Fixie Project - Part V

Not much progress to report on the painting front; the weather has been too humid for spraying for the last few days, which is holding up everything else. In the meantime I've done a few odd jobs like preparing a jury-rigged head cup press, using exactly $13.30 worth of bits from my local hardware store:


The threaded rod is 3/4" x 24" with a BSW thread. A tool like this only needs a rod about 20cm long, but 24" was all they had in the shop.

I'll post a picture of the tool in action once I get up to that point (i.e. after the frame is fully painted). I got this idea from Dave Moulton's Bike Blog. If it works, I'll have saved myself some workshop costs or the price of a proper head cup press (e.g. US$50 + P&P at Ben's Cycle).

Fixie Project - Part IV

Part IV in this riveting (and grinding and painting) series of blog posts about my fixie conversion project.

I'm doing a few things at once in this project, but the most visible progress has been the painting of the frame. In a previous entry, I showed you the frame in its original paint with all the bits stripped off. Well here it is after a few coats of grey primer from a rattle can.

Below you can see it in the final colour, Dulux sky blue. These shots show the horizontal dropouts quite well; hopefully they're deep and horizontal enough to provide easy adjustment of the chain tension.



The fork has received the same attention; sanding back to bare metal (or at least old paint that's in good condition), grey primer, then the colour.

The last steps will be a final sanding with #1000 wet-and-dry, then a coat of clear spray, again from a rattle can.

Somewhere in there, I'll apply some nice frame stickers I bought on eBay.

Fixie Project - Part III

Part III (the sequel to the sequel) in this riveting series of blog posts about my fixie conversion project (you can go back and read Part I and Part II if you like doing things in order, or you can read them later if you're more of a Memento kind of person).

Ugly Bits - Out!

Next step in the conversion was to attack the frame with a range of low-tech weaponry to get rid of all the ugly bits that you don't need on a fixie.

In the picture above, you can see the bosses for the rear cantilever brake (the two little grey posts). You can also see the angle grinder I used to cut them off. Angle grinders are not only dangerous, but also great fun. Their strength is also their weakness - they can remove a lot of material (especially thin or soft material) very quickly. So if you go this way yourself, be very conservative with your first few cuts; you can easily grind more off, but putting it back is a lot harder. I've done a lot of angle grinding over the years and (patronising rant continues...).

Now the right-hand (driver's side) post has been completely removed. I didn't go all the way down to the tube with the grinder. I stopped a mm or so short and used a flat bastard file (a fair dinkum technical term) to remove the rest. Next (after the photo) I used a fine file to take out the marks left by the bastard file. Lastly I went over the general area with garnet paper (coarse wet and dry would be OK too). That one week basic fitting course I did during my industrial training was sure coming in handy.





In the photo at right, both bosses have been ground and filed off, as has the cable stop for the rear brake (the upper pair of shiny patches).

All that's left on the seatstays is the brake bridge with the mounting boss in the middle. I'll leave this in place, as unlike the cable stop, it contributes stiffness and strength to the frame.

Paint

Although I'm trying to build this fixie on the cheap, I still want it to look half-decent. My plan is:

1. Strip the original paint using that goopy citrus paint stripper.
2. Spray a couple of coats of grey primer from a rattle can.
3. Sand with #600 wet and dry to smooth down the primer.
4. Spray with the final colour (still a secret, but it's not black) also using a rattle can.
5. Apply stickers (I've bought the main ones for the down tube from Cyclomondo, and am still trying to decide whether to put on some others or remain minimalist).
6. Spray on a clear coat from a rattle can.

Like most plans, it didn't survive first contact with the enemy. The you-beaut citrus stripper was laughed off by the doughty Nottinghamshire paint. The paint stripped off the fork OK, but that was a fork I'd painted myself a few years ago. The frame wasn't having any of it. So I reasoned that if the original frame paint was that intent on staying put, I'd leave it in place as a base coat. Instead of trying to remove it, I'd just key it up with some very rough sandpaper. Where there were any chips or scratches, I'd sand them out, trying to remove as little paint as possible in the process.

So then I sprayed the whole frame with a very rough coat of primer, for two reasons:

• to stop the bare metal rusting while other things like job and family got in the way of a perfectly good project, and
  
• to act as a guide coat so that I could more easily find any scratches or chips that I had yet to sand out

The result was very encouraging; despite the new "westie grey" colour scheme, having the frame in a single uniform colour made it look a lot more attractive. Motivation is important in ad-hoc projects like this, where obstacles are always cropping up.

New Bits

Although I was able to reuse several bits off the old bikes, such as frame, fork, headset, stem, wheels, seat, and bars, I was going to have to get some new stuff as well, either because the old stuff simply wouldn't work (e.g. wrong gear ratio) or because it was too rusted to look presentable (e.g. the seatpost and its clamp bolt).

At the end of the project I'll post a full list of what I had to buy, where I got it from, and what it cost me, but the first things I wanted to fit were the drivetrain components:

• bottom bracket
• cranks
• chainring
• rear sprocket
• chain

These parts were a priority because they would allow me to check and adjust the chainline of my new ride. The new Shimano BB was initially hard to fit, and I had all sorts of theories about my frame having been made in Timbuktu and thereby having a BB thread unseen anywhere else in the world. It couldn't possibly have been that I had it around the wrong way, could it now. Either way, it fits nicely now.

Next were the new 165mm crank and 42T chainring, which went on without a hitch. My new 16T sprocket hadn't arrived yet, so I screwed on a BB lockring where the sprocket would go, just to give me a rough idea of the chainline. It soon became obvious I would have to do two things to get it anywhere near straight:

• Mount the chainring on the inside of the crank (with the new short chainring bolts I had bought), and
  
• Respace the rear hub to the right. Sometimes things just work out nicely; on the right was a 15mm spacer, while the left was a 5mm one. Swapping them around would move the hub 10mm to the right.
  

That was all good until the real sprocket (a Shimano 7600) turned up and had a big flange on it; so big that the locking I was going to use won't also fit onto the hub (see pic).

I'm still undecided what to do about this ... find out in a future blog post (or a past one if you're Guy Pearce).

Fixie Project - Part II

OK, here's some photographic proof that I'm actually doing this thing! Here are the two donor bikes:

(L) a Giant Peloton 7000 road bike; bought new as my first club racing bike c. 1999; steel frame with vertical dropouts, QR wheels, drop bars, 1" threaded headset, triple chainring with 175mm cranks, RSX groupset with 7-speed screw-on freewheel, two sets of bottle cage mounts, no frame or mudguard mounts, STI combined gear/brake levers; known affectionately (if unimaginatively) as "Golden Boy".

• (R) a c. 1992 Raleigh Pioneer Spirit 18; apparently one of the first hybrid bikes in the UK; Reynolds 501 (steel) double-butted frame, nutted (non-QR) axles, flat bar, 1" threaded headset, 6-speed screw-on freewheel, front and rear mudguard mounts; known as "Blue Boy" (which is problematic because my current road bike is much bluer, but never mind)

The first step was to pick which frame to use. Golden Boy's frame is probably lighter, but the vertical dropouts make it impractical for a fixie conversion. You CAN convert a vertical dropout bike to a fixie, but you need to use either a chain tensioner, which looks ugly and adds weight and friction, or one of those White Industries hubs that Sheldon Brown talks about on his web site, which are a very expensive item that also necessitate a complete wheel build, something beyond the budget of this project.

Luckily Blue Boy's frame has the horizontal dropouts required for an easy fixie conversion:

Blue Boy's frame has some other nice features too; a retro-looking raised metal Raleigh badge on the head tube, and lugs instead of welds where the frame tubes meet.

The next step was to strip Blue Boy down to his component parts, which was mostly straightforward. The first exception was the bottom bracket - I didn't have the right tool to grip onto the Raleigh-style end cups. In the end I carefully clamped them in my bench vice and rotated the frame to unscrew them. The other hard things to remove were the two headset races, which had been pressed into the head tube upon manufacture and stayed there ever since. I did some Googling to find out how to remove these things, and came up with a few options:

• Sheldon says to use a hammer and screwdriver, doing each side a little at a time. I couldn't get this to work; the screwdriver kept slipping off the race.
• Then I found out there's a special tool you can buy to push them out; like the one from Park. The downside is that the tool costs a lot for the number of times you use it, especially (and it saddens me to say this) if you buy it in Australia. So this option was ruled out.
  
• I'm sure my LBSes can do it, but apart from the time and money aspect, it's also more satisfying to complete a project using your own skills as much as possible.
• You can make your own tool out of steel rods, but this looked like way too much work for a tool I'd hardly ever use (plus the effort and cost of sourcing and cutting the steel).
• Finally I learned about another option, the homemade "tube with slits" tool. I bought a 1m x 25mm x 1mm aluminium tube from my LHS (local hardware store!) for about $8.50, cut a 30cm length, made two cuts crossways in the end, and presto! The first version died after driving out 2.5 cups (of 2 bikes with 2 cups each), so I made another version in about two minutes that completed the job:

At the left-hand end of the tool you can see two of the four slits, which are about 6cm long. The right-hand end of the tool is burred over from repeated hammer blows. Below the tool you can see the races from Golden Boy (L) and Blue Boy (R). The former were in better nick and also used enclosed roller bearings, so I decided to use them even though cosmetically they don't suit the frame as well as the original ones.





Once the disassembly was complete, my former pride and joy was now a pile of transplant donor organs on the garage floor (missing from the photo are the 170mm cranks and the triple chainrings riveted [not bolted] to them):















Which bike's wheels to use was an easy choice; Blue Boy's axles are non-QR (quick release), which means you have to use a spanner to remove the wheel, even to fix a puncture. Also his bearings were trashed from years of neglect and maladjustment (and that's just mine I'm referring to). Both bikes' rear wheels have screw-on freewheels that take a track sprocket, so using Golden Boy's wheels was an obvious decision.

I could have used the bars from either bike, but because I like the bullhorn style, I used the "chop and flip" technique (and a hacksaw) to convert Golden Boy's drop bars; I'm pretty happy with how they turned out:

















More pics and blithering about my progress (or lack thereof) in part III.

New Project No. 27 - Building a Fixed Gear Bike

I'm a firm believer that you can never have too many projects on the go at once. So to the list I've now added "building a fixed-gear bike". If you don't know what this is, it's a bike with one gear that doesn't let you coast; so you have to pedal the whole time you're riding it, yes even down hills, around corners, and when coming up to a red light.

If you want to know more about fixies, read the late Sheldon Brown's web site, or search YouTube for "fixie" (the slang name for such machines).

My obstacles are:

• I've never ridden a fixie (or a track bike, which is much the same thing), so I don't know exactly what components will suit me best (e.g. what size gearing to choose for the only gear, which is a pretty important call).
  
• I'm part Scottish, so I dinnae wanna spend a lot of money, laddie.
• Although I've assembled my own road bike, it was with more modern components, and I'm by no means a bike mechanic when it comes to skills or even tools.

My strategy is to cannibalise two of my existing bikes that I don't ride any more (one is worn out, one is too small) for as many useful parts as possible, and buy the rest as cheaply as possible. I want the bike to look decent, but it doesn't need to have top name bits or be particularly light.

More details and pictures to come in part II; it's getting late.