There's a new Rival in town!

      Well it's a new year and I figure I'll try to put more up. So I guess I'll start with the latest venture, converting the group on my Trek over to full '09 Rival. I'll just go ahead and say that it was the best present my wife gave me this year for Christmas.

      It took about a day to get everything installed and set up only to find out that the left shifter was completely screwed up. The adjusting cam was spaced to low from the adjustment plate(see picture). That brought on a whole new kind of pain. I knew that customer support was supposed to be great with SRAM and I'll agree it was awesome. All I had to do was find a LBS that would let them ship me the new part, along with a prepaid envelope to return the old one. Go figure that no LBS wanted to do that. The first one told me it was 'shady' and the second said it would cost him to much money. It wasn't till everything was over that he apologized saying, 'You knew what you were doing and I didn't know what my part was in the whole thing.' It's cool, at least I'll still shop there. As for the first guy, he can just shove it. And now for the real purpose of the post...

      Here's the before picture.

      And here's the goods,


      And here's the after picture,


      Before and after cockpit views,

      All in all it was a great learning experience and other than a few FD tension problems everything went great. I also got a trainer which allows me to get ride time, at least in some form. I've spent the last week getting my seat height set right and it's been working well. I think I'm finally dialed in and feeling great. Well I think that's enough for now, but I'll try to keep it up this year.


      And in case you were wondering here's that bad shifter.