Bike Upgrade

Context

The week I arrived in Palo Alto, I bought a bike from Silicon Valley Bike Exchange¹. For $250, I got a 700c hybrid bike with v-brakes and 1x8 speeds. Honestly, a pretty good deal; the only comparable new bike for the price is the Ozark Trail G.1 Explorer.

Until now I have used the bike to commute to the office daily, as well as for random rides around the bay area. It has accomulated 1076 km on my Strava as of writing (which excludes the rides I have forgotten to record). I have brought the bike to gnarly trails on Waterdog Lake, crossed the Dumbarton Bridge, and everything else in-between.

My greatest issue with the bike was the lack of super-low gears. Do note, that for my commute, where my most-challenging climb is the dreaded Hanover Street, I done the entire bit in 4th-gear. The types of hills that I'll find this low gearing useful the the right fork of this trail; along with really long stretches of elevation gain.

Upgrade!!

I decided to bite the bullet and bought the LTWOO A9 1X11Speed Groupset for MTB off Aliexpress, knowing that it won't make financial sense for me to bring this bike back to Canada. I figured I'd get 6 weeks of riding with this upgrade. I did the upgrade today, and I couldn't be happier with the process. I ordered a set of bike tools, a wrench, and a cable cutter before-hand. Did a trial run of removing the cassette and grips a few days before. Then spent 4:15 minutes today making the upgrade.

Overall, the upgrade went quite smooth. I spent a lot of time disassembling then reassembling the to-be-replaced parts to get more practice -- particularly with the chain cutting. The old derailleur cable got super "unwound" as I tried to get it to work with the new derailleur; I don't think that was very useful and should have just installed the new shifter immediately. The only tool I purchased that I didn't get to use is the cable cutter. I might just leave the extra derailleur cable there for now, unless I decide to also buy one of those end-of-cable thingies that I can clamp.

Lessons learned:

1. Turns out, in addition to the cassette vs freewheel difference, different cassettes also have different mounting mechanisms. I was lucky as my old freehub was HG and my new cassette is as well.
2. My chain is too short. I think this is why the derailleur pulley gets stuck when I attempt to shift to my largest cog. I'm assuming the seller assumes the user will have a ~32T chainring, whereas I probalby have closer to ~40T.
3. Be very sure your chain is routed correctly before connecting (especially when you don't have a quick link chain disconnector tool). I made a mistake with the routing in-between the derailleur pulleys, and I was luckily able to use a chain cutter on a quick link, reroute, then re-attach the chain. I'm not sure how durable that chain link is now, but it looked ok.

I took the bike for a spin to get grocries today. Noticed that the orientation of the shifter was not great, so I adjusted that when I got home. Planning to do a much longer ride for tomorrow. Super excited!!