Further to yesterdays post, Im still feeling indignant about this bike:It just seems to me they basically retrofitted a disc brake road bike to work with rim brakes, which is a rather roundabout way of going about things when the rim brake bike had already been more or less perfected.I mean couldnt they have consulted a company with with rim brake road bike fabrication expertise likeFirefly?[Liberated from here.]Like, couldnt they have just made that but with medium-reach brakes?I know, too easy. Also, objectively, of course I get it: whats the point of being a custom bike company if you dont dream up and build hot rod bike projects every now and again? Its just that, as the self-appointed President of the Rim Brake Road Bike Preservation Society, it offended my brittle sensibilities, thats all.Also further to yesterdays post, I included this photo in it:[They made me wear those clothes, Id never have chosen themand yet I kept them and wear them regularly, because they were free. As for the facial hair, I have no excuse for that. Same goes for the leg hair.]I enjoyed riding that old hunk of plastic way more than I thought I would, and even though I returned it to Classic Cycle over three years ago now, I still think about it sometimesthough I never think of asking for it back and giving it the JBARA* treatment like this one got:*[Just Buy A Rivendell Already]I do like how they preserved the original Campagnolo hospital bed urine thingies:[Holy crap, Bens Cycle really does have everything Campy!]The Vengeance Bike actually had one, tooBut I removed it almost immediately because I was scared to drink out of it.Meanwhile, Ive been spending a lot of time on my own medium-reach brake road bike recently:Please note that what some of you have been mistaking for a bad fender line or an abysmal fender line or even a vomit-inducing fender line is in fact the result of many hours in the wind tunnel, and that this configuration actually improves air flow and minimizes turbulence.No, I just cant be botheredeven though it kind of bothers me, too. But it doesnt bother me quite as much as I cant be bothered. So I dont bother.As for the brakes, theyre Tektros:Not the prettiest, but they work perfectly well. The Shimano brakes I had on there before were a little nicer:But Bens sent the Tektros along with the new drivetrain I got from them last year, presumably because theyre similarly black and angular:The R7000 stuff is also not the prettiest (you could even call it ugly and I wouldnt argue with you), but it represents the very last mechanical-and-rim-brake road drivetrain from Shimano at the Dura-Ace/Ultegra/105 level and it works extremely well:In fact, you know that book OJ Simpson wrote, called If I Did It?Well, if I got a really nice road framelike dream bike material, say a Richard Sachsthe R7000 stuff works so well Id even consider putting it on there.But like the murder description in If I Did It, my obtaining a new Richard Sachs in addition to the one Im currently riding is merely a hypothetical scenario.Wow, that is eerie. The AI even came up with the subtitle by itself! However, I hope Joe Bell never sees that paint job, because if he does hell feel like Enrico Pallazzo watching Frank Drebin sing the National Anthem:And nobody should have to suffer through that.