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.