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Thread: The Lounge of Terrestrial Wheelmen

  1. #4671
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    I didn't see them list the elevation gain, which I'm assuming means it's not known for its big climbs. 75 miles after six months of riding is absolutely doable, you got this.

  2. #4672
    High Plains Luddite George's Avatar
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    Welcome M4FFU!

    Quote Originally Posted by M4FFU View Post
    I can change in 6 months, right?
    Certainly! I stopped cycling (not intentionally, but it just happened) in my early twenties and didn't really get started again until my mid-forties. I was amazed at how quickly I progressed. Part of it is that cycling is fun and doesn't seem like an ordeal to be suffered through, such as running/jogging (at least to me).
    Last edited by George; March 18th, 2019 at 08:05 AM.

  3. #4673
    High Plains Luddite George's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Cam
    ...he has the same road bike as me, an older, red and white Specialized Allez.
    My Allez is a 1996, according to old catalogs I found online. I’d love to see yours, if you’re ever in the mood to share a picture larger than the one on Strava.

    Below is more typical bike thread foolishness from me - the penultimate episode of the ever-popular series starring our humble hero, the mighty Lunch Bike! It’s long and boring, as usual, but it is a GTX Forums exclusive.

    Spoiler:


    Back in 2017, inspired by our late friend overpowered, I decided it was downright silly of me not to keep a cheap bicycle in my office at work in the city to increase the radius I could explore on a typical lunch break, because as Lightnin' Hopkins said: "the rubber on the wheel is faster than the rubber on the heel."

    I paid very little for an okay bike on craigslist and liked everything about it except the straight and narrow handlebars and clunky, hard-to-turn, twist-grip shifters. This bike has Shimano Acera components, which I think are/were at the bottom of Shimano's component list, and the shifters just plain sucked. My wife's bike has very nice twist-grip shifters, so I know they exist, but the ones on Lunch Bike had to go.

    Then we hired four people at work and I had to move out of a large office with its own exterior door. I lost interest in having the bike there in a busier office and didn't want to be the guy with the bike who was always wheeling it through the whole place in order to enter or exit. I brought the bike home but promised to give it to my friend and coworker who I had shared the bike with (he rode it more than I did), once I finally got around to swapping out the handlebars. I thought giving him the bike would be a lot more fun than selling it for peanuts on craigslist.

    I wish I had not spent the money and time buying new parts. I could have just given it to him right then with all its original parts and been done with it. But, I had already stripped the old parts and donated them to the co-op so I had to finish the job to make the thing a functioning bicycle again. Finally, after a year or maybe more, the time and the weather was right this weekend to put the thing back together again.

    The bike wasn’t filthy, and actually looked okay from ten feet away, but there was enough crud on it in the usual places and dust from hanging in the garage all this time that I took the time to give it a thorough cleaning. I resisted the temptation to wax it, as I would have done for a bike I was keeping.

    This derailleur schmutz simply will not do.



    Ahh! Much better.



    I really wanted to put some fat tires on this thing, like perhaps Schwalbe Big Apple 26” x 2.35”. The clearance for tires looks huge – even bigger than the other mountain bikes of similar vintage and design that we have in the family. But I was determined not to spend more money on this bike. These tires are 26” x 1.75” tires that I bought when I started commuting to work on a mountain bike at my last job. They’re fast, but heavy and a pain to mount (I’ve mounted them a few times now) so I’m happy to see them go. This bike came to me with soft, slow knobbies that went to the co-op within the first couple days of ownership.



    Here it is with the new bars (Velo Orange Porteur), brakes (VO City Bike brake levers), and shifters (Shimano 8/9 speed, with the right/rear shifter switchable to friction mode – the left/front shifter is friction only, which I like much better than triggers or grip-shift for a triple crankset). I leveled the saddle and moved it back a little after taking these pictures. I thought my knee was too far forward with the saddle like this, and the next owner of this bike is a couple inches taller than me.

    If I was going to keep this bike, I’d have already installed an all-black saddle. I would also have gone with a wider handlebar (I was thinking narrow would be good in the city) and mountain bike levers. These levers are classic-looking, I suppose, but they don’t feel as “nice” as even cheap mountain bike levers. I love the bar-end shifters, however, and those don’t fit inside most handlebars designed for MTB levers and shifters.



    Here it is with bar tape after a test ride yesterday afternoon. I will probably re-do the ends and the finishing tape, since they aren’t symmetrical. My son helped with this part (and more) and I didn’t want to be Mr. Fussy about having everything just perfect. The tape is Performance Bicycle’s store brand and really thick. I probably could have wrapped it with less overlap to make it look thinner, but it feels great on this rigid bike that rides pretty “hard” with those small tires pumped up to 75 PSI.



    Tonight I’ll reinstall the rear rack and then tell my friend it’s ready, and just in time for spring. The snow is melting quickly around here and this coming weekend should be a good one for riding.

    One last thing: I have a bicycle repair stand. Highly recommended. However, with this bike, and my mountain bike as well, the shifter and rear brake cables run along the top tube, and the front derailleur cable is in the way on the seat tube. Using a two-legged "touring" kickstand as shown in these pictures completely solves the problem of shifting with the bike in the stand. Sure, the repair stand is great for most stuff, such as cleaning the bike and doing anything to the bike when one or both wheels are removed, but if I could only keep one, I'd keep the double kickstand. It's great for this kind of stuff.


  4. #4674
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    Man, you made that bike look better than it has any right to.

  5. #4675
    Bubbles :D M4FFU's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Tom Servo View Post
    I didn't see them list the elevation gain, which I'm assuming means it's not known for its big climbs. 75 miles after six months of riding is absolutely doable, you got this.
    https://www.mapmyride.com/gb/richmon...oute-121589167

    There are some big (to me) hills on there, kindly towards the end of it.

    And yes, at the moment it's a struggle. 27.5 2.6" tyres are a slog up hill, or anywhere, but I guess speed will come - else I'll swap them for something with a little less rolling resistance. The course to Brighton isn't that boggy, so I don't need anything as extreme as I've got at the moment. Wishing I'd got a 29" XC bike rather than 27.5" trail bike, but it looks rad, so...

  6. #4676
    Bubbles :D M4FFU's Avatar
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    And that bike is clean! Don't get much Schwinn stuff in the UK. Love some of their retro/cruiser stuff.

  7. #4677
    High Plains Luddite George's Avatar
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    Thanks for the kind words about how nice the bike looks. I just texted pics to my friend and got a similar reaction, which hopefully means his new wife (first wife; he's a young guy) will think the same thing.

    I've been bringing home stray guitars (and now bikes, too) long enough to have learned a few things. No way his lovely bride is going to be happy about him bringing home some dusty, dirty, old thing. It'll get that way soon enough if he rides it. But the first impression hopefully will be, "Oh, that's nice" instead of "You're not keeping that old thing here!"

    You old married guys know how it is, right?

    He is coming to pick up the bike tomorrow morning, so you guys won't have to listen to be go on and on about it again. I just enjoy messing with bikes and occasionally not doing all the other stuff I should be doing around the house instead. "Sorry, family - can't plunge that toilet now - gotta finish this bicycle setup!"

    A couple more pictures are below.

    Spoiler:


    I readjusted the brakes yesterday afternoon after my initial quick setup and tried to fix the rear brake pull. The front brake lever snaps back to the fully open or "off" position like it should, but the rear ones were hanging mid-way between closed and open when I released the lever - not rubbing, but still not quite "right".

    I removed the cantilever arms and found old grease and dust caked inside each one - not a surprise. All the older bikes we have in our family had this problem to varying degrees. It's an easy fix.





    Pull the spring out, carefully.



    Cleaning the spring and inside of the cantilever arm. Then I lightly greased the post on the frame and the inside of the spring and reinstalled everything. Repeat three more times and the brakes are hopefully good to go for a long time.



    I fixed the handlebar tape, because having them as asymmetrical as they were makes me go





    The final "after" picture:



    And a "before" for comparison. Not much looks different, I guess, but I had fun.




  8. #4678
    Ask me about my bottom br FaultyMario's Avatar
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    Noice!
    acket.

  9. #4679
    Jedi Cam's Avatar
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    Since G asked for it. My and Lori's road bikes brand new in 2006.

    bikes.jpg

  10. #4680
    High Plains Luddite George's Avatar
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    Neat. Thanks for taking the time, Cam. Hopefully I'm not the only one who likes to see new and interesting content here.

    The large manufacturers seem to change their styling (logo placement, colors, geometry, etc.) every year. It's interesting (to me, anyway) to look at one model vs. the same model just couple/few years later. Lately the trend seems to be brand names but no model names (Trek), or the model names pretty well hidden (Specialized).

    I went to the co-op yesterday to get a new stem for my daughter's bike. They'll probably outgrow these bikes soon but I figured she needs a taller stem for the summer, and it's another excuse to learn and teach bike repair. This is a picture I took for myself so I would have something to refer to while digging through the parts bins. Stems seem to look a little different when they're off the bike and in a bin with a bunch others. I found one very similar to his for five bucks, and I bought a cable hanger as well, since her front brake cable currently goes through the small stem.



    A couple spy photos of part of the back room at the co-op:





    They have many, many more bikes in there than just the ones you can see here.

    Our kids and the girl across the street rode their bikes to school today for the first time this year. They're calling for 75 degrees F (24 C) today - by far our warmest day of 2019 so far - but then a chance of snow Friday and Saturday.

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