Spring Avalanche

Just as March looked like April again this year, so did the repair load go from zero to backlogged in a matter of days.

With only 1.3 mechanics on duty most days, we get buried more easily than we did in the boom times of the 1990s, but even back then the amount of repair work this early in the season would have been remarkable.

I did manage to finish the crash repairs on that Pedego.

The battery case takes a long time to install, because it is held together with eight little Phillips head screws that are mostly inaccessible. Inaccessibility is no excuse, however, so you have to use several different screwdrivers and contort your wrist to coax the fastenings down to seat fully. This was after rewiring the damn thing. Sliding the battery into the case was an appropriately satisfying insertion. Bit of an anticlimax, really.

The fun had just begun there, though. Pedego had changed their wiring harness (of course) since the bikes were built, so the new light and control unit had to include the adapted fittings for the old harness. Even the wire from the brake levers, that cuts the motor when the brakes are applied, had the connectors reversed. Most of the work was not complicated. It just took time to collect all the necessary little bits, from Pedego, from the hardware store, and from the crash-damaged parts that still had useful wiring.

Mixed in with the earliest arrivals was a Motobecane from the 1980s with a classic corncob freewheel.

Back when 52-13 was considered a big gear, and we only had six in the back, the 13-18 was the mark of the racer. Anyone old enough to have a freewheel like that now is not pushing a 42-18 up the hills of the White Mountains anymore. Converting this bike to lower gears required not just a wider-range freewheel, but also a derailleur that could handle the cog size and chain wrap. We're still waiting for the crankset to convert the front end to 110 compact. Adaptable old bikes can have new lives. They'll still be rolling along when the exoskeletons of the most recent marvels are already lying cracked and discarded, the batteries in their shifters dead, hydraulic fluid and tire sealant seeping into the ground.

I do like the 1890s leather on 21st Century carbon fiber on this Trek road bike:

Carbon fiber the bike may be, but it's such a relic that the cables are actually outside the frame! The poor bastard riding it is getting by with only ten speeds in the cassette and has this weird device that moves the chain between two chainrings on the crank. Old people have weird stuff. They say things like, "By cracky!" and "Jehosaphat!" too. And they do that weird little jig with their elbows out when they're excited. This guy still has all his own teeth, though. I can say things like this because I'm pretty sure I'm older than he is.

A couple of posts ago I said that only a rare old codger wanted me to build a wheel anymore. Then two wheel jobs came in. One of them was for the Trek above. The 24-spoke Easton rear wheel had a cracked rim. No rims were available, but we could get a 28-spoke hub and rim to build him a complete new wheel. I'm not a fan of low spoke count wheels, but they do go together more quickly.

                                                                   Hub porn

The All City hub is very nice for the price. I thought about stockpiling one or two for future wheels of my own.

The other wheel project used hub, rim, and spokes provided by the customer. I couldn't figure out why the wheel had been completely disassembled in the first place. The spokes were bundled and labeled right and left side for the disc hub, but even though they were supposedly the correct lengths the wheel was difficult to tension evenly. The rim had taken a couple of hard shots. Also, the customer had told me it was two-cross, but it turned out to have been three. It's easy to overlook that first cross down by the hub flange.

In the repair mystery department, a bike this week was completely missing the return spring assembly on one brake arm.

It wasn't a model with plastic parts that could break easily and allow the spring to fall out. There was no sign that the brake arm had been removed. I had nothing in the salvage bin to replace just the missing pieces, so we had to install a complete brake set. This tends to happen on repairs where the customer has set low financial limits. We agree to a minimal repair, trying to ignore anything off the script, and then find something we can't let go. Fortunately, the customer accepted the necessity.

Salvaged parts featured prominently for another repair. A road bike turned out to need a cassette after a new chain did not play nicely with the original gear cluster. The bike has nine-speed brifters, from back when that was respectably middle class. The cassette was a 12-25. We can't get one. We had an 11-28. The derailleur theoretically could be coaxed to handle the 28, but couldn't handle the chain wrap. I went to the cog farm to piece together just the cogs on which the chain had skipped. In the process I discovered the intact low-gear section -- 17 through 25 -- of the exact cassette we needed.

Save old cogs. Most of the time, a cassette is not completely chewed. Even if the chain skips on more than just the cog with the fewest teeth, others less used in the cluster may have lots of useful life left in them.

Finally, I was looking for videos on a repair procedure on a smokeless moped. At the end of the YouTube video, the montage of stills for "videos I might like" included this excellent accidental pairing:

Remember those words and heed them always.

Another "Valley of Death" rim

This is a Bontrager AT550 hybrid rim, 622X20 mm. It has the troublesome Valley of Death, where inner tubes meet a premature end. The skinny rubber rim strip can slip aside, uncovering a tiny fang on a spoke nipple. The inflated tube distends down into that deep channel, stretching unevenly. Sometimes tubes fail just from that. In other cases, the thinned part in the channel is more vulnerable to chafe.

Throw in the life line!

Ordinary clothesline fills the ditch. You have to allow for the valve hole.

Then top it with rim tape.

This cumbersome process brought to you by The Bike Industry and the fine re-labelers at Trek.

The Bike that Never Was

A woman in town wanted a road bike to leave at a place she regularly visits in Maine, so she wouldn't have to transport her regular bike back and forth.

A good used bike is like a glass slipper: it's no use if it doesn't fit. We don't see the flood of trade-ins we used to get in the 1990s, when everyone was dumping their road bikes to get mountain bikes. Some places probably do a brisk trade in used bikes, but few of them make it all the way to our backwater anymore.

I had a couple of frames hanging around. If one of them fit her, I said I would try to scrape up the parts turn it into a bike.

The frame that fit had a bent fork. But I had a fork that would probably work. The frame had a crank, derailleurs, a headset and seatpost.

We got pretty lucky with wheels and brake levers. I kept running into blockades and then surmounting them somehow. The only things we had to buy new were the handlebars and interrupter brake levers. Oh, and a chain and cables. And she wanted a good women's saddle. That was the most expensive item.

On second look, my replacement fork didn't look all that great. I remembered I'd bought the Park Big Honkin' Pry Bar, so I figured I would take a shot at straightening the fork that was on there.

The Park BHPB-1

Lacking a fork jig, the straightening process was an art project. The first time through it looked pretty good until I put a wheel in it. Even then it wasn't too bad...until I tried to make it better. The quest for near perfection, as always, was a trapdoor into Hell. I tried to quit at least a half a dozen times before it somehow ended up better than some 1970s production bikes were when new.

The bike isn't ready to roll out yet, but we're down to the rigging and details.

I don't even remember where I got the frame. As I worked on it I noticed things that make me think it had been improvised by Bill, a mysterious man who had been the team mechanic for cantankerous old geezers around town until his death from cancer several years ago. The frame before me might have been ridden by Crazy George. Crazy George's riding habits did not kill him. He was run over walking in a crosswalk one early winter night, going from the library to the church across the street. A van hit and dragged him. He lingered for weeks at Maine Medical Center before finally succumbing. This is how it is to be elderly and non-motorized.

Crazy George would have ridden the bike with its bent fork, helmetless and headlong. Bill would have kept it running as best he could with parts he scrounged. I am only doing the same thing, with better parts and tools. The improvisations I have upgraded were all cleverly done. They showed knowledge of how a bike should be, not just superficial applications of whatever hardware-store bolt will sort of fit the hole in need of filling.

Because a bicycle is a collection of parts, I can keep an eye out for a better frame and fork while my client rides this one. Nearly every part will transfer to any decent frame that comes along.