Service Course: Andy Potts

Andy Potts posing with his brand new race bike, finished off with an Omega SV brake. Our goal was to aggressively clean up the front of the bike, leaving nothing for the wind to see beyond the bars and the frame. I think the final result is a big success.

Today we're introducing a new type of feature to the site: the TriRig Service Course. The name 'Service Course' generally refers to any kind of bicycle mechanic services rendered to professional athletes, from simple race-day tune-ups to completely custom one-off fabrication projects. Accordingly, it's the perfect name for this new series of features. We are going to focus on some special projects that we do for some correspondingly special riders.

To be clear, the 'Service Course' designation won't be used for ALL of our builds. Just the ones that we consider to be unique, extra special, or for another reason worthy of special attention. Often this will be bikes we build up for pro athletes, but on occasion other bikes might make the cut as well.

For our very first Service Course article, we tore apart two brand new Kestrel 4000 bikes belonging to Ironman champion Andy Potts , and completely reworked the front end to make it as slick as possible. We hid all the wires, replaced the stock brakes with Omega SV calipers, and gave Andy a bike he can be proud of.

Andy is a good friend of the site, and we keep in touch on a somewhat regular basis. And just as you see me do all over this website, I'll often talk to Andy about the fact that he could clean up certain aspects of his bike. When he got his 2014 Kestrel 4000 rigs with Di2 9070, I had a chance to see them firsthand and do some preliminary work on just one of them. But I told him I'd really like to take another crack at it and really hide those Di2 wires. A few weeks later, Potts dropped off two bikes. One was the same bike onto which I'd already installed an Omega SV prototype. The second was a fully-built spare bike, which had a complete component kit, but needed to be completely gutted and re-cabled in order to replicate Andy's position.

I told Andy what I wanted to do with the wires, and that it would involve some pretty special custom work. For those of you who like to replicate the custom stuff we do at TriRig, this isn't an easy one. In fact, this is at a high enough level that I don't think any bike shop would be willing to do it for you. They might even tell you that internalizing Di2 9070 components on this kind of setup isn't possible. And to be sure, it isn't easy. But it IS possible. I told Andy what I was going to do, which included stuffing the Di2 junction box inside the frame, rewiring the shifters, and modifying the frame's top tube hole to fit all the new wires. Andy liked the plan of action. He gave me the green light to proceed, and his session at the TriRig Service Course was officially ON!

In essence, we were were planning to clean up his front end, and get rid of every bit of exposed hardware, leaving nothing but the bars and the frame. Potts' Kestrel 4000 bikes don't have the ultra-clean integration you'll find in bikes like the Trek Speed Concept or the Cervelo P5 , so our mission would require some creativity, and the courage to go 'off-the-books' with our modifications. At this point, the best way for you to see what we did is just to go through the gallery. The images are self-explanatory, and offer a better explanation than I could put together in words. So have a look, and enjoy! Thanks for reading.