The Hardware - Cube Aerium

Behold - The Aerium.

This is one odd egg. This is a strict TT frame, with bladed seat stays, down tube, and head tube. The ride is quite smooth and very stable. This is a TT frame for road racers (as opposed to tri-geeks). I got it wicked cheap, second hand, from someone who bought it from the Mavic truck at the annual Pedro's sale a couple of years ago.

It was a bitch to set up. The big problem was the headset. It is a massive 1 1/2 inches, which may help with the stability. Where the big issue cropped up was that I have an old Easton EC90 for that I wanted to use, with a 1" steerer. So I have to find an adapter to go from 1 to 1 1/8, since I couldn't find a headset that that reduced from 1 1/2 to 1.


The other challenge was the seat post, a mere 30.8 mm. Sorry, I didn't happen to have one of those laying around.

Once I got all the parts, - the only other purchase was the bar-cons and stem - I set about putting thing together.

I had an old Scott Lite Flite drop bar, which I cut the ends off of and mounted upside down. I didn't want to spend another few hundred bucks on a TT specific bar set up, so I instead shopped around for the steepest reasonably weighted stem I could find. This Bontrager Select is 20 degrees. This way I could use my Syntace clip-ons. With a regular 10 degree stem I was still up too high, the 20 degree stem dropped me to a good level.



After all was said and done, the bike is actually comfortable. I took it out on a few hour long rides, working in hard efforts, and it _felt_ very fast. This was confirmed, last summer, when I came very close to setting a PR for average speed in a TT at the Working Mans Stage Race. Granted, I was very fit last year, but this is one of those cases where the bike - _I_ think - really did help One needs to remember that was the first competition TT I had done in about ten years that didn't involve a big hill at the end, the little 3 mile flat TT at the Bob Beal Stage Race not withstanding.

All in all, a good find, and I need to give a shout out to my friend Armand for setting me up with it.

Frame - Cube Aerium
Fork - ~2002 Easton EC90 full carbon
Wheels - Rolf Vector Pro
Crankset - Campy Veloce 46x39
Front Derailleur - Shimano 600
Rear Derailleur - Campy Chorus
Cassette - Sram 970 11x21
Saddle - Flite Ti