Major Jake, ready for deployment...

So the Kona is finally done up right. As I said before, the cross rig now features sram rival 10spd drivetrain, paul's touring cantis, and tubular race wheels (though I only have one 10 spd cassette that is crossworthy, so these will basically be training and race wheels). As shown, comes in at 18lbs. Legit!!

The front end... featuring the extra brake levers that I have not used much since I've gotten used to being on the hoods / in the drops

Paul's brake calipers. Sexy.

They feel just as nice as they look. I promise this bike won't be clean in one weeks time... have two races next weekend...

The picture below shows an extra washer I had to put in so that the calipers would work properly. The problem was that with certain calipers, there was an inordinate amount of torsional friction, which would not even be compensated for with high spring tension (which would have felt weird anyway). So it took a few days, a phone call and a few emails with Paul himself to get to the bottom of it. Actually Paul didn't know what was wrong (hard without see it)... it took me taking the calipers apart numerous times to realize what was happening. What happened was that if you accidentally overtighten the bolt without holding the nut the caliper down on the post on the frame / fork, then the sleeve, which is slid on top of the post, is pushed onto the flats (further than it was designed to go) and therefore allows the spring mechanism to be squished. Now this could have been avoided if AlphaQ and Kona had made the flats on these parts larger than the shank of the post, but that would be hard to fix now.... so what I did was add an additional washer to make sure the caliper didn't push the sleeve up onto the flats. Might be easier to see what I mean...

For those of you who don't know what the heck is going on, then you might not realize how Paul's brakes work, which I didn't either before buying them. It is actually really cool - they do not use the typical tabs which lock the torsional spring into place (in fact I took them out on the fork). The springs are held between the caliper itself and the nut that the mount bolt goes through. A really cool design, that you really need to see to get your head around I think, and even then it took me a while to realize what was going wrong with my particular installation.

Yes, I'm a dork for making up that picture. Excuse me while I go spend my Saturday evening recovering from a 90mile road ride by coding matlab and watching the documentary "Who Killed the Electric Car".