I decided to up my off-season training game this season. I've claimed to be a 12-month outdoor rider for years, but when it's below 32F / 0C, my feet will only really give me around 20 miles before I start to lose feeling in my toes. And that's with one of the many toe warming gadgets I've tried over the years--shoe covers, oxidation "hot feet" packets, battery powered socks, and this year, battery powered heated insoles. I had big hopes for the new battery powered insoles, but I found their performance quite underwhelming. In addition to not getting very warm, they don't heat the toe box at all--since they leave the toe area free of wires to facilitate trimming to fit into your shoe.
So back to square one on upping the miles over the winter season. I have a set of Kreitler rollers that when coupled with my fixed gear bike, have been my "go-to" for winter training, but I have trouble sustaining my concentration for more than 30 minutes on the rollers and you know what happen when you lose your concentration on rollers! Whatever I did this off-season, I wanted to integrate Zwift into it, since there's been so much talk about the platform. I looked at all of the trainers that hook to the back of the bikes but after speaking with an expert who has gone almost entirely inside (!) in terms of their riding, concluded that the full bike style trainer would be a better fit. After consuming every review on the internet, I landed on the Tacx Neo Smart Bike.
I found an open-box model from an online reseller and managed to avoid the crazy sticker price. It arrived within a couple of days and was as good as new. It set up in around 30 minutes and with the adjustments available and with my backup Infinity saddle, was able to emulate the geometry of my bikepacking rig--in nearly everything except the handlebar width. The bike comes with some seriously dinky handlebars, they must be 38mm in width. For those of you that follow us here, I'm a big fan of wide bars and ride Walmer 60CMs on my bikepacking bike. Since I happened to have another set of 60CM bars onhand, it should be fairly easy to emulate 100% of the bikepacking bike on this platform, right?
A quick disassembly of the handlebar setup revealed that the OEM bars are 31.8mm and held in place with an aluminum "stem" with four M6 hex head retention bolts, and that the electronic "brifters" were held in place with a traditional drop handlebar mounting system. Looking very promising up to this point. But as soon as I started removing the brifters I realized that the Tacx had been designed as a stand-alone consumer product rather than as a modular platform. The brifters are connected to the head display unit with an impossibly short wire set. To connect them to my Walmer bars, I was going to need to extend the length significantly on each side.
Of course, there were no specifications on the type of wire used in the brifters and Tacx doesn't sell an aftermarket extension wire set. If I were the product designer, I would have wanted to go with a modular configuration, something that would allow me to unplug the wires from the brifters and from the head unit when the device needed servicing. This kind of logical approach would have allowed me to make an extension that would have allowed me to use the Walmers with the extension--without destroying the OEM wiring--and later, return the unit to its original configuration. But NOOOOOO! Tacx designers opted for a completely hardwired approach. The impossibly short wire set dissappears into the brifters and the head unit without modular connection points and likely terminate right onto a circuit board with a soldered connection. Really sort of unforgivable from a design standpoint.
So plan "B" was to create a modular connection point for the wiring setup. I cut into the wire and learned that beyond the external sheathing, it contained six insulated stranded wires, of Ethernet gauge. I dragged out my old RJ-45 crimping tool (I'm old) and crimped a set of connectors onto each end, connected four Ethernet coupling blocks, and then a shorty Ethernet cable in the center. The hardest bit here was keeping track of the colors of the wiring (white, red, blue, green, brown, black) and making sure they connected in line with the same colors on the other side. This seemed like a logical solution and one that once it was protected from sweat ingress, would theoretically improve the product with a bit of modularity. An hour later, I'm feeling proud of the solution and bold enough to plug the trainer in and see if it will work.
But no! The Ethernet connection solution didn't work. Turns out that this thing runs on 48V DC and the coupling blocks must have introduced too much resistance into the circuit. With only 6 wires, it wasn't an Ethernet connection, but I was hoping the modularity would work out. So plan "B" was to revert to a really simple telephone style hardwired connection approach. Out to the store to get a box of gel-filled buttsplice two wire connectors. These are great because you don't need to strip back the insulation to use them and the internal connection bus is entirely self-contained, so less of a chance of interference across the different wires in a bundle.
24 snap connections later, I had everything connected up and the trainer was fully working! I sealed up each wire bundle with some heat shrink tubing, connected the bars into the handlebar rig, and then realized that in order to get everything connected back up, I needed to make a few modifications to the plastic interface that connects the head unit to the handlebar mount. A quick hacksaw and ziptie later, everything look good and it's time for new handlebar tape. I went with the jefe.bike double layer - the XL 4.8mm ultra thick tape as the base layer and the XL 3.7 super grip tape on top. Very nice setup!!
Was it worth it? Yes! The bike feels almost exactly like my bikepacking rig, even when standing up on the pedals. You can find me poking along periodically (mostly in my zone 2/3) on Zwift as Jefe Velo!
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