New Ride: Traitor Wander

I've been on a bike buying binge this fall. I spent most of the summer selling bikes: the Raleigh Pardner went to Indianapolis, the Raleigh Kodiak went back to Raleigh, the Rockhopper became a winter beater for a local, and my old Raleigh Technium is hanging from the garage rafters, waiting in vain for another Technium fan. At one point this year, I was down to just two bikes: my Karate Monkey and my Black Mountain Monstercross.

Of course, that situation couldn't last. As mentioned in my previous post, I picked up a Niner ROS9 to handle my hard charging mountain biking duties, and now the KM is back to its normal rigid and single lifestyle. For a while, I ran my BMC as my city/camping bike, but that didn't take. I like to have a lightly loaded road bike for solo rides, and something good for running errands: upright position, racks and fenders and baskets, that I don't mind banging on bike racks.

Which brings us to my latest buy, a Traitor Wander frameset.

Traitor bills this as a touring type bike, built around a modern semi-compact geometry and disc brakes. My build leans more towards an upright city bike:

Niner ROS9 First Ride

After I returned the Raleigh Kodiak, my bike fund was again flush. Temporarily. I came across a reasonably priced Niner ROS9 frame on ebay. I was actually looking for another SIR9 for a another 650B+ conversion--I kind of miss my previous one--but I figured the ROS9 will let me do the same thing while trying a more modern geometry package.

Plus, it was purple, had a huge head tube, and came with a dropper post. All good.

My build got off to a slow start. There were two change points that had me worried going in: my rear wheel had to be converted from quick release to through axle, and I had to increase my fork's travel from 100mm to 120mm. The wheel change turned out to be dead easy, taking less than five minutes. The fork travel change, on the other hand...  I remember some Rock Shox forks used to have a U turn knob to change your travel. Super easy to adjust. But probably to save cost and weight, X fusion relies on a spacer on the spring shaft to control travel. Taking the fork apart to get to the spacer was straightforward, though I had to order a $9 special tool from ebay. But the spacer was held in by a pressed in pin. I ended up using my friend Marc's drill press as a press to drive out the pin, using a nail I had modified into a press pin. I didn't have the spring shaft well supported while I was pressing the pin out, so I bent it slightly during the operation. Doh. I did successfully get the pin out, and then bent the shaft back as straight as I could. I adjusted the spacer and pressed the pin back in with a bench vise.

I put it all together, and... it seems to work. Nothing blew up or leaked or acted weird in my first loop at Chestnut Ridge, and I'm getting about 110mm of travel: