First real ride: 42 km and what rattled
Two years and one month after the bicycle came into the garage, I rode it 42 km on Sunday morning, out along the river road and back over the ridge. Average speed was nothing to write down; the point was to find out what I had gotten wrong, and the answer was four things, one of them embarrassing.
The first was the front derailleur cable. I had set the tension in the stand with the chain on the small ring and it shifted perfectly there. Under load on the first climb, the shift to the big ring took three attempts and a lot of grinding. In the stand the chain has no tension; on the road it does, and the cage needs about 2 mm more travel than I had given it. One quarter-turn of the barrel adjuster at the top of the hill fixed it for the rest of the ride.
The second was a tick from the drivetrain every revolution of the cranks, which I spent 10 km convincing myself was the bottom bracket I had so carefully rebuilt. It was a crank bolt. I had torqued both to what felt right by hand; the left one was something like 25 Nm and the right one apparently less. Tightened at the roadside with the 14 mm socket I had thrown in the saddle bag for exactly this reason, and the tick was gone.
The third was the saddle, which was 8 mm too high. I had set it by the old formula of inseam times 0.883 and should have trusted my knees instead. The fourth, the embarrassing one, was that the rear brake quick-release was open. I had opened it to get the wheel in that morning and never closed it. The brake still worked, just not well, and I did not notice until the long descent off the ridge when the lever came back a long way further than it should.
What did not rattle: the headset, which I had been nervous about, stayed silent and smooth. The wheels I rebuilt in February stayed true after 42 km including a stretch of broken pavement, which I checked in the stand the same afternoon with a dial indicator showing 0.3 mm of lateral runout on the rear. The freewheel is loud in the way old freewheels are, and I am keeping it that way. Next ride is a longer one, with the saddle 8 mm lower and the quick-release checked twice.