Charisma's Surly Cross Check

Found them! This is not a recent build, we thought that we’ve lost the shots after our computer crashed a while back. If you followed us on Twitter, you might already recognized it as #ProjectCheckmate. Here’s the full wrap.

 

This 54cm Surly Cross Check belongs to Charisma, who wanted to build a versatile bike that eats everything thrown at it, be it tarmac or dirt. The Cross Check itself is one of those do-it-all frames that lets you race cyclocross, go for a long haul touring, or shred through your commute ride on it. It’s adorned with many eyelets that lets you to put racks or full-shroud fenders on it. It even featured long, semi-horizontal dropouts should you want to run single gear. The odd-spaced 132,5mm rear dropouts gives you an option between using 130mm road rear hubs or 135mm rear hubs from mountain bikes.

Top-mounted cable routing keeps the muck out of the cable.

 The group was assembled mainly from Shimano 105 5600 parts, aside from the Dura-Ace hubs and Deore LX cantilever brakes. Those hubs are then laced to 19mm-wide 700c Rigida rims through 32 Richman double-butted spokes in 3-cross pattern, then shod with 34c Bontrager Jones CXR.

The 52/39T chainring is a bit too large for 'cross, but helps on flat commuting rides.

We have to make custom shim to fit the 31,8mm derailer clamp to the 28,6mm seattube, since finding such small part is a bit difficult back then.

34c tires might not fit the recent change on UCI event regulations, but surely adds more comfort.

Another mountain bike twist is the Kore Elite cross country stem, matched to Pro PLT anatomic drop bars wrapped in blue Velo tapes. The fi’zi:k Arione VS saddle is held by Ritchey WCS 27,2mm twin-bolt seatpost.