Cole Rollen Wheel Failure - Update 4 November

I was riding home from work mid September on my Giant in and the rear wheel was rubbing. A quick glance when I got home suggested that it needed a little truing so I swapped back the original heavy duty Giant wheels and thought nothing more of it. This weekend I thought I'd spend a little while trying to pull it back to true and spotted this:

This is a pretty catastrophic failure  - I was lucky I swapped the wheels when I did as this would have been a ride stopping failure!

I have started to strip the wheel down (to keep the hub for general bike maintenance purposes) and have seen another crack in the rim. The front looks OK but I'll double check now.

The wheels have done about 12500 miles - mainly in the Spring to Autumn months. I don't think that's particularly impressive, given that I am also quite light.

Update 4 November: I have scrapped the rims. I cut them up and here is a couple of shots of the cross section:

 

JLR Strava Club - Longest Ride w/e 21 December 2014

I wanted to get the Strava Grand Fondo 12 badge as this would mean that I achieved 9 of the 12 in 2014 - starting with the April one and getting them every month. It meant a long ride on Friday 19 Dec that I was not sure that I'd make.I had been feeling pretty tired again - it's been a long year both at home and at work and my mileage had been dropping off, as expected as the year end approached. The Friday was the first day of my holiday, the weather was dry and not too cold although the wind was strengthening. I decided to ride one of the routes to the North of Meriden which is about 75 miles and then add some distance on the way back. The problem with the Meriden routes is that there's only one way to get to the routes and that's to Meriden, and hence it means its often the same route back as well - so there's nearly 20 miles of "there and back" whatever else you do on the way out of Meriden.

Anyway I set off and felt reasonably good. I had a few energy bars and gels on the way. It was windier than I had expected and seemed to build as distance went on. The sun was out though and it was "warm enough". The turn back at about 40 miles was welcome although I was feeling quite tired by that point. My Giant is not a bad bike but it currently has the original Giant wheels with 25mm Gatorskins on for winter use and these are about 1.5kg heavier than the normal wheel/tyre set (Cole Rollens). The return leg was about keeping the pace sensible and making sure I got the distance in rather than any chasing of segments. The last 10 miles was hard as I was really tired, and I needed to do a couple of local roads to make sure I got the distance - 82.2 miles and the Grand Fondo was mine.

Here's the route http://www.strava.com/activities/230801673:

As an added bonus I also rode the furthest of the JLR Strava club:

And thanks to the great Veloviewer site I can see all my completed challenges for 2014 in all their glory:

In fact Veloviewer is so good that I paid the pittance of about £9.50 for a year - its about £60 for Strava Pro and I don't think that Strava matches the features - I certainly don't need to set a target in Strava to work towards it.

Giant Defy Headset Bearings

This post is also a follow up to this post: Focus Cayo Bike Weights

Back in February I got the Giant of the rack in the garage:

only to find that the steering was stuck in the straight ahead positions. Clearly after 4 years and 4 winters the headset had given up the ghost, got rusty and siezed. Fortunately a little gentle twisting action loosened it again but it was clearly time to replace the bearings. A couple of days later I got the bike in the workstand and dropped the fork out to get to the bearings. I was hoping that they'd be marked up and I could read the part numbers of and source replacements easily, but unfortunately they were completely unmarked. I measured them up as best as I could, cleaned and applied some grease and re-assembled. I got the following data:

Upper Bearing - ID = 30mm, OD = 42mm, Height = 6mm
Lower Bearing - ID = 34mm, OD = 46mm, Height = 7mm
In both cases I estimated the taper at about 45° but had no way of measuring this. I used a standard steel ruler for the measurement - so within +/-1mm is the best I could do.

I also looked on the internet for information. The best I found was this Bikeradar Forum article: http://www.bikeradar.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=12955189&p=18696395 where it identified the bearings as:

TOP BEARING 41.8mm x 6mm 45° X 45° MR136 (1 1/4")
LOWER BEARING 47mm x 7mm 45° X 45° MR137 (1 1/2")

This was close enough to my measurements to give me confidence that I had measured correctly:

Here's a few pictures of the bearings:

New Top

New Bottom

Old Bottom

Old Top

The bearings were OK again with the re-greasing, but this was obviously just a short term containment so as soon as I got the replacements I did change them. 

It was surprisingly hard to source some bearings. The best shot I found was here: Aire Bearings on EBay. I can't fault them for price, delivery and customer service - I would use again. The cost was £15.54 for a top and bottom bearing. Bearings seemed good quality and there was no issue with fit. Only time will tell for longevity but at that price I'd be OK with a couple of years given that the Giant is used all year round.

I took the opportunity to thoroughly clean and service the bike at the same time as I changed these bearings (new chain, new jockey wheels on the rear derailleur, replaced the short length  of gear outer cable at the rear derailleur etc and general tweaks). I also put the Cole Rollen Wheels back on after the Winter.

Because I had some of the bike apart I also weighed some of the components for comparison when I stripped the Focus/built the Scott.

Giant Defy Weights
Components	Detail	Actual Weight (kg)
Cole Rollen Wheel (Front) with skewer, inner tube and Continental 700cx23mm Gatorskin tyre		1.28
Cole Rollen Wheel (Rear) with skewer, inner tube and Continental 700cx23mm Gatorskin tyre, and 12-25 105 Cassette		1.77
	total	3.05
Giant Wheel (Front) with skewer, inner tube and Continental 700cx25mm Gatorskin tyre		1.92
Giant Wheel (Rear) with skewer, inner tube and Continental 700cx25mm Gatorskin tyre and 12-27 105 Cassette		2.27
	total	4.19
Weight saving due to Cole Rollen Wheels		1.14
Crank RH (drive)	FSA Gossamer (Scott)	0.55
Crank LH	FSA Gossamer (Scott)	0.25
Crank RH (drive)	FSA Vero (Giant)	0.64
Crank LH	FSA Vero (Giant)	0.42
Weight difference between Gossamer and Vero		0.36
Focus Weight		8.52
Giant Weight (Cole Wheels)		10.62

Bike Upgrade Summary 2012

From the 2 posts below I have made a brief reference to some potential benefits of upgrading the wheels on my Focus.

I bought a Focus Cayo 105 from Wiggle at the start of 2010 as an upgrade from my 2009 Giant Defy 4. The Focus is a really good entry level Carbon bike and was a big upgrade from my Defy. I didn't spend any money on the Cayo in 2010, riding it as delivered. In 2011 I fitted a Short Cage 105 rear dérailleur for cosmetic reasons only and changed the tyres. However in 2012 I was looking for some bigger improvement and decided that some wheels would make an improvement. I spent some time looking at what was a sensible upgrade - looking at cost, weight, and other factors. After a lot of review I selected some Shimano RS80 C24 wheels (here).

Noel already had a pair and they seemed really good, plus everywhere I looked the reviews were pretty well overwhelmingly positive.

I also got some Continental GP4000s tyres (here).

This combination seemed to make a real difference the first time I road the bike, but it has been over the past couple of months (March April 2012) when I have put more miles on them that I do believe that they have made a big difference, especially when climbing, but also on the flat - it seems easier to accelerate up to a cruising speed and up hill I seem to be a gear higher than previously.

In terms of overall weight these wheels are light (~1550g for the pair) and the wheels that came with the Cayo originally (Cole Rollen) were not bad (~1750g for the pair) so although there is only a small weight loss the 'feel' of the wheels and the performance gain seems significantly more than 250g worth of improvement.

So would I recommend the Shimano wheels - definitely yes