A Spoke Too Few

I AM A POWERFUL ANIMAL!

The front triangle of Chia’s bike. All brazed and ready for cleanup.

The top tube of Chia’s bike. Dry fit to check alignment.

New tubular tires. Supple…

My new race wheels. They’re tubular, so I’ve got to learn how to glue tires. More on this later…

I had a very productive morning of racing today. I did two races at the University Oaks Crit in San Antonio. I the first race I won three of the four premes and took fourth overall. My prizes were 1) a box of odwalla bars, 2) a bag of Gu energy gels, 3) several boxes of instant bean/rice meals and 4) $15. In the second race I finished second and scored a large tub of Iron Man drink mix.  

I had a busy race weekend with 4 planned races. There was the Thursday night crit at the Driveway as well as a road race, TTT and crit for the collegiate race weekend. Number of successfully completed races: 0. I got off to a rough start at the Driveway. I was near the back of the starting group, so lost a lot of time as people ahead of me slowly ramped up to full speed. And I had no chance of hopping on the early break away. A few laps in, though, I managed to find my teammates Tanner and Blake and we pulled away from the main peloton and tried to bridge the gap up to the break away group. We made it about half a lap and then Tanner clipped a pedal around a turn and went down. Blake and I collided as we tried to swerve around him. I had a couple minor scrapes, but nothing too bad, so I hopped back on my bike and started to chase the peloton. But with the time I lost in the crash and the sore hip, I never managed to catch up. I was waved off the track after a few solo laps. I wasn’t hurt too bad, and my bike was fine, so I wasn’t too disappointed with this result. I had 3 more races to look forward to. 

Saturday morning I drove out to Pace Bend park for the road race and TTT. The course was a 6.2 mile loop with traffic control in place, so we didn’t have to worry about oncoming traffic or even getting passed by cranky drivers. My race was 6 laps with an uphill sprint to the finish line. The race was fast, but I just sat a few wheels back in the peloton to conserve energy. I few riders tried to attack off the front, but nobody had what it took to break away until the last lap. Half way through, I saw a blur whiz by on my left and heard someone shout, “This one’s going!” I jumped on it and accelerated to catch up. I managed to catch up after a minute or two, as did a bunch of others, but it did split the peloton in half, dropping a sizable portion of the field off of the back. The intensity kept ramping up as we got closer to the finish. I started looking for my teammates with maybe 2k left in the race and found Mitchell, Tanner, and John. We started to get organized for the final sprint. Then, without warning, I was being loaded into an ambulance. I still have no memory of the crash, but apparently a rider tried to squeeze passed me when there wasn’t anywhere near enough room to do so. I was knocked into Mitchell and his rear derailleur caught my front wheel. You can see the damage that this did to my wheel, and all of this happened while going ~26mph. The combination of push, collision, and wheel explosion knocked me down. Hard. I’ve got road rash, a broken wheel, a shattered helmet that prevented anything worse than a concussion, and no more riding for a week. Completed Races: 0/4. John managed to avoid the worst of the crash, but was pushed off the road and tipped over at low speeds. Nothing serious, but enough to end his hopes for placing.  The good news is that Mitchell and Tanner escaped unscathed and took first and second in the race!

Being my first time working with composites, I made a few mistakes. First, Mixed up way too much epoxy. I used about 1/4 of the stuff that I mixed up. I left the leftovers in the plastic mixing cup while I did my work. When I came back to clean up I found a half-melted cup with hardened epoxy bulging out. I had forgotten that the epoxidation reaction responsible for the hardening of epoxy is very exothermic. A thin layer doesn’t heat up much because it has a large surface area to dissipate heat, but a cup doesn’t have nearly as much surface area. The heat from the reaction was enough to melt the cup adn substantially shorten the curing time. Secondly, I over saturated the cloth with epoxy. This made a sticky, drippy mess as I was wrapping the cloth around the seatstay. Even more epoxy dripped out as I wrapped everything with electrical tape to compress the fibers. Additionally, the excess epoxy under the wrap caused some lumpiness in the layup. Nothing that a little sanding couldn’t take care of, though. Here is the result after several coats of lacquer. I think it turned out all right.