Thursday, January 18, 2007

Chain stay challenged

Haven't had a chance to get it out on the trails but it's built. Tonight will be it's maiden voyage. Pretty stoked to have the opportunity to buy a new trail rig this season...pushing around this welter-weight might even be good training for enduro's.
I have noticed a couple oddities with the frame as I assembled it the other night. Thought it was me, or the way I was looking at things. Maybe a bit slanted... It was late, I was beat so I put down the wrench and went to bed...woke up this morning to have another look at a possible clearance issue with the chainstay.
The remedy came with 2.35 tires but the bike was designed to fit a bigger tire.
This is where the problem lies...on the drive side the tire has only an eighth of an inch of clearance but on the non-drive side the clearance is three quarters of an inch? I removed the tire and put the wheel in my true stand to hopefully find that the wheel was just out of dish but it's balls on...? Weird. Maybe I am simply chain-stay challenged?...my Igleheart had some clearance issues last year...but that has been corrected with some new wider stays (that bike will be off to paint today and should be back in two or three weeks) I'm pretty confident that Trek will come up with a fix for the problem. Till then I'll run a 2.1 tire out back and wait for a new stay...hell if my local custom frame builder can correct a similar dilemma than Trek should have no problem...right?

Update:
New wheel and tire mounted (George you should recognize both. It's YOUR mavic XL and specialized eduro 2.4) and the tire is almost hitting on the non drive side. Wheel is perfectly dished. I'll just run a 2.1 and hopefully trek will address the issue at some point. I don't plan on hounding them as a 2.1 or 2.25 is fat enough for trail riding but when Highland opens back up I want to have s'more meat on the bottom...I need all the help I can get to keep up with Greely :) It may take them sometime to revise the chain stay but doubt they'll ignore the limitation.


4 comments:

jeff said...

did you slap another wheel in there and see if it had same issue?

Bill said...

Could the chainstays be too short?

Bring it by when you can I want to see it in person.

wraith said...

looks like the pivot is offset to the wrong side or the pivot is in backward. The non-drive side has a scace between the yoke and main frame and the driveside has no space. Also ther is plenty of space between the stay and the rings.

Andy, R&D said...

ok, so I think I know what's going on with the rear end...I believe it's an allignment problem with the drop-outs.
I took into consideration your (Daren's) backwards pivot therory. I removed the shock this morning and cycled the syspension. It is smooth as jeff's freshly shaven legs ;} so that leads me to believe the spacing of the top pivot is perfectly alligned with the main pivot.
So then I simply loosened the skewer and centered the wheel and tightened the skewer. When the wheel is centered in the chainstays and seatstays it doesn't bottom out in both drop-outs.

I'm going to bring it by Igleheart's shop later and have him put his allignment gauge on the frame.