burnthesheep

Door went up. That storm door looks good and seals room up nice but man was it a royal PIA to install. Drill this, try that, attach that.

I bought some of that vinyl interlock flooring. That'll go on top of a pad in there this weekend. Can't find some plastic to cut/put up over the triangle shaped openings that are left and are still just screening mesh. That's the last bit for now.

I'll grab photos this weekend.

gsteinb

throw back conversation ---- power meters

I've been using SRMs for, well, a really really long time.

One of mine went bad. I'm doubting the other. And I'm considering getting something different.

What are people using?

hubcyclist

i love my assioma Uno pedal (left sided) and it works well, obvs they make dual sided. They use look style cleats so if you aren't particularly sensitive to cleat style (I don't think I am, I notice no difference between look style and spd-sl), they are somewhat of a gold standard for power meters these days

himespau 

I really like may Assioma Duos. A bit nervous at first going with a plastic pedal-based power meter as it seems more likely to wear out than a metal crankarm or a wheel hub, but I'd been using Powertap wheels for a while and they stopped making/supporting them, so nothing is truly future proof/going to last forever.

hubcyclist

i've been doing my amateur web development again, this time building a group ride web app, with a side of club management features (would love to make it more robust to allow to pay dues and compete with bikereg lol). basically, I've got it set up so you can join a club, enter events into a club with a route, and I've got the route and elevation profile rendered on the site, and people in the club can indicate attendance so you've got an idea of how many people are in. The impetus behind this is that with the clubs I'm involved with, there's a reliance on stuff like slack, groupme, or emails, hoping my thing can be something marketable to clubs if it's polished enough. I just need a catchy name without vowels, because that's what all the startups do! lol

topflightpro

GStein, can you not send them in to SRM to be serviced? I know the service times are slow right now, but that has long been one of SRM's selling points.

That said, between my wife and I, we have 3 SRM cranks, 1 SRM pedal set, 2 Quarqs and 1 Stages. There is no doubt that the data quality from the SRM is better than Quarq and Stages. My wife, who recently got the SRM X-Power pedals to use on her Gravel and MTBs, was really impressed by how much better the data was than her Quarqs or the Stages (which is now on my gravel bike because we sold her road bike that it was on.) So, if that is what you are looking for, I'd suggest sticking with SRM.

Also, SRM's prices are much more competitive than they used to be. We bought my wife the SRM pedals over the Garmin because retail price was the same and Garmin has a spotty record.

gsteinb

SRMs are $1500 new? Carbon is over 2K. Not sure that's competitive to anything out there.

Yes it can be serviced, but there's no reason this should have gone bad, and it's $400 to fix. Plus whatever they get for a battery now as often as that needs to get done.

They just don't seem as steady as they used to be.

I've been riding time pedals my entire cycling career. I don't really see that changing, since I have a ton of stock on them.

Flatballer

Sounds like the Assioma are out, but I would throw in a 3rd for them as well if they would've worked. I loved mine when I was still riding. I still charge them occasionally in case I want to get back into it, or sell them. The Duos I have always just worked, but I was already on Look pedals.

gsteinb

yeah, I never liked the cleats on that style pedal. I'd spend the next two years fiddling with my position. plus I'd have to buy cranks anyway so it would end up not being such a cheap transition. Pedal totally makes sense in most applications, but given what I'm doing I'd be better off just saying eff it and getting a cyclometer and HR meter and calling it a day.

I could just keep using my SRMs and consider them 'suggested power.'

gsteinb

beep



beep




beep




update?

Flatballer

Seems to have stopped again for a couple days.

Flatballer

Without a job to tie us to an area we're having trouble deciding where to live. We'd like to move, this wasn't where we wanted to be forever, and the tornado really wrecked a lot of the charm of the area and our yard.

But the areas we're considering are huge. Usually I'd find a job and we'd consider an area, but we can live basically anywhere with good internet and 1.5 hours from an airport, not middle of nowhere but nowhere near a big city (my wife has imposed a 46 minutes to Target rule to stay near civilization). We're considering MA, ME, NH, upstate NY type areas, but that's a huge geographic area to try and narrow down.

gsteinb

Good excuse to start traveling and checking places out. We're 90 minutes or so to Montreal. 40 minutes to Plattsburgh (airport and target), 2 hours to Albany.

of course you're on top of a velodrome for when you have your mid life crisis

Flatballer

A velodrome and somewhere decent to sail would both be nice for my mid life crisis. Or the tons of gravel roads in Maine, buy a gravel bike, that would work too.

And yeah, wife and I are maybe making a big loop on a long weekend soon (I work 4 days, so they're all long weekends), up through upstate NY, over to ME mid coast, back home through MA.

gsteinb

well, if you pass through this way let me know

gsteinb

cleaner than ever!

French study: Spinal cord-injury drug detected in Tour de France riders

Experts tested hair samples from seven Tour de France cyclists with three revealing the presence of tizanidine, a muscle relaxant that is not currently banned by WADA.

burnthesheep

How crooked does a doc need to be to prescribe this stuff for athletic performance? Wouldn't this pretty much be against the law in France and most of Europe?

Even if not on the dope list yet, it's still an issue with you don't "need" this at all for a medical condition.

carpediemracing 

Here's my thing on SRM service. You send it back to get serviced. If the stuff you sent back is not cutting edge then they offer you a significantly discounted price on a new or refurbished unit. I paid $600? $800? for one of my SRMs, just before the rechargeable spiders came out. I paid $900? for the other (Cannondale SI spider) new. And I think $800 for a new track one, rechargeable, after sending in an old wired one to be upgraded. The last one happened to be around Thanksgiving so they gave me a Black Friday price. Adding a PC7 and some other stuff I paid over $1000 for it. They sent me a seat mount for the PC7 on the house (for track use).

Also, they say "it'll be 6 yo 8 weeks". Generally I've gotten my cranks back in 2 weeks. They call a few days after I ship it out, then they ship it back in a day or two, and it takes a day or two to arrive. I was pleasantly shocked each time. I'm not a ProTour rider, I'm not DC Rainmaker, so they have no reason to service me quickly, but they do.

I'd spring for the rechargeable upgrade personally. At that point you're not going to remove the cranks for a few years minimum. I don't know how long those batteries last, but I figure if a phone battery starts to fade after a few years, so will the SRM battery.

I did pass on the PC8. I have PC7s, $200 refurb, I have 3 of them now, seem rock solid. I think the PC8 is $800.

Matt2.8NJ

I had looked at upgrading my wired Dura-Ace SRM into a wireless. SRM USA offered $500 for it about a year ago... I decided not to bother. I had a carbon repair place here in NJ run the wires through the frame while doing another carbon repair on my Tarmac. So the fact that it's wired is no big deal.

HOWEVER, the main issue with my SRM wired these days is that the SRM wired software is awful. I have to keep an old Windows 7PC on hand to run it. So I end up just running Powertap wheels with that bike whenever I use it (it's a backup these days). What a pain in the rear.

carpediemracing 

The wireless software is better, or at least not as limiting. I use it on a Mac that I bought a couple years ago. Mac mini to be exact. I have it on a Windows... 10? I don't know, it's my Zwift machine. But it's easier for me to download onto the Mac due to the computer not being blocked by a bike.

I like the wireless because it's Ant+ and works with Zwift. I used zPower on Zwift for many years with a wired SRM, and I found that I was being shorted substantial power (50-80w at 200w, 100w at 1000w). I was suddenly "much faster" when I got the Ant+ upgrade. And as a bonus the PC7 stores a ton of data. I think they use, as an example, you could do the entire Tour without downloading data. On the PC5 you'd run out of memory after a long road stage.

I have Golden Cheetah too but haven't bothered with it since I got the PC7 and the matching software.

carpediemracing 

I imagine they justify it. It's like the youth doctors here, prescribing test, anabolic, HGH, etc. It works for what you want it to do.

It's possible the doctor/s are already on the out, like close to losing their license due to whatever problems, and therefore they turn to this to make money. You never know. That lawyer in the south that did stuff that reads like a John Grisham movie... he didn't need to do all that stuff, but he did it.

gsteinb

PC8s in reality are way less. SRM gave me one at some point and I've had it on ebay for a while. I have three other PC7s and learning new stuff doesn't interest me. Plus the whole GPS thing is a waste for me.

All good food for thought thought.

carpediemracing 

I'm also in the boat of "don't want to learn new things". The PC7 was seamless for me. I don't know the PC8 at all.

I do think the GPS would be interesting, but I'm not about to buy a Garmin / etc. To try and track myself at the track, without carrying a phone (no pockets) I used my wife's old running watch. Bright pink. I did tuck it under the end of my long sleeve skin suit.

burnthesheep

Last lexan up. Windows caulked. Expandable foam in all big gaps. Last flooring in. Disassembled patio couches to rearrange. Lamp and heater in. Spiders evicted. However small cute they were.

Last task is remove an in house sensor on the hall bath and place on patio door for the security system. It cares not what door it is on.

Then move in the trainer and old 42 inch TV. And other stuff.

Close……

gsteinb

what's wrong with pink?