Raising the dead
It’s been snowing in Portland, and since everything is covered with ice I decided that this is a good time to reassemble the mountainhack and outfit it with a pair of Nokian A10 studded tires that I bought several years ago and never actually used, what with not riding for a year and then getting hit by a car just before last year’s round of snow.
The mountainhack is less mangled than the third-party bikeshop (River City Bicycles) said; the rear triangle is a little askew, but not terribly so (the top of the rear wheel is tilted a tiny bit towards the NDS, which makes the NDS clearance for the A10 less than I’d want, but which can be fixed by manually lining up the wheel and clamping it tightly in place (a better solution would be to file the DS dropout to even the axle)) and the only thing that is bent to the point where I’d want to replace it is the fork, where the NDS leg was bent to the tune of 10mm of rake (fixable, maybe, but I’d be better off just brazing up a new fork which I’ll do when I take off and reposition the front derailer braze-on boss.)
The reassembled version (the A10s are mounted on a couple of el-cheapo Weinmann Zac19 rims laced to noname hubs – it was cheaper to buy the preassembled wheels than it would have been to lace a set up myself) is more or less what it was before I was hit by a car, even though I’ve yet to put a rack onto the thing. And the A10s are nice and clingy on icy roads and sidewalks, so my plan of having a machine I can ride when everything is covered with a layer of ice and/or snow seems to have been a success.