Sunday, October 31, 2010

Saturday afternoon bike wash

Our road cycling season (in Iowa anyway) is winding down, so Saturday afternoon saw Larry washing a few bikes which will be pretty much put away for the winter, including his original Mondonico, shown here in new livery courtesy of Jim Allen of CycleSmith.
Jim paints all the Mondonico and Torelli bikes that don't come from Italy already painted. Larry asked for an atypical tricolore scheme for this one, his favorite because of its gorgeous seatstay arrangement. It may be all-in-his-head, but this bike, with the smaller diameter stays seems to have just a bit more of the springy, resilient ride the NEMO 747 tubeset delivers. He still wishes he'd had Antonio make him a Columbus FOCO or Ultra-Foco bike before he turned off his torch for good...but it's too late now.
This bike has a 10-speed Campagnolo triple gruppo, using a mixed bag of Centaur carbon shift/brake levers and skeleton brakes with a Racing T/Comp Triple combination, including an odd-looking combination of black chainrings mounted onto a polished cranket. The black rings were robbed from an all-black (and rather ugly) crankset sold a few years back before Campagnolo (grazie!) brought back the polished versions. Torelli's excellent Triumph rims (made by Ambrosio in Italy) and a now-rare pair of Campagnolo Centaur hubs (now all you can find is Record hubs in black, sadly) make up the wheels, shod with Larry's favorite Vittoria Open Corsa CX rubber. Larry being a sucker for pretty much anything tricolore, Elite's bottle cages were the finishing touch. And yes, the pedals are that "S" company's SPD's which, when combined with Vittoria's MTB shoes, do just fine in the comfort/power transmission department while letting us walk around without fear of slipping and ending up on our a__!










3 comments:

  1. Gotta lose the black chain rings my friend... Other'n that - she's the berries.

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  2. When this went together, the only new chainrings on hand were the black ones robbed from the black crankset. This bike will soon get a BLACK set of wheels -- black Campagnolo Record hubs laced to a set of black Torelli Triumph rims. A similar set looks great on Heather's bike!

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  3. Update - now the chainrings are silver and the wheels black.

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