On Second Thought

Somewhere along the way when my decisions with the Soma Smoothie build took a turn toward a classic style one part just didn't belong any more. The carbon forks were keeping the bicycle from totally embracing the look of years gone by. What the Smoothie really needed to complete its vintage aesthetic was steel forks. The change will add many more grams to the overall weight but the difference will not concern me, I'm not racing in the Tour. I'm actually quite excited about this development and even more anxious now for the final result. Another mind changer had to do with the nature of the material of carbon parts. Odds may be in my favor that the forks will not break, but I still don't want to tempt fate considering the price I will have to pay in flesh alone in the event of carbon failure. Even if the forks were to merely crack, not breaking completely and sparing me from gruesome injury, they would still be compromised and need to be replaced. In comparison, steel provides piece of mind. Steel is resilient. Steel is reparable. Steel is real.

So what to do then with the Profile Design Silencer SL fork I already have? Craigslist. Don't want to end up with two forks for one bike so I gotta sell before I buy again. I listed the fork and a week came and went with no responses. I listed it again and the very next day I got an inquiry. Another day later it was sold. I took a minor hit in recouping my money, but that's par for the course in these cases. The buyer turned out to be a 16-year old guy who showed up at my door with a scale in hand. It's safe to say this kid was a complete bike geek, and I mean that with sincerity. The way he thought out loud about the carbon fork and it's addition to his bicycle in run-on sentences. His preoccupation with verifying the weight of the fork on his digital scale, never averting his eyes from the matter at hand while we talked. Our interaction was both fascinating and strange. If you've witnessed or encountered fanatics of Magic the Gathering, or comics, or Star Trek, and their enthusiasm for their love of these things you get the idea. Except for this young man it was bicycles. I was kinda proud to be contributing to his passion. This sort of zeal for beloved pastimes that is equally endearing, amusing, admirable and troubling is the reason why the Comic Book Guy is my favorite Simpsons character.

Within a matter of a few days of the Craigslist sale I had ordered and received a new Tange chromoly steel fork with lugged crown. Thank you Soma! This baby was intended to pair with my Smoothie frame, down to the sparkly pearl white paint. The sleek blades of the fork compliment the traditional tube sizes of the frame, whereas the fat blades of the carbon fork were disproportionate and it looked mismatched. The correlating color scheme is an important improvement as well. An interesting note in finding the fork on the Soma Fab website is it is not listed under the "Forks" section, but rather in the "Frames" section as an option with the pearl white Smoothie frame. I guess that makes sense being this particular fork was intended for a particular frame of a particular color, but then if I'm looking for a fork I would intuitively go to the forks section, not frames. I just so happened to be browsing the frames section and discovered the fork by dumb luck. Anyhow this whole situation played out how I had hoped it would and I am on track to finishing a sweet bike build. I'd like to continue this paragraph so that it extends to the bottom of the photo on the left because that's just how my mind works, but I'm out of thoughts on this subject.

Daddy Gets A New Pair Of Shoes

For about a month my Dell laptop was out of commission. I wouldn't say it crashed, but rather crashed and burned except it burned first then crashed. The motherboard overheated and one, or more, of its components fried causing the computer to freeze up. It took some trial and error troubleshooting to figure this out and so a couple of new sticks of RAM, a new recycled CPU and new recycled motherboard later the computer is up and running again. So on with the blog post.

If Darth Vader's Imperial stormtroopers had a cycling brigade these shoes would be standard issue. And that's about the nerdiest Star Wars reference you will ever hear from me. A little personal history first before I continue on about this Shimano R086 cycling shoe. The last pair of cycling shoes I owned were made by Cannondale. They were good quality and just comfortable enough. I bought them in 1988 or '89. Rather than having the velcro straps common to most shoes today these shoes were lace-ups. They were made of a full leather upper with a hard plastic sole and that is about the extent of their construction. When I say leather upper I mean that's all it was, leather. One layer of leather, no lining. Holes in the material allowed for air flow but there were really not enough of them. You see too many air holes would compromise the structure of the shoe. If you've worn cycling shoes and ridden a bicycle in them (and chances are that you have if you're bothering to read this blog) then you know that structure is important. You need to feel that the shoe is firmly holding your foot in place on the pedal. You can't have the foot moving around in the shoe during the act of pedaling. You can't have that feeling of the foot rolling off the outside edge of the shoe. These Cannondale shoes did not provide that level of confidence. The leather upper was tough enough to take numerous scuffs and scrapes, and it formed to my foot just fine, but it was too flimsy to hold my foot in place like I needed it to. Why did I buy these shoes in the first place? Two things: money and selection. There was one shop in my rural town that even sold cycling shoes, and of the handful of models they had on the shelf this was the pair I could afford. I had these shoes for 10 years, using them for about 5-6 of those years, until I rid myself of them. That was another 10 years ago. So about 20 years in advancement of cycling shoe technology has come to pass until now when I have purchased my second pair of cycling shoes...the Shimano R086.

I've ridden in these shoes twice now on my current steed, the KHS Montaña Comp which has been modified over the years from a 21-speed hard tail mountain bike into a single-speed urban commuter, and first impression is very good. They offer the necessary amount of support and structure expected in a shoe. The toe box has a generous patch of mesh material to allow for air flow into the shoe and keep the foot cool, yet the end of the toe has enough firmness to protect the little piggies. Three adjustment straps do their job well of fitting the shoe to the foot. The outer sole is made of plastic, hard enough to sufficiently transfer power from the foot to the pedal. I'm not sure a graphite or graphite composite sole is actually necessary in a cycling shoe unless you compete at one of the highest levels of the sport. The fit of the shoe and feel of the interior is very comfortable. For a moderately priced shoe for a recreational rider the Shimano R086 has so far proven to be a good value. And of course they look pretty damn cool with their black on white color scheme.