Ben's Rad Maruishi

 I hung out with a bud today while he readied his early 80's Maruishi Mountace MT18 for an upcoming tour. He got the bike as a frame/fork and did a nice job building it up with a bit of a Rivy style. Looks good to me. This frame has the semi dreaded 21.1mm stem/fork but Ben managed to find a nice Nitto stem for the job. I poked around a bit and it seems that Maruishi is still around and that they rebranded at some point for the US market and sold as Jamis. The bike is lugged and well made. Closer examination of the lugs and other details makes me wonder if Maruishi (or whoever made bikes for Maruishi) also made my 84 Bianchi Grizzly. The lugs/fork crown/cable stop/braze ons seem to be the same on the two bikes. The fork crown is no suprise because many Japanese bikes of that era used the same fake bi-plane crown but the other details really make me wonder. Whatever the case it's a cool bike with some unique details.

Just a better shot of the fast back style stay attachment.

Double dimple

Bad pic here but these babies were crazy long. I measured the chainstays at 480mm.

Nice long horizontal dropout.

And for reference the rack mount and cable stop on the Grizz.

more grizz

more grizz

I'm not dead

 It's been a while old blog buds, but I'm not dead. I've been using instagram more these days for quick ride pics, which you can find at macadamian devil. Below I've got a few pics some recent tinkering projects and such.

Actually this has nothing to do with me except that I use it. It's the most recent iteration of the Superpac made by my bud Mark at Heavy bags. I use this thing on every ride. I had to go without one of these bags for a while recently and was lost when trying to pack everything I needed for an all day adventure. This version has the improved feature of having the main strap pass behind the side pockets keeping everything pretty accessable.  Mark also updated and beefed up the seat post strap and made it so that multiple straps could be used, great for when you take your rigid bike down a real kidney jiggler.

 Also, Tamar's bike was in the shop recently and I got the chance to take a pic of this radical Nitto stem. Too cool.

 These are kinda lame pics of something that I'm pretty pumped about. A couple of months back I got this new old bike and put an old campy 8 speed mirage kit on it. The new frame felt great but the campy cassette was a bummer; geared too high with a max low of 26t. I had heard that there were folks who used campy shifters and shimano cassettes but had never tried it myself. Turns out that Campy 8speed cassettes have the same cog spacing as shimano 7 speed. So I laced up a shimano 105 hub I had sitting around to a nice polished sun cr18, popped a spacer and Sram 7speed 12-32t cassette on, and voila Shimergo! It works nearly as well as the original, and might be perfect if I had the derailleur hanger in more perfect alignment.

 I also got a generator hub for my wifes bike recently and tried my hand at making a dyno powered light. With help from fellow Dirt Owl Nick I got this funky old LED fashlight to work as a dyno light. I have a few little snags to work out before it's done but here are some progress shots.