Somet Hingo Rother

[GeePig]

I am not sure how old it is, they are the kind of thing that was always easy to burn down in the event of a war, and then rebuild using local materials... The current skin probably dates to the 1960s, so it is as old as me, but you can see the blue paint on the main timbers so you know the house was older than that.

Yours looks very nice and comfortable, I wish we could remove the fire. I can see that you have a garage as well, I need to convert one of barns into a garage, just one more thing to do.

Here is our house number and village name, with the non-current Polish dash above the 'n', which we need to remount.

Corner joints peaking out on our house, between the later cover on the right and our current expanded polystyrene. They say that the pale blue meant that there were unmarried girls or women living there, and yes the last people living here indeed had two daughters.

 

[Ulu]

I’m guessing that that sign would translate in English to “French-town”? Something like that but I don’t speak any Polish.

I only mention it because, Francis was my grandfather’s first name, and my father’s middle name, and is my youngest daughter’s middle name.

Strictly speaking, for a girl it would be spelled Frances, but I just ignored that when I named her in 1982, and nobody cares nowadays.

I have lived in quite a variety of different houses in my life, but perhaps none so old as yours. The oldest place I ever lived was the garrett of a brick town house built in the 1920’s.

That was back east in Kentucky. Here in California there is nothing like that. There are some old brick buildings standing, In the oldest sections of the oldest towns, but because of the earthquake regulations most of them have been heavily remodeled or demolished.

 

[GeePig]

Ha ha, good guess, but it really means 'place named after Francis' - most of the place names in Poland are based on someone's name, second by some feature and third are unknown (like 'Lublin').

Another of my Romets, the Turing, had a rear wheel mudguard that was nice, but pitted with rust all over. Sure, I could have stored it, even restored it, but they are bulky things and few people care about originality here.

Of course I do have a supply of things stored for the future, and I am planning some better storage conditions for the bulkier items, but at the moment only my Turing is the one I care about. My order of interest is definitely still Jubilat > Wigry > Turing > other stuff.

So I took my hacksaw, marked some lines on pieces of paper tape, and began work.

Well, as this was the second mudguard I have ever cut, the result was not too bad. This would be quicker with power tools, but neither of my two were really appropriate.

This was the result on the upper side for the front and back, as opposed to the state of the unused part.

This is how the underside looked after chemical treatment - another first for me. My plan is to paint the underside with some undercoat and topcoat, but just give the visible parts a clearcoat finish. I don't want the bike looking too new, too refurbished.

 

[Ulu]

What did you use for chemical stripping?

 

[GeePig]

What did you use for chemical stripping?

I don't know, I didn't make the effort to read the Polish. It was all they had at the shop, but I will check later.

 

[GeePig]

Anyway, in the excitement of actually making the mudguards, I forgot to add the introductory stages.

This is a pity, because here is the actual rusty rear mudguard off my Turing, after not finding anyone desperate enough to buy it. I could have usd the front, but that was smaller and thus much easier to store. If you have ever had to store rear mudguards you will know what a pain in the backside they are without a sufficiently large box to loose them in. Storage for such things, including racks and the single 'wigry' bike cover I have, will move into the wooden barn.

Anyways, it was the rear that I tried it out first. Here you cannot see the jagged hole in the mudguard where something had been bodged on it badly. It was all theoretical at this stage, because trying to cut mudguards neatly was still a new thing for me, an almost unexplored entity.

Having made the first slice, it came time to do the same with the back end of the same mudguard, fitted at the front. Luckily the mounting holes for the rear light can be hidden under the fork body as long as I can slice the mudguard in just the right place to fit the mounting.

All I had to do was decide how much mudguard I actually needed or could support from a single mount.

You can see here that the front forks do not match the frame colour, but that is something I will worry about another day.

 

[Ulu]

One of the joys of living in the desert, is that you don’t need those. No mud.

The only time I ride through water is if someone has overwatered their lawn.

Nonetheless, I’ve been trying to design a bicycle where the rear fender is a major part of the structure.

 

[kingfish254]

Cool details from your house and great work on the fenders!

 

[GeePig]

At the moment I have a bit of a storage problem - yes, I know, I have three barns, but most of them are still ready for cows, chickens and wagons. Indeed, our biggest barn still gets used to store equipment by some of our friends in the village.

Our wooden barn has a small raised section at one end that is fully enclosed and dry, and it has been the perfect winter fun palace for extended families of mice for years AND grave lamps. Every year the previous owners would buy their candle lamps for the cemetery, and then later bring them home and stick them somewhere in the barns.

At the moment I have a few old frames stored in there, but now I have to get in there, clean it out and remove some of the walls to the pens. Once that is done I can store various items from my warsztat there.

This is the junk pile corner of my warsztat, where the bikes I am currently working on end up sitting on the floor. Here we have two Romets, marked as Zenit and Universal instead...

I also want to deal with this wheel and tyre wall - because the wheels from the 'Universal' Wigry are currently standing on the floor.

My plan is to move all the extra bulky things like wheels, mudguards and racks to the wooden storage room, where there will also be enough room to keep my current runners, and by doing so free up the space in the warsztat for a new bike rack and room for the work I need to do there.

 

[GeePig]

Right, so I finally found the missing image AND the amazing shot of both my powered tools out on the bench at the same time. Yes, I did buy them together, about 35 years ago, long before snappy little batteries became the norm.

Anyway, the jigsaw was not used here, because I tried it when I cut my other pair of mudguards about two years ago and decided that never again was the best choice. A simple combination of hacksaw and file was enough to quickly achieve the right shape in such thin steel components. In actual fact it has taken far longer to clean and paint them.

These two chainwheels below were the mainstay of Romet production, the two-piece design on the smaller bikes and the three-piece on the larger, racing bikes. Both feature 5-pointed star patterns, and the one on the right is the most economical version ever to be fitted, when it was built in the late 1980s. No plastic chain guard, and especially not the aluminium one that appeared on Zenits from the 1970s.

At least the steel was polished before chroming.

In fact very little of what made this a Zenit remains on the bike, most of it is stored away.

Perhaps I do need to reconsider painting the frame.

But no.

 

[kingfish254]

Cool to hear the continued history of your barns and bikes.
I can only imagine the carnage a jigsaw could do to thin loose metal fenders. They could quickly look like balled up aluminum foil.

 

[GeePig]

Thanks, I like to explain what I think about the bikes, as it influences my choices now.

I have been away for a few days, so today I hope to finish off the fenders, they have an appointment with some paint.

 

[GeePig]

This is where I have been working for the past few days, which with the number of open bottles and other junk was a winter apartment for mice, even with sacks of wheat seeds ready to be torn open and consumed. It must have made the perfect indoor winter getaway, if you were a mouse, where you could be left undisturbed the whole season through, snuggled in an empty bottle. I cannot tell you how much corn and poo I had to sweep out, how many bottles and junk, including a doorless refrigerator and a table - and SO MANY used cemetery candlelamps - why bring them all home when they could have dumped them there?

Anyway, this is going to be where I store stuff like old frames, mudguards, wheels and racks, and even the occasional bicycle. And one set of farm scales.

Oh yes, and there was also this religious picture leaning against the fridge and a classic framed husband-and-wife photo, which needs a bit of restoration due to mice nibbling, but will be hung here as well.

It is so much nicer in there now, and frees up a bit of space in the warsztat, hopefully making it easier to get on with the bike build.

 

[Couch tater]

What a great work space. I could get lost inside my head for hours in there. How are your winters, will it be comfortable to work in there?

 

[Ulu]

Those winters drove Napoleon back to France!

 

[GeePig]

What a great work space. I could get lost inside my head for hours in there. How are your winters, will it be comfortable to work in there?

I don't have any heating in either space, yet, so it can get extremely cold. Last winter I used cardboard to create a fuel tank and seat for my bike, because I could do that indoors at home. The new space has been like a winter holiday palace for mice until I cleared it out, tearing up the corn sacks and rags to make hibernation homes in all the glass bottles stored in there. They will have to take their vacations in someone else's barn next year.

 

[GeePig]

All taped up, and we are ready to go!

I carefully cleaned them up, but they are always tricky things to paint as you have to get in where the edges have been folded.

This was after the first coat, but on the second coat I did get some dribbles as it was very difficult to get the paint into the edges. Luckily this is just to stop them rusting so easily again, and they will be getting a coating of black and then the clear top coat all over.

I have a container full of everything I have undercoated so far, ready for the top coat - and then I can get on with assembly. It doesn't matter if I paint stuff I eventually choose not to use, because they will be ready for some other project.

 

[GeePig]

Now it was time to put the top coat on, in classic satin black. Most of the bicycles and motorbikes I have built since the 1980s have used satin black extensively. Originally it was just a convenient choice after I welded motorcycle frames, but it has kind of grown to be a way of marking out that my bikes are different. Whatever, it certainly keeps my parts universal and my paint tin collection simple. Eventually it goes a matt black, unless I polish it.

Now the mudguards. I could have polished them, but since most of the chrome was not the highest quality and most of the parts were at least 30 years old, from a time when life in Poland was difficult, I decided to maintain the worn look with just a clear coat.

The underside, as mottled as they were, is semi-gloss black. This is much shinier than I usually do because I applied the clear coat all over.

Clear coat is fine, except that it is hard to see the areas that you might have missed. If the weather is right the paint goes a little unclear when you apply it, which then disappears as it dries, but allows you to see where it is going on.

Once all the painting of the minor parts is finished, I can move onto painting the main frame. I might paint the front fork black, but I want to check how it looks when I do a test build first. Or maybe I will just paint it black anyway.

 

[hamqqea]

Tidy work.

The stain black finish makes the end result appear consistent throughout as well. Nice.

 

[GeePig]

Tidy work.

The stain black finish makes the end result appear consistent throughout as well. Nice.

The trick is remembering where everything came from...