2011 Niner Jet 9 RDO - Part I

I was so excited to learn a while back about the coming release of the Niner Jet 9 RDO, the carbon cousin to the Jet 9. I had feared it would be one of those bikes I would have to wait until next race season to fully enjoy. Luckily, through some great relationships over the past year I was at the font of the queue. Now that I have the RDO and spent time putting it together I want to get a few notes down about my build experience and first ride experience, I'll be racing it this coming Sunday at the Steamboat Stinger and will surely have more to add afterwards. Unfortunately, since I finished building it last night and early this morning, there have been fierce thunderstorms in my area so I have not been able to ride it. So my notes are in two parts, this first part about the buildup process.

I got the call before noon yesterday that frames had arrived. I was in a little bit of a panic because I was going to transistion the majority of the parts off my old Jet 9 to the new one, but since racing in the Breck 100 the past weekend I had done little more than hose the mud off the race bike. So I had a lot of dissassembly and cleaning to do before I could start adding parts to the frame. Since there are a few specialized tools that I have not yet added to my toolbox I grabbed my used parts that I would need some help with, namely the fork, and headed over to Golden Bike Shop. There I got to unbox my frame.

Other than excitement the unboxing was not that notable. It was well packed in the typical Niner Bikes thick cardboard box and the frame was wrapped with bubble wrap, plastic, and cardboard. I had the shop press in the BB30 cups and the headset. The rest was up to me. When I got home I started the process of putting the parts on the frame.

The first step was to run the cables through the frame. The process is well detailed by Niner Bikes in a video posted on their website. Generally the cable and cable housing install was pretty straight forward. I had been given a heads up to make sure I had plenty of slack in the cable housing between the chainstay and the bottom bracket shell.  As I try to show in the photo to the right, you can see that I probably don't have enough cable housing pulled through here, something I'll need to correct if I get ghost shifting. I suggest cutting the cable housing longer than you think it needs to be, because I thought I carefully measured mine and it ended up being a little too short. Also, since I am using a Gore cable kit, the housing is very stiff and some patience will be needed in the bottom bracket area to get the housing to curve and stay put long enough to get the other end into the derailleur cable stop.

The last item cable related that should be noted is that the ferrels that go into the headtube badge can sometimes become stuck in the badge. I know this from my Air 9 Carbon when redoing the cabling I could not get the ferrels out and they broke into pieces finally requiring some very careful drilling to get them out. To avoid this in the future I dabbed a little Phil Woods Waterproof Grease on the ends of the ferrels. Hopefully this will work.

Everything else when together as it should, very easily. I hope to be up bright and early tomorrow for a ride and should have more to report aftwards. Meanwhile check out more photos in the photo album.