New Fixie

I got a new frame for the fixed gear bike I put together for my brother. This steel Free Spirit frame is infinitely better than that Huffy piece of crap I was using before. I am glad I was using a cheap frame and throwaway components. I ran into a couple of problems I wasn't expecting. This really isn't going to be a long term bike for a couple of reasons. I somehow managed to cross-hread the drive-side bottom bracket. I should certainly know better than to put it in there with any force, but it was just sticking a little bit, and I tried it so many different times, and it took so little force. Once I found out it was cross-threaded; I just cranked it in there all the way as hard as I could, so the bottom bracket is now garbage, and the frame more or less is too. I mean, it's in there, and it's going to stay in there, but it will be unusable if it ever comes out, and the bottom bracket shell is ruined too, unless I could get it re-threaded. Another problem I had was with the non drive-side crank arm. I must not have tightened it down hard enough the first time, so it came out while Gabe was pedaling. Luckily, he wasn't going to fast. Online, a lot of people said that if it happens once it will continue to happen. I cranked it on there, and it seems to be on there fairly well, and it's been a month and a couple hundred miles, so hopefully, it's there to stay. I don't want to end on a negative note, because it's been a positive experience. I learned a lot, and my brother has a functioning bike. I can't wait to build my own.

Sweet Fixie Brah

I just slapped together what could possibly be the most un-hip fixie in existence. I told my brother I'd make him one, but I'd been having some difficulty locating a vintage road bike. At our hunting lodge, I noticed a hunk of junk Huffy mountain bike, and to my surprise, it had horizontal dropouts. I didn't like the one piece crank, but I figured that I had nothing to lose, so I started putting her together. Mostly, I used stuff I already had laying around: track wheelset, 17 tooth cog, and some sweet handlebar grips. Unfortunately, I was a little short on chain, so I had to get a KMC Z410 Bicycle Chain
from Amazon, and I also had to get a Pyramid Track Cog Lockring. After acquiring the parts, everything fit together fairly nicely (all things considered). Fortunately, the inner chainring wasn't riveted, so I was left with the 40 and the fifty. Ideally, I would've disconnected those two, and just ran the 50, but they were riveted. Right now, I have it on the 50, and the chainline looks acceptable. If it gives me any problems, I'll run it from the 40 tooth, and probably go with a 14 tooth cog. The distance between the dropouts is a little longer than it should be, but the axles on the wheel are long enough, so I just need to crank on the bolts to bend the steel in a few centimeters on each side. I would also like to change the saddle, and chop a couple inches off each end of the handlebars. As of now, it's a functioning bike, but I don't think it has much of a long term future. There's a lot of rust, and the tightening bolts on the stem are completely rounded off, so I'll never be able to service the headset. The important thing is that my brother has his bike, and everything I put on there can be transferred over to a vintage road frame if I ever find one.

Dad's Bike, Finished

After doing everything I could imaging to get dad's bike going without making that god-awful noise coming from the drive-train, I gave up on it for a while, and worked on some other things for a couple of days. I was going to take it apart one more time today, and put it back together, and hope for the best, but when I rode it up to the deck, I noticed the noise was much subdued. I made a couple more adjustments with the rear derailleur, and it's riding fairly well. I still feel a little bit of vibration in some of the gears, and it doesn't shift strongly while going up hills, but most of them feel pretty smooth, and the noise is gone for the most part. Considering how cheap the bike is, I believe it's performing at an acceptable level at this point. Gabe's put about 45 miles on it over the last couple of days, so it looks like the job is done (for now).

Dad's Bike Cont.

I got the parts for dad's bike last week. I bought the Park Tool FR-1 Freewheel Remover for Shimano Freewheels and the Shimano 7-Speed 13-28 Freewheel I pulled the old freewheel right off, and popped the new one on, and I thought it was going to be that easy. My first inclination that things were not going to be perfect was the tire rubbing against the gd v-brakes (which always give me hell). I thought I would deal with them later, and work on the task at hand. The chain was coming off the sprockets, so I used the barrel adjuster, and got the chain shifting through the range of gears without falling off. It was pedaling relatively smoothly, and shifting cleanly, so I thought I would give it a little test drive, and that's when I heard that god-awful noise; a grinding, squealing groan. I relubed the chain, repacked the rear hub, serviced the bottom bracket, and oiled the derailleur pulleys. Still making that noise. It only makes it when pedaling under load. I've spent hours on that thing, with little to show for it. I was pretty depressed by Thursday. Luckily, I had a nice productive weekend in the garden to help forget about it. I'm going to give it one more go sometime this week, and if I can't get it, I'll have to hand it over to Alpine cycles.

Week 2 To Do

To start my second week home I was greeted with a May 10 frost, but it did turn into a beautifully crisp spring day afterwords. For the rest of the week, it's going to be cold and damp until the weekend, when it's supposed to warm back up into the sixties, and possibly seventies by next week. Besides regular maintenance of checking on my seeds and plants, I've got a few special projects going this week. One that I'm excited about is trying to get my dad's bike back up and running with the help of the Bike Forums I think I figured out what tool I need, and the part to replace the broken freewheel. I ordered them from Amazon, so they should both be here this week. If I get it fixed, I'll describe it in a more detailed post.

I also started working on a three box system for the compost. Using the chicken coop as a backstop I've got three walls up, so it's kind of a 2 box system. I'd like to find one more board to use as a fourth wall, so we can stop using the garbage can altogether. I'm also going to be building a couple of tee-pee trellises for my pole beans to climb. I've located some long ash limbs. Now, I need to cut them and get them in place.

The chicken coop is looking a little abandoned, so I've got to start getting it ready. On Monday the 17, Uncle Paul and I are going to head to the stockyards, and pick up a few laying hens.
Work begets work, so I'm sure I'll discover a few more projects while working on those I've already got planned. To wrap this up on a positive note, I got my finally grades back, so I've officially got the 36 credits I need to graduate. I'm now a certified Master Librarian, or masterbrarian as I like to call myself.

Dad's Bike

In addition to gardening, I would like to take some time this summer to work on my bicycle mechanic skills. I've done a number of repairs on the bikes I've owned, but they are all fixies and road bikes. My dad has a department store mountain bike (Schwinn, High Timber). The bottom sprocket on his cassette is completely shredded, and the teeth on some of the others are worn down (this bike is a year old). In theory this should be a simple repair. Buy a new cassette, slip it on, and tighten it. In practice it's much more difficult, because Schwinn bikes are using this off-brand component, DNP. The DNP freehub has three tiers, whereas name-brand freehubs have one diameter from base to tip, so it's not as simple as just ordering a new cassette.
I might have to replace the entire freehub, which I've never done before. There are some tutorials online, so I'm going to give it a shot, but the problem with department store bikes is that there cheapie components don't always conform to industry standards, so the online help may not apply.