’t ride it much until the Cross-check dropout broke sometime back in May. The Casseroll has maybe five months of daily riding on it. I’d put the mileage figure at just over 2K, with all of it on asphalt, save a lone 25 mile jaunt on the C&O Canal Trail. A curb-drop every now and then was the closest I came to ever riding that bike hard and I don't believe it saw even a single winter ride...bizarre.

So the frame and fork are on holiday travel, and I’m left to wonder what the outcome will be. It's all in Salsa's hands, now. If the decision goes in my favor, I’ll be singing their praises to anyone who will listen. If it goes against me, I’ll be looking for a frame and fork from another manufacturer. Regardless, I’ll report the outcome on this very blog. Stay tuned...

1. With apolgies to the late French social theorist Jean Baudrillard.
2. The fine blokes at Revolution Cycles in Clarendon have been nothing short of fantastic during this process. Thanks, gents!

Long Division...

I'm not your villain,
not your adversary,
I'm not your reason
to crack and divide.
tt's long division,
crack and divide.
—Fugazi, "Long Division"

Sometimes a creaking bottom bracket isn't a creaking bottom bracket.

You begin to understand this, to believe it, yesterday, on the morning commute, when a faint creaking sound suddenly interrupts the gap between songs on the Shuffle, in the interlude between, say, "Heart and Soul" and "Twenty-Four Hours". It happens when you stand and deliver, particularly on climbs. At first, you dismiss it as simply a rogue pack buckle banging idly against a seat stay. You ride on, hard, fast, passing other riders and staying past them, dropping curbs to advantage. The creaking continues.

A little over halfway to work, the sound is persistent enough that you pull over to inspect the cranks and chainring. Everything checks out fine. You hop back on the bike and pursue the rider who passed you while you were stopped. The sound continues and you dismiss it as the meaningless moaning of friction, the settling in of unsettled parts, feckless frottage between formerly friendly surfaces. In other words, a creaking bottom bracket.

You arrive at work and the work day passes.

The next morning, same damn scenario, all the way up until about a mile into the ride home, when you've had enough. You execute a couple of low trackstand hops just to see if everything will hold together under moderate force, to approach an unknown threshold—dammit, if something's going to give, it's going to give under your terms. The post-hop creaking is louder, worse. Something has changed. You look down at the bike between your legs and notice a dagger of missing paint crossing the down tube some six inches below its junction with the head tube. Uh oh.

Sometimes a creaking bottom bracket isn't a creaking bottom bracket.

Sometimes a creaking bottom bracket is a crack running more than half way around your down tube. And sometimes the creak isn't a creak, but a death knell. And this death knell tells you your beloved bike has gone the way of all things.*

You decide to ride it out and keep on eye on it as you do. What choice do you have? You ride gently, gingerly, as delicately as you can when the bike is a fixed gear and the juju against further damage, against a new set of sparkling, synthetic teeth—the luxury of coasting—isn't an option. The frame holds up, but the protests continue.

Halfway home, in the gloaming of a chilly fall evening, just after the deck-bridge, with its uneven planks over which your tires resound like the thumping of a rickety old roller-coaster, you stop to look closely at the damage, to analyze the entropy (the whole ordeal a quiet reminder of your own mortality; a crack is developing somewhere in you right this minute. Yessiree, old boy, keep playing, but know that I'm here, following the script. And though we all know what happens in the dark denouement, only I know how it happens). Lo and behold, the adolescent crack has grown into a full-blown adult. The bit of good steel between fissure ends is retreating, succumbing. A half-inch margin of safety is all that's left before all bets are off.

You walk it out, past Key Bridge and the artificial glow that floats like a halo over Georgetown, up the hill along Route 29 through Rosslyn. Riders pass, as silent as their shadows, red taillights pulsing like alien semaphores. One asks if you are okay, and the bitterness subsides, just a little, just enough. The march is slow, and the damn bike creaks at every fissure in the sidewalk. It's terminal now, this crack, as if it were ever anything else, and its slow, circular creep is nothing less than a fatal metastasis, irreversible, the triumph of evil over good.

You stop at Whole Foods to grab dinner and some compensatory beer, a Russian Imperial Stout (one of which you're enjoying right now). Ten minutes later, limping along Wilson Boulevard, you give in, capitulate, crack, like the frame of the bike you pull along beside you. Into the back of a cab van goes the spavined Salsa, and less than three miles and seven dollars later you're home.

You've got a Bianchi, a nice full-on Italian job—a geared bike (said with a sneer)—all set to go. You've got a Cross-check and the pieces to make it mobile laying about. You'll get to work tomorrow on two wheels, no worries. The streak will continue.

Sometimes too many bikes is just enough.


*I plan to contact Salsa about getting a replacement frame under warranty. This frame is less than a year old and I've ridden it for about half that time; I haven't abused it by any stretch of the imagination, though I have been commuting on it every day for several months. I'll post here about my experiences, for what it's worth. Damn! I'm bummed. I really like this frame!

Cross-Check Cosmesis...

Tom—cold-steel craftsman over at the eponymous Palermo Bicycles—has been hard at work on the comparatively unglamorous job of replacing the dropouts on my vintage Cross-Check.

With a new addition to his family, plenty of new frame orders (the guy makes some beautiful bikes!), and my add-on request for rack spool braze-ons¹, time has been short at the one-man, Baltimore-based operation. But the frame repair is now nearing completion. Finish-filing and sanding are done, and a coat of paint is the only task left before the frame is ready for pick-up². Timing is right; I need a change from the bent-over riding position of the more refined Casseroll, which is a bit more delicate over the oft-times pothole plagued streets of DC on the daily commute. Not to mention, the impending cooler weather means plenty of overnighter opportunities hovering on the horizon, and the Cross-Check is ideal for that kind of thing.

Tom ran into a bit of a snag during the repair process. Seems the dropouts Surly uses are Campy knockoffs—inexpensive copies of the Italian bits that still get the job done, but on a budget. Tom wasn't able to locate replacement knockoffs, so he went one better and procured some genuine Campagnolo parts, at no extra charge. Nice.

If you're on the prowl for a custom road or cross bike, or if you have a fractured frame that needs a little lovin', check out Tom's work and be impressed.



Photo credits: Tom Palermo.

1. These are standard features on new model Cross-Checks. They dispense with the need for the pipe-hanger set-up when attaching a pannier rack to the seat-stays.

2. Pix of the finished repair coming soon.

Taste Spin...

"Droolworthy!"

Finally finished the build on my Salsa Casseroll last night. The hold-up? Finding the tires I wanted without further breaking the bank.

Since the narrowest Vittoria Randonneur (a current favorite) offering is a 700x28, and since I need a narrower tire for the Velocity Aerohead rims, and because I'm hung up on Vittoria ever since I had a set (and still do) on my 90s Bianchi Eros, I ended up cheaping out with some Vittoria Zaffiros, 700x25. At less than $12 a pop on sale at Performance, and with pretty good reviews online, the miser in me figured what the hell.

First impressions are that this baby is smoooooth! Part of this, of course, is the Phil hubs and bottom bracket, but the other piece is the frame itself. It's surprisingly stiff and responsive, very solid-feeling, but with a faint shadow of twitchiness, exaggerated, I'm guessing, by my inexperience with track-style bars—Soma's Major Taylors, to be specific. And...it's light! Well, compared to my Cross-Check, anyway.

And although past experience would suggest that I should have ordered a smaller size frame (the Casseroll is said to run about 2cm larger than the given frame-size), the 57 seems to fit me fine, at least during the short spin I took on it. In fact, I had to slide the saddle back a wee bit to dial in the cockpit. Speaking of which, I still need to determine where the stem works best, hence the uncut steerer tube and ridiculous quantity of spacers. Perhaps this weekend will provide me with the opportunity, if the weather cooperates.

Currently running a 49:18, since an 18T Soma cog is what was in the parts bin. It's not as steep a gear as I'd like, but it'll do until the 16T cog I've ordered for the flip (or is it flop?) side arrives. For a comprehensive spec sheet, go here.

Rating: 5/5 Forks, Spoons, and Knives.

Bon appétit!

Baking a Casseroll...

Introducing my nouvelle petite reine.¹ Well, her torso, really.

A spicy Salsa Casseroll, size 57 cm, that is dreaming of rolling suburban byways and city alleys with a fix on. First impressions are that this is a well-constructed, well-finished frame. I believe it's about a pound lighter than my Cross-Check (both 4130 chromoly)—not much of a weight savings, but at $280 for frame and fork, I couldn't pass it up. Ginger Beer is the color. Stainless-steel, semi-horizontal dropouts. Elegant. Hell, I'd even go so far as to say "classy", though in a meretricious way: a versatile strumpet with a sense of fashion, not yet jaded by nights spent trolling the seedy streets of DC.

I installed the headset the other night using my homemade headset press (HHP), aka "the warranty voider". Both cups went in like a dream, straight and smooth and...transposed. Zounds! Seems that in a single-beer induced fog, I'd installed the bottom cup in the top of the head tube and the top cup in the bottom. Nice.

When I mentioned this oversight to Butch, he suggested I leave it for style points, citing as a precedent the ofttimes flamboyent rickyd's deliberate such transposition some time ago. But anyone who knows me would see right through that ruse. Butch then turned me on to a homemade headset remover (HHR) constructed from a foot-and-a-half section of 3/8" diameter copper plumbing pipe, quartered on the business end with a hacksaw to form flaring tines, and capped on the other end where the pounding takes place.

A quick trip to the LHS (Local Hardware Store), a little handyman action, and I soon had a new tool on the cheap to add to the arsenal. Like the HHP, the HHR tackled the task with pugilistic aplomb, wresting each cup from its steely burrow with a few quick taps of a stout hammer. Double-checked that I had the cups properly placed, and back in they went. I drove the fork race home using a section of PVC tubing as a slide-hammer, and viola!—the job was done.

Without further adieu, I include a list of ingredients:

• Phil Wood front and rear high-flange track hubs, 32 hole (polished silver)


• Velocity Aerohead rims (silver)


• DT Swiss Competition Double Butted (14/15 guage) spokes (silver)


• Vittoria Randonneur tires, 700c x 28mm


• Surly track cog, 17T


• Sugino 75 cranks, 49T (silver)


• Crank Brothers Eggbeaters Quattro SL pedals (silver/black)


• Chris King headset (silver)


• Soma Fabrications "Major Taylor" track bar w/ (black) track grips


• Thomson Elite stem and seatpost (silver)


• Salsa Lip-Lock seatpost collar (black)


• Selle Italia (dick-friendly) SLK saddle


• Phil Wood bottom bracket (108.5)


• Tektro R538 Long Reach front brake caliper (silver)


• Paul Component Engineering E-Lever front brake lever (silver/black)


• KMC Kool chain

Since I built up the wheelset before deciding on a frame, I had to order a Phil conversion kit to stretch the 120mm (track) width rear hub to a 130, the Casseroll's spacing. Currently awaiting the arrival of this kit and the uber-pricey Phil bottom bracket. It'll be a few days before this baby gets a taste of the tarmac.Disembodied bling...

"Warranty Voiders" I and II...

1. La petite reine ("the little queen") is a French term of endearment for the magical, mystical transportation-device-cum-carnival-ride object most commonly referred to in English as "bicycle".