I headed off into town last night to chat to Evans Cycles about having the butterflies fitted. There is no way I am going within a mile of AW Cycles with the intention of discussing arranging for the bars to be changed by them; they have made their opinions very clear on the subject and I have discussed why I disagree with them at length on here before. The deed is done and they are bought! It seems only reasonable and fair that I give my custom to a shop that actually helped me along the way rather than implied I was just being a novice idiot (I can feel my blood pressure rising as I type). It is time for Reggie to be wrenched from his midwife and put in the hands of a consultant pediatrician (warning: the medical metaphor continues in the last paragraph…)

Clearly Friday nights are the best time to visit bike shops as it was deserted. I looked around for the chap who I had chatted with a couple of weeks ago but he wasn’t there and I ended up in conversation with another one of the assistants. I was a little apprehensive that he may have tutted and taken sharp intakes of breath in an AW Cycles manner but he didn’t; just like his colleague had done previously, he checked a few details on the computer, looked at the specifications of Reggie Ridgeback, discussed with the grease monkies behind the shaded glass panel at the end of the shop and then headed off to search for suitable boxes. I must have been on good form and given him the impression that I knew what I was talking about as it was only after having found all the bits and pieces that I needed that he realised that I wasn’t going to be doing the work myself! We decided upon the Shimano M770 XT 9-Speed Rapidfire Shifters (I think)…. as I would like to replace good quality with good quality and will hopefully be able to recoup some of the cost on flogging off the Shimano Tiagra ones that are currently fitted to the bike (which, I’ve just discovered, cost about £200 new – bloody hell!). That’s a sentence that I never thought I would write but am proud to have created; perhaps I should be saving a few quid and fit them myself! But no – this is a job for the pros. We weren’t sure whether it would be necessary to change the stem or not (the stem btw is the horizontal bar that attaches the handlebars to the frame). I suspect it will need changing as the clamp at the handlebar end of things looks too big. The Yuma Modolos are 1 inch wide – a standard fitting apparently – but the clamp isn’t (it’s more like an inch and a quarter).

So Reggie is booked in for his (bicycle) facial next Wednesday. I will leave him down there on Tuesday evening and pick him up 24 hours later once he has come round from the anesthetic. I am about to enter the premier league of long-distance cyclists; I am about to have a customised bike (of sorts). 🙂