Sunday, April 19, 2020

ben's bike: a rebuild

Pal Ben had his bike stolen recently -- hey, times are really hard now -- and needed a replacement to get around on. I scored this abandoned bike some months ago and dragged it home by carrying the front wheel in my front cargo rack and tying the fork high onto my rear rack. (It was ugly getting it home, don't ask.)

It would be a perfect size for Ben, so with his go-ahead, I tore it down and rebuilt it.

As it turned out, I needed the front wheel right away for another project. So I swapped in another wheel when one came along last week. The rear wheel was basically a loss -- too many fatigued and/or broken spokes -- so I pulled the cassette cogs, cleaned them up and installed them on another wheel that should work just fine.

The shock fork had to go. The stanchons were locked out and frozen, and I was horrified to discover that metal had worn away on the inside of each stanchon -- on one, whatever had caused the wear had made an actual hole (photo at left).

After pulling the old fork and removing the crown race from it, I set about replacing it with a rigid fork, all that would be needed for urban riding.

To my dismay, I noted that the one fork I had on hand that would fit was just 1/4" too long in the steer tube. What to do? I looked around, and decided to modify a headset space of the right thickness and install it under the crown race. I cut a gap with bold cutters, spread it slightly with pliers and slammed it home onto the bottom of the steer tube. Then I slammed the crown race home and it not only fit, it stayed put. An odd way of adding stack height to a threaded fork, but as long as it's a very small amount it should work.

Obviously, this is something that would never be done at a full-service bike shop; they have liability issues to contend with and that limits what kinds of repairs the service manager will take in. But that gap is less than 1/4" wide, and the stack and crown race are not going anywhere, especially after the fork is installed. (If it really bothered me I suppose that I could squirt some fast-drying epoxy in there to fill the gap. But it's fine, really. I would ride this repair on MY bike if I had no other options.)

After that, it was onto the rear end of the frame. The frame was straight (sometimes amazing when the bike looks like it had been kludged together and ridden hard by someone living outside), but the derailleur hanger was bent, preventing a good adjustment of the rear derailleur.
(Below: derailleur mounted showing bent hanger.)

 In order to straighten a bent derailleur hanger -- the part of the frame into which the rear derailleur is threaded -- two things have to be taken into account.

First, are the threads damaged? If so, it's very possible that the metal is compromised within and without, meaning that any attempt to cold-set (bend by hand) the hanger could result in breaking it off.

If the threads are in good shape, and the bend isn't too severe, then it's possible that a deft touch with an adjustable wrench may be just enough to bring the hanger back into alignment.

How do you gauge how much force is required?
We often call that, in skilled trades, mechanic's feel; a sense of how much force is needed to tighten or bend something without going too far -- by stripping threads or breaking a bent piece of metal.
Because the bend was slight, at the end of the hanger and the threads looked good, I didn't have to move the hanger very far at all.













 As a result, when I re-installed the rear derailleur it mounted easily and in line with the frame. All I needed to do after that was adjust the derailleur to line up with where the cassette cogs were spaced on the cassette, set the limit screws and hook it up.






























Then I hooked everything up -- cables, housing, a new chain, and some nice old friction thumb shifters on a great swept-back handlebar. I chose to keep the old stem, so that Ben would be able to still lean forward a little even while riding with a more upright position -- most younger men like riding this way and their longer torso can easily manage the longer distance to the handlebar.

I lately had an embarrassment of riches in multiple sets of cantilever brake sets, so finding one to install here was easy. Tires and tubes came from my bike (when I decided two weeks ago to swap in fatter tires on the All Rounder), so on they went. In the end, The only new parts needed were cables, housing, saddle and seatpost, and a top-pull front deraileur I scored from Kai at Upcycles.

I test-rode it up and down my empty street several times, shifting gears and trying the brakes at different speeds to make sure they would stop the bike.

After that, a few more tweaks and checks on nuts and bolts, another test-ride and it was done.

I think Ben will enjoy riding this bike. I hope he has a good lock for it.


If someone wants to bring me a frame and some parts and turn it into a rideable bike, I am happy to do that -- though parts and labor will make this a slightly more expensive proposition than simply buying a used low-end bike and tuning it up. But buildups are fun and can give you a bike that comes a lot closer to suiting your needs. If you build it with decent parts, it can also last longer (though tires, tubes and chains all need regular checking and replacing no matter what).

Happy, safe, SOLO riding!

3 comments:

Eric in California said...

Hi Beth,

Love reading about your work in "rescueing" bikes and getting them back on the road to needy people.

I used to wrench for a Connecticut bike shop in 1980 -1981, this was pre-shock, pre-threadless headset, pre-indexed shifting, pre-mountain bike, pre-suspension. Bikes came in British, French, or Italian threading for bottom brackets, SunTour was king, TA cranks/chainwheels were the rage, and every shop had a wall with TA chainrings hanging on it so you could construct your own double or triple chainring to whatever gear system you desired. "Half step plus granny" schemes brought out the nerd in many of us.

Shifters were all down tube, some of us radicals put bar end shifters on our own bikes, and took Raleigh sport touring road frames and had local framebuilders like Peter Weigle braze cantilever brake bosses onto them to create a decent touring frame.

Freewheels threaded onto hubs, and debates over center pull vs. sidepull brakes bordered on the theological. We also had a Campagnolo parts cabinet with loose parts so that you could rebuild any Campie front or rear derailleur that was in production as needed.

When you're repurposing your rescue bikes, how do you negotiate the wide variety of parts, standards, freewheels, shifters, and bottom brackets now out there today? It seems like such a Tower of Babel today, do you end up with shortages of some parts, and too many of other parts?

Just curious what this looks like today...I enjoy your blog posts and admire your continued dedication to "tikkum olam"...

Keep up the good work.

Eric in Santa Clara, CA

Eric in California said...

Hi Beth,

Love reading about your work in "rescueing" bikes and getting them back on the road to needy people.

I used to wrench for a Connecticut bike shop in 1980 -1981, this was pre-shock, pre-threadless headset, pre-indexed shifting, pre-mountain bike, pre-suspension. Bikes came in British, French, or Italian threading for bottom brackets, SunTour was king, TA cranks/chainwheels were the rage, and every shop had a wall with TA chainrings hanging on it so you could construct your own double or triple chainring to whatever gear system you desired. "Half step plus granny" schemes brought out the nerd in many of us.

Shifters were all down tube, some of us radicals put bar end shifters on our own bikes, and took Raleigh sport touring road frames and had local framebuilders like Peter Weigle braze cantilever brake bosses onto them to create a decent touring frame.

Freewheels threaded onto hubs, and debates over center pull vs. sidepull brakes bordered on the theological. We also had a Campagnolo parts cabinet with loose parts so that you could rebuild any Campie front or rear derailleur that was in production as needed.

When you're repurposing your rescue bikes, how do you negotiate the wide variety of parts, standards, freewheels, shifters, and bottom brackets now out there today? It seems like such a Tower of Babel today, do you end up with shortages of some parts, and too many of other parts?

Just curious what this looks like today...I enjoy your blog posts and admire your continued dedication to "tikkum olam"...

Keep up the good work.

Eric in Santa Clara, CA

bikelovejones said...

hi Eric and thanks for your interesting reply.

I worked in the industry full time 1995 through 2012, with some part-time forays into non-profit bike work between 2014 and 2018.
During that time,I watched as the co-op shop I worked in transitioned from buying, refurbishing and selling strictly used bikes into selling new bikes almost exclusively.
Today that shop no longer pays cash for use bikes or parts, in order to circumvent the city's stiffened recordkeeping requirements for dealing in used goods.

I learned how to overhaul Sturmey-Archer 3-speed hubs and why to avoid doing the same on Shimano 3-speeds; why Campy was desirable mostly by older men with money to burn, and how to make mixtures of Suntour and Shimano work like butter in the same drivetrain; how to make old junky bikes safe to ride (until taking in those bikes for repair was no longer cost-effective); and in the end I gained and then let go of a sense of snobbery about brands and cache so that, by the time I left Citybikes in 2012, I was able to appreciate a department store bike as a bike instead of calling it a turd.

I also worked in the industry during a time when manufacturers began churning out, faster and more frequently, new component groups that wouldn't function with parts from a previous model year ON PURPOSE; where shocks became the rage on COMMUTER bikes (remember that? Ugh.) but shock manufacturers stopped offering tech or parts support on any shock more than four years old; and where disc brake became the new saviour and then became ubiquitous on nearly every bicycle leaving the showroom floor, whether they made sense or not in a given application.

That last part was coming into play just as I left. As a shop catering to transportation riders, we didn't yet have a lot of bikes in stock with disc brakes so I actually seldom worked on them. The few times I did I found them to be grossly heavy, fussy and unsustainable because the "pads" -- tiny shards of metal coated with a fine layer of rubber-cork mixture -- wore out t an alarming rate. I left the shop underwhelmed by early mass-produced disc brake technology and remain unconvinced that they solve all problems.

And I say that as someone living in the PNW where it still rains quite a lot. I have never had a problem riding in Portland with rim brakes.

Since most of the bikes that come my way are either donated, purchased outright for peanuts or abandoned, discs generally aren't a big part of my landscape, and I'm fine with that. As for shocks, one of my greatest joys is replacing a dead shock fork (like the one above) with a plain, boring rigid fork. I often score these from older guys who are selling off the contens of their home workshops -- there are usually a few each week in the want-ads -- and so I get them for a few bucks each.

In short, I enjoy the process of scavenging for old stuff and making it work again. Now that I do it for bikes that are donated to refugee families, sold for stupid-cheap to essential hourly-wage workers or fixed up for friends on a budget (like this one), I feel like THIS is why I spent all those years learning to fix bikes -- for people who will really ride them and not treat them as status symbols or wall-hangers.
I am slower now -- arthritis and Crohn's have made me slower and less-efficient a mechanic these days and I could not get a shop job now if I tried -- but I am the happeist bike mechanic I've ever been in my life, and grateful I can still do this for all the folks who really benefit from bicycles.
Best of all, I still believe with all my heart that bicycles will help save the world.