I hereby declare that winter is over! Anyway I put my chips down on that space, come what may. I pulled off the studded tires and put on some new 47mm Marathon Racers. I just went out for a short shakedown ride... it was wonderful to have those studs off! They're always a bit skittish on pavement. But just a couple days ago I was up a back road that was covered in ice, so I was happy enough to have the studs then! I'll just wait another few weeks to go back up such a remote road!
Not just new tires though... yeah, a decent cleaning too, but also: a chainglider! A new Surly steel chainring, a new KMC Z610HX, a new Rohloff sprocket... my old chain was really nasty! At least it wasn't squeaking! Now, though... I must say, on my first little ride, I can't tell the chainglider is there at all. So far seems really good!
Putting on the new chain, of course I had to readjust the EBB. I noticed it was a bit stiff in the frame, & remembered some recent talk about somebody's getting stuck in the frame. Would rather avoid that! So I had the bike upside down and dribbled a fair amount of copper grease down those two holes, then moved the EBB around a fair amount to distribute the grease. That did seem to free things up pretty well.
One challenge - will all that grease down there, I couldn't use my usual trick for reusing indents. The grease was thick enough that it hid the existing indents. So I had to go by feel. I snugged down one of the grub bolts very loosely. Then I over-tightened the chain, and then started loosening up the chain slowly as I kept a bit of torque on the grub bolt. I could feel when the bolt came to the first indent - all of a sudden the bolt freed up and I could easily snug it down a couple turns. Then, yeah, pull out the torque wrench and snug both bolts down to 10 Nm.
Now, to ride!
