Bike hacks
The front fender clearance on the mlcm has been a source of increasing annoyance for most of the last year and change (ending up with my pulling the fenders altogether and riding this last summer au naturale.) It finally got to the point where I sidelined the mlcm and started riding the project bike on brevets in its place.
Well, last week I fabricated a mandrel for fork bending, then went down to the hardware store to get the hardware I needed to fasten it to my workbench. I also found a ½" conduit bender, which, happily, is basically the size of the tubing on the lower parts of the fork blade. I reraked one of my scrap forks as a test, and was pretty happy with it, so I went out and got a cyclocross fork (which has clearance for days, but pays for that with a substantially longer crown to axle distance) and reraked it to bring the crown to axle distance down to a more reasonable amount (and, not exactly accidentally, to give myself a low trail fork that I can test ride a bit.)
After more of a battle than I thought (I’d last disassembled my old fork last year, and since then there’s been approximately 10,000 miles of me riding (and sweating on,) which meant that all of the spacers and the headset caps were stuck pretty firmly onto the steerer tube) I removed the old fork and dropped the newly reraked cross fork in place of it. And while I was at it I dumped the caliper brake and bought a mini-V to replace it with (still need to buy a travel agent; as it stands, I /can/ brake with the mini-V, but it takes pretty much all of the lever pull to do it – I can tighten up the arms of the brake, but then it becomes /very/ difficult to pop the brake cable loose so I can remove the tire.)
I still need to cut the steertube, tighten the stem down, put the fenders back, braze up a new porteur rack (that can take advantage of the rack mounts on this fork), and then decide whether to try and internally route the power and signal wiring up the inside of the fork, but it’s nice to be closer to being able to ride a bicycle with good front clearance again.
Comments
Great job sorting the new fork, however I cant help but notice that brake looks like a standard V brake rather than the mini-v variety so its no supprise your having difficulty getting it to work with canti/caliper levers. Mini-v are much sorter than standard V brakes, so end up with less cable pull and work more effectively with the shorter pull levers. Might be worth hunting out one in preference of a travel agent, horrible things those are.
That’s not the actual brake – that’s a mockup that I was using to check dimensions (the mini-V brake was hiding under a pile of bike parts in the basement.) Tektro has recently started to change their documentation on the mini-Vs to say that they work best with brifters that pull more cable than the Shimano ones (they explicitly mention Sram & Campagnolo, neither of which I use, of course.)
I can get the mini-V to work with a little noodle surgery; if I trim the nipple down to about half its regular length that gives me enough slack so I can set the brifter up to lock the brake in about ¾ths of the leverl pull and still be able to pop the noodle loose if I need to. It’s really teetering on the edge of usability there, though, so I’m still going to travel agent the thing (sadly, it looks as if there’s enough room inside the guts of my brifters to increase the cable pull about 50%, but, of course, there’s no way to really do that unless I physically modify where the cable attaches to the lever.)
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Very impressed by successful fork-re-raking.
Moreso with the impromptu setup you used.