Here’s a trip to relish – a tour of northern Spain and the Basque country. Gunnar owner and Trophy Bikes of Philadelphia customer Vinod Vijayakumar joined three of his friends for what would be to most of us the bike trip of a lifetime looping from Madrid up to San Sebastian, then westward along the coast to Santiago and back. Click http://picasaweb.google.com/orie0704/CaminoDeSantiago#5509483521463699842 for great pics and visit their blog, http://www.jumanaidjimidjango.com/2010/08/camino-de-santiago-from-madrid-to-san.html.

Happy trails!

Gunnar rides again! Come join us for our July factory ride on Saturday July 17. Factory Tours run from 8-8:30 AM. We assemble for announcements at 10 minutes before 9AM and push off on the hour. We offer a 21 mile, 45mile and metric century loop, exploring the wilds north and west of our Factory in Waterford, Wisconsin. There’s no charge, but waivers and helmets are required. Limited SAG support is included.

Thanks go to the KR Bike Club for all their support.

Gunnar introduced chainstay disc mounts 3 years ago on the Rock Tour and last year on the Fast Lane. What are the pros and cons of using on the Rock Hound, as well?

vs.

Wanna see your Gunnar’s birthplace and enjoy some excellent riding? Come join us Saturday, June 12 at the Waterford Factory (go to http://maps.google.com and put “Waterford Precision Cycles, 816 W. Bakke Ave., Waterford, WI 53185″ on the search line to find us). We have factory tours from 8-8:30 AM. The ride starts just before 9AM and includes SAG support.

You don’t need to own a Gunnar to join us (but we love homecomings)!

Enjoy the excellent roads and scenery of Southeast Wisconsin’s southern Kettle Morraine area while heading toward Elkhorn, Wisconsin on loops of about 17, 35 and 64 miles.

There’s no charge for the tour or ride, though we require helmets and a waiver sign-off. Thanks to our friends at the Cream City Cycle Club for their help on the ride.

It seemed like a typical sale for our shop in Alaska, Speedway Cycles – Rock Hound 29er – add some rack mounts. Little did we know about just how far this dog would travel. First off, the owner, Stuart Briggs, hails from Perth, Australia, it traveled better than half-way around the world just to get home! Then it’s on to Cairo, Egypt, for the 11,844 km Tour d’Arifrique, a tour/competition traveling south all the way south to Capetown. Below is Stuart celebrating on Melkbosstrand with Capetown and Table Mountain in the background. Stuart finished first in the competition, which crossed Egypt, the Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Botswana, Malawi, Namibia and South Africa. Here’s a link to the route: http://www.tourdafrique.com/epictours/tourdafrique/overview.

Stuart beat the next person, Gisela Gartmair of Germany by 6 hours with 398 hour 26 minutes for the full tour. Both of them and several others joined the EFI club, meaning that they road the entire ride without any backup support (riders were ferried across Lake Nassar and Lake Malawi). We glad that Rock Hound did its duty so well!

A big congrats go to Stuart!

We’ve been approached by a student at the the Chicago Art Institute who’d like to create a Gunnar poster. So we’re putting out the call for cool, hi-res action photos that might make a cool poster. Right now it’s just a student assignment, so it’s all for the glory and not for the bucks, but we can talk about an arrangement if we put out a poster. Use our contact page http://gunnarbikes.com/site/contact/ send in your pix.

It was with quite a bit of anger that I heard that when Campy introduced their 10-speed drivetrains that they would no longer provide a 28.6mm clamp. What a slight to steel builders the world over! At least Shimano had a clamp-on adapter for our dimensions. Even that went away last year. We’ve been encountering a growing number of cases of “clamp-itis” – seat tubes deformed by the front derailleur clamp. Clamp-itis has existed for years. The thinner the walls, the bigger the problem, but riders often live with it. After all, the deformed seat tube makes it harder for the derailleur to twist out of position, and it’s a low-enough stress location that cracks may never appear in the tube.

For the more compulsive of us, a dent is still a dent, so how can this be avoided?

1. Don’t use a cheap clamp. They assume you’re putting it a really heavy tube which causes the clamp to deform, not the tube.
2. We’ve come to like using 31.8mm clamps from Campy and Shimano with the right kind of shim that takes it down to 28.6mm.
3. Wheels Manufacturing has the best alternative – a one-piece shim that fits quite nicely under the clamp bus doesn’t leave gaps that allow tube to deform.

Also, having a plastic shim in contact with the paint mars the paint even less than the best of the old shims. TIP: to provide the best protection under the shim, be sure to wax the area before you mount the derailleur clamp.

By the way, if a crack does appear, the only way to fix it is a new frame. We don’t consider it a warranty claim.

Why don’t we just go to a braze-on front derailleur? If we were a mass production house, this might make sense, since we’d only have one derailleur for each model. Using a clamp means you can go from Campy to SRAM to Shimano, double chainring to triple to compact and never have to worry if you can’t mount your front derailleur because of the wrong location. This makes your Gunnar more versatile in yet another way.

Clamp-on!

Look for a reorganized ordering section on http://gunnarbikes.com by clicking on the ORDER button. Now you can order touch-up paint for your Gunnar. We offer colors of the month going pretty much back to the beginning. It’s 2 weeks or less from order to ship.

Also, we added a small parts section if you’re looking replacement seat clamps, BB cable guides and other small parts.

Either way, you pay through Paypal. If you don’t have a Paypal account, you can just use your credit card. It’s the secure way to pay.

For Gunnar frames and complete bikes, we still recommend going through our shops, which you can find at http://gunnarbikes.com/site/shops/
Thanks!

One of our riders, Josh Harris, does great photography. Look at the pix he took of his new Gunnar Sport: http://forums.roadbikereview.com/showthread.php?t=204360

You can see his work at http://www.lalandscapes.com/.

Thanks!

Richard

Can’t get enough of our fine ferrous friend? Now you can dress up in Gunnar T’s and hoodies, you can drink up with Gunnar Mug Mugs and mark your territory with Gunnar stickers!

http://cafepress.com/gunnarbikes

Thanks and happy shopping!