Author Archives: Péter I. Pápics

Standert Triebwerk Mach3 – custom steel road bike build

I was thinking about building a custom titanium or steel bike for a while already (partly motivated by this article too), but so far I always settled for buying a factory model from Canyon (with admittedly zero regrets). But after riding the Canyon Endurance CF SLX DISC 9.0 SL for a half year, I realised something: there are no upgrades possible from such a top-of-the-line model (and really, I would not even want anything else, this bike is a dream to ride), so if I want another bike at one point, then I could go for a totally new experience this time. So the idea of building a bike from scratch was born.

I wanted to experience how building a bike and picking out all the right components makes me feel like. And I also wanted to build a bike that is simply very pretty to look at :) I was sure that I want something more classic looking (so externally routed cables and rim brakes), but I was not really decided between titanium and steel for quite a while. I did not want to buy a too expensive frame set, because I knew that I would still pour way too much money into the rest of the components, so I was looking at more reasonably priced options.

At the end I choose the Triebwerk Mach3 frame from Standert, for multiple reasons. The frame had a very similar geometry to my previous road bike (the Canyon Ultimate CF SL 9.0 Di2), it was metallic blue, was very classic looking with minimal branding (plus a waving kitten), and most importantly it came with high-quality Chris King parts (headset and bottom bracket). Also, it was possible to ask the Chris King parts in matte punch colour (a.k.a. pink). I bought the frame in October right after selling the Ultimate for a still very good price.

First I just wanted to put on the lightest possible components and some light and cheap HUNT wheels, but soon I made up my mind and decided that I will go for the maximum bling-factor, letting the costs and weight go a bit higher, but creating something that I can be fully satisfied with. This meant having wheels also built from scratch, using matching coloured Chris King hubs (that cost a fortune, and takes ages to have them delivered from the USA). At the end I went almost 50% over the initial price limit, but luckily it took me almost 3 months to get all the components, so it did not feel so bad after all. I had the wheel itself built up by the owner of Fietsen King, whom I already known from earlier (via biking, Instagram). (They also cut my fork at the end, but these were really the only things that were done by someone else than me.)

The easiest part of the puzzle was choosing the groupset: since all my other bikes have SRAM components, and I wanted the lightest option, there was no question that it will be SRAM Red 22. (Originally I was not going to put a power meter on, but then I could not resist so this purchase was further inflated by a SRAM Red DZero crankset).

Deciding about the chainring and cassette combination took a bit more time, but at the end I went for a 50/34 combined with a 11-30, since it gives the same easiest gear as the 52/36 & 11-32 on my Endurance (which I really appreciate on the steepest climbs), but it has a better coverage in the 30-32 km/h range (I don’t really like the big jump from 52/22 to 52/19 on the Endurance, here in the same range the jump from 50/21 to 50/19 is nicer, overall the spacing on the 11-30 cassette seems better to me than on the 11-32).

My tire choice is the quite unknown Continental Grand Prix Classic. Originally I just wanted something else than the Vittoria Corsa tires that everybody else is putting on their classic looking bikes, but then I also realised that the darker brown sidewalls of the GP Classic go really well with the matte punch and blue colour combination too.

I did not want to mess with my saddle so I stuck with the Fizik Arione (although went one level higher with the R1 model), and when your saddle is Fizik then your bartape needs to be Fizik too, where I went with the newly released Vento Solocush Tacky (after I noticed that my original choice – the Superlight – had white backing that was totally visible from the side…).

Picking out the handlebar, stem, seat post combo was a bit more nerve wrecking, mostly because (… long story short …) I am a way too difficult person. But seriously, I just wanted something relatively light, with matching looks, without visible branding. At the end I ended up with Zipp parts, and while I was considering Ritchey and Fizik part too, these were the cleanest looking ones thanks to the black on black branding (that is called beyond-black by Zipp). I went for carbon only for the handlebar, because a) I don’t like too much flex under my saddle and b) I wanted the same metallic black stem and seat post (but the extra comfort for the hands is welcome). A minor complication was that the first stem that I received had a minor scratch on it, so I had to get that exchanged…

The remaining small choices were the pedals (just picked the lightest Look pedals just like for my Endurance), the bottle cages (what else than the famous titanium King Cage), the headset spacers (matching Chris King ones), and the mount for my Wahoo BOLT (K-EDGE Aero Race Mount, simply because a metal mount goes better with a steel bike than the original plastic one).

I have a big (top secret) Excel (ok, Numbers since we are Mac users, at home at least) spreadsheet containing all the parts with their official weights, price, description, webstore-link, etc., so I know exactly how much the bike cost (ouch). Since weights reported by manufacturers are notoriously inaccurate, and/or do not include parts like cables, housing, the Chris King parts in the frameset, etc., I also measured everything by myself so I know the actual weight too very accurately (confirmed by total weight measurements just before cabling and at the end). The weight is 7762 grams without pedals, bottle cages, and the Wahoo mount (for people new to cycling, that is how people measure bike weights), while with everything included it is 8120 grams. For a steel bike this is quite nice, especially given that the wheels are not even near the lightest (you could easily gain another 300-400 grams there, but I preferred a more bomb-proof configuration), so I am quite satisfied.

Building the bike up was actually pretty easy, I got only delayed by a few things. First of all, the bolt of the front derailleur: the original SRAM bolt is a proprietary bolt that serves as a female part for the smaller bolt that fixes the chain catcher to the whole setup, but this bolt only works with SRAM derailleur clamps. Now SRAM clamps only come in 31.8 mm and 34.9 mm diameter, but my tubing diameter is 28.6 mm, so I have a custom clamp. Therefore I needed a new bolt, and a new chain catcher, which was all-in-one solved by simply buying a K-EDGE Chain Cather. Then there was the already mentioned incident with the original ugly-looking bar tape (the new one looks so much better, I am glad I did not stick with the original choice), and the fact that I managed to cut the last cable housing too short, and I ran out of cable housing so I needed to order a full set just for that. Also, while everything was quite easy with a multitude of manuals and YouTube videos online, guiding the cables in a symmetric and tidy way took quite some effort, but at the end I was very happy with the result.

While I will have to wait with the first ride of the bike until the weather gets considerably better (as I don’t want its first experience to be a salty water bath), it looks perfectly as I imagined, and that is already something. (I also sat in the saddle once and the position also felt good, but this is not surprising after the mentioned geometry-similarity with my earlier bike.) My only minor complaint is that I feel like that the shifter cable towards the rear derailleur is guided way too close (at the closest point there is less than 1 mm of clearance) to the chainstay, so I had to put cable donuts there too, but there is nothing I can do about that. I had a great few months planning and building this bike, I hope it will also be as nice to ride it on the road. All my cycling friends that own a steel bike speak super positive about their ride qualities, so I am sure it will be worth the wait.

The bike even got picked by the guys at the Global Cycling Network as a supernice bike! (Although this is not such a huge achievement, given what kind of bikes they give the supernice badge sometimes…)

Update after 4 rides with the bike: I am happy to report that the bike rides as good as it looks, I have totally fallen in love with it. Now I understand what people mean when they talk about the special ride quality of (modern) steel bikes. I was a bit afraid while building up the bike that I was spending way too much money on a fancy looking bike that I might not even want to ride that much, but that feeling is totally gone now. I even think that if I was allowed to keep only one of my bikes, then I would pick this one over the Canyon. I am also happy that after some small adjustments on the front derailleur, the chain catcher’s position, and the pre-load adjuster of the crankset during the first two rides, everything works super smooth and without any unwanted noise, so I must have done a good job assembling everything. (Of course now I don’t know which bike to take to France, so I will probably take both…)

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Memories from the past half year

Well, keeping this blog alive beyond the occasional holiday pictures and yearly sport summaries is getting more and more difficult. Still, simply for my records, I like to quickly flip through the memories from the past few months once in while. Because I might be lazy to write, but I still like to look back from time to time, and it feels better to do it here, than on any social media platform.

Soon after our holidays in Bretagne the Belgian team finished third on the football world cup, and it was really nice to experience the daily buzz that surrounded the team progressing through the tournament. Following the traditions we had a (super serious) competition at work about predicting the scores of the games (as we have a few others each and every year, e.g., for the cycling spring classics, and the Tour de France), where I managed to grab the prestigious first spot, meaning that I actually got my name on the coveted TML Cup! This was a much needed success after my horrendous performance surrounding the spring classics…

We have been to Budapest for a week as usual, Clio got her annual portion of kürtőskalács, I read an actual book (the “new” Dan Brown, which was not as much of a let down as the previous one), and my parents were happy to just have us around. On one of the evenings I met up with a bunch of old classmates from high school, most of whom I have not seen for at least ten years.

Motivated by last year’s success (and by the fact that our team was short of one person) I rode two shifts during the annual 12 hours of Zolder again, but this time I must have been lucky because my shifts were not super fast at all, therefore I had no difficulty what so ever riding in the bunch, or even coming to the front a few times. (I did it only for the pictures.) I don’t even remember our final position, but it was fun and that is all what matters.

Then early September (but still in full-blown summer) we had a long weekend in the Bütgenbacher Hof in the Oostkantons, with two delicious gastronomical dinners, some walking, and a nice bike ride (where Clio joined me for the last 50 kilometres along the Vennbahn, motivated by the promise of delicious waffles, that were served at halfway point from an old train carriage). This was not my last ride in the Oostkantons, I went back once alone and once with Steven later during the sunny and warm early autumn that we had in 2018. These were some great days in the saddle.

Thanks to friendships that I made while biking, I participated in a guided tour of the Jewish quarter in Antwerp, which was really interesting. Then summer sadly ended somewhere around the last week of October, so the time of Playstation (Red Dead Redemption 2, and of course lots of FIFA 19) and Netflix arrived (Master of None Season 2 – I loved this so much I can not recommend it enough -, then just recently Sex Education was also quite nice). Liverpool is on top of the Premier League at the moment, and while it is way too early to say (especially when you are a Liverpool supporter), but maybe this season will be the one, if they manage to perform as they did so far…

Even with the less pleasant weather I kept biking, usually either before or after work (and once in the weekend), often in the dark, even in freezing temperatures (with a new negative record of -8°C). But being in shape payed off of course during the Festive 500, or last weekend when I joined a group of people for a beautiful sunny ride across (the occasionally snow covered) the Dutch Limburg and the Voerstreek. Still, it has been a few years since I have been so inactive in January :( The weather has not been that great lately, we had a lot of rain, even some snow, and my bike had to be serviced too (trashed bearings in the wheels, meaning that for the first time I actually took my bike to the Canyon service centre).

In the meantime I have been busy with work (but mostly good busy), and ordering bike parts/building up the new steel bike. More about the bike in the next post (hopefully very soon, as it is basically almost completely finished). Speaking of work, I am still very happy at TML (and I talked about this in a 20 minute presentation in front of a hundred PhD students and postdocs last week on a Career Talks event organised by the KU Leuven), I had some interesting projects this year, and in December I even did what I always wanted to do: work with data and plot it on a map. To be able to do this I learned using QGIS in a few days. QGIS is cool. I made so many cool plots that I could not stop smiling about them. (Below you can see a visualisation of the area around Leuven using the digital elevation model of Flanders, and also a slightly arbitrarily scaled map showing the population density in Belgium on a statistical sector level.)

I was also deeply incolved in a project called Telraam, this will be a network of low-cost high-precision traffic counters, and my job was writing the actual script that runs on the Raspberry Pi units, doing the image recognition, tracking, and counting of different objects. I also did the initial work on the object classification and visualisation part. Unluckily we have no windows looking at the street, so I have no unit at home :( (Below is the average traffic from a few weekdays in a street that is one-way for cars)

We had a nice and calm holiday season, with three delicious dinners in the city (and zero unnecessary presents), and a Harry Potter movie marathon. Filou still knows how to behave around the Christmas tree, but he is probably the best behaved cat ever. Now it has been more than a year that he is living with us, and he comes to sit/cuddle with us (mostly me) in the couch every day. I am pretty sure Clio is sometimes jealous of him :D

Let’s hope this year I will take more photos with a proper camera (especially since I just bought a Fijifilm X-T3), because 2018 was a low in that sense in the past decade.

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The year (2018) in cycling (and other sports)

2018 was the fourth year in a row that I managed to bike more than 10000 kilometres, but this was the first time that I finished the season with more than an average of 1000 km per month (my best months were September and October with 1340 km and 1329 km, while my worst were July and February with 628 km and 676 km). Therefore my best cycling-year ever is now 2018 with 12704 km (with a not even small margin of 1374 km – 10.8% – over 2017). For the first time ever I broke the 100000 meter elevation gain limit too.

As usual I had no real plans for the year, but I still managed to make it somewhat special. First of all, I had quite a few nice rides in the Ardennes (and the Eifel, once even Clio joined me for a while along the Vennbahn), maybe not as many as I wanted, but still much more than the previous years. I hope to continue this trend in 2019 too, because I know the roads around Leuven way too well (and as I get ~~older~~ more experienced I seem to tolerate the crap infrastructure and the intolerant drivers of Flanders less and less). Furthermore, I had a really enjoyable (except maybe for that crazy thunderstorm with hail) cycling holiday in France with a small group of friends, and I also took the bike along to Bretagne where I made three nice morning rides (to make up for all those pancakes which we ate with Clio). Thanks to these non-local rides, I have ridden more on previously unseen roads than ever before. My biggest achievement this year was biking to the highest point of Belgium and the highest point of the Netherlands alone, which is now my longest solo ride with 306 km and 3057 m elevation gain (and by duration also my longest ride – including group rides too – with 11 hours and 32 minutes). Finally, my latest achievement is completing the Rapha Festive 500 in five consecutive days (I did it in 6 non-consecutive days back in 2015), being amongst the first thousand people who have crossed the threshold :)

The raw numbers for my cycling – without the daily commutes of course – in 2017:

Total distance: 12704 km
Total elevation gain: 101385 m
Total time: 460 h 31 m
Activity count: 192 (over 155 days*, just like in 2017)
Average speed: 27.6 km/h
Average heart rate: I stopped wearing a HR strap, I only look at power now.
Average cadence: 87.5 rpm (but I have no sensor on my cross bike)
Average temperature: 13.2°C (coldest: December with 1.9°C, hottest: July with 22.4°C)
Total calories burned on the bike: 302730 cal

*Starting from the last days of July there were a lot of days when I did my training rides immediately before and/or after work, and on those days I rode my race bike also to work to save time, therefore creating days with two activities (of which one was most of the time less than 5 kilometres).

And now it is time to look at some maps and figures. Let’s start with the maps of cycling I have done this year. The first figures show the location and (for Belgium and the area of Leuven on a separate zoomed-in map) heat-map of my rides.

Out of the 155 active days, I rode solo most of the time: only on 44 days was I riding with at least one other person. As usual, most of the time that was Willem (22 rides, and a total time of 2.9 days), or Hao (17 rides, 2.4 days). The distribution of these non-solo rides over the year can be seen below.

The next one is a summary table (click for legible size) of the bikes I have been riding during the year. I used the new Endurance and the old Ultimate parallel until I sold the latter early October (to make space for a new custom built steel bike that I am working on right now).

Here are the graphs showing the yearly evolution of my cycling distance, time, and elevation gain compared to the previous years.

New this year are some monthly figures, because the more the merrier, right? So below you will find the monthly totals and averages for distance, elevation gain, activity time, average steepness (meters climbed each kilometre on average), and average temperature.

My non-cycling activities reached a long-time low, with only a tiny bit of hiking (17 km), and kayaking (4 km), so this is the first time since 2012 that I did not run at all (and I did not miss it to be honest). Here is the usual summary figure (including all activities) from VeloViewer.

Finally, here is an overview of the evolution of the total activity time (also an all-time record with 465 hours), and its distribution across the calendar throughout the years.

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The longest lunar eclipse of the century

The longest lunar eclipse of the 21st century was a good occasion/motivation for me to do a bit of astrophotography again (after my wide-field adventures on La Palma last year). I wanted to take some close-up pictures of the Moon, so I bought a relatively inexpensive and compact 1000 mm f/10 Maksutov Telescope (from TS-Optics). My Sky-Watcher Sky Adventurer mount could still take the combined weight of this and my Canon EOS 6D camera, but my old Manfrotto tripod proved to be not exactly as stable as hoped for at this focal length… Of course I did not notice this during my test shots a few nights before the eclipse, because back then there was no wind at all, but later during the eclipse itself the vibrations caused by gusts were quite a bit of a problem.

The day of the eclipse was the hottest day of summer so far (although today might have broken that record), but also the last day of a heatwave, and as such, storms were closing in on the low countries from France during the afternoon. Looking at the satellite pictures and the weather models I was pretty sure that it would not stay clear in Leuven, so we got into the car and drove an hour (93 km) to the East – away from the storms – and set up the equipment on the Southern flanks of the Fort d’Aubin-Neufchâteau (which I scouted on Google Maps making sure that the view towards the Southeast would be more-or-less unobscured, as during the eclipse the Moon would stay quite close to the horizon).

The moon rose already fully submerged inside the shadow of the Earth, so it was very difficult to spot it in front of the bright background of the evening twilight. By the time I found Polaris (and aligned the tracking mount to be able to follow the movement of the Moon during longer exposures), the eclipse was just past its maximal phase.

As mentioned earlier, it became clear already during the initial setup (while focusing on the rings of Saturn), that my tripod was not strong enough to hold the whole system perfectly stable against the wind, so my strategy during the eclipse was the following: I kept taking pictures basically continuously hoping that there would be at least a few during which the wind would be weak or constant enough to not move the tripod too much, so with some luck I would get a few good-enough photographs at the end. This worked out as expected (with Clio’s not small contribution as a paravent), so the expedition became a total success :) The settings I used during the totality: ISO 3200, 2.5-2 sec. Settings in the partial phase: ISO 800-1600, 1/60-2 sec.

We stayed almost until the end of the partial phase, but by midnight the clouds reached us, so we had to pack in and drive home. It was still almost 30°C when we left…

Overall I am satisfied with the results, of course with a bigger budget I could have made better images. While I really like astrophotography, living in one of the most light polluted places means that I do not feel like investing a lot of money into another expensive hobby (right now). As a bonus, here is the first test shot I made a quarter before the eclipse.

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Holidays in Bretagne

We spent the second week of our holidays this year in Bretagne. On the way there we stopped for a walk at the cliffs of Étretat, at Omaha-beach and the American Cemetery, and at Mont Saint-Michel. (Honourable mention to the steep bridges of Le Havre along the A29, they were pretty cool to drive over.)

After the slightly busier schedule of the first weekend we had a much more relaxed time in and near our AirBnB apartment on Île-Grande. Since I also took my (older) road bike with me, I went cycling on three mornings, but otherwise we spent our days walking around on nearby beaches (around our island, along the Pink Granite Coast of Saint-Guirec, the white beach of Trestrignel, the rugged coastline north of Plougrescant, and the tiny and beautiful bay of Pont Roux), or eating pancakes and galettes (and Clio got her share of seafood too).

The weather was also nice, we had rain only once, and the temperature definitely felt much warmer every day than the lies of the weather forecast, so we were positively surprised. The coasts were all beautiful and not at all too busy, the pancakes were delicious everywhere (especially at the small bar just 5 minutes walking from our place), and finally we really managed to have a not too exhausting holiday :)

I even managed to just play some Celeste on the Nintendo Switch, or watch the Belgian football team (without constantly hanging on social media) make it past the Japanese and Brazilian team to reach the semi-final of the World Cup. On the last day we went sea kayaking, so for the first time in my life I got to wear a wetsuit.

I definitely need more holidays like this one.

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