Fitted rear pannier rack / Abus Granit Bordo X-Plus Lock

Spent today adjusting stuff and adding on a few bits to make it easier carrying stuff.

Pannier rack

Fitted the rear pannier rack to the bike today.  Went on like a dream, no faffing around like with the previous two bikes I've tried to fit pannier racks to - must have taken about 15 minutes to fit (compared to literally hours with the other bikes).

The rack braze-on on the Surly LHT frame is perfectly positioned and a rack can be attached in either of two ways to them which is handy.  You can kind of make this out in the image below - the two 'struts' with those stoppers on can be attached either on the outside or on the inside, so in theory you have an extra set of 'lugs' to attach something to (not quite sure what that might be though, maybe a ... trailer or something? No idea.

(Incidentally on the image above you can see the damage I had to do to the 'struts' to make them fit on my old Marin bike!  That was a major PITA, took literally hours to get them to fit properly and I remember having to even take a file to the frame to file off back one of the cable stops... quite odd really, why did they (Marin) bother putting lugs on a bike for a rack if the frame clearly isn't designed for a standard rack?!)

Here's a better picture of the 'two way' braze on (bottom left of the picture):

There's tons of clearance between the rack and the wheels on this Surly build though - I can remember having issues on old bikes where the rack was dangerously close to the wheels and occasionally you could hear the rack rubbing on the tire which was less than comforting when you had a couple of fully loaded panniers flying down a hill at 30mph!  But on this frame that's not going to be an issue at all.

Strikes me in the picture above you can't actually tell what the clearance is like 'laterally' (ie from the rear) between the tires and the rack.  Trust me, it is HUGE!  Probably 1-2" at least, absolutely zero chance of the rack rubbing on the tire unless the wheel fell off or something. ;)


Another nice thing about having the rack on the bike is that I can use the rear light adapter on the pannier rack to attach the light to, saves having the rear light attached to the seatpost - which is always awkward when using a saddlebag as well and can end up hiding the light completely if you're not careful.

Seatpost

Still having issues with the damn seat post clamp (the Hope one).  I removed all the anti-seize grease that was on the shim/seatpost thinking that might have been what was causing the post to slip, but it doesn't seem to have made any difference and after an hour or so of riding the seatpost has slid right back down again into the seatpost tube. :(

I'll probably replace this Hope clamp with a more substantial steel version and give it some proper tightening, up to 20-25Nm or so.  Which is probably less than I used to do on the aluminium frame and it was fine on there, so with a steel frame it should be equally fine.

(EDIT: in the end it turns out I managed to get enough torque on the clamp to secure it without the clamp bolt snapping - from memory this was about 16Nm, maybe a touch more)

Brake Toe-in

Had some brake screeching at the front yesterday so I adjusted the toe-in on the brake pads today.  Tied a rubber band around the back end of the pad before aligning it to the rim to give a bit of 'toe' (ie so the front of the pad hits the rim before the back, supposedly that stops the screeching... though it's debatable I think and possibly bordering on old wives tale!).

That said though... the screeching did seem to disappear so it seems to have done the trick.

Abus Bordo Granit X-Plus lock

Attached this beast to the frame today as well - used the water bottle attachments on the seatpost tube just above the front derailleur to attach the carrying case.  Bit fiddly getting the bolts in place but not that much so, used a couple of washers as well to stop it coming loose hopefully.

Here's a picture of the carrying 'case' attached directly to the frame, sans lock (I have a ton of pictures of the lock which I will add at some point along with a review hopefully):

Seemed fine on a 5 mile test ride, adds some bloody weight to the bike though!!!

Out for a test ride 

I was supposed to go up and meet a friend which would have involved a 10-15 mile ride, which I was quite up for actually as a test ride but unfortunately that didn't happen.  Instead I just went on a local run, maybe 5 miles or so, with panniers fully loaded (albeit with lightish stuff) just to see how the rack held up.

Generally seemed excellent, very pleased with it indeed and clearly the frame / bike seems to almost cope better when loaded up than not loaded up, which is possibly to be expected with it having touring roots.

I'm no speed freak on a bike, but one thing I am finding with this new bike is that the gearing is VERY low (ie suited more to hills).  I think it's maybe due to my expectation that because it's almost a road based bike, the gearing should be a lot higher - or perhaps it's because my CX bike has much higher gearing - but in fact the gearing is very low and I'm finding I'm running out of high gears quite quickly - managing to get into the highest gears when doing only maybe 20mph or so.

When it comes to changing the rings next I'll probably think about stepping it up a little bit, maybe go for something like a 26-38-48 perhaps or 24-36-46, not quite sure just yet and can't remember off the top of my head what the 'recommended' jumps are between the various ring sizes (22 seems to come to mind as being the maximum you should ideally go between smallest and largest rings and 12 between smallest and middle... but I might be wrong, have to look it up).