Yikes! Bikes!

I had a little more time to take some more pictures and upload them of the whole build and so on – and so I thought I should probably take the opportunity to add some up here and maybe annotate a few…

I have the frame almost completely stripped down – to the extent where all there is left is the bottom bracket (as I don’t have a large enough spanner!) And I’m not sure whether to go ahead and replace it anyway with a new sealed cartridge one… I am tempted to, but then again, why do it if it currently works fine and just could use a few more bearings and some greasy times? Hmm, we’ll see! On the topic of bearing I might replace the headset too as that’s a little buggered, but I think I found a nice 1″ bearing cup so that might do.

As part of all the rebuilding and so on, I’m stripping down the whole frame and removing rust and sanding and painting and everything – which is long and laborious, but the results are generally pretty self evident, so there’s a fair amount of almost immediate satisfaction. And so I have a few pictures from after removing the first amount of rust (which was luckily just surface stuff!).

As for the wheels, here’s some pictures of the rear wheel – which was originally a Shimano disc front wheel -h this should make for an interesting conversion. I currently need to retrue the wheel—a few spokes are loose, and replace the axel and bearings with a longer solid one.

For the front wheel, I have a fairly thin and light Mavic X139 wheel, which is probably sufficient. I only really need to get a thin (1.5″ is the thinnest) tyre.

The almost finished front forks. I have just put a couple coats of the main coat on. I need to (wet) sand it a bit to get rid of some lumps, but it’s looking pretty hot as of the moment.

And that’s all of the pictures for now. I should probably get on with truing the wheel more and sanding and so on, but watch this space.