Carl gets fixed gear fever

Well, I've getting a lot of calls and e-mails lately from fans of my blog. Everyone has been asking when will the next post be? Are you still out there. . .under the shade of some tree. . .wrenching on some bike?

The answer is "yes."
Since my first post I've done very little with my bikes. I had EP at MonkeyWrench put on some Road BB7's on my 29er. I would have loved to do the work myself, but I had no experience with them and after getting into trail riding I've realized how important a reliable brake set-up really is.

My friend Carl did contact me with a little bit of a project though. He scored an old Bianchi and had aspirations of fixed geardom. We e-mailed back and forth for a week or so about what needed to be done, and when we could do it.

We ended up getting together a couple weeks ago, to begin tear-down, in the "shop/studio/laundryroom/basement of my house" with some french press Ethiopian Sidamo from Coffee Emergency. It all went pretty well, except we (mostly I) almost messed up the threads on Carl's fork. Whoever the last owner was thought it would be a good idea to put locktite on the threads and nuts. . .hmmm. We had to go to Cycleworks to pick up the rear wheel and some parts anyway, so we just took the bike there to get some assistance from a proffessional, thanks Damon. When I was tapping the lockring loose it jumped a thread or two and we were a couple of grunts with the wrench away from disaster.



The rest of the tear down when pretty smoothly. I took the frame back to my parents to utilize my Dad's abundance of powertools to grind off the old cable-stays and chop the drop bars.

Today Carl got up early, bright eyed and bushy tailed to finish the conversion. There where no major set backs. The guys at MWC had to hook Carl up with another interior nut for the quill stem and he had to make a second trip back to his house for the chain. Overall everything went very smoothly and he was off and spinning by noon. The bike isn't completely finished. . .but when is a bike really finished? I'm going to shellac some cork bar tape for him this weekend and he is seeing a honeybrown B17 in his future.


oh so close.


Damn these Surly cogs and lockrings are so classy. . .just when I was feeling content with my bike too. Oh bike lust.

The finished product. Way to go Carl. Carl asked for my help, but really did almost everything himself and proved me wrong more than a couple times. If you see him cruising around downtown give him a thumbs up or way to be

I don't about all of you, but everytime I go into the local bike shops I've been envious of the ease with which the wrenches suspend almost any bike on their heavy duty repair stands. Within a few seconds they are torquein' away,even the heavy crusiers are completely stable.

When I started tinkering on bikes I realized how important a repair stand is. I tried using two of those scew-in utility hooks and some insulatd wire to hang my bike from the rafters, and it worked. . .well not really, but I got by. I researched repair-stands on-line, but i read some reviews and if you don't spend more than $150-$200 you are basically buying a nice hunk of scrap metal. So I began to look into building one myself. There are some plans on the Instructables website to make bench mounted repair stands out of PVC. Those look alright, but I don't have much bench space, and some of the cutting looked a little difficult without having a table saw.

After a little searching I did find a decent looking plan for a floor stand, that seemed easy to assemble and fairly sturdy. It consists of a 60"-1" black pipe, 18"-3/4" black pipe, floor flange, 90 degree reducer elbow, 4-bolts, 4 fender washers, a pony clamp, some scrap wood, and of course JB WELD. All I had on hand was the scrap wood, and I only spent about $40 on the whole thing. The pony clamp was by far the most expensive item at about $14 at Home Depot, on one thread I saw that someone found a cheaper-imported one for something like 5 bones.

So far I'm extremely happy with the stand. As you can see it holds my 2-9er with ease. The real test will be when I try and put the Lady's pre-1953 Hawthorne Cruiser, or maybe Brent's LHT with racks and all on it. It is kind of a trick to hold the bike up with one hand and screw in the pony clamp with the other, but since I'm not putting bikes up and down on it all day it'll work just fine. Let me know if you have any questions, or want any pointers on building one. You can even come over and give it a test run for a couple PBR's.

Here are some pics.