Now we got a problem

When I took the fork out of the Alex Singer to overhaul the headset, I was able to lift the bottom headset cup out of the head tube with my fingertips. To call it finger tight would imply it had any grip at all on the head tube. It was rattling in there.

And I'd thought that the big hassle would be chasing 52 5/32" ball bearings across the floor.

Good luck finding an easy fix for any major problem on a bike that is A) old and B) French. Tubing diameters are different (though bottom bracket shell i.d. is not). Threading can be different (such as right-hand thread bottom bracket fixed cups.) Steerer tubes are skinnier inside and out, as well as having French thread. Crown race seats are quite likely to be 27.0 mm instead of the more common 26.4. While you can get headsets with 27.0 crown races, they aren't the highest quality. None of them have French thread.

The head tube itself seems undistorted. The aluminum headset cup has a very short skirt (oo la la!) so it was able to work in the head tube, wearing away the softer alloy. The play went from bad to worse as the skirt wore down.

Getting the Singer back on the road depended on being able to use all the frame-specific parts. However, headsets act like two separate bearing assemblies. The parts of each assembly have to match each other, but the scheming mechanic can mix upper and lower assemblies as long as the total stack height works with the existing fork. If anything had to go wrong, this was the thing.

To make matters better, high-end French bikes might use the ISO standard 26.4 crown race. This significantly increases the available stock of donor organs. This bike turns out to have a 26.4 crown race. I have some period-appropriate headset parts in my stash. They won't be as weirdly cool as the Edco Competition that was in there, but the top end of the headset will still say Edco. Good thing, too, because that's the French threaded part. Down low I hope to graft in an old Cycle Pro alloy headset. It was a Campy copy in unmarked aluminum.

Here are a few more pictures from the work in progress:

We actually had a TA crank bolt wrench hanging around.

Here's the underside of the BB shell, showing the brazed-on cable guides. That's the Kingsbridge fixed cup tool sticking through. Loose balls in that bottom bracket, by the way.

Here's a cleaner shot of the logo. I still haven't gotten one in focus of the head tube.

The number 1394 is stamped on the fork end and on the left rear dropout.
Regarde.

The bottom bracket is Campagnolo, but the cups don't have that wicked cool reverse thread around the bottom bracket axle. The reverse thread would cause a little bit of grease to extrude during pedaling, helping to keep dirt out.

The owner put some miles on this thing before she took her long hiatus from riding. The current management of Alex Singer hasn't answered an email I sent them (en Anglais, excusez-moi) asking if they had any records of Old 1394. I might take some time to frame the inquiry en Français. At least it will give them something to laugh about.

Rims are on their way. Velo Orange gives their stamp of approval to the Sun CR 18s I had already selected.

I also need to get some Simichrome polish. This bike actually has parts you can polish. I miss that smell.

A bike that remains in active use is as much a part of the present day as it is part of its era of origin. The rear dropouts on the Singer only measure 120 mm wide. The rear hub is about 122 over the locknuts. That would make updating the drive train to current-size cassette hubs difficult. Could the frame be cold set 10 millimeters to 130? I don't know, myself, but I know several torch and tubing types I could ask. I keep meaning to mangle some 8-9-speed hubs to see what I can do to slim them down to meet the older frame half way. It's good to have options.

If the owner of an older bike wants to keep as closely as possible to period-appropriate components, that's a different challenge. At some point the frame or the parts thereon seem like more of a part of our history and heritage than an endlessly mutable machine for immediate wish fulfillment. That was one reason I finally retired my Super Course frame and quit beating the crap out of my Eisentraut. The 'traut only had five out of eight original frame tubes and was on its third fork when I got it back from its last repair. If I felt like having a museum I would build it up with all my 1980s parts...the ones I'm not still using.

Hey, an interesting project.

A nice woman asked if we might possibly be interested in working on her "old racing bike." Of course we would. We assured her she should bring it in. She displayed the modesty verging on shame that seems to afflict many owners of older bikes. We are constantly urged to scorn and discard old products in favor of new ones. If we did not succumb to this pressure the economy would grind to a halt. Right?

What she brought was this fascinating Alex Singer Mixte-frame touring bike. The mix of componentry suggested it was made between 1979 and 1982. I'll dig deeper as I go forward with the overhaul and other work.

I grabbed a few quick shots when I checked the bike in. The afternoon darkened rapidly as rain clouds thickened.
Details, details.

The barcon shifters are an excellent choice. This bike would be far less fun to ride with down tube shifters. Notice that this master builder, known for clever innovation, did NOT put the cable stops right at the head tube.


Alex Singer's shop was known for making many parts beyond just the frame and fork. This stem bears his name stamp. I suspect the seatpost is Singer work as well.


Look at those nice long dropouts!
The wheels have Super Champion Arc-en Ciel rims, for sewup tires, laced with 36 stainless spokes to Campagnolo Record hubs. I'm going to rebuild those to nice clincher rims for her, so she can run a little wider tires on the challenging road surfaces she will encounter here.

She said she bought the bike to ride with a racing-oriented club in California in the early 1980s. Her husband picked it out for her. Then they had to move, so she never really rode it as much as she hoped she would. Now she wants that chance.

I had the little front rack that bolts to Mafac brakes, but I gave it to a friend of mine for one of his bikes. He's an eccentric character who is spending his under-funded retirement building and maintaining a small fleet of odd bikes. He's been a lot of things: prep school teacher, dish washer, bike mechanic, coma patient...when I show him this jewel he may decide it needs the rack to complete it. In any case, he'll like it.

Cheap production versions of the standard 1970s mixte bike were a dime a dozen back in the day. Even so, this bike just looks classy, even with its hard grips, center-pull brakes and bland aluminum brake levers. The frame details and componentry give it elegance like the deceptive simplicity of a designer suit.

When the owner asked what it might be worth I sounded like Antiques Roadshow as I explained what I have read about the vagaries of the collector bike market. According to the little I've gleaned so far about this particular brand, the fancy randonnee models with custom racks, fenders and light sets can go for thousands of dollars. The more stripped-down performance models draw less interest. And bike value is very subjective. To many people this would just look like a used "ladies' bike" they wouldn't buy for $20 at a yard sale. "How come the shifting doesn't click?"

It has some paint flaws and pinpoint rust in the chrome on the stem. I hope I can clean most of that off. It's great to have something in very good condition as a starting point. We're not equipped to handle a restoration project.

Singer Ready to Roll

On a day that never got light I reassembled the Singer. Because of the relentless rain I was not able to take it out to an uncluttered background for photos.

If I get a chance I'll take a better shot.

The mid section.

The control room

This is your stem on Simichrome.

The bike was finally all together. I turned the cranks to check the gears. The vintage Sedisport chain ran through the derailleur pulleys. A faint tick caught my ear. When its rhythm became clear I knew the bike was tossing me a final challenge. After careful scrutiny I found the missing roller on one pin of the chain.

I wasn't about to junk a Sedisport chain in good condition. I really miss those chains and the drive trains that could use them. The Sedisport was the greatest cheap chain ever made, and by that I mean it was one of the best in any category. It could shift narrow-spacing or conventionally spaced freewheels smoothly and it never seemed to wear out. It felt like a worn chain when you first poured its sinuous length out of the plain paper package it came in.

Other chains of the era, the Regina Oro for instance, started out very stiff laterally. Their shifting speed came from that tendency for several links to move laterally together when the derailleur pushed or guided them. If you held one up on its side, it would stick out and droop only slightly. The Sedisport looked and felt floppy. But its flared inner plates (as opposed to Shimano's flared outer plates on the Uniglide chain) and beveled outer plates would easily catch the next cog when the snaky chain was pushed over. Lengthwise, it retained its proper pitch for many miles.

Given a Sedisport in workable condition, I wanted to repair the link. But we expended our stash of Sedisport links long ago. We installed so many, back in the day, that I was able to assemble more than one complete chain for my own use from the links removed for sizing new chains to customer bikes. I knew I had some spare links at home. I just wanted to get this job done so the owner can enjoy some of the beautiful weather that lay in the forecast.

I poured out our bucket of extra chain links, hoping an overlooked Sedisport link pair might lie beneath all the SRAM and Shimano dreck. With ever narrower chains needing ever more perfect riveting, chain repairs require more than just a chain tool and a chunk of leftover chain. We can resection them using the new tool-free connecting links. Those are very handy. In fact, just before Sachs-Sedis disappeared into the maw of SRAM, the last of their chains came in with connecting links. The problem now is that links and chains have to be compatible and don't work with chains of older generations.

No archaeological treasures lay beneath the newer pieces. But then I had a thought. Our chain whips are old. Sure enough, the chains on them were Sedisport. I swiped a link pair from one of them and used it to fix the Singer's chain.

I went crazier than usual on this overhaul because of the unique value of the bike. I would ordinarily take off chain rings and grease chainring bolts in an overhaul, but I would not polish chain rings and crank arms. The TA also uses a six-bolt circle to attach the big ring to the crank arm and a five-bolt circle to attach the other two rings to each other and the big ring. Nothing on the chain rings points obviously to the correct orientation of these to each other to allow the easiest possible tool access to all bolt heads. Also, the chain rings are held apart by ten spacers that have to be kept in place while long bolt assemblies are fitted.

The bottom of the head tube did show some wear from its unfortunate experience with the Edco headset. The Edco was not really well designed. If a better French thread headset were to come along I would suggest that the owner replace the remaining Edco portion. The top cone in the head tube has the same short skirt as the lower cup had. It fits snugly, but not very tightly. It only survived because the top end has a lot less leverage exerted against it.

The bottom headset assembly I installed is okay, given what I had to work with. I beefed up the interface with a bedding compound even though the longer skirt did reach a less deformed area of the tube. The head tube itself is not very thick. You make a bike light by using lighter materials or by using less of a heavier one. Each approach can have its pitfalls.

The Mafac brakes took a quick, high shine with just a little polish. Too bad they're the same crap they always were. But what the hell. Bernard Thevenet won the 1975 Tour de France on a Peugeot with those brakes. Gold anodized no less. Perhaps his reluctance to make them squeal in their well-known fashion contributed to his blistering speed up and down the mountain stages. Especially down.

The 700x28 Panaracer Paselas are such a plump 28 that I had to remove the quick release skewer from the rear hub to coax the axle around the end of the dropout. The chainstay bridge is set a bit far behind the bottom bracket. A 700x25 or a slimmer 28 would slide in at the limit. Once the Pasela is in place it has plenty of clearance all around.

I hope the owner likes it, after all this. I'd been a bit vague in the estimate, just telling her it would easily exceed $300. It did. And it stopped short of the next hundred, but barely.

The value of a bike far exceeds its purchase price if the bike was decent to start with. A really cool custom or semi-custom bike like this has some collector value as well as usability value. But any well-designed frame can be fitted with many configurations of parts to meet changing needs through the years. If a rider learns mechanical skills, acquires tools and amasses parts, the cost of all this goes down dramatically. Even if the rider needs to buy some or all of the skilled labor, the result could be better than a new bike bought for the same amount of money.

Last Singer Pics (I promise)

The sun, the Singer and I were finally all in the same place at the same time. I couldn't resist getting some sun on all that polished aluminum.

The blinding glory of the brakes

Seconds ago I loaded the bike into the owner's car. She did share more information about it today. Her husband bought it in Salinas, California, second hand. The frame and many of the parts could date back to the patent year on the Campy derailleur, which was probably late 1960s or early 1970s. But bikes are so rebuildable that parts of any vintage could have been grafted on at any time. The only odd notes in the generally European lineup were the Suntour Cyclone rear derailleur and Dia Compe brake levers.

It's on its way. The owner is pleased. Now I'm trying to reorganize the workshop, but people keep bringing in work. Nothing interferes with productivity like customers.

My friend is dying, but still he rides

In the mid 1990s, a stranger rode into town. I started seeing this tall, bespectacled man riding his bicycle at a slow but steady pace here and there. His clothes were frayed and worn, but had the air of New England preppy gentility about them. His hair was whitening gray, conventionally cut but often not freshly combed. He looked like a professor or a private school teacher. The latter he actually turned out to have been.

He looked like a run-down version of an extra George Plimtpton, carrying a spare voice module for Garrison Keillor. If I closed my eyes when he spoke, I could sometimes imagine it. He did not have Mr. Keillor's theatrical sense, however. A free-range intellectual, he would quiz me about things, but never in a hard-assed way. Everything was said in that soft voice.

One day, when I called the shop and he happened to be there, he asked to speak to me.

"Spell Poughkeepsie," he said. When I did, he said, "Damn, I should have known you'd be able to." He liked to pull spelling bees on me at odd times.

He had the look of a stray cat that had had a rough life when you got close to him. He had lost a lot of teeth. His shoulders were narrow and uneven, as a beat-up cyclist's will be after sufficient impact with the ground to reduce the collarbone to a formality. And he could get a little drifty at times. He would trail off in conversation or not make absolutely perfect sense.

I'm never one to pry. I wait for someone to tell me what they want me to know, when they're ready.

We established early on that we had almost crossed paths 30 years earlier, when he was a young prep school teacher at Severn School in Maryland in the early 1960s. I would not attend that school until six or seven years after he had left, but my family did live in Annapolis at the time. It wasn't the wildest of coincidences, but it was interesting to share some geography and a near-miss on some shared acquaintances. He had courted the daughter of a boat yard owner in Annapolis until the penniless young teacher was deemed an inadequate match. Or so he told it.

He reminisced from time to time about being a young man just out of college, who liked jazz music, good stereo equipment and expensive Scotch. He also had a passion for sports cars and road racing. At times, bicycling seemed like a poor man's surrogate. But his love for the bicycle became obvious. He studied all aspects of racing, long distance touring and bike construction.

One day he told me that, on the last day of the Tour de France in 1985, he left his house in Milton, NH, to go for a ride because he felt so fired up from following the Tour coverage to its end. He took off on that sunny afternoon and, as he tells it, "woke up weeks later in the hospital. They told me I'd been wandering around the halls for two weeks, pissing on things. I don't remember any of it. I don't even remember crashing. I remember I was going down a long grade, it was fast. That's it. I don't know if someone hit me with their car or if I just went off the road."

He has a handlebar-diameter hole in his skull and permanent neural deficits, as they say. He also has those narrowed shoulders, some spinal injury, this and that. And beat up knees, but he could have been working on those already, from pushing big gears.

In addition to teaching in prep schools in Maryland and the Midwest (that I know of), he recounted working in bike shops and as a dishwasher. This was all pieced together in conversations when he would drop by the shop. We would talk about whatever he felt like talking about. If I didn't know the subject, I would do my best to hang in there. If I did, I could give him a few gems I had mined to add to what he has gleaned. He spent most days in the library, and visiting up and down the business district. He was not homeless or a beggar. He lives with his girlfriend in her house out the north end of town. She's another character. And she protects him fiercely.

My employers, never known for their compassion, and certainly not for their acceptance of people who seem different (I came in under the radar and proved myself too useful to fire, so far) finally found an excuse to banish him forever when he insulted one of their family political saints during one of his neurally-deficited lapses of tact. They didn't know about his injury and probably wouldn't have cared. All they knew was that they finally had a righteously indignant reason to bar him forever. I considered qitting over this piece of cruelty, but I discussed it with Bill and he said not to worry.

"My mouth is always getting me into trouble," he said.

He reached Social Security and Medicare age shortly after he came to town. With normal aging and his accumulated injuries, he mused a lot about how he lived his life.

"You tell yourself that whatever else happens today you will get on the machine," he said.

He rides all year. He rides in all weather. Even if he's just going to town for a newspaper and a cup of coffee, he does that eight or ten miles. He might miss a day. His girlfriend might take him on an outing that requires riding in the car. She also occasionally scooped him up from the far point of a ride outside of town when nightfall overtook him. But for the most part he gets on the machine.

Now he is dying. I'd heard from people who had seen him that he wasn't looking good. Then someone told me for sure that he had cancer. The same person also confirmed something I had just heard a rumor of: Bill is a talented guitarist. His brain injury gave him some odd quirks, but his friends found and refurbished a guitar for him and he played with them for a while. Even as I heard bad news about his health, I was learning more about how he lives.

I hadn't managed to see him for months. We just kept missing each other. He has no telephone. We would simply stop to talk wherever we ran into each other. He's a nicknamer. He didn't like my former coworker Ralph's name, so he would call him Ethan or Elliot. He calls me Mr. Vails, after the 1980s sprinter, Nelson Vails. I'm pleased to be given a nickname that crosses racial lines to follow cycling lines. It's especially sweet considering my employers' bigotry.

So, the other day I was driving home from a dentist appointment when I saw the unmistakable figure of Bill riding toward me. I hastily shoved the car into the ditch and ran across the road to wait for him to get to me.

He is gaunt. His face, never very rounded, is long. The bones of cheek and jaw push against the skin as if the skull demands acknowledgment. He wore a balaclava under his helmet on this raw, damp day. I felt almost ashamed of my newish clothes, my relative youth and the fact that he found me driving. But Bill is not a cycling Puritan.

"Mr. Vails," he saluted me, laughing a little wheezily. "Biggest thighs known to medical science." He grinned. He is too kind. I took in how he no longer fills his clothes. His thighs are just femurs under cloth.

He noticed the car I was driving, a 1991 Toyota Corolla LE. He'd had his eye on it for years, when it belonged to its former owner, the mother of a friend of mine.

"What's that, about a '92...no '91. Is that the LE? If it's the LE it has a red coach line." He knew more about the car's cosmetics than I did, and my wife has been driving it for more than a year. "Yeah, the LE is unusual. You don't see too many of them around here. Beautiful little body."

I also finally got to tell him about the Alex Singer. I'd hoped he would ride by while I had it in the shop. I would have defied the edict and brought him right in to see it. Fortunately, the bike lives in a neighborhood near the house where he lives, and the owner of the Singer had spotted Bill as someone who looked interesting to meet. Having urged her to pursue it, I now urged him.

He said, "I've been diagnosed with colon cancer. I refuse to take the chemotherapy. I figure I'll be in pain either way. I don't expect to make it next year. I don't want to go into the hospital."

There's no way to ease into a subject like that. One minute you haven't said it, the next minute you have. And there it is.

"I don't know what I would do," I said to him. "I tell myself I do, I think I do, but I don't really know. " I do know that I would hate to spend my last days in a hospital, and if I knew for sure that I was going down I would head for the open range as fast as my last strength would carry me. I want to see the sky over me when I go, and I want to be alone.

"I can't complain, really," he said. "I've done about everything I wanted.

"I just don't want to give up the bike," he said. His even tone broke for the first time since I've known him, but it didn't break by much. "I don't want to stop riding. I don't want to be driven around in a car." Was it the raw breeze that made the glistening moisture in his eyes momentarily top the dam and flow toward his cheek? Again, it was only a moment before he regained control, if indeed he had lost it. He took a deep breath.

"I guess I'll go on into town, get a cup of coffee," he said.

We never had a touchy relationship, not even a handshaking one. I'm not much on contact unless I'm reciprocating the contact of someone who prefers to be that way. But as he flipped the toeclip up and resumed his slow trek to the village, I patted his shoulder. Whatever else was happening that day, he had gotten on the machine. He's welcome to whatever energy I can give him.

Memory of meals missed

One afternoon, in the redwood forest, my traveling companion and I had set up our tent in the bargain campsite provided by the California parks department and gone for a little wander among the enormous trunks soaring up to a canopy you could sort of forget about as you examined the vivid green undergrowth in the filtered light. Trees that big seem more like topographical than botanical features.

We returned to find other campers setting up. One was a German woman with a blonde crew cut, riding a touring bike. The others were a couple of hitchhikers, a man in his 20s and a woman who appeared barely old enough to qualify for the description. The road of summer is full of travelers trying their wings for better or for worse.

The young man had just finished a summer stint cooking at an inn in Vermont. He and his companion had traveled across the country swiftly enough to arrive in the redwoods in early September. Still summer, but only technically, the time just after Labor Day is a great one for traveling.

While my own companion and I had given up on culinary gumption and opted for a big skillet full of scrambled eggs, we soon regretted our haste as we watched the young chef whip up something that looked and smelled far more elaborate over the same fire pit.

To make matters worse, he could play guitar and sing. This he demonstrated after supper. We had been joined by a soft-spoken woman with long, straight hair, who asked if anyone minded if she did some background vocals. My own companion, a guitarist and singer herself, stayed in the music circle. I, possessed of only grunts and croaks, wandered the periphery of the firelight, still in awe of the immense forest. The music drifted over me with the flickers of firelight as I tripped over unseen obstacles and got up again, still in the trance of that random convergence of talents in this enchanted place.

Yeah, at the time I also felt like a boring, miserable toad with nothing to contribute. But I was taking it all in anyway.

The next morning, my companion and I had to move on. We had a deadline in Eugene, Oregon, and a few hundred more miles to cover. The chef was making blueberry pancakes.

Several days later, in Oregon, under steady rain, we converged with the crewcut German woman again. I liked her because her watchword was "coffee." "Coffee? Coffee?" she would ask. Even a big jar of instant looked fine to a caffeine freak pushing a loaded bike over wet roads and bunking down in a wet tent each night.

Her name was Marianne. She told us that she had stayed two more days in the redwoods with the chef and his girlfriend, emerging only to go to the little grocery store nearby to get ingredients for the chef's next creation. She said she finally tore herself away because she realized her bike shorts were getting tight, and she was in danger of just settling in there for the winter. We traveled together for a couple of days, eating our own miserable fare, as she described the chef's creations, to give our imaginations a taste of that little bubble of feasting and conviviality.

She left us to rendezvous with other travelers. We rode onward in the rain, a little hungry.

More Progress on the Singer

This is the stuff. Cal found some at Sanel Auto Parts.

Here is what it does. The directions on the package say to avoid contact with the skin, but at $12 a tube I would apply the stuff with my tongue sooner than waste any of it on a rag. I did start using a rag, but only after I had spread polish with my fingers. Once a small section of the rag was well charged with polish I used it to spread subsequent applications.

A hubcupine!

Commencing to hook up the spokes.

Wheel builder style: hub label visible through the valve hole. All labels read to the right.

The TA crank, après Simichrome.

The bike is all in pieces at the moment, but those parts are nearly ready to merge back into a whole machine.