Bike Thread:

Wow truing up a wheel is a bit fiddly innit

I got a spoke wrench 'cause the trashbike had comedy wheels, I twisted and turned and got it more gooder, should have stopped at Good Enough but instead I got out the incredibly sensitive dial indicator I use for setting my table saw blade and oh man was that a bad idea. A wheel that eyeballed straight enough has that little needle swinging around like a fox's tail in a stripey sock factory.

NEVER LOOK CLOSELY AT ANYTHING is the lesson to take away here

Bike thread update: been riding just a couple times a week since last November, not for exercise, not for commuting, just for the simple joy of going fast. Didn't even ride at all in the cold-cold part of winter. Not even 100km on my odometer.

All the above is just for context. I just went to buy some new shorts, 'cause these ones are falling apart.

And man, see next CW'd post...

Dang, yeah, doing the same thing I do when I buy clothes (typically annually, still wishing I could just give my measurements to a bloke in a shed and have him chuck me a couple of bin bags), y'know, stick my hands in the pockets first to make sure they're worth trying on, liftyleggy, give a wiggle to make sure they're not gonna annoy me, turnyspinnyshoulderlooky to see how much I'll distract folk and WHOA HAHA WHAT HAPPENED THERE

You know how sometimes things change slowly over time and you get the occasional visceral reminder that recontextualizes the last few months?

Damn, my ass is fine now lol

This was totally worth it

I understand why some bike guys wear the tight stuff now, they say it's for aerodynamics or whatever but really it's because they're proud of their new arses and they wanna show them off

I paid $0 for this bike and it's given me hours of bonding time with my daughter and a butt my spouse can't keep her hands off

I am one of Those Guys now, I will evangelize bikes just so there can be more people in the world who are happy with their tocks

I cannot overemphasize enough the gratuitous overpayment in positive changes to my body in exchange for just how casually I've been riding this bike.

Someone who actually cared could get up early, set their odometer to zero, pass what I've done since November and get back home for a normal bedtime. I haven't commuted, I've barely done any hills, and I wasn't trying to exercise. I was half-assing it!

But my bike was all 🚲 Half-assing, huh? You've barely got three-eighths of an ass to start with, let's fix that

BIKE THREAD: Littleun's bike has always been hard to downshift. So far it's had its cables and housings cleaned, chain cleaned and lubed, housings and cable lubed (I was of two minds how the materials interact but decided heck with it let's give it a go), derailleur cleaned/lubed and endlessly adjusted, shifter and cable replaced, derailleur replaced, and now I've just got a package of new cable housings and fedi, dear fedi, as far as my pinball-technician's eyes can see there's just not anything else to change except the (admittedly dodgy-looking) housing geometry.

Any tips for routing the housing? To my eyes it looks like one or two too-sharp transitions

Here's some pics (alt for all three: cables routing in black housing against a pink bike)

Am I right in thinking these could be done smoother? Her thumb's just not strong enough to shift down ㄟ(ツ)ㄏ

So remember last night when I was all "Nah, it's the picture taken at a funny angle," well I just went to take another pic and looked at it with fresh eyes and went "Oh wow yeah that's hecked up huh"

(2 pics showing a gear shifter at an "It's just my art style" angle)

See I copied the mounting angle from my bike, where I sit at a weird angle because my bike is a face-down-ass-up-like-a-good-boy style. I've reevaluated the angle a bit here so it's closer to being parallel with the brake lever, but aye, that top housing routing is Bad

Gotta figure out a new housing that takes the bag into account 'cause she loves her bag y'know

Side view.

Aye gonna have to think about that housing huh

Alright so. I re-routed the upper housing, crossing it over the top of the yoke around the speedo, and that made things a good bit easier.

It was when I was pulling the cable through that I noticed it'd gotten frayed inside the lower housing! That was a brand new cable that came with the shifter!

So I replaced the lower housing entirely (got one of those cheap all-in-one kits online with the cables and housing and ferrules and a cutting tool and all those other bits and bobs), new cable also, and WOW what a difference. The old housings were all rusty and scragged up inside! So I replaced all three sets of housings and now it shifts BUTTERY SMOOOOOOTH

Passes the tug test, and job's a good 'un!

Another job where fixing the problem took a fraction of the time of figuring out which bit was the problem.

Haven't ridden bike in a few weeks 'cause holiday and Other Crap, just took it out for a quick spin round the block and OOF MY BODY FORGOT QUICKLY

Backs of my thighs are burning real good now

Gonna hafta just keep doing it more eh

I got a new bike!

The other one's a road bike and very tall and not especially comfy so I got this one for $15 from a local bike co-op.

This one's got more relaxed geometry and shocks on the front. Also I kinda dig the colours; and by the colours I mean the way it's still red in the back but the previous owner ground off all the paint in the front.

Spent a while with naphtha and brushes clearing massive chunks of gross outta the drivechain, got the chain off and cleaned up well enough to determine that it was beyond salvage

Didn't need a chain wear gauge to figure that, just wiggled it in my hands lol

So, bike: $15
New chain: + $15

Got the new chain on, skippetyskippety on 4, maybe I shoulda looked more closely at those back sprockets before hitting checkout huh, alright yeah 4th is absolutely shagged, it's bollocksed, it's an ex-parrot, the only chain it was ever gonna work with was the one that could extend out a full link past the same number of links on the new chain. 4's the worst but they all look pretty ragged.

So, bike: $15
Plus new chain: + $15
Plus a new cassette: another $15

Gonna want new cables and housings on it too... brake pads...

oh and it's had a new tube already. Plus wants tyres.

Aside from that it's great

Freewheel, not cassette apparently. Anyway new freewheel turned up (they sent the wrong one) and I sent it back and got the correct one and the cassette removal tool turned up (I ordered the wrong one) and then I ordered the correct freewheel removal tool and then that turned up and MAN

this does NOT want to come off

Wrapping my biggest adjustable spanner in a rag so I can bang away at it with a big hammer, still not coming off

Dripped some oil in, gonna give it overnight and then tomorrow I'm gonna get out the pipe wrench and blowtorch and Tell that thing

Spousebike has buttbags now too

These were $12 off AliExpress. The difference between these bags and the identical ones for $40 off Amazon is that the Amazon ones have sat offgassing in someone's garage for a couple days so they don't have that New Manufacturing smell to them.

They smell like my school bags did in the 80's when they were fresh off the market stand

I mean it about touching bikes being calming

There's something very reassuring about a machine that doesn't need petrol or electricity but can still take you 100km in a day

Got some spare tubes, a patching kit and some basic tools, maybe $20 worth, all fits in the bottom quarter of the saddlebags no problem leaving room for lots of snacks, and with that much it'll just Keep Going

As long as my legs work, this machine works, and there's enormous comfort in that.

Bikes make you aware of the power of your legs.

Weird gendered thing about the top versus bottom halves of your body: most women I know are aware of how strong their legs are, whereas when a bloke thinks about his strength, like he's gonna try and move something heavy, he tends to think of his arms and chest and back. I've seen many fresh new trans lads suddenly becoming more aware of their shoulders or biceps for example.

Which, like, even a really strong person's arms don't have nearly as much torque or endurance as the most thoroughly ordinary leg. So after a couple of times of looking down at my little ten-dollar Sunding speedo/odometer and seeing Just How Far I'd gone, I think it kinda altered my relationship with my legs? Like now, when I have to do something that needs a lot of strength, even like unscrewing a big rusted bolt, I keep thinking of how this would be much easier if I could let my legs do it instead of my arms? I move differently, I stand differently, I'm more aware of this whole half of my body I've been under-using

And I say this to the women and femme and AFAB people in my life and they're like ??? you didn't know??, and the not-bike-riding cis blokes I talk to about it go ??? oh huh yeah I guess, wild???

It's almost as if modern american carcentric life has hidden my whole entire legs from me lol

I'm finding that talking about bikes is very calming today so lemme show you my little speedo/odometers.

This is a SunDing bike computer mounted on the handlebars of my spouse's bike. They're about a tenner on eBay. I got one for my kid and was that impressed with it I got two more lol, one for me and one for spouse. Right now you see it's just telling the time, which is better than the fancy one that came with my fancy bike.

The fancybike one is fancy and wireless, which is Bad Actually because it means you need two batteries, one for the transmitter and one for the receiver; it also means you have to press a button to wake it up. I'll show the wire and how it works in the next post

(this is a show and tell post so the images don't have captions but are instead explained in the post body itself)

You zip-tie the wire to the frame, leave a little bit of slack so you can turn the handlebars and the suspension works, and it goes into this black tube.

Inside the black tube is a reed switch, which is a little glass vial with two bits of tin or steel inside not quite touching, both bits of metal soldered to the wire (the black wire is actually two wires inside insulated from each other just like your headphone wire). There's a magnet that you clip to your spoke, you can see it as a black circle in the photo, and when the magnet passes the black tube it pulls the bits of metal together inside the reed switch, completing the circuit just like any other switch.

This is cool and better than wireless because getting the switch properly aligned with the magnet can take some fiddling, and during your fiddling you don't know whether the computer or the switch isn't working properly, so you can test the switch by setting your multimeter to continuity mode, touching the probes to the prongs inside the mounting bracket, and listening for the beep as the magnet goes by. Similarly you can test the computer by just shorting its contacts with a bit of wire, and then confuse it into thinking you're going 100km/h by flapping pliers quick against the contacts lol

When you first put the little watch battery in the computer it asks the diameter of your wheel (there's a chart in the instructions where you can just read the numbers on the side of your tyres and it gives you a number to punch in - tip, take a pic of this chart or consult the charts on sheldonbrown.com when it's time to replace the battery), and then every time it sees a switch closure from the magnet going past it Maths It and figures out your speed.

As soon as you start riding, this display comes up with your current speed, average speed, top speed, odometer, resettable trip meter, how long you've been riding, it even has a thermometer inside and will show the temperature. You can tell it miles or kilometers and celsius or fahrenheit when you're setting it up.

It's very easy and cool and cheap, like I say about a tenner on eBay. I like it a lot.

Regular Bike People: 🦊 I like to post about bike lanes, trails, spandex etc

New Bike People (or maybe just Dan): 🦝 holy shit I have LEGS