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It's a very nice frame that I would like to buy but must not!
Do you have any idea what bottom bracket shell and rear dropouts those are? I think I have identical ones on a mystery frame I'm trying to find out more about.
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Did you sand it? What happened? I would expect that it doesn't withstand serious sanding and you would just strip it straight off again. The instructions suggest brushing it down or something similar. If you clear coat it, it should get a bit glossy, but by nature it's rather rough and porous so many many coats would be needed to build up something that really protects it.
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to avoid ending up on faster roads though.
I think if you look on streetview and find a one-lane-in-each-direction "main road" (on google maps these are yellow with a blue marker), it's ok to cycle on if you need to, but two-abreast cruising will not be relaxing/possible and there can be some quite big junctions. There may well be a bike lane in places or a separate shared use path (even if not part of the network routes on that web page). Google maps also has roads that are white with no marker, and these can be exactly the same size as the above, small town or country roads, or gravel tracks (the width on the map does give an indication if it will be a fast one or not).
Highways (2 lanes in each direction) are large yellow roads with red symbols, and I don't think there is any real chance you could stray on to one - it would be the same as riding onto a motorway.
Strava seems to think that there's a perfectly rideable trail between the two over the mountain. I don't think so!
Can happen if mountain bikers go that way I think.
far more economical to spend more time in Italy than in Switzerland.
I can only agree...
Supposed to be looking at the route in more detail tonight but I think we might be riding to the pub
Just one other thought: I've been on holiday in the Val di Mello/Splugen area in about September, and it's getting later -the deep valleys were very cold in the mornings, the weather getting changeable and not nice on the Swiss side of the Splugen. I think your route is great and it isn't a difficult place to get about - if you don't like a section of road/track, there will almost certainly be an alternative. It might be not worth worrying about it further and keeping flexible about whether you spend more time on the Swiss side or the Italian side according to the weather nearer the time.
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Check out the Klontalersee , you can ride over Holloch grotte and the Pragel pass (this picture) to get to it
Will do!
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Couple more things: Switzerland has a lot of cycle routes, they are pretty well signposted once you know what you're looking for (usually small brown arrows with the number and blue symbol, but only really where you need to deviate from your current course) so if you can find one going in your direction it makes navigation easy. They keep you off the major roads very nicely (though these quite often have a bicycle lane anyway), but also tend to route around town centres, which is fine except you just see the suburbs...
Be warned that they almost certainly will have gravelly sections, which can spell disaster for normal road tyres (we toured last autumn on such routes with 28mm tough commuting tyres and no problems, but this week I got 4 punctures in one go with 25 mm road tyres).
Having a quick look at
https://www.schweizmobil.ch/en/cycling-in-switzerland.html
and
suggests you could pick up a route near Tiefencastel, then follow the route 2 to Disentis and Andermatt...
The app is a pretty handy way to plan and navigate.
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Once in Davos, go via Chur to Andermatt, from Andermatt you can make loops including the passes Furka+Nufenen to Airolo, or Susten+Grimsel+Furka to Andermatt, or Susten+Grimsel+Nufenen to Airolo. From Airolo you can go up the St Gotthard over the cobbles. If as a day trip they wouldn't be too bad on the way back down, or you can descend the other side back to Andermatt. I think combination of climbing up to the Gotthard from Andermatt and descending to Airolo is less satisfactory.
The Splugen pass is a hidden gem though! The landscape at the top is splendidly strange, and the descent on the Italian side would be rather exciting in places - sort of twisty tunnels and galleries with on-coming coaches!
Or go in reverse to spend a couple of days in Bormio doing more of the iconic climbs near there?
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I've seen the competition discussed elsewhere, but the function of the shelters isn't too clear - are they just rest stops or for overnight?
I think the Eurovelo routes are aimed at "normal" cycle tourists rather than endurance racers. For heavily loaded people sedately following the Rhine route or whatever, vertical storage of fully loaded bikes is likely impractical.
If for overnight stops, especially if designing for northern Europe (you can choose where your design would go, I think), some kind of drying facility!
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Indeed, and last year they had the Transfargarasan highway in Romania as a parcours I think, which I would try to incorporate into a route if I was going that way (and not extremely heavily laden maybe).
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We went by train from Zurich to Istanbul, via Austria/Hungary/Romania/Bulgaria/Turkey, except a couple of days in Romania when we travelled with local guides in their cars - the traffic is probably not heavy in the countryside, but the driving on A-road equivalents was petrifying!
Istanbul was the real standout part of the trip and I would definitely recommend allowing a few days (at least a week) to explore it.
Don't forget you (UK passport holders at least) need a visa for Turkey!
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Really? Interesting... how tough is the finish? I have at my disposal an art supply place with a pretty good selection of montana cans, or a DIY place with a rather out of date selection of some car paint product.
The colours of the montana cans are more appealing, but they're mostly flat colours and I might not be able to let go of a little metallic sparkle, and I thought the car paints might be a bit tougher.
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In real life the pink is less than neon. I assumed the gold was everywhere and that the pink was a primer cos I'd read about Gios using a pink primer to make the blue so distinctive, but maybe part of the bike was pink. 3 different primers and the black base coat would seem amazingly dedicated.
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Montana do a silver glitter and what looks like a rainbow glitter.
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My feeling was that different colours are different. I used three, one that erupted into a massive cloud of powdery dust and was very difficult to get to cover (fluoro orange), one that went on fine and came out fairly smooth (quasar), one that tended to go on wet and then would get rough (dark green).
I also did quite a lot of careful priming and stuff, and I didn't get the feeling that you can just whack it on over anything and expect it to stick.
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Yvette Horner, played the accordion in/on the Tour de France caravan in the 50's (when, so the article says, the caravan itself was 30 miles long and about 15000000 people saw it) and had a generally amazing life and times.
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I was planning some kind of sick fadez on the fluted tubes (flutez?), but I think the original paintwork just needs to be stitched together with something low-key, like a paint equivalent of the castle. I'm thinking of some shade of grey, and stencilling in the Motta decals in a second shade of grey. The thing is that the shorelines look like a natural part of it now and they pick out the shapes of the tubes, which I want to do, but they also look just too ratty for me. I think if I picked out the white/pink shorelines in the second shade of grey, that would keep it feasible, minimal, but help make a natural transition between the two.
So, I'm interested in your thoughts on a couple of things:
What to do with it now, in general!?
Any ideas for masking irregular shapes like these? Has anybody used something like the art masking fluid to paint a mask freehand?
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So I bought this frame a while ago with the intention of trying to do my own Gianni Motta-inspired neo-retro paint job on the fluted tubes (the frame is supposed to have been custom built by Gianni Motta...) . The thick green paint was even uglier in real life than the advert, but when I started to pick around the edges, I found a lot of layers underneath suggesting the green was not the original colour. When a bit of what was underneath was exposed, it looked unusual, so I tried to strip off the green and keep as much of it as possible. It is a sort of marbled gold finish, with a purple kind-of flip colour in it. Unfortunately it is practically impossible to do justice to it in a phone photograph. Most of the damage was already done, just a few of the smaller spots are due to me, and I guess they just sanded the decals off the original and painted it in the colours of their club/team (arbo kinderg is an Austrian club with minimal web presence and generally green stuff).
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Shimano or Campagnolo compatible freehub on the wheels? Collection from where?
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... checks neighbours from hell thread...
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I can't tell cos I've only got this thread, the official Giro page, and the Guardian, which I wasn't keeping up with, but according to them Froome already took the blue jersey at Sestriere. Wikipedia description of the points available, or my adding up, doesn't seem to square with the classification of this morning.
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Yates will still have the blue jersey tonight? They could try to hang on to that by keeping Froome out of maximum points tomorrow.
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Try asking in I am a framebuilder AMA (https://www.lfgss.com/conversations/311246/) ?
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Can you see what is 'wrong' with it.....sort of?
Is it the mismatched brown seat and black lever grips?
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How about posting the Centaur callipers?
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