Thursday, March 29, 2007

What a difference three days makes

I'm just off the phone with SJS Cycles and am pleased to say the girl I was speaking to this time was very pleasant. Hoorah! Being the fickle and short memoried beast I am, I can now like them a bit more. Anyway, the reason I was ringing them was to see about getting something to control the tandem's Arai drag brake. The first item I saw was this which, so long as it's the right size, would definitely do the job. However, I'm a tight-fisted miser and didn't want to shell out £40 [GBP] for it when I've already got a spare set of decent downtube shifters. In phoning SJS, I was pointed in the direction of these. Again it all depends on the diameter of my handlebars but I could get them (And a barrel adjuster) and use one of the shifters I've already got. I know it'll probably only be a couple of pounds less than the unit I linked to above but somehow it seems like I'm getting more for my money. I guess it would give me a spare if anything happens to the drag brake lever I would be attaching.

In other progress, I've got my new brakes, brake levers, grips (Which will have to come off and back on again once I get a drag brake lever), shifters, cabling, cable stops and cable housing attached and ready to be adjusted and my wheels are both in for rebuilding with shiny new spokes. Hopefully they be with me sometime around the weekend and I can get adjusting the components/swearing profusely at how mechanically inept I am. I've also got my wheels, tubes, rim tape, saddles and computer ready to go once everything else is in place. I got the seatposts I had ordered but, alas, I had ordered the wrong size so back they went and another order was placed. Hopefully these seatposts will fit or it'll be the same all over again. In the meantime, I guess I could use the crappy seatposts on it but I'm not fond of them at all. Oh, just remembered, I could do with sticking a pannier rack on it too.

Just totalling up the stuff I bought specifically for the tandem (And that doesn't include the £350 [GBP] we paid for it or the saddles, pedals, pannier rack, wheel rebuilding or bits we already had) we've already spent£250.94 [GBP]. That's turning out less cheap than I may have hoped. Still, hopefully it'll be semi-decent and equivalent to a tandem at least twice that combined price.

There you go. I hope you're as suitably excited to read all that as I imagine you would be.

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