New Commuter Bike

[WindingRoad]

Sooooooo after some time trying to make it work I discovered that you CANNOT use a Shiftmate device to pair your shimano sti shifters to a SRAM rear derailleur when you are using Gore Tex Sealed cables Apparently the cables are too slippery to allow the pulley to work and rotate fully, bupkis. I did however make a new discovery that even though Shimano resource guides say that an 9 speed Deore XT rear mountain bike derailleur will NOT work with 10 speed Shimano STI shifters they are absolutely full of poo It does work, in fact is works better than I could have dreamed. I'm talking every gear of every ring working good I have all 30 gears and they are all usable, not chattery annoying ones at the end of the cassette. Very VERY happy about this. After some extensive research online about who has 'non traditional' drive train setups on their bikes I found the whole 10 speed STI with XT 7-8-9 speeds to be pretty common place on a lot of tandems??? I did ALSO find out that a 10 speed shimano mountain bike derailleur does NOT work with the same 10 speed STI shifters?!?!?! It's enough to make your head spin right??!!?? So I thought I would share this pivotal tidbit of info in the case that anyone else runs into this, that way you can save your self a good chunk of money and not buy parts that don't work.

Today came my next hurdle.... the fenders. As beautiful as they may be they are horrible to install. I have absolutely no idea how but when I was installing the front fender somehow one of the eyelets got all cross threaded and mucked up and I thought the freaking screw was gonna break off in there So I used a little of my optician background and ran a couple of screws through it backwards and managed to pretty much restore it to useable, whew, that was a close one. I got the front all installed and it is beyond gorgeous. I'm taking a break so now I can get the courage to drill a hole in the back fender I'm so afraid I'll screw something up and oh did I mention I am a perfectionist to the nth degree when it comes to this kind of stuff. I've had the tape measure out measuring the gaps between the wheels and the fenders. I needed a break from being OCD. So now that I'm almost done with my coffee and muffin it's about time to drag out the drill! Wish me luck!