Rain a coming ... or so they say

Well, rain or snow/rain or some snow is being predicted for the second half of this coming weekend. Well it feels cold enough to be close, at least. For now, we had a great week for bike commuting -- it was dry! There were some great mornings of awesome city views, and there was some east wind which was cool for the ride home, which of course added to the joy of going uphill into a headwind, right?

These two images show the change from day to day, with a little difference in my ability to get a good point-and-shoot camera exposure and getting use to my DSLR - lol. The second image was a morning with a bit of fog and shot with the point-and-shoot. The first image I used my Pentax K5. That is one pretty cool thing about Portland is you can go out day after day and come back with a different sense of the same image, in this case Portland - Willamette River - Hawthorne Bridge.

Project MB-1? The MB-1 is doing great and I am loving the ride! The fit is good, I think I have pretty much dialed in seat position and that lines up well with the handlebar position. The Dura-Ace downtube shifters are doing their job and working out nicely. I am getting the hang of friction-only shifting, though I only seem to miss when I am downshifting going uphill - why is that, anyway, haha?

I did do a small update to my wire routing along the top tube rear brake cable set up. To eliminate the need for the zip ties and just clean up the look a bit, I ran a longer piece of spiral wrap that extends a little past each brake cable boss. This keeps the wiring lined up nicely.

Now, there is no more white zip tie on either end and the line is cleaner. The following picture shows how I bridged across the cable boss.

You can see the single wrap around the cable, then a couple wraps around the wiring, then the wrapping around both the wiring and cable housing. This keeps everything nice and tidy. The other thing is that, should I change my mind, which I often do, I can easily remove everything for re-use and without having to undo the brake cable.