The moving target, temporarily immobile
It’s been about 4 months, and I’m up to somewhere in the ballpark of 1600 miles on the thing. It spends a lot of time moving these days, thanks to the typically bizarre Oregon weather.
I finally swapped out the crunched left pedal (with MKS touring pedals,) the handlebars with a twisted left horn (replaced with a Nitto Randonneur bar, which I highly recommend; the horns flare out a little bit, so I can ride in the drops and not have my lower arms rubbing against the top part of the handlebar anymore,) the old Suntour indexed shifters (with a pair of Rivendell Silver friction shifters – the Suntour shifters allegedly had a friction mode, but it was less frictiony and more mushy indexed than I was willing to put up with, and after a day when I went up a pretty steep hill on 232nd with the chain hopping unhappily all the way, I decided that sacrificing Yet Another Computer was worth a more retrogrouchy shifter,) and the Avocet saddle (with first an old used Brooks Professional (US$30 on Ebay) and, when that saddle started to develop a tear across the front, a new unused Brooks Professional mail-ordered from the UK (because, even with shipping, it was US$100 cheaper than the prices I was seeing from sellers in the American Imperium.)) On the pure cosmetics front, I replaced the neon green Blackburn bottle holder (which had finally worn to the point where it was neon green and scraped-bare aluminum,) and the cheap-and-it-showed Trek bottle holder I got from my LBS, with a couple of cheap-but-it-doesn’t-show silver bottle holders, and the pink bar tape had gotten so filthy that I needed to replace it, so I went with some black tape on the hopes that the black greasy staining the pink tape had gotten wouldn’t be quite so visible against a black background.
I was given a US$75 Amazon gift certificate for christmas, and I spent that money buying a generator hub, which needs to be laced into a wheel before it goes onto the bicycle. This might take a while, because I don’t actually know how to build wheels yet, but those parts won’t be going anywhere while I’m waiting.
Comments
The Free Radical frame has a sideways U shaped staple at the front end which is used to clamp the embarrassingly named attachment plate to the front end of the rear triangle. The chainstays on my trek are too short to fit the staple, so I had it cut off, shortened, and rewelded.
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“…when I bought a free radical and (after surgery to shorten it to fit into the rear triangle) stretched it out.”
What does this mean?
What exactly did you have to do?