Tour 2026 - The Preamble
A New Tour:
When I left you, last year, I knew that my summers will now be consumed by touring. This is me saving my own future. The physical demands on a person my size are extreme and so it’s helped me to return back to cardiac health, and to feel strong again. Having this to look forward to every summer is a positive pressure to get up off my ass and keep doing, even if I’m never anything but a “fat-lete” as my mother would say.
Over this year a found out I genuinely am strong after last year’s tour. My resting heart rate rebounded quickly after getting back into cycling and is sitting at an athletic 56-58. My capacity to put out high levels of power for long periods was genuinely surprising to me.
More than anything I need to continue to do this because I want to be around as long as I can for my wife and my kids.
This year has been exceptionally tough. I lost my father in November and then my Mother in February, one expected, the other sudden and absolutely gutting. Even tonight I found myself tearing up thinking “Oh I should call mom” as I often did in years past. But I can’t.
I’ll never hear her pep talks, or “real shit” talks again. I’ll never hear her say “you just don’t understand” when I would frustrate her. But I know she would tell me to “keep it up fuzzball”.
Anyway… I’m rambling.
Necessary Upgrades:
Last year was a tour punctuated by equipment failures. Particularly the failure of my back wheel to hold up the stress demands.
I hope that’s been remediated, as I had an extremely experienced ebike builder retrofit the broken wheel. So far after about 160 miles of operation every spoke plucks with audible tension and we’ve certainly sorted the biggest issue: the angle at which tension was stressing the heads of the spokes.
This new wheel is as bulletproof as can be made for what we had to work with. That may sound like I’m not confident, but I’m quite confident under normal use the wheel will hold. The problem is that Tours often provide abnormal conditions. My first tour I broke a 48 spoke wheel on a pothole — which is an impressive feat given that wheel could probably have held up a car with ease.
This year I’ve pulled off a lot of the weight into a purpose built trailer. No longer am I using a modified kids trailer to haul equipment, now I have a genuine touring trailer.
Not only that I’ve retrofitted the bike so that within the trailer there is a battery pack I built from two equally sized batteries joined together with fuses. They are in a water sealed container in an effort to stave off the other major failure I had: water intrusion into my battery that caused it to fail.
During last year’s tour I solved the same issue by sealing a new battery into the frame using butyl rubber — and that worked great, but the experience of constantly having to worry about battery charge levels was not something I look to repeat. So overall now I have 3x the battery capacity with an estimated range of 90-140mi per charge.
Above that I have the ability to charge this main trailer pack at 4 times the rate I could recharge my original battery, using a 12 amp charger to do so. I can recharge most of the capacity in an hour or two at most. This gives me a huge amount of flexibility.
Another important upgrade was one to the drivetrain: I went from a 1x7 speed drivetrain which had a lowest gearing of 48:36 ( 1.33 ) to a lowest gearing of 30:46 ( 0.66 ), which gives a HUGE amount of climbing ability. All this on a 2x9 speed system so shifting is smoother with more options. Admittedly the front sproket is a manual switch, but that’s there for the genuinely hard stuff.
To date I’ve tested all the parts, but like most projects they all tend to come togther right as you really need them. So Today was the first true test of a fully loaded system — 560ish pounds of moving mass.
Which leads to the last upgrade: high quality brakes. I went from crappy tektro dual piston brakes on 180mm rotors to quad piston Magura on the front with a thick 203mm rotor for extra heat absorption and braking power. On the back I upgraded to a magura two piston as 70-80% of all braking power is in the front wheel.
Updates to come:
I’ll have some time to really write up what today’s adventures were, but it’s 10pm, and I got a very late start today. So I’ll likely combine Day 1 and Day 2 tomorrow into one posting.