I wanted something more appropriate and mid-90s-ish than the minimally-spoked and semi-aero Shimano RS20 wheels that were on the purple mid-90s Trek. I was unable to find Mavic rainbow-anodized rims with rainbow-Ti spokes and splatted-painted hubs, so I did the next best thing, double the number of spokes. Actually, the more I think about it, the next best thing is not more spokes, but three spokes.  Anyway, what I did get was a set of 36h Mavic Open Pro rims and Ultegra 6600 hubs with DT Swiss Comp spokes and Pro Lock nipples. While it won’t necessarily make up for the extra 66 spokes, the Open Pros do have rainbow-effect stickers that shift from turquoise to violet. In my mind, this falls squarely in the ‘mid-90s-ish’ category.

These wheels are used, but only three months old, built locally and in near-perfect condition. The original owner swapped these wheels off of a cyclocross bike for something tubeless. In any case, I paid less for the wheelset than the hubs alone would have cost new.  I was in the process of gathering parts to build some ‘mid-90s-ish’ wheels when I found these, so I now have a couple of extra Shimano 105 and 600 hubs.  Assuming I can find a nice matching hub for one of them, I’ll likely build some wheels anyway.

As I mentioned, these wheels have a lot of spokes, double the number of spokes that the Shimano RS20 have (36/36 vs 16/20). For those who are good at math(s), feel free to check my arithmetic.  Anyway, despite the 36 extra spokes, the Open Pros only weight 120g more than the RS20s (1980g vs 1860g). I suppose a set of 28/32 spoke Open Pros would have been a little lighter, but not very ‘mid-90s-ish’, and not light enough to matter.

For those concerned about the fate of the Shimano RS20s, don’t worry. They replaced the orignal Alex DA16/generic hub wheels on Rachel’s Sirrus, and cut 460g (that’s slightly over one pound) of weight.  Again, with the use of math(s) you’ll realize that those Alex DA16-based wheels tipped the scales at an authoritative 2320g (slightly under 350 pounds).

The fifth Port Adelaide Cycling Club (PACC) cyclocross race was yesterday, Saturday 13 August 2011.  This time I raced in the B-grade, and had a good race.  I led the race for the first half of the first lap (yes, that would be a grand total of about four minutes), and finished seven of nineteen.  PACC has a great race animation, results and a race write-up over on the PACC CX Blog.

View the PACC CX 5, 2011 race in a larger map

This is the race course as captured by the new phone using Google My Tracks— the timing is a little off due to when I began and stopped the GPS.  See distance, time and speed details.

The Gunnar recently had a new King headset installed thanks to BMCR. The new headset is a huge improvement over the clunky, stiff and generally trashed 10-year-old Cane Creek. Not much else to say here, it’s a King headset and it does exactly what you’d expect.

Since the last race I also picked up new set of WTB ‘All Terrainasarus’ tyres from Road Rage. The new tyres are significantly taller and a little wider than the various SpeedMax Pros that I had been using over the last five years.  The extra volume allows for lower pressures, which helps grip, but the tread ‘packs-up’ and doesn’t shed mud very easily. As a result, the All Terrainasarus is marginal in wet and muddy conditions.

In all honesty, I got these tyres primarily for non-race use that includes commuting to and from singletrack on the road and towing the Burley up and down the beach paths.  The WTBs handle very well on the road, and the tread works well enough on the dirt.  The old SpeedMax Pros were probably a little more capable in dirt and mud, but they are squirmy and wear very quickly on the road.  Overall, the WTBs feel faster and smoother than the old tyres, but do give up some grip in the wet.

On to a few photos:

I’ve made several changes to the Mac Minis in the last week or so.  First, Mac Mini number one, the ‘early-2009’ 2.0 GHz Core 2 Duo, was upgraded to OS 10.7 Lion and along with that it got some new hard drives.  The primary 500GB Wesetrn Digital drive was upgraded to a 500GB Seagate Momentus XT hybrid SSD drive, and the dead DVD drive was replaced with a HDD tray and the old 500GB Western Digital drive.

How successful were the upgrades? Well, I’m not convinced that Lion/10.7 is an improvement over 10.6.  Overall, some of the features are interesting (Launchpad, applications that save their state, file versioning), but others are crippled, frustrating, or just missing (Spaces, Finder, Dashboard, Rosetta, Front Row). I can cope with the changes, but what I don’t like are the crashes and bugs. Mail crashes frequently and regularly, the system won’t reliably sleep and Launchpad won’t keep icons where I put them.  I suppose these are the issue one may expect from an 10.x.0 release…

The Momentus XT hybrid SSD/7200rpm drive works just fine, but I can’t say that I noticed any change in speed or system responsiveness. However, the drive was installed along with a new OS, so it’s difficult to say if the drive is any faster than the old 5400RPM Western Digital. Speaking of which, the old drive and new HDD tray (search eBay for 12.7mm HDD caddy) that replaced the dead DVD drive was easy and a noticeable improvement.  The drive was recognised as an internal SATA drive and this is an easy and quick way to double internal storage.  Responsie time from the drive on the internal SATA bus is vastly improved over the external FW400 or USB 2.0 ports.

Adding the second drive also opens the door for future upgrades such as a small SSD for the OS and a large secondary data disk. How does a 128GB SSD system drive and a 1TB data drive sound?

Moving on, I had originally planned to upgrade Mac Mini number two, the ‘early-2006’ 1.66 GHz Core Duo, to Lion as well, but after upgrading the other Mini I decided against it.  The lack of Front Row was the main reason I decided against the upgrade (yes, I know it can be reinstalled from an old 10.6 system), but aside from the Front Row issue, I really don’t see any reason to upgrade.

However, prior to deciding against Lion, I bought an Intel T7200 Core 2 Duo CPU off of eBay for about $40 AUD.  The T7200 is a dual-core 2.0 GHz, 4MB L2 cache CPU that meets the minimum systems specs required to run Lion; this is in contrast to the original T2300 1.66 GHz Core Duo that was in the Mini that does not meet Lion’s minimum requirements. Anyway, the CPU upgrade was simple, and I even got to break out the ‘Arctic Silver III’ thermal compound left over from my PC building days– I think the last time it was used was 2001/2002 when I built the Athlon XP 2000+ system.

So, is the system faster?  Maybe.  Speed (or lack there of) wasn’t an issue before, but at least I have the option of upgrading to 10.7 should I decide to later.