If 6 was 9

Finally got my carbon 29er fork from ebay(3 weeks later!) and got a new cane creek headset as the old one was pieced together from my slavaged trek 4300(picture loose ball bearings shooting all over the place). This idea was orinally put on the table after finishing my first project bike(HT Gary Fisher Race-ready), alas that bike was stolen just a few weeks later and I now needed a race bike for the Boulder STX series and thus some urgency was injected into the life of the SS 69'er project.

I got a deal on the frame from a friend it's a Small Santa Cruz Chameleon that came with Salsa cranks(36t). The Cockpit came from Jensonusa.com on sale, the fork from ebay(as noted above), the wheels came from University and Blue Sky Velo respectively. I am using a Surly Tuggnut chain tensioner and some SPD M545 pedals.

The first ride I took was up the Boulder Canyon Link trail, very steep technical but not too long, took 17mins to climb and it felt like the fastest I had ever done it. I have it geard 36/18 or 2:1 right now which makes some if the steep climbs here very difficult but it felt very fast on the flats. The bigger front tire is awesome it allows me to just plow over small obstacles without getting hung up like with a 26'er front wheel. All in all this bike climbed like a champ but how would it descend?

I knew I was going to get rattled coming down the trail but to my surprise it was much softer than I could have expected, the carbon fork really doesn an amazing job of damping the bumps and smoothing the trail out. So far I am happy with my fork choice. And it wasn't all that much slower than my FS rig.

This bike is freiggin sweet and will be seeing alot more miles over the next few weeks, First Boulder STX in the books, with Race 2 tomorrow and a Race report to follow, I swear.