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.