Thursday, March 13, 2008

First Real Ride

Aaaaaah. That was nice. I took the P-38 for a spin around town, after fitting the seat bags, tools and spares, bottle cage, computer, and all that good stuff. Not a particularly long distance; 33 miles or thereabouts, but I made sure to include some typical Pittsburgh hills, like Stanton, Black, and S. Negley, and still maintained an average 2.5 mph faster than my usual city pace.

Unless I've horribly miscalibrated the Cateye Enduro, the P-38 seems to run about 1-2 mph faster on the hills, and 2-3 mph faster on the flats. As far as handling, it's just on the nicely responsive side of twitchy, even at low speeds.

I got the shifting mostly worked out; my long-standing hate affair with indexed 9-speed continues, but that's just my cross to bear. Front brake still plays banshee under use(I tried toe-in, toe-out, and dead flat, all to no avail), so I'll try swapping out the current pads for salmon ones and see what happens.

All in all, I'm delighted already, and haven't even acclimatized to the bike yet. I can barely wait to see what the bike and I can do in the 200K next month...

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