Another trivial project of the day
After slapping another coat of shellac onto the handlebars, I pried off my shiny! red crankset and put on the old crankset from my Trek (with a single 42 tooth biopace ring to replace the 48 tooth one I was running.)
This drops me from a 115-40" range down to 101-35". Given any luck this will make it easier for me to row up steep grades without derailing the chain into the weeds. If it doesn’t work, I guess I’ll just have to resort to a pair of chainrings up front.
(Note the black and white photo. Now that I’ve once again got a camera that uses interchangable lenses, it means I can toss my f1.8 super-takumar into the fray. But when you take the pictures in the middle of the night without flash, the color balance becomes, um, amusing, and then going greyscale becomes an essential part of keeping my readership from going insane.)
(Also note that the crankset is a Sakae Blaze from the late 1980s. Originally it held a 53/42 double, and the arms reached up the sides of the 53 to stabilize it. If you just rip the old chainrings off and put a 42 tooth biopace on it, all of the arms overlap the teeth and force the chain off into the weeds. Well, there’s nothing wrong with that that a little work with a bastard file, a finish file, and some steel wool won’t clean right up!)