I just got back from a nice out ’n’ back on the 1999 Rivendell gofast fixed gear custom road bike (but I felt crappy so a brief one) and noted again for the 1,000,0001st time how it just fits so well — as if it were a pair of good leather shoes that have molded themselves perfectly to your feet. Your body just seems to drape over the bike so naturally; it really is wonderful.
(A bit of a headwind on the way out but the bike felt so easy to pedal that I left it in the 76” gear instead of the bailout gear — 52 t ring X 17/19 Dingle and 24 3/4” tires, so the granny gear is 68”. Yes, I am kidding with the word “granny.”) I’d been feeling a bit stretched out on the Matthews #2 IGH road bike which is a geometrical clone of the Riv and built with the same saddle, seatpost, stem, bar, and brake levers so it ought to feel very much if not quite exactly like the Riv. But before raising the bar I took some measurements and was surprised to find that the saddle on the Matthews was in fact 2 cm closer to the bar — ~41 cm nose of saddle to center of stem binder versus 43 cm with the Riv. So, what the hey, I bumped the saddle back 2 cm and gave it a wee bit more tilt to match that of the Riv’s; the saddle is a wee bit — ~3/4 cm —lower (center of bb spindle to top of saddle along st and sp) but the bikes have different pedals (older XTR on the Matt, Dura Ace mountain bike-type SPDs on the Riv, and the Matthews’s saddle doesn’t have any foam padding, so I didn’t mess with the seatpost binder bolt. Well, what do you know: I took the Matthews up the block and low and behowld, it felt just like the Rivendell. I still must remove the tape and play with bar tilt and lever placement and I daresay that moving the levers down a wee bit while rotating the bar up a wee bit, so that the ends of the hooks are just barely north of perfectly level, might make the fit feel even better. This is a project that I’ve been procrastinating on, and also involves recabling the trigger shifter at the end of the right bar hook and re-gluing the saddle cover — the Flite was decades old and the leather failed, so I removed old cover and the padding came with it, so I glued on some very nice, and thicker, quality brown leather directly onto the plastic base, and this detaches every few years, so it is now taped to the base with electrician’s tape. The moral of this story is: sometimes you get more comfortable with more saddle setback, and in rather odd ways. -- Patrick Moore Alburquerque, Nuevo Mexico, Etats Unis d'Amerique, Orbis Terrarum ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Executive resumes, LinkedIn profiles, bios, letters, and other writing services ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- *When thou didst not, savage, k**now thine own meaning,* *But wouldst gabble like a** thing most brutish,* *I endowed thy purposes w**ith words that made them known.* -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "RBW Owners Bunch" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to rbw-owners-bunch+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/rbw-owners-bunch/CALuTfgtiTHdXNX502bMyTsRJCf3omYpc_2Kr6Ez1oX%3DWa1ho7Q%40mail.gmail.com.
