Search results for:

I don't know how hard they are to buy, but PMP Carbon? PMP Titanium is the reference non-Campagnolo metal seat post for Campagnolo so I think the carbon variant could work nicely. The clamp has some side-facing circular silver hardware as well, which would match your stem.

The bike is almost done. I set up the drivetrain a few days ago and it mostly seems to be working quite well on the workstand. I initially had some concerns about how crunchy the drivetrain felt and had just chalked it up to a combination of large narrow-wide chain ring, large cassette, short (380 mm) chain stays and unfamiliarity with 1x until I realized that actually I'm an idiot and I'd put the chain on the wrong side of that plate in the derailleur cage. With things the right way around it functions a lot more like you'd hope. If there's one upside to that mistake, it's that in trying to mitigate the crunchiness I added a link to back to the chain relative to Shimano's recommendation, which makes 52/46 noticeably quieter where the chain engages with the narrow-wide teeth. The downside is that there are little particles of derailleur cage all throughout the drivetrain, so I will have to give everything a cycle in the ultrasonic cleaner. Overall though, I'm pretty satisfied with the function of the drivetrain considering how far outside of the designed parameters it is.

I believe the last things I have left to do are replacing the brake cable inners and applying adhesive wire management to the chain stay and the handlebars. Hopefully those things will arrive by the time the roads are dry of snow.

The brake cable routing on this frame is a little bit tortured, and that coupled with how sensitive Ciamillo brakes are to cable length meant that it took me ages to get the housing right. I think I've set them up basically correctly, but there are so many complaints on the internet about how fiddly (or straight up bad) these brakes are that I won't really know until I get to actually ride the bike outside. Mentally, I'm at peace with the idea that they may not be great at stopping the bike, because they look good and that's what counts.

You may notice that there are cable outers but no cable inners in the photos. This is because after I got everything dialed in, I torqued the cable clamping bolts to the 6 Nm specified by Ciamillo, which caused an alarming cracking noise when I was tightening the rear. I unscrewed the clamping bolt with a feeling of dread to discover that the sound was fortunately just caused by two of the strands of the cable being crushed and severed. I checked the front and it too was flattened, so I removed them and installed a spare set I had, which were crushed again.

Of course I looked into this to see if this is a common problem, and it's not - because the cable clamping bolts are supposed to have a washer on them that mine lack (thanks again to the bad person who sold me these brakes). They're 5 mm ID, 8 mm OD, which is a size that I don't have and that seems to be hard to buy, so I ended up destroying some stem bolts to harvest their captive washers, and then filing out their insides so that they'd fit over the threads of the cable clamping bolts.

What a pain.

As for the rest of the brake setup, the cables are Transfil Flying Snake, and the pads are Kool-Stop Salmon, which I am hoping will prolong the life of the braking surfaces of my sick death trap wheels.

I picked up these Ciamillo Negative GSLs via an eBay auction some years ago at what I thought was an excellent price until they arrived and I discovered quite a few issues. The most obvious and alarming was the condition of the spring nuts - notice the enormous crack down one of them, but also the fatigue causing the spring retaining lip to lift on the other, which is a problem that's present on both. Based on what I know now from disassembling and rebuilding these brakes, I'm pretty sure this damage was caused by severe overtightening, probably due to a lack of understanding of how centering works on these brakes. (It doesn't. There is no provision for centering.) Also, one of the barrel adjusters looks like an artfully weathered Warhammer piece and its locking ring is seized into place. It's hard for me to understand how somebody can treat their expensive boutique lightweight components this badly.

Last year I managed to scrounge up from the internet a pair of replacement spring nuts which, annoyingly, turned out to be slightly different - one glossy and one matte, with slight differences in internal geometry - because they were evidently made by Ted Ciamillo at different times. I kept them begrudgingly because parts for Ciamillo brakes are next to impossible to buy, but mounted on the bike I think the different surface finishes actually kind of work to mediate the transitions to the frameset.

Normally I'd have documented the process of breaking these brakes down, cleaning them, replacing the broken parts and reassembling it all, but honestly my hands were sore and covered in grease the entire time because it turned out to not be a straightforward task. Each caliper is assembled on the central bolt: you put on one arm and then the other and then the spring, and then the spring nut threads on to the bolt and holds it all together. I didn't know this when I started with the rear caliper - there isn't a lot of documentation for Ciamillo brakes out there - so when it was all still attached together even after I unscrewed the spring nut by breaking off the severely fatigued retaining lip with a pair of pliers, I didn't think too much of it. It wasn't until I disassembled the front caliper with ease that I realized that the problem with the rear was that the inner of the two arms was seized onto the central bolt.

I managed to get it undone with penetrating oil and more force than I was comfortable applying, after which I cleaned everything in the ultrasonic cleaner. Reassembling them was trickier than I imagined because it all has to be done against the spring tension, and the fit for the spring is very tight, but thanks to vise grips I was able to get everything together.

Athena is the last actually nice-looking silver groupset, but I imagine it'd be pretty hard to piece together now. Conceivably you could also try to find a less heinous crankset for silver Potenza or Centaur, although the black pieces interspersed throughout the other components are a bit disappointing.

Personally I think all black with deep carbon would be fine on this frame.

Two hours left on this NOS Colnago track fork.

Harsh but accurate.

We've come full circle - this is just an actual hybrid.

Power ATACs would be nice, but I don't love this on balance. Sram will control retail pricing much better than Time did as well.

Cable routing will look something like this, although better with heat shrink obviously. Unfortunately it looks like I could do with a 5 cm shorter wire from the shifter to the display.

@SWijland @spotter Thank you!

I designed and printed the aero extension battery holder last night. It worked out pretty well. Thanks again to @Five-Hats for the suggestion.

I'd love to see a drive-side photo of this.

Thanks for this suggestion. It's a much neater solution. Back to work!

You know, I never even thought of that. It does fit.

What I want to change about the above is the routing. When it's all connected up it looks a bit more, well, wiry than I envisioned. Part of this is certainly that the cable exits the steerer tube really high up and is thus really conspicuous; I left a ton of extra steerer just in case but I think I can safely trim an inch off. I am thinking of routing the wiring through the aero extensions, which conveniently already have cutouts for bar end shifter cables. The hole is right behind the display clamp, so I think it should look pretty neat. I'm also thinking about trying to figure out how to route the wire to the derailleur internally, but it might not be worth the effort and complexity given that if I leave it as is I can just heat shrink it to the brake cable and it will probably look fine.

The wire enters the frame where the down tube shifter bosses used to be and is held in place with these grommets that I'm quite pleased with. The geometry works with the layer lines and the gloss of the material to create a visual effect. You might say they are 'authentically digital'.

The one underneath the bottom bracket is less interesting, but who's looking there anyway?

The case has an inset rail on each side that is the size and shape of a large zip tie, with a cutout at the bottom to fit the head. The zip ties are there to provide something to pull on to remove the case from the steerer. I also made some custom one-inch spacers from CF-PETG, of which the top one has a cutout for the wire to exit. A TPU top cap mates securely with this and the inside of the steerer to seal everything up.

Just wanted to document this before I take it all apart to implement some different ideas that build on this.

The thing about building a Softride with Di2 that you don't really think about until after you've bought the Softride and the Di2 is where are you going to put the battery? I think the best answer is probably in the steerer. Shimano (via Pro) does make a kit to facilitate this, but as you can imagine it is not compatible with one-inch head tubes.

So I designed my own kit. It's printed out of TPU to provide some grip on the inside of the steerer and around the cable plug. It's not weather-sealed but it's probably close enough; the Pro kit doesn't provide any protection at all so I think it'll be fine. I intended the case to be held in place vertically by friction, but it turns out that the inside of the steerer tapers towards the bottom, so there isn't any risk of the battery falling out.

Titanium spacers on eBay tend to have 31.8 mm OD (check the listing description to be sure). I've purchased a couple of sets from different sellers and they've been fine, if a little bit inconsistent in tone.

Omniums are indeed 44.5 mm. For what it's worth, I ran mine fixed for years and never really had cause to think about the chain line. It's only now that I'm planning to run them 1x that I've measured mine and found that the chain line is as wide as it is.

Also, if you managed to get a new set, you should consider not returning them - they've gone up a lot in secondary market value since they were discontinued.

Which chain rings are you running? I found Stone and Garbaruk (not narrow-wide unfortunately) - what else is there?

Omniums are 44.5 mm, so I think it should work fine. At least I hope so - I'm also building a 1x bike with them.

I kind of want to see the full bike, but I also kind of don't.

I discovered that I don't actually need to drill a hole into the down tube: like some Cannondales from the mid-90s apparently, the shifter bosses, rather than being brazed on, are threaded into one another like a seat binder bolt. This means I was able to just unscrew them from the frame, conveniently leaving a 7.5 mm hole on either side of the down tube.

This is nice because I was starting to get a bit antsy about the potential long-term effects of drilling a large hole into 25-year-old aluminium. For this reason, I decided to not drill into the chain stay; instead, I enlarged the preexisting hole in the bottom bracket shell to create the exit point for the wire to the rear derailleur. I'll route the wire along the bottom of the stay and through the cable braze-on there, and then secure it in place with the external wiring kit that Shimano makes (electrical tape for now). I think it'll look fine, but if it doesn't, I can still revert to the initial plan of drilling the chain stay - all I'll have lost is the original BB cable guide mounting hole.

I will need to design and print some different Di2 wire grommets - I have the ones for 6 mm round holes and they won't fit the holes at either the down tube (too small) or the bottom bracket (too shallow).

I've mounted the new saddle, short stem and pleasingly enormous cassette now that all of these things have arrived. The 60 mm stem puts the elbow pads in the right place, but looking at it mounted now I actually kind of miss the appearance of the temporary silver stem - it matched the saddle clamp and provided lightness and visual comprehensibility to the front end. Unfortunately 60 mm only comes in black, but if it turns out I need to lengthen the stem again I will definitely go with silver. I also replaced the previous valve extensions with these better ones. The crankset is off because I've been considering my strategy for routing the Di2 wire.

Thanks for the kind words. This is how the Di2 display mount turned out in the end. It actually took me many, many iterations to get the fit right because the geometry of the underside of the display is just slightly irregular - things are at weird angles to one another and you can't really tell visually.

I managed to refine the form down quite a bit from the initial version. There are a couple of things I could continue to work on, but this will do for now - I have other things I need to model and print for this bike.

Unfortunately I didn't take any more photos of the ST-7800s before I sold them on, but the ultrasonic cleaning didn't do anything to help the scratches, if that's what you're curious about. What it did do was strip out all of the sludgy grease on the inside of the mechanism in places that I'd never be able to reach.