Today I got my custom Fred Bar from Erik and I couldn't help but head straight to the garage to play around. I have had Tour Divide on the brain for several weeks now. I still think about some other things but it feels good to get excited about another kind of adventure. I've been reading tons of info, blogs, forums, etc. and this has been nice because I've even made some minor changes to how I intend to pack my gear this year. The undertaking for that route is going to be huge so I'm sure the head start on planning won't hurt. I feel pretty confident in my ability to pick the appropriate gear to bring along for a trip of that magnitude but the logistics truly do intimidate me. Many of the areas of the northern section are not an area to fool around in so you really wanna have your ducks in a row. My friend Marshal did his homework and I saw a lot of his handy work so I plan on asking him for help with making my own maps that show services, profiles, and cue sheets.
Because of the issues/pain I'm having with my neck, I have a whole lot of spacers under my stem right now and I'm still not happy. Going to a zero degree stem should raise the bars another 20mm so I should be able to remove some of the spacers. This is how the Fred-like bar should mount.
I was a bit surprised when I stepped back to look at how high this thing put the aero bars. But...it's only because of how high I have to run my flat bars now.
Then I installed the aero bars on the flat bars. This time they felt just a touch too low.
This is with the pads spaced out about 10mm higher with some Lexan spacers and longer bolts. This felt good for the few seconds I sat on it. Just the fit aspect of setting up a bike for something like Tour Divide is really going to be a process.
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