Parts Unknown

            At around noon on Tuesday I took the Gitane cycle frame that I’d bought on Saturday and started heading over to Bike Chain on the U of T campus. I was rolling through Little Italy when my chain came off and I couldn’t get it back on. Something had come undone with my derailleur and I tried for several hand blackening minutes but I couldn’t figure out how the chain was supposed to do its roller coaster act around the three-starred mechanism. I started walking, looking for a bike shop and feeling hot. I was wearing a scarf and I wanted to take it off but I’d just washed it the day before and my hands were all greasy. I went into Pedalinx (worst name for a bike shop ever!) about three blocks west of Bathurst. The guy at the front desk informed me that I’d lost part of my derailleur. I noted what a strange coincidence it was that on my way to get one problem fixed at Bike Chain I would end up with an even bigger complication. I made use of some of Pedalinx degreaser before continuing my walk the rest of the way to Bike Chain.

            Bike Chain is in back of 563 Spadina Crescent, across from the Graduate Students Union Pub and just a couple of doors down from Koffler House, where I took my first Continental Philosophy class in January of 2016 before the course got bumped to St Joseph Street on the other side of campus. They have a smaller shop than Bike Pirates but they are definitely better organized. The first thing customers need to do is either open an account on the computer or log onto an existing one, with a phone number, then one has to lock one’s bike outside and wait for a call. There was one guy ahead of me, but while we were waiting he suddenly got called away and so I was suddenly next in line.

            When I first clamped my bike to a stand there was just one young woman handling both the front desk and helping customers with their bike dilemmas. She was pretty knowledgeable though and explained to me that one of my derailleur wheels and the bolt that held it in place had come off. My first task was to find a matching derailleur wheel to the other one and I found one right away, which looked like the only match they had. Then I had to look through all of their little boxes of parts to find a bolt that jibed with the one I had left. I spent about half an hour looking before I told her that I hadn’t been successful. She warned me that if I couldn’t find a match the only alternative would be to change the whole derailleur. That motivated me to search even harder. The original bolt definitely had nothing that concurred with it in terms of head or thread. It required an Allen key and only had a small amount of threading at the end. I managed though to find two bolts the same size that were threaded all the way and required each a different screwdriver to fit them. It turned out that they fit just as well as the other.

            By this time another volunteer was on the floor and he was conveniently helping the guy at the stand next to mine so I was able to get lots of help without waiting around too long. My next step was to assemble all of the parts of the derailleur, which included a tube in the centre of each wheel and a little hubcap on each side. Some of those parts had fallen off as well on the road and there in the shop but their agreements were much easier to locate in their boxes than the bolt had been. Even though Bike Pirates is a do it yourself shop, the volunteers are much more willing to step in when a customer is having a problem. At Bike Chain they seem to really emphasize the “do it yourself” part more demonstrably. My helpers stood there guiding me but never once put their hands on anything. After some fumbling I finally managed to get the derailleur put together but then it turned out that I couldn’t put my chain through without unlinking it. He gave me a pliers-like tool with which to pop the master link and after a few tries I managed to separate it but that caused the two parts of my master link to fall on the floor. I found half right away but it took another customer to locate the other half. Then I had to run the chain under, along and over the derailleur wheels before relinking it, which was another task that I fumbled several times with my volunteer standing by and coaching me until that final satisfying moment when he had me pull the chain hard on each side to snap the master link back into place.

            The next thing was to take my bike outside to lock it, then to put my Gitane cycle frame onto the clamp. I went across the lane to the washroom in the GSU building and then came back to find that my helper was already looking at my lower bracket. He told me right away that my bracket couldn’t be rethreaded because some kind of bulging of the metal had taken place. He informed me that it would cost me at least $90.00 to replace the bracket, which would only make sense if the frame had some kind of sentimental value for me. Essentially, that meant that the frame was scrap metal and that I’d wasted $45.00 when I bought it from Bike Sauce on Saturday. I asked if I could just leave it with them since there was no point riding awkwardly with something useless, and so he put it in their pile of garbage metal.

            On the way out I had to log off on their computer, which also took a lot of time for me. They had a desktop monitor connected to a laptop keyboard, which I had a hard time manipulating. Actually the most hands on help I’d had all day was when the guy behind the desk assisted me with performing that task.

            The derailleur performed a lot better on the way home than it has worked for quite a while. When I got there though I realized that I’d forgotten my hoody back at Bike Chain. Fortunately, unlike both Bike Pirates and Bike Sauce, Bike Chain has an actual phone number. I called them and told them that I’d come back for my hoody the next day.

            I took a siesta because I was exhausted, and when I got up I went over to Bike Pirates to start looking again for a frame, since I was back to square one. The short, serious, stern looking volunteer who sometimes barks a bit was the first one I spoke with. Maybe he likes people more that want to build bikes, but he was very accommodating this time as he took me downstairs to help me look. We didn’t find anything but he brought up a name that often comes up when people are looking for rare bike components. He mentioned George of Parts Unknown. He’d remembered that he’d had the shop down on Fraser near the tracks but that he’d moved to an alley somewhere around Queen and Bathurst. He asked the other volunteers but no one knew exactly where Parts Unknown was now or if it even existed anymore.

            I went home and suddenly felt the urge to do something that I seem to do better than a lot of people. I put on my metaphorical Sherlock hat and started really trying to track down this Toronto legend that is as famous for being hard to find as he is for having rare bicycle ingredients. Since a sale of parts had been held last year at 7 Fraser, I found the posting online and called the number for the Toronto Bike Community. The guy that answered didn’t think that Parts Unknown existed anymore but he told me that because it is spring he gets a lot of calls from landlords cleaning out the bike rooms in their buildings. He said that he always directs them to take the bikes to places like Bike Pirates, so he urged me to be patient because a frame that suited me would probably show up soon.

I found a video from 2013 that covered Parts Unknown’s eviction from Kensington Market after eighteen years of being there. One of the prominent people interviewed in the piece was a guy named Mike Wilson, who seemed to be pretty close to George McKillop and who had his own shop with the name “Mike the Bike”. I found that the Mike the Bike shop still existed and that it was open, with a phone number, so I called Mike and he gave me the last phone number that he had of George. I called it and George answered right away. He told me that he had at least one tall frame for me. He said that he was in a laneway between Clinton and Manning, south of Bloor, so I rode over there.

His directions had been pretty vague and so I didn’t know if he was closer to Bloor or to Harbord, but I decided to go up to Bloor and Manning then weave my way down. I found a north-south alley just south of Bloor and followed it. About half a block down I passed an open garage and saw out of the corner of my eye a lot of bikes inside. I stopped and saw a curly headed older man who looked something like the guy in the video, except that his hair was now shorter. He was indeed the legendary George and he was quite friendly and accommodating. The first bike he showed me was 62 cm and the height was already perfect. He told me that he was going to keep the front wheel though but he would give me another so it would roll. The only problem was that he was asking for $100.00, which I couldn’t afford. He was only willing to drop the price to $80.00, which was still beyond me. I told him that I could maybe come back after I got my income tax return. He enthusiastically declared that was what he was waiting for too.

He informed me that he had a French bike that was buried under several other bikes that he would let me take away for $30.00. I helped him dig the velo out from under the pile. It was a silver road bike that was basically a frame with forks, handlebars and crank arms. The guy I’d spoken to at Bike Pirates had warned me that parts for French bikes are hard to find but that the guy that would most likely have them would be George, so I decided to buy the bike, at least for the 61 cm frame.

George told me that he’d just moved to that detached garage behind 317 Clinton after three relocations in a row. He said there was a loft up above that he could fix up and sleep there, but that right now he was staying at his ex-girlfriend’s place, which was really not a good situation.

George seems to know everyone involved with bikes in Toronto because everybody eventually comes to him for something that no one else has. He offered the view that the people that run Bike Sauce are much more likeable than those in charge of Bike Pirates. We also discussed my ex-mechanic, Agostino, who committed suicide a couple of years ago. He voiced the observation that the year of his death, he’d known two other bike mechanics that had killed themselves and two more that had gotten sexual reassignment surgery. It seemed odd to me that he was listing one occurrence as if it was equivalent to the other, but I just offered that the second option was better than the first.

I was glad to have finally located Parts Unknown and suspected that George would be a useful resource in the future as I began to build my own bicycle.

I rode home with one arm steering my bike and the other carrying the French bike, the name of which seemed to have been painted over in silver. I found out later though, according to a label that it had been sold at the Cycle Shack at 310 Cumberland Street north in Thunder Bay, which is, according to Google Street View, a detached two story building smaller than most houses, that was in 2012 “Ling Lee’s Culinary Office”. Once I got home, my left hand was shaking from having gripped the bike all the way from Clinton and Bloor down to Harbord, west to Ossington, south to College, west to Brock and south to Queen and O’Hara.

When I got back there was still half an hour before Bike Pirates would be closing and since everybody there is always wondering where Parts Unknown is located I thought I’d do a little community service and pass the information along that I’d finally found George. I talked with a volunteer with a handlebar moustache who remembered my old bike. I told him that I’d been looking for a bike that was my height and he told me that he’d just found a 59 cm Peugeot frame. He showed it to me and told me I could take it away for $10.00. It was my last ten dollars but I felt compelled to take it just in case the one I’d bought from George didn’t pan out. So at the end of the day I’d found two French frames after losing another. It would be interesting over the next little while if I could actually build a bike out of everything I’d accumulated that day.