With today a wash because of Irene, I figured I’d write up a fun bike ride I took last weekend on the Minuteman Bikeway. It’s a fun ride but on a Sunday it’s pretty crowded. There’s a good mix of little kids and Lance Armstrong wannabes, perfect for keeping things interesting. I covered the whole [...]
The crash course I’ve been getting in bicycle handle bar diameters is a real drag. There’s 1/7th of an inch difference between most roadbike bars and BMX so, as I describe in my last post, the stem on my new cutter won’t work with my new bull horn bars. The old FBM bars I had [...]
I’ve been waiting for what seems like forever to get my wheel set from Mello Velo (the local bike shop). I’ve had pretty much all of the other parts together for a week now, but a bike isn’t a bike without two wheels. Yesterday they finally came in. You’d think that would be all good [...]
It’s been a busy month and I’ve neglected putting up a few things I’d deem “blog worthy”. First up is the new bike I’m building. Restoring the Raleigh was so much fun I had to start in on another one. So far I’m just spec’ing out parts. I settled on the Cutter frame by Volume [...]
It’s done. Putting the bike back together was super easy. Part of what made it so easy was that I put the components (breaks, derailers etc) back together as I cleaned them up. The brakes were already done so I just had to bolt them back on, the bottom bracket was a bit more difficult [...]
This is the turning point. The derailers were the last two pieces of this bike that had to be cleaned up / repaired. Mechanically they’re pretty much the most complicated parts of the bike. Modern derailers have a lot of plastic on them but these ones are all steel. This makes them super heavy but [...]
Drilling out cotter pins is a pain in the ass. I tried real hard to pound these things out but I ended up doing more harm than good. I tried pounding them out the good old fashioned way but I ended up bended the threaded end one one side and putting a good ding in [...]
It’s been a while since I’ve posted about the Raligh. I’ve been working on it but not as much as I’d like. You know how it is: school, work blah blah blah. Same old sob story, poor me. Anyways I’ve started in on the home stretch and it’s turned out to be a very long [...]
My last post about this restoration project was a pretty big one. I’m thinking it’s a better idea to post about my progress in smaller steps and thus this post will be much shorter. Since last time I’ve taken on the brakes: they’ve been disassembled, cleaned, polished and greased. Here’s the before shot of the [...]
The last post I made about this winter project was a while ago. Since then I’ve made some great progress. So far I’ve only focused on cleaning up the easy stuff: getting rust off of the wheels, handle bars and neck, and the break and gear leavers. All the grunt work that no one likes [...]
