On Thursday I took
my cycle building project to Bike Pirates. I was about five minutes ahead of
their official opening time and there were four people ahead of me. They opened
relatively close to on time but the only volunteer on the floor was the little
guy in his seventies who looks like a cross between an elf and Santa Clause. He
told us that he could only take care of three stands at a time, unlike Dennis,
who manages four when he’s alone. So the rest of us had to sign up and then
lock our velos outside. Since I live five doors down the street, I just took my
machine home, took a pee, grabbed some writing paper and then came back.
I thought that since the first thing
that I planned on doing was to find a bolt and nut for the unfilled hole on my
crank set, that I might be able to look through what they have since I wouldn’t
need a stand for that. The volunteer was a little annoyed when I asked him and
stressed again that he could only handle helping three people at a time. I
shrugged and said, “Okay” and then I went to the couch near the entrance and
did some writing.
There was an A-frame blackboard sign
sitting just inside the entrance and positioned to be one of the first things
anyone would see when they walked in. The message that had been chalked onto it
though was obviously left over from Tuesday night, because it read, “No more repairs
today. Sorry”. While I was sitting there, two people came halfway in the door
with their bikes looked at the sign and then backed out again. When the elfin
volunteer came up to the front desk, and stopped to ask himself out loud why he
had come up there, one of the people waiting pointed out the sign to him and I
told him that two people had just left because of it. He went outside and
managed to catch at least one of them, then he closed the sign and turned it
around and went back to wondering why he had come to the front.
After about half an hour he decided
that things were going pretty smoothly and so he could handle one more machine
on a stand, so that put me to number one on the list. After another fifteen
minutes one more volunteer arrived and so the elf said that I was up. I went to
get my bike and he told me to put it on stand number five. The volunteer that
had just come in was the one that helped me. He sounds like he might be from
Russia, some Eastern European country or even Israel, though I have overheard
him mention that he also speaks French. I think his name is Dan.
My first half hour was spent
searching for a bolt and nut, although it was Dan that found the bolt I needed.
I later found a nut that fit, though it was a little thicker than the other two
nuts on the crankset. He told me to tighten everything up and then we’d put the
crankset on. When we did so though it turned out that the crank set was too
close to the frame. Dan’s solution was to find a longer version of the same
kind of axel. That meant that I had to open up the bottom bracket again. For
some reason it had gotten dirty in there, even though I’d cleaned it all out
thoroughly before carefully placing the ball bearings. The only reason I can
think of is that dirt eventually got knocked down there from the side tubes
while I’d been doing work on other parts of the bike. So I had to remove the
ball bearings, some of which fell down the side tubes and so I had to flip the
bike to knock them back out. I cleaned the bracket out again and was going to
replace the ball bearings but since I still couldn’t remove the cup from one
side, it was too difficult to put that half’s ball bearings in while the cycle
was upright, so I tried to do what I’d done a few weeks before, which was to
take the bike off the stand and lay it on its side on the table. But when I did
that before it was just a frame and it still fit on the table, whereas this
time with a headset, wheels and a seat on, it just wouldn’t fit on the table,
so I laid it out on the floor. The elf came up and almost chastised me about it
until he realized what I was doing and walked away.
When it was time to install the
axel, I inserted it but then Dan changed his mind and got me another one of the
same length that wasn’t as corroded. But I had already knocked free some ball
bearings again and so I had to once more lay the machine out on the floor to
put them back in place.
Finally we got a working crank on
and then it was time to install the arms. The original pins that I’d knocked
out were bent and so we had to replace them. It took Dan a while to find the
right size, but in the end I had a crank and arms. I had hoped on being there
for only a couple of hours, but I started an hour late, and on top of that I
basically had to take three steps back and then four steps forward again just
to get one new thing installed on my bike.
I brought my old
Phoenix over to show Dan and to ask what more could be salvaged from it for the
project. He said I could use the pedals, maybe the chain and he thought that I
could use the cassette from the old bike, though it seemed to me that other
volunteers had said it wasn’t compatible. Dan encouraged me to keep working
that afternoon because the axel on the back wheel hadn’t been put in right. He
asked who’d helped me with it but when I said it had been Alain, he didn’t seem
to believe me, because Alain wouldn’t have made that mistake. I felt that I’d
already been there too long, and I planned on coming back on Saturday anyway to
I cleaned up and left. Since all I’d gotten were the pins I only donated $10.00
this time.
No comments:
Post a Comment