Minor updates to P's Ritchey

In something of a dirt road/trail craze and I decided P's Ritchey needed some refreshing for us to ride together.

Simba is inspecting the build.

Three things to change:

• Move to single ring.
• Replace the brakes.
• Add "cross levers."

Single Ring

I have gone to single rings on nearly everything new and everything rebuilt for a while now, after first going 1x on the commuting rig in Indy.  In three cases I hacked it - I:

• pulled the front derailler and clipped (literally or figurately) the cable from the left lever, 
• replaced the crankset or chainring, and 
• ran the 1x10 (Neuvation) or 1x11 (Salsa, Litespeed) with little fanfare.

And, it works well.

In one other case I bought a 1x bicycle, the new 3T gravel bike at 1x12.

For the 75% use, 1x is clearly superior.  For half of that 75% a hacked 1x10 or x11 is perfectly fine.  I love that with the tall teeth on a single chainring the dropped chain on a stoplight sprint is a thing of the past.  I have rarely found a need for taller gearing than mid-40s front and 11 back (unlike Sam, I spin at closer to 90 for long rides and 100 for races - when I used to race).

So I thought it might work for P.  It does save weight, saves the hassle of a front shift, reduces wear on the chain.  This is a 40-tooth Wolf Tooth ring on an old SRAM Rival crank.

Wolf Tooth does a good job matching the design of a number of cranks.

This permitted me to pull the FD and cabling.  Double bonus - on a break-apart bike, which P's Ritchey Cross is, that is one less cable that needs splitting and that much less chainring to fit into the case.

Avid V-Brakes

Back in 2014, P and I had our Ritcheys built with cantilever brakes - though it turned out the pull on the Shimano levers did not match the pull on the cantilever brakes.  They worked, but braking wasn't sharp.  I replaced mine with V brakes when I rebuilt the Ritchey prior to ultimately selling it.

I liked the cantilever brakes and wanted to keep them for P, so I found this offering from Avid that was supposedly optimized for Shimano shifters.  Suffice to say I could not figure out the mounting process - I think because the Ritchey frameset did not match well to the design of the brakes.  Though it could be because I am a terrible mechanic.

Shorty Ultimate, photo from SRAM.com.

My loss.  This is a sharp-looking design.  Anybody in the market for an unused - and nearly unmarred - set of Shorty Ultimate brakes?

Instead I went with V brakes for P.  These are also from Avid.  After fiddling with them on my Ritchey for a while before the sale, I feel pretty good about my ability to mount and tune them.  And, in fact, this went well.

Pretty much a plug-and-play install job.

"Cross Levers"

Somebody started calling these middle-mount levers "cross levers", although I've never actually met a real cross cyclist who has them installed.  P likes them because they make the semi-upright sit easier to accomplish.  We had them on her old Trek 800, long since gathering dust in the basement.  Now they are here.

* * *
So, here is the bike as refreshed:

38mm Panaracer Gravelking SK tires go well with steel tubing!

That's a 12-27 cassette.  Probably need to take that to 34 teeth with this 40-tooth ring.