A Few Words From Arn About Our Bikes (2/3)

A couple of words about the bikes. All in all, so far, I am pleased with the setup.  We've seen 3 people with busted racks (that needed welding).  All of them were flimsier than the OMM racks that we are using.  Most folks are using front/rear panniers plus some type of trunk bag or drybag.  We talked to one guy that had non-Ortlieb panniers - big mistake as they gave out.  We are on the light side as we have no front panniers and D has a trunk bag while I have a drybag.  The Schwalbe Marathon Extremes are amazing tires - roll amazingly well and provide great comfort on the road and provide surprisingly good traction in the ripio. We haven't tried them in wet ripio yet and that may be where they have their worse time.  The Ergon grips are awesome and I'm really glad we got the bar ends so we have another hand position.  Between the tires, grips and panniers, ever other biker thinks we are German (which is a good default choice as they are the most prevalent other than the Argies).

Building up 36 spoke wheels on my bike was definitely the right decision. Every day after riding on the ripio I touch every bolt on the bike.  Surprisingly, the only thing consistently loose is the front derrailer.  Others bolts have required a tiny amount of tightening from time to time along with the spring tension (centering) of D's rear brake.  Most people look at our setup with envy - mostly because it is light and they are riding rigid frames and don't have a sweet front shock!  We've had a couple of very minor mechanical problems - two from shipping the bikes and one from my initial setup in Seattle (not enough spacers on the headset) and too much play.  Not sure how I missed this but D noticed it yesterday and so after my stack was set, I gave her a spacer so we could set her stack.  It was easy to stop in the bike shop and get another spacer when we rode by on the way out of San Martin. That said, bike parts here are difficult to find. You are punished for building up anything special.  We are pretty generic but there are a couple of ways we could have difficult to correct failures if there is a problem.  For example, because we have no brazeons for racks, we use the OMM racks and their attachment system (to rear brakes plus an extra long rear wheel skewer).  The brake attachments would we relatively easy to replace.  The skewer, you are f'd.