It’s our nation’s birthday & we plan on celebrating it with family & friends. Beer, Brawts & Bikes (our take on hot dogs, apple pie etc).

To this end we will be trying to close at 2pm Friday & to close entirely on Saturday.

Thanks for your understanding.

Jeff

Our primary road clothing supplier Giordana is part of the Gita Sporting Goods group. In addition to clothing they also import four bike brands (incl Pinarello & Merckx) & several couple other brands including Gommitalia tires.

We’ve not tried these yet & as you know we like to see & use it ourselves before bringing it to the shop en mass. We’ll be putting a pair of Targa K clinchers on some Mavic Kysriums for everyone to try out. These are handmade in Italy (technique of inflating the casing then hand gluing the tread onto the casing), and features a 22 mm cross section open tubular design (looks like a clincher but uses the construction method of high-end tubulars). The Polyester/Cotton/Kevlar® casing has a high density thread count of 250 TPI which is an honest one axis count. The high thread count creates a stronger, lighter, more flexible tire that in turn means more dollars to be spent, ah but what price perfection.

Oh, don’t worry for all you folks that don’t ride retro Italian bikes, they come in a all black finish.  They have a claimed weight of 195g & will retail for a bit south of $100.  Should also be seeing some really nice training tires too for around $50.

As an aside Torelli.com has a nice simple piece on tires. Can be found here: http://www.torelli.com/tech/tires.shtml

My wife’s reminded me that this Sat is my birthday, so instead of watching the F1 GP of Britian Qualifying, I’ll go out for a ride.  Pat’s proposed a Cove Run & given my lack of fitness, that sounds good to me.

Mike bought me a new toy to try out, a Sigma ROX computer. Hopefully I won’t find it too distracting & run into a ditch.

Ride start time is 8:30am, not 9am, getting hot out there.

Cove Run looks something like this:
To the Cove & Back (w/ a twist)

Hope to see a bunch of you out there on Sat.
JEFF

No, I’m not writing about an old girlfriend, nor am I getting a divorce – that is SRAM’s new full MTN group. Boy, I remember it like yesterday, it was the early 90’s and Campy had their OR group out. Who says Shimano hasn’t faced MTB competition?

Sarcasm aside, I am looking forward to this group. A 2×8/9 has always made sense to me (in fairness my only actual MT bike is a single speed lacking even front suspension). So a 2×10 seems like it was sent from heaven! Lightweight, brutally efficient hardtails only get more so, & dualies have a simplified chainline/suspension system.

Now if I can just convince someone to buy me one!