My little bike project - The Epilogue

Turns out I'm not quite the perfectionist I think I am when it comes to bike building. I have discovered a few problems with my single speed.

Gear Ratio
I decided to go for a 3:1 ratio for the front to back sprocket. So I have put on a 48 teeth front crank, and a 16 teeth rear sprocket. This it turns out is a brilliant ratio for the flats, but even on the slightest incline its proves quite tough. I have a constant feeling that I'm in the wrong gear, and I instinctively try and down shift on my gears, which don't exist. In hindsight, I should've done a bit more research on gear ratios, and gone for a smaller crank on the front. This is something I can't change, I guess it will help strengthen my leg muscles.

New wheel ignorance
Since I buckled the wheel from the original bike while trying to get the cassette of it, I invested in a cheap Halfords touring wheel for the rear. Having never had to purchase a new wheel, I hadn't realised that it didn't already come with a rim tape. I happily slid on the new tyre and inner tube on Sunday, pumped it up to 95 psi and rode it into work on Monday. When I returned in the evening to ride home, I found the bike sitting there, all proud and shiny, but with a completely flat rear tyre. An investigation ensued, which is when I discovered the missing rim tape. Lesson learnt !

Snow !

I share a love hate relationship with snow. It turns the view from my window into something from a post card. For the briefest of moments, everything is pristine. Looking at it from my window at night I'm filled with happiness.

Snow !

The next morning however I'm filled with the dread. I've put on 2 full body layers, a balaclava and my ski gloves. I'm now in my own little cocoon completely segregated from the elements. I don't enjoy this kind of cycling. It's almost like driving a car. You can see everything around you, but you can't experience it. That combined with slippery roads, tentative drivers and careless pedestrians make for a not too enjoyable commute. At least I'm still riding !

My little bike project - Part 3

The hard bits of the job were now done. All that remained was my favourite part of this project. Putting all the new shiny parts that I had bought onto the frame. There is something very special about assembling shiny parts onto a clean set of threads with fresh grease. It's an almost Zen like moment, of yin and yang combining together to bring harmony to my world. Passion or obsession ? You decide..

First thing to go on were the stunning cranks. Once on, their beauty is in stark contrast to the cheap frame, but this contrast makes it look almost arty, I think so anyways.

Shiny Cranks

Next comes the new wheel, cassette and spacer combination. All securely locked together with a special Shimano nut, for which I had to buy a special £20 tool, which I will now not use for another 6 months at least ! I am going to digress here slightly to have a little rant. The bicycle is the perfect example of humanity's brilliance manifested in the form of some cutting edge engineering. Every part that holds the bike together has a long winded history of development from something simple to something brilliant. But all these diverse developments when come together in one single unit, you are left with a hundred parts, all requiring their own special tool to remove/attach. And these parts aren't consistent between different bikes. The bottom bracket for example, on this bike is a square taper, on my mountain bike is a hollowtech II. Both of these require special tools to remove and attach. I have used the mountain bike tool once, in the last 2 years, and the road bike tool once during a similar period. There is some merit to be given to simplicity in engineering.The bicycle at its inception was just this, the epitome of engineering simplicity, this is no longer true, and this is probably the only downside to owning and maintaining your own bikes. I dream of a world in which a bike can be stripped and re-assembled with just an adjustable spanner and set of Allen keys ! That's it, rant over.

New Wheel and Cassette

Finally, the chain tensioner goes on. Chain tensioned, new pedals attached to the cranks and tyre/inner tube put onto the wheel, and we are done.

The last steps

This is what the finished product looks like:

Job done, and still a wee bit of daylight left for a short spin. Couldn't have timed it better !

My little bike project - Part 2

Although the thought of change had planted its seeds in my brain, it was going to take a while before I actually did something about it. I had a brief look at parts, and found them rather expensive, and so decided to wait for the January sales before making any purchases.

January came and went, and I didn't really come across the parts that I was looking for, in the price range that I wanted. I began contemplating just giving the bike to halfords, and they would replace all of it with cheap parts, and the bike becomes functional again. However, this would deprive me of hours of fun in the garage getting messy, and so although I dwelled on the idea, I never went through with it. So the bike continued to gather dust in the garage. That was until I stumbled upon this brilliant kit on Wiggle:

http://www.wiggle.co.uk/gusset-1-er-single-speed-conversion-kit/

This made me think, why not convert it to a single speed. There is only one hill on the way to work, it would be a completely different challenge, and maybe I would finally be considered "trendy". So I acquired a few other parts to make it all happen. They were as follows :

A beautiful Sturmey Archer F26 48 teeth silver chainset:

http://singlespeedcomponents.co.uk/chainsets/sunrace-sturmey-archer-silver.html

And finally a cheapo chain tensioner:

http://www.gussetbikes.com/products-information.php?id=CHGUSSFK

Once all the parts had been delivered, work began on that weekend. The first task was to strip and clean the Apollo of its old rusty parts. This was easier said than done.

Rust is like equivalent of superglue for metal. If efforts aren't made to keep rust at bay, parts tend to just join together to form one brilliantly integrated part, perfect in its place, but impossible to remove. Since barely anything had been serviced on the Apollo for a few years, the bike was now just one solid mix of aluminium, steel, grease and dust. The pedals had fused into the cranks, the bottom bracket had become one with the frame, and the cassette and the wheel were just one integrated unit. WD40 on its own self was not going to be enough. I had to employ the additional assistance of my flatmates rather large arm muscles to help me out. Thus began 3 hours of muscle flexing, confusion about clockwise and anti-clockwise turns, and endless spraying of WD40, until I finally had everything taken off.

Stripped down

Rusty !

Once I'd finished stripping it down, I spent a wee while just cleaning it all up, getting rid of the rust and the special black soot covering all the nooks and crannies which is a combination of grease, chain oil, dust, grit and tarmac. She looked like a different bike all together once I was done. What a brilliant way to spend my Saturday !

My little bike project -Part 1

A few months ago, a friend of mine decided to up sticks and move to the land of the free and the home of the brave, The United States of America. This being quite a drastic move, he decided to flog/donate/destroy a number of things he had managed to acquire over his lifetime in England. One of these was an Apollo TDF 02 road bike, which he had owned as the name suggests, since 2002. At some point in his life, he had been quite fond of this beast, but with a new life beckoning he had decided to dispose of it, and offered to give it to me. His reasons for doing so aren't completely clear. I'm quite sentimental about my bikes, and so the thought of giving a bike you've owned for 10 years away, seems incredulous to me. Maybe he's not that sentimental about his bikes, or maybe he knew that I would keep riding it, I'll never know what was actually going through his head, but he did seem a wee bit sad when he finally handed it over to me.

I also have a wee bit of history with this bike myself. Around 3 years ago, he had lent me this bike for a week to give me a chance to discover what road biking was all about. I instantly fell in love with this agile and light style of riding. Finally, I could fulfil my need for speed on a bicycle. This eventually led to the purchase of my first ever road bike a few months later.

He had also recently bought an all carbon Giant road bike as a replacement, some time ago. Hence his Apollo had relegated to the status of a  commute bike. For people who own multiple bike, the commute bike tends to always be the most ridden, and also the most neglected when it comes to maintenance. This was certainly true of the Apollo. I had decided that, this would be a fitting way to carry on the tradition, by making this my commute bike as well.

He had already provided me with a list of things to fix, ranging from "urgent" to "some time in the future". So I fixed all the things he'd listed as "urgent", such as replacing brake pads and gear cables, on the next free Saturday and awaited excitedly for Monday.

My ride to work, was not as enjoyable as I'd hoped for. I discovered that there was a very significant amount of chain slippage. Which was particularly noticeable on the one hill that I come across on my ride to work. It was nearly impossible to put any power down. On the ride home, I concluded that this was not going to work. I would have to replace the Chain rings, chain and cassette, just to make this bike ride-able again. Thus began "My little bike project".

Riding to Work

Feeling much recovered, I decided today was the day to get back on the bike. Being a weekday the first ride was a humble 5 mile ride to work. On most days I find this ride quite boring, its more or less the same route that I've ridden regularly for the last 3 years, mostly flat with one short hill. Today however was quite different. Having spent so much time off the bike and predominantly indoors, I had been looking forward to this ride all weekend. I could barely sleep due to the excited anticipation. Its times like these when I wonder if I'm blurring the lines between passion and delusion. Is a 20 min bike ride on busy roads with endless potholes really worth loosing sleep over ? I certainly seem to think so.

The ride itself was harder than I was expecting,  probably due to the heavy winds. Hoping to go for a longer ride at the weekend, the numbers from which will tell me how much fitness I've actually lost, and how much ground I need to make up.

Illness

So I have failed to stick to my plans for winter training. First it was snow, then holidaying in the sun and now I am ill. Feeling like death warmed up, and having spent nearly two weeks off the bike I'm going a wee bit crazy trapped indoors. Hoping to recover soon and report on my cycling endeavours.