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I’m afraid all my ancestors came from the great frozen north as well. Boat-building Vikings that, raped, pillaged and slaughtered their way down into Scotland, Ireland & Germany. (To escape the cold! Also starving because there wasn’t enough farmland or enough good weather to grow crops.)

They eventually became peaceful boat makers and piano makers, before coming to the United States to avoid the war. It didn’t work at all. Most of them wound up in the military at one point to another.

(Grab on to something if you see a root or twig, because we’re going further down the rabbit hole.)

It is clear to me, that if snow was the natural environment of a human being, that we would have the same fur as a bear. Or a Caribou. Even my dog is not warm enough!

I was used to snow by the time I lived in Utah. I had shoveled so much Rocky Mountain snow, that the Minnesota snow and the Washington snow and the New York snow & even the lighter more cheerful Ohio snow was all but forgotten.

But I’ve lived in the desert valley now for almost 50 years. Real snow would be a big inconvenience, even though I could afford to hire someone to shovel it.

My wife has lived here all her life. She spent one winter up in Yosemite Valley freezing her butt off in a tent cabin though. She doesn’t remember it well enough because every now and then she tells me “Gee we should go up and play in the snow.” Pointing to the mountains above our house.

Now if I thought she could stand to ride a snowmobile, I might take her, because Snowmobiles are my one real attraction to the snow, though I haven’t been on one since 1975.

Anyone reading this far is surely gasping for air by now…..
 
Ha ha, more breathing refreshed, as it was a great read, and I have finally cracked how to load the new year's load of security BS for work.

My only question is why you wife is asking me (Geepig) to go play in the snow?

It is all a mystery...
 
What with the November-to-Christmas work rush and then Christmas, it has taken me all this time to get back to the bike, which while it clearly will not be finished I will at least have the opportunity to get some of the stuff done.

The first issue were the cranks, which as you can see from an earlier picture were clad in an ugly plastic shield that had just started to crack. I knew that If I cut the plastic coat off the metal below would be more as-cast than polished, but Christmas has passed and I have been down to our local shop in Lublin that sells food and everything to buy an angle grinder.

Here is the sprocket-side rod partly done and the other one still untouched.

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Along with the inevitable grinding disks that I bought some time later I also bought a sanding disk. I was surprised when I opened the package the angle grinder came in because there was only one 'spanner' and no plastic backing to take a sanding disk - and why should there be a second spanner when you can lock the drive shaft, and why would one need a plastic backing sheet when the sanding disks overlap?

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There are still a ton of important little jobs to be done to get this bike rideable, but not finishing is OK as my winter builds are more about experimenting. Last winter I built a cardboard fuel tank/seat/tail light unit, an idea that led to my plastic fuel tank for my summer build, and of course every build sees me rebuilding some of my worn-out stock - such as the front wheel for this project.
 
I have sprayed my cranks black, and it is certainly cold enough that I had plenty of time to get my camera out while some of the paint was still wet.

I have a BB which I think is the right one for this bike, but I am not sure as I keep forgetting to give it a test fit. In theory the BB should be the right size to take the original Romet bearings, but they may also have changed the BB size from the Romet design. Well, we will see.

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Work progresses on the seat, as I have some plastic sheeting left over from when I covered the middle barn front window openings (another job that still needs to be finished). For the rear pair of window openings I chopped up a pair of the windows we had replaced in the house - they were a bit too narrow for a complete fit, although they are enough to keep most of the weather out. That was a lot of work, but then I discovered this translucent plastic and the front windows were real easy to cover ....

The rear mounting bracket is a few millemetres thick, which made it a bit of a task to bend, but if I had a welder then it would make a fine mounting bracket. I have had a fair amound of welding experience, including on many bikes and cars using gas and electric, but I do not know what would be a good choice now.

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The fact that this year we have wrapped the walls of our cottage in expanded popolystyrene is handy, as it is easy to shape something from the remants we have leftover.

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I was worried for a while because I had no adhesive that would work with the polystrene, but then I rediscovered the unused roll of tape...
 
It’s good to see you back on the case!

I also have a set of arms that are heavily coated in plastic. Unbelievably thick plastic, and I want to take it off and then paint them. I don’t know what type of plastic it is yet but it might be marked on the plastic somewhere.

I haven’t started that yet because I hadn’t decided what the easiest way was to do it. I thought I might actually be able to heat them up enough to soften the plastic and then easily cut it away with a big knife.

But then I am expecting it to peel up clean once it’s hot, and I’m afraid what I’m going to do is end up shaving and sanding to get off the stubborn remnants.

If the original castings were fairly spotty, then that would give a lot of adhesion to the plastic.
 
I suppose it depends on who made the arms, mine were off a bike that was at the cheap end of the market. I wonder what more expensive ones are like, do they use some kind of adhesive? I just did a bit of cutting, and the plastic just came off.

Of course, then it was just a couple of minutes with the sanding 'disk' on my angle grinder to smooth everything off, ready for paint. :)

However, I am going to have to put this on a back burner, as I have run out of time. But that is good, as I it gives me time to think about the design a bit more, and look out for some decent tube to support the rear part of the seat.
 
It looks like I won’t have time to remove mine either, because that means I have to paint the arms and there’s no time for that. I have three bicycles to finish and photograph.
 
The funny thing is that when we arrived back at our place in Lublin on Sunday, there was a whole lounge seat thingy out by the trash cans, in pretty good condition. It was all in a red material, no holes, but in dire need of cleaning.

I took the big headrest unit off it, stripped off the material and underlay, sponge under-underlay, the steel fixing arms and chucked the chipboard frame back in the trash.

I now have ample material to cover the seat for my bike and maybe another.

This is what I enjoy the most, finding stuff that I can use :)
 
There’s only one thing that’s even better.

That is finally being able to use something you have been saving for an unreasonably long time, with the thought of, “...this could look good on something …
 

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