Zasada Rides Again

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EDIT #2 - And as I was just about to fall asleep tonight it occurred to me that the following would be true only if the bike had a fixed gear. If the wheel is allowed to coast there is no fixed relationship between the wheel position and crank position. So... Never mind.

If you have a 1:2 ratio on the sprockets and a coaster brake, the rear wheel will be in roughly the same spot every time you apply the brakes. Assuming you have a dominant leg you brake with.

For instance, 99% of the time I'd push back with my right foot. The tire would be in the same spot since it turns twice for every one crank revolution. So I'd wear out that spot from braking.

See how the rear tire has the bald spot but the rest of it has tread?

If you don't have a dominant leg you'd still be wearing out two spots rather than a more random pattern on the tire if you have some fractional gear ratio.

EDIT: Actually on further thought you'll brake in the same spot of the tire no matter which leg you use...

I've gone back and edited my reply to this thread - turns out I have no idea what I'm talking about.

Of course I was 2:30 am and I was just about to drift off to sleep when for some reason this popped into my head, so now I'm wide awake again... I tell ya if it's not one thing it's another.
 
. . . as it turns out that a 24" wheel + tire will not quite fit, by about half an inch. That is a bit of a problem, as the axle needs to be very long, the kind of long-ness one would normally associate with a derailleur wheel...

Bolt-on dropout plates will extend the frame, and if you can put them on the inside of the existing dropouts, perhaps you could shorten the axle.

Custom dropout plates are one of those things where you can go crazy with your imagination. As long as you want to keep filing ,they can be nearly any shape. :)
 
Spoke puncture paranoia.
Since these bikes are abandoned by my neighbours in my block, who have garages at the base of the block, I sometimes see them down there and wonder what they are doing.... ;)
 
Bolt-on dropout plates will extend the frame, and if you can put them on the inside of the existing dropouts, perhaps you could shorten the axle.

Custom dropout plates are one of those things where you can go crazy with your imagination. As long as you want to keep filing ,they can be nearly any shape. :)

And I have found them here in my city garage!

Crude, rusty, everything one might expect if you make them from the hinge of a former barn door. I might not clean the rust off, just to show that they were made from old hinges. :)
 
So I got my small front wheel all stripped down and sent to the city, ready for paint, before I realised the problem I was going to have in selecting the rear wheel: 24" or 20"

As I do not have a cream/green 20" rear wheel, I had to put such decisions on hold to see whether I could find the frame extenders and whether they work. That means it will be next week before I know whether I will be applying clear or coloured paint to this wheel, since the rims, hub and spokes are in my city garage.

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16", 20" and 24" rear wheels, all with different numbers of spokes, but all with too short axles. The earlier axles are shorter and are threaded from each end with the same size threads. The later axles have a larger inner thread, and are slightly longer than the earlier axles, but not long enough. My 'special' axle has the larger inner thread, and is just long enough to fit the bike, but since all my all my later coaster brake bits are currently on bikes then I do not have enough bits left to build another hub. If I fit a coaster hub depends on what type of axle my 24" coaster brake wheel has.

I can only imagine that when they designed this frame it was to take a range of options, including derailleur hubs. The only question here is whether I have enough bits to build a gear shifter mechanism.

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This is the wheel I would like to use - it is 24" with a 5 speed hub, and my only semi-operational plastic shield.

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Yes, I know everyone cool us supposed to hate those plastic disks, but I live in a land where chain guards are mostly simple things, often just a chunk of black plastic. I would really like to find a chromed disk, but they are rare, and since my red 'Romet' marked chain guard has reached the end of the road (it now sits on the shelf above my computer), this is all I have left.

If I use that wheel, that chain guard will stay on it, even with its cracks.
 
Yes, I know everyone cool us supposed to hate those plastic disks, but I live in a land where chain guards are mostly simple things, often just a chunk of black plastic.
"Blaze your own trail, my man. Build it for you, not the internet"
Me, to myself, but worth sharing. I'm tired of"supposed to". If we all follow the rules, then everyone gets the same bike.
 
Well, Matti, in that case I am going to have to strip that wheel down, paint everything cream and green and rebuild it with, hopefully, that disk still in one piece.
 
These are my forks.

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Well, not all my forks, obviously, these are just the pair that take up the most room on the fork hooks. I have never used them after stripping them off the bikes they arrived on. The yellow one was on the cheaply made and damaged full-suspension bike I took in part exchange for another bike, and it might be slightly bent - but it takes a 26" wheel. The silver one came off the Zasada frame that I am planning on using here, and I only used it when I briefly rode the bike before buying it for the wheels, tires and saddle. It might be quite a decent fork, compared to the yellow one.

The yellow one might not fit, as the stem is a bit short, but I really hope I can use it. But, whatever, it will still be an interesting build.
 
That silver fork looks like the kissing cousin of the one I turned into a rigid for the baby chopper bike. That was a 20” mountain bike fork From a Huffy.
 
Well, it could be that they are related, seeing that nowadays companies buy things internationally, and it would be nice if we each built a bike in two different countries so far apart with the same things.
 
Here is my box of Velosteel coaster brake hub parts, including a good selection of new bearings. Over the years the parts have changed, and sadly most of the major parts here have come out of failed hubs - I just keep them as a reference. All these hubs I think were made in the Czech republic, or Czechoslovakia for the older stuff, and includes Romet, Ukraine and Velosteel marked parts. Yes, there is, or maybe was, a bike company in Ukraine called Ukraine - you sometimes see them around here as we are not far from the border, and I found the rear wheel from one in one of my barns - and that sprocket there has corroded onto part of its hub. The parts from the Ukraine have slightly different dimensions, and I am guessing that they are the oldest parts that I have.

See those smaller bearings there? One of those goes under the sprocket, and if you do not clean and lubricate it every so often then it will begin to break up. Once that happens, everything begins to move around in the hub until something major breaks... Hence my collection/museum.

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Sometime in the 1980s or 1990s they beefed up the axle - see the two sizes of thread on the upper axle? That means that there are two different sizes of the parts at one end of the hub. Some time later they made the parts at the other end of the axle almost impossible to strip to service, including the main bearing.

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This is a part actually marked 'velosteel', while that lever with a hole in it is just another variation in the hub design.

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So I removed all the hub parts out of the brake tube in the wheel, and replaced them all because that type of hub had the single axle thread size, and they are the shortest axles that I have. Now I do have a new twin-thread-size axle that is longer than both the short single-thread-size axles and all the other twin-thread-size axles, and that one is just long enough to fit the extra-wide frame that this bike has at the rear - I assume that they designed the frame wide enough to take modern derailleurs.

I am an engineer, so this is a part of the job that I am very fond of.
 
Well, I almost got a complete hub out of my parts box, but what I lack is the dust cover that is supposed to go over this bit. I have several dust covers, but none are large to fit the hub part here.

Super long axle, though!

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This is what the hub is supposed to looks like, once the reaction lever is installed.

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This hub is the only other one I have built up in a spare wheel, but if it has the single-thread-style axle then that dust cover is unlikely to fit.

Tomorrow I shall find out, as I will be back in rural climes.
 
Now I am back in the village with the various bits of steel that have been hiding at the back of my city garage's bench.

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These are all bits of old barn and shed door hinges that have kind of accumulated all over this former farm where we now live half of our time. The bits on the right are what I made to mount a wheel behind the frame, but for a much larger bike, and have been threaded - although putting threads in an old barn door hinge was more problematic than I had first imagined, because a hinge like this is not like stock steel since it has seen some action in a blacksmiths forge.

Anyway, this pair is a bit too large to fit this frame, so now I am looking at the metal from the smaller hinge.

My problem at the moment is that all the seller's of nuts and bolts around here seem to believe that they world is held together with hex-head bolts, and I really could do with some cap head bolts as the pair I will need are going to be really close together. Well, unless I can figure out another solution.
 
When you mentioned barn hinges I was thinking of some big strapping things, but those all look rather small for what I was considering.

I never heard of a Ukraine bicycle either, of course, but with current conditions, they are perhaps destined to become an extremely rare species. Even if it’s just a re-badging of another manufacturer.
 
Well the weather was beautiful over the weekend, and therefore I spent many hours playing around various bits of metal, and which I will describe over this wet and rainy week.

I have finally got to sorting out the parts left over from my most recent attempt at a build, including the seat. I really did not have enough parts to continue, neither did I have a gas bottle to heat my warsztat. So here it is again...

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... with the parts! I might have found just the right materials to fit it on the bike now, including this superb piece of tubing I retrieved from a chair being thrown out by one of my neighbours. Now all I need is some measurements, a hacksaw and some way of connecting the tubes together without a welder.

I really must buy a welder, I have not had one for over 25 years, not since when I had a neat arc welder with a carbon rod brazing kit to go with it. I suppose it is time to buy something a bit more modern.

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Since I have retrieved my small collection of steel bars from my city garage, and decided not to go with the original set of frame extenders, then this should be the perfect material for a new pair, with its years of unpainted life experieice bolted on some shed door. All I have to do is drill some holes - and figure out how to attach it to the frame without any kind of welding.

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I cannot remember what I cut up this hinge for originally, but I was clearly in a hurry, given the angle I cut them.
 
IF I had a welder, then what I am doing now would be irrelevant, but that is where things get interesting. I am going to drill my two little plates so that I can bolt them to the frame, through the slots here. These nuts will be bolted to the extender plate, and then there will be washers or another plate placed here, secured by a second set of nuts.

I know, I am supposed to be in the middle of the mad streak of showing off how I am painting or assembling the frame, but this is the bit that really interests me at the moment, assembling something in my small, relatively poorly equipped warsztat with minimal access to the world of bikes and bits.

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These are the nuts for one side, can you see how the one on the left has a more rounded side to fit in snug to the end of the slot? That gives me a whole 20 mm between the centres of the nuts, not terribly long but we will see how it goes.

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Before I got around to finishing cleaning up and drilling the plates, I thought I would make a bit of room around the bench by seeing whether the bigger set of compressible forks would fit. The smaller set would, naturally, as they came off this bike. I really only bought the bike for the 36 spoke 20" wheels and two sets of tires, just another kid's bike. Since the frame is super light and well built, now I have to wonder how good the original forks really are. The bike was bought new with knobbly tires, but they were uncomfortable to ride on the quiet roads near where they lived, so they put road tires on...

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I slotted the bearing housings on, and there was no way that my naff hydraulic forks from my cheap, heavy, so-called 26" wheeled off road bike were going to fit. That was a pity, because I would like to try them out on something, so now I will have to fit the original 20" forks from this bike unless I can find another set of forks somewhere, something off a 24" wheeled bike...
 

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