General: Gunnar Rockhound has arrived!!!

Just got in today, unpackaged it, looks amazing!! Will post pics as soon as taken.

Just excited about it, thought I would share with you all!!!

Yes, here are a couple pics for everyone's enjoyment while I wait on a headset. the only thing holding me back right now!!!

I like that towel.

can i have that old rusty vice-grip?

Posted By: cyclecrazyjames

Posted By: Aaron Ccan i have that old rusty vice-grip?

Haha, I actually have a couple of those old vice grips, they work great, I can spare one if you really want it.

nah, thanks though. i've got four or five myself. i'm super jealous of that frame, i almost bought a complete gunnar recently on the old cl but i couldn't come up with the scratch in time...

Random question here... How hard is it to install disk brakes? I have been wanting to put some on my trek and I have seen some inexpensive disk assemblies online, but the lbs around the corner wants more then the disks are worth to install them...
Also is there anything to take into consideration with size specs?

Nice looking frame by the way - look forward to seeing it built.

Posted By: LyKqiDRandom question here... How hard is it to install disk brakes? I have been wanting to put some on my trek and I have seen some inexpensive disk assemblies online, but the lbs around the corner wants more then the disks are worth to install them...
Also is there anything to take into consideration with size specs?

Mountain or road? I'm going to assume mountain, as this thread is about the Rockhound. If you're talking about road, don't waste your time. Buy a bike with disc brakes standard. They're not worth adding because I don't think a road bike exists that has disc tabs standard without a set of disc brakes to go with them. You'll have to have a tab welded onto your frame and replace your fork.
Now then, on a mountain bike, if the frame and fork have disc tabs, cable actuated discs are only just a little more difficult than installing canti or linear calipers. I installed an Avid BB7 on my Dragon a few months ago by myself, never having so much as used a bike disc brake before. It took a little while, but it (the Avid BB5/7 series, at least) is pretty foolproof. They even have a step by step BB7 installation video on YouTube.
A hydraulic system is another story. I have a friend who is a downhill only mechanic and he spends the vast majority of his time making them shits work right. He says don't do it. Likewise if the frame doesn't have disc tabs, you're going to be spending a lot of money on something which will make a small difference in your ride quality.

As for sizes, I wouldn't go larger than a 160mm rotor on a 26" wheel. For 29" use 185. 203's are only for serious downhill riders.

What Ruff said is true, though. You'll also need a new wheelset unless your hubs are disc compatible.

older: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1kezXQVnLY
and
newer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLzw7c6oNiM

i thave got the same towel at my house. one of those stupid things you got to get while on vacation.

HI all, well I finally got my headset today. I got a chris king(1 1/8"), silver. Color didnt really matter, I just wanted to get a chris king for the first time, and well what better frame to put it on right. Im installing it tonight, along with the fork, bars, stem.

Pics for your enjoyment.

Current state of build:


New Headset:


Stem:


Bars:


Fork:


Brake levers:


Front brake(disc):

more more more!

These are the only seats I have to work with, I havent collected many seats.


So I will be on the lookout for probably a brooks for this build. If any of you mtb'ers are looking for a super good pair of AVID ti v-brakes, I can trade for a super good saddle, thanks.

Mechanical discs? How do they compare to hydraulic ones?

And a 10000000% bigger pain in the ass. You have to be a pretty serious rider to really take advantage of their strengths.

You can easily skid with avid bb7 mechanical discs with one finger on the lever. I guess with hydraulics you can skid with one pinky finger. Power is not much of an issue in that respect. The main difference is supposed to be modulation. Hydraulics make it easier to brake at the exact force that you want to, lets say 53% of the way between not braking at all and skidding. With mechanicals you might feel like your control is more like 10% then 20% and so on. Hydraulics are such a pain in the ass though.

James, what would you consider a super good saddle?

Thats pretty good!!

Bike is all built up, decided to go disc on the back this time, just have to make some minor adjustments, slapped a seat on for now. Thinking of upgrading the brakes as well, will post some pics when I take some.

Very bad pics going on here, I will take some tommorow after I go riding and wash it(will take some dirty though, will not disappoint). I still need to adjust the rear disc(buying hayes hydraulic though), also changing the chainring to a 32t or 33t but here you go for now!!

Posted By: suicide_doorsDamn skippy. Good thread.

Thanks man, means alot coming from you, haha!!! Im going to do one for my colnago to, that is if I keep it....

yes, yes they are, shows that you have done work, and work is good!!!

Posted By: carbon fiber15thats the nicest single speed ive seen in a while. good work.

Thanks alot!!!, going riding today, will take better pics today...

I had a similar issue this morning, where I couldn't upload pictures at 1024x768 and < 200kb. I dropped them down to 800x600, and was able to upload after doing so.

Posted By: cyclecrazyjamesOK, I am having serious troubles uploading my pics, I am resizing them, and they are meeting the requirements by far,

the first one Im trying to upload is 690 x 458, with a KB of 253, whats up, anyone?? and all the others are the same almost, but they wont up load??

How are you getting the 253KB number? That number may not be accurate; your photo may be over the 300KB limit without your being aware of it.

A lot of picture resizing applications give misleading numbers, which magnifies the problem that most computer users have no idea why the data size of a picture is what it is anyway. There's a difference between the actual physical size of a document and the amount of space it occupies on a hard drive/flash drive, which is determined by the block size of the formatting system the drive uses.

A disk partitioning and file system is a way of organizing files on a disk so that they can be located when the operating system needs them. I use the analogy of a library:

• The physical hard drive is the library building


• The formatting system is the girders around which the walls, ceiling and floor are built


• Each partition on the physical hard drive is a room in the library building


• The file system within each partition is the bookshelves in each room


• The data within the partition are the books on the bookshelves

The formatting system is a key thing to understand. If you think of your hard drive as a pizza (analogy time!), formatting is slicing the pizza into sectors small enough to pick up and shove down your gullet. Each sector is called, well, a "sector" or a "block", and each formatting system has a maximum number of blocks they can keep track of.

FYI, common formatting/filesystems are: FAT16/FAT32 (MSDOS, Windows), NTFS (Windows), HFS/HFS+ (Macintosh), UFS/ZFS (Unix).

Now, if you divide all pizzas into 16 pieces, then the bigger the pizza, the bigger each slice gets. But let's say that the rule is that you can only put one piece of pepperoni on each slice of pizza. In that case, it doesn't matter how big the pizza is; you still only get 16 slices of pepperoni, and the bigger the pizza gets, the more un-pepperonied pizza surface you get.

That's what happens with files on your hard drive. Each file has to occupy its own independent blocks, or else the data gets all scrambled up. For example, I've taken a screenshot of the file size of a text document I just created:



Notice the numbers. The document occupies 4MB; but there's only 3 bytes of actual data in it. That's because 4MB is the minimum block size under HFS+, the main Macintosh formatting system since 1997. I made this file on a 500GB hard drive; prior to HFS+, the same 3-byte text file would have taken up nearly 500KB, because HFS kept track of a much smaller number of blocks than HFS+. Instead of slicing the bigger pizza into more pieces, it would have just made each pizza slice much bigger.

But I don't really care about the pizza; I'm all about the pepperoni. And older file systems like HFS and FAT16 give you a lousy pepperoni-to-pizza ratio; there's a lot of wasted space.

ccj, it's possible that when you're using a resizing tool, that you're noticing the smaller size (the actual data size) instead of the larger size (the space the photo takes up on a disk). You need to be sure that you're always aiming low; the space on the disk is the one that actually counts.

An interesting note: Although the info screen I posted above was of a 3-bytes real, 4K diskspace document, the photo of that info screen is 42,354 real, 44KB disk. As a file gets big enough to go beyond the limits of one block, the filesystem gives it additional storage blocs. The 42+KB photo occupies all or part of 11 blocks. If I changed the photo to make it 43,390 bytes, it would still be 11 blocks. If it were 44,010 bytes, I'd slop over to the next block and take up 48KB on disk. The bigger a document is, the lower the percentage of "wasted" space. Also, photos take up way more space than text :-/

awesome build, thanks for sharing