New Parts Arrived: Datatag Transponder Kit / Hope Bottom Bracket / Shimano Cable Stops

Yet more items arrived today in the post:

• Shimano STI Cable Stops
• Hope Stainless Steel Bottom Bracket
• Datatag RFID transponder

Shimano STI Cable Stops

Probably doesn't need a lot of talking about other than to say that The Surly LHT frame requires the purchase of additional cable stops for the down tube (ie the diagonal tubing from the headset down to the bottom bracket) to route the gear cabling correctly.

You can just make them out in the little 'packet' to the right of this picture:

There are two braze ons to install the cable stops to, and at first glance it's not entirely obvious what is required to fit onto them IF you've never had to build a bike up from scratch before.  Usually the cable stops are just 'there' when you buy an off the shelf bike, but with the Surly LHT they're must be purchased separately - here's a picture of them fitted to the bike before the cable has been installed:

In hindsight it was 'telling' that the number one suggestion / recommended additional purchase on Wiggle at the time when I purchased the LHT frame was this set of Shimano Cable Stops!  Obviously other people that had purchased the same frame had also purchased the cable stops at the same time... I wasn't quite so on the ball about it and ended up buying them later once I realized.

Anyway... they fit on the bike perfectly with a 5mm(?) hex bolt, not a lot else to say really:

Hope Stainless Steel Bottom Bracket

This is a thing of pure beauty, it really is.

I actually ended up having this loose / uninstalled / pristine for quite a long time since it took me AGES to decide on which crank to purchase... at one point after a few weeks I actually thought to myself I might just go for another crankset that had the bottom bracket already integrated/included, and just keep this Hope BB as an 'objet d'art' on my desk (lol?!)... it really is that beautiful. :D

These pictures don't really do it justice, I'm sure I'm not the only sad geek to have had these kind of thoughts though so no doubt there's plenty of 'artwork' out there from people who've taken the time to actually photograph the item properly from lots of different angles.  Here's mine though lol:

A few months on now and I've ridden about 200 miles or so on it and all I can say is it's just a joy to ride combined with the Middleburn crank I eventually went with.  Buttery smooth transmission, a huge amount of stiffness together with the resultant high input to output power ratio - you just put your foot down and the power you put in is transferred into the drivetrain with very little loss of power due to flex or other movement.

Datatag Transponder Kit

There is a separate post I wrote about the Datatag kit here:

To Datatag or to not Datatag...

I won't go on about it too much more here, it arrived today though on 04/11/13.