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Urgent DI2 advice needed

MattAaronsonMattAaronson
in General Training Discussions
I decided to enter an Olympic-distance tri tomorrow. This was an 11th hour decision so my equipment isn't sorted.

I converted my bike to 11-spd DI2 recently and it turns out my Zipp 900 clincher disc isn't upgradable. I will see if my dad's wheel cover fits on my Mavic training wheel but the training wheel isn't a powertap hub so I suspect the wheel cover will have an odd hole where the PT hub is supposed to poke out.

I still have the 10-spd rear derailleur...would it work to put it on my bike and use my 10-spd disc and cassette? The chain and rest of the system is all 11-spd.

Other ideas???

Comments

  • Al TruscottAl Truscott

    Can you just use your dad's bike instead of trying to jury rig something - you guys are about the same size, right?

  • MattAaronsonMattAaronson
    Actually he's taller than me!!! Also, frankly, my bike is much faster than his even with an open wheel and chattering gears!!!!!!!!
  • John WithrowJohn Withrow
    Have you tried just putting your disc on with the 10-spd cassette. You can probably set the limit screw so it doesn't jump off the end. Might not shift perfectly, but if you can get 5 or 6 good gears at the end, probably good enough to survive hammering an OLY for an hour...?

    Otherwise just use your training wheel on the rear with no cover. That'll likely only cost you a minute so you'll need to just run faster...
  • John WithrowJohn Withrow
    Won't be perfect, but you can make that disc cover work even with the bigger center hole...
  • MattAaronsonMattAaronson

    Posted By John Withrow on 20 Jun 2015 11:39 AM



    Won't be perfect, but you can make that disc cover work even with the bigger center hole...
    I think I'll go that route. I need to get the bike back this afternoon and see how it fits. The other issue is I don't know if the diameter is correct since the cover is for a HED Belgium wheel and my training wheel is a Mavic. I'm hoping it fits ok. I did order up a brand new Zipp Super 9 that my LBS was somehow able to get for $1,100 (MSRP $2399 I think) but there wasn't time for it to arrive before this race.



  • Bruce ThompsonBruce Thompson
    So...what did you go with, and how was the race?
  • MattAaronsonMattAaronson
    Thanks all for the input. I went with my dad's wheelcover although I needed to trim the part behind the cassette a bit to allow it to rotate. It scraped when coasting but I figure if I'm coasting then I shouldn't be anyway!!

    It turns out however that I had other equipment issues that were more problematic...I put on a cassette with tighter spacing (11-23 instead of the 11-25 I user for training) and something was screwed up because the shifting wasn't clean and the gears were jumping around and missing cogs - so much for the value of tighter spacing, eh? I guess I should have trimmed it but I didn't know how to do that. Then at ~18km the DI2 just failed and left me in 52/14 for the rest of the race. My cadence went from a rock-solid 90 to wildly-fluctuating from 110+ on the downhills to 65 on the uphills grinding out of the saddle. Actually I spent a LOT of time out of the saddle as a result of the gear failure. That said, I managed the 3rd-fastest bike split of 534 competitors and about 25mph (but not the sub-60' split I wanted because the course was long, bummer). I followed up with a 40:17 run split with the last quarter mile 5:50 pace and lots of gas in the tank. The swim was predictably poor at 30' but I finished 2nd AG and 9/534 OA. The guy who beat me swam 7 minutes faster and only beat me by just over a minute overall.

    I'll post a race report later.
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