Thank goodness for used frames
So the old trek cracked and needed to be replaced ASAP. “Maybe,” thought I, “I can find something at the Community Cycling Center and I’ll be able to put off the decision to buy a big honking torch and a fistful of tubes until later when I actually have time to do so.” So this afternoon, after retrieving the bears from school (and discovering that Russell had lost another lock key, which meant that I needed to buy him another lock again) I hopped on the mlcm and bolted up to NE Portland to take a look around.
And there, at the end of a line of aluminum and steel frames hanging from racks on the ceiling, was this shiny! red Trek 400, claiming to be 56×56 (which is allegedly the size of the now crippled Trek 1000.) It wasn’t as dirt cheap as some of the raggedy old mountain bike frames up there, but it was still really really cheap, and when I took it down and looked at it all of the tubes seemed straight, so it only took about 30 seconds of waffling to decide that it would be the perfect replacement frame. So I bought it (and a lock for Russell) and brought it back home, at which point it went down to the basement to wait for a 4-hour block of time for me to extract the old frame from the xtracycle and insert this one.
Hopefully I’ll be able to carve that block of time out before the end of the weekend, because I don’t want to carry a full load of groceries home in half a dozen trips on the mlcm.