Brews you can use

This is getting to be addictive — I’m not sure which I enjoy more: riding bikes or tinkering with them.

Yesterday evening, I “rode” a short hop over to Bill’s place for a wheel-hacking session on his new truing stand. I respaced and redished the wheel in a couple hours, and mostly trued the wheel while I was at it. For a first attempt, it turned out better than I expected^*, and was quite fun. The chainline’s about perfect now, and I’m itching for a real ride to see if it makes a difference.

I chickened out for three reasons today:

1. The horizontal steam/smoke from the neighbors’ flues. Cold? Not a problem. Wind? Problem.
2. The number of ice patches on the (very short) way home made the two blocks thrilling enough, 6 miles of that would have been hell, and required a trials-caliber sense of balance.
3. A severely bent rear axle that had somehow gone unnoticed. I had probably been riding on it for a while, but … <shudder> I wasn’t comfortable riding that. I was surprised it turned smoothly at all. I’m pretty hard on bikes, I guess :-/

On my lunch break today, I headed down to Varsity for a replacement axle, and picked up a fixed cog while I was at it. I just finished replacing the axle, and am waiting for a good time to do the fixed switch. I’m not sure winter is it, although I was tempted to bring the conversion “kit” (freewheel remover, giant crescent wrench, and cog) into the new luggage, bring it to work, do the switch there, and ride home fixed.

^* Of course, what I expected was to trip some odd pattern of stresses in the >30 year old wheel and taco it on the stand. And yet I proceeded

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008 at 11:18 pm and is filed under Bike.