Slowgress

            On Monday afternoon I took my cycle building project over to Bike Pirates. I was the fifth one there but Dennis told me I was a special case so I could go right back and find a stand. The first thing I wanted to do was to get the wheels functioning properly, since they weren’t rotating freely, but that was just a matter of balancing the brakes. Dennis told me though that my rear rim needed to be trued, so we started doing that but found that one spoke was not turning. He had me put some “magic juice” on it and let it sit for a while.

            While I was waiting I decided to see if I could find a second hand seatpost to fit my frame. Dennis measured the diameter of the seat tube with a digital calliper and so I took it over to the seatpost drawers to see if I could find one that fit, but I couldn’t. Finally Dennis went and got a new one that was the right size. He said it would cost me $8.00.I don’t like getting new stuff at Bike Pirates if I can avoid it but it looked this time like I had no choice. While trying to tighten the post in the seat tube I discovered that the nut was missing to compliment the seat-tightening bolt. Another volunteer found me a tray of nuts to sort through but none of them seemed to fit. I was about to conclude that the bolt was stripped when I finally found a nut that threaded smoothly around it.

            I took my old bicycle seat, which had been quite comfortable until it had started to tear and went looking through a couple of large bins for a comparable but not damaged seat. I found one that looked brand new and mounted it on my bike.

            I returned to the trueing wheel with Dennis but when the spoke we’d soaked didn’t click when it was turned he concluded that the spoke needed to be cut and replaced. However, he decided to try one more thing. He started spinning it with a pair of pliers and discovered that the spoke actually does tighten and loosen even though it doesn’t make a noise when it does so. Dennis didn’t really spend a lot of time showing me how to true, though he did tell me that he would be giving a seminar on the subject at Bike Pirates at a certain date. Soon he said the wheel, though not perfect, was passably true. I would like to learn how to do it but I figured in the future other volunteers would give me more hands on instruction, and I really wanted to make progress with getting this velo built.

            The next step was to work on the crankset. Before I could mount the chainrings onto my bottom bracket, the two chain-rings that came with my frame were missing one of three bolt sets. What was needed was something with the head of a bolt but which at the other end has an internal thread that receives a more conventional bolt on the other side to secure the two chain-rings together. Dennis showed me a large tray full of such bolt sets and told me to dump the whole thing out on my worktable and then to go through them until I found a match. Right away he found what he said was the regular bolt part of the combo but after searching through the pile for the last of the three hours that I wanted to be there I couldn’t find the match. Just before 20:00 I decided that when I came back on Thursday I would forget about looking for a bolt set and just simply try to find a bolt and nut combo that held the damn chainrings together.

            I cleaned up my station and went home in time to make myself dinner. Even though I left there with progress having been made: I had a seatpost, a seat, a trued back rim and my wheels rolled properly down the street, I was a bit depressed because of how long it had taken me to get that far and because it was probably going to take at least another week before I’d have my bike built.