New DeSalvo Road bike...

Hello people of earth and beyond.

I have taken countless hours today rebuilding and tuning my DeSalvo road bike instead of riding since it was too cold. Instead, I brushed the dust and cat litter off the rollers and watched Old School until the point where Frank the Tank is in the Trust tree and talking about really cool new underwear that he doesn't even know about.

Now I am making a permanent, and devastatingly important mark on the world wide web with this great post about some used road bike. This is what a sad Japanese man does on an exciting Saturday night. There is nothing sadder than a sad Japanese man.

But I digress.












A little history. I had Mike at DeSalvo Custom cycles build me this frame about a year after I had the cross frameset built. I really like his work and I am very glad I was able to order a road frame from him.

I bought this maybe back in 2004. It is hard for me to remember now. The geometry/graphics design work is another Brewer/Katsumi collaboration. One would not believe how many countless hours (Precious Graduate Student Research Hours) were wasted at Q-level discussing the merits of a masked decal, over a cup of double espresso. The graphics are totally trick. The colors are dark metallic blue, light metallic blue panels, and masked logos. In hindsight, I think the bike would have looked even better if I had used the light blue as the main color and the dark blue for the panels. The tubing is Columbus Zona steel, and the seatstay and the chainstay are ovalized and shaped, and the downtube is what Columbus calls MegaDowntube, translation, super heavy but super stiff. The fork is 1.125 inch and have panels too!
























I come from riding a really stiff, and race rocket-C-dale. I loved that machine for its efficiency, but after a 2 hour ride, my hands were totally numb, and I thought it was a really ugly looking bike. On the other hand, this bike is about 2 pounds heavier at around 20 lbs., but it feel really smooth, possibly because the micro as well as the macro vibrations enter the two pound fork, never to be seen again. I think this bike would look so trick with some deep dish carbon wheels. I hope to be very good to this bike and not leave it out in the elements.

I took the parts off the Hampsten Mudpig and put it on the road DeSalvo. The cross DeSalvo is somewhere in the basement but missing a seat and post.