Zasada Rides Again

[GeePig]

As tempting as it is, I make it a point not to pull parts off of completed or fully functional bikes. I know you’re in a unique spot, but I’d leave last years build out of the equation!

Don't worry, that build has already been changed, as it is being converted back to the field bike I use for riding through the local forests, although now with a new seat and handlebars off one of the kids bikes. I do need to extend the handlebars, so the bike will not be doing much for the next two months. I find that the more I strip and rebuild my bikes, the quicker I get at it and the greater the chance that I notice some opportunity to change something.

 

[GeePig]

I really enjoy seeing your creative building. You do great work.

Thanks, it is always nice to hear something like this

 

[GeePig]

Today was spent messing around with the remains of a small girl's bike that I used to see ridden around our block, several years ago.

I am not fully certain how I will attach the rear seat supports to the frame, because I want to make the minimal number of changes to the frame. So my current idea is to bolt these rear wheel mounts to my frame by drilling a pair of holes, enabling me to use them to bolt them onto the pairs of mudguard mounting holes.

My first plan was to remove the welds enough, using an angle grinder, that they could finally be slid off the frame. It would have been a good plan, if the frame had not been so small that access was difficult, and instead I sawed them off first. This allowed free access by my angle grinder, so I could just remove and tidy up the bits of frame and weld.

Once that is done, all I need to do is drill a pair of holes that I can use to bolt each of these to the frame of my bike, then mount the seat frame onto the slots. Or I could mount these to the frame using this slot, then bolt the frame to this.

Slowly and surely, we are getting there!

But I must get rid of this pink coloured paint, as it is such a mismatch to the orange frame.

 

[hbn]

That is another smart solution. I get good ideas from this thread

 

[GeePig]

That is another smart solution. I get good ideas from this thread

That is very good to hear!

My intention with my bikes is really to consume the stuff I have around me --> other peoples waste

 

[GeePig]

After some work with the angle grinder, I bolted the pair of axle mounts from the little pink bike together to make them both the same shape.

I am still not one hundred percent sure that I will use these, but even if I do not then they will sit in some box until the day I do get a welder and find a use for them. But if I do, then I just need to drill a pair of holes to attach it to frame.

Now these are the bits of metal that will eventually hold the front wheel, once I have drilled the holes in them and maybe even shaped them a bit. I can see future uses for these, and they have come a long way already from their former task being part of a farm door hinge. I do need to make some other metal straps to create a triangular structure to keep the front wheel firmly in place.

This was once a bicycle pump, until it ended up on or too near a bonfire. Today I am using part of it to make a sleeve to maybe fit a narrower but much lighter seat tube into the frame. I have a long filing task ahead of me, unless I try out sanding them a bit with my angle grinder.

You cannot see it in this picture, but the black plastic is used as the structural element of the pump, but inside the tubular part is another tube in a harder, white plastic that presumably acts as a better pumping surface. It is all a bit different to the aluminium and the hard plastic pumps we had back in the 1970s.

Now I need to spend some time working on these small details to make them fit for the purpose.

Now I know I have not built the bike up into a rideable state yet, but already I know in my head where this bike is going, so I just need to solve all the details along the way.

 

[Ulu]

A plastic seat post sleeve? It sounds like gravity will win there.
So what's the clearance like?
If it's just 1mm or so you might consider slitting the undersized post near the bottom, and expanding it by driving in a steel slug from the bottom.
Actually even a wood plug would probably work.

I'm trying to figure out if you will actually ride this bike or it's just intended as a display piece. The rules don't require you to ride it as far as I can tell.

 

[GeePig]

I remember that the one I built last summer only went up and down the road a couple of times, and there was some difficult in selecting a gear. Nothing a bit of development wouldn't have sorted out, but I really wanted to finish building it as a woodland trail bike. It still needs some work, but then heh ho!

The gap between the seat post and the hole is about 2mm, which is kind of large. I could expand the bottom of the post, but then I would also like to use it elsewhere, maybe in a smaller hole, so that idea is out. The plastic is rather hard, as it would need to be as the structural element of a pump, so it actually works quite well in supporting the seat. I need to knock it out and grind some more off for a good fit, the trick is not to go too far...

As far as I can tell, many people have a large number of bikes in their shed which they rarely ride. To be honest, unless I was selling it or one of my other bikes needed replacing, taking it all apart is by far the most effective solution. That way all the parts go back in their boxes, some of which will be reused elsewhere and some will be ready for the next build.

I currently have two rideable bikes and one for sale in the city and the same in the village, so that is six rideable bikes. I think that is well enough.

 

[GeePig]

I think I have turned my workshop into a mini blacksmith's shop, as I seem to spend a lot of time beating and drilling metal. I am not sure what my neighbours think, but my cats do not seem to mind.

I need to drill these out to 10 mm, I think, and then I need to file some nice curves on the ends to make them look nicely rounded. I could also make them narrower in the middle a bit, a bit like a small set of weights, but I think I can live with their chunkiness for now. These will go between the holes at the bottom of the front forks and the wheel, which will mean I will not need the nuts I am currently using on the axle as spacers - especially when I add the reaction rods.

And here are the front reaction rods, nice and beefy enough to keep the front axle in place.

So far I have heated up, beaten and drilled the upper ends of the reaction rods. All I need to do now is measure the gap between the old brake lever mounts and where the lower brackets should be - on the front axle. Shall the wheel extensions be sticking straight forward, or maybe bring the wheel up or even down a bit? These are the decisions I need to make before I cut, heat and then biff more flat plates at 90 degrees to the flat areas at the other end of these reaction rods.

I know that these are a bit more beefy than the things other people seem to use, but that is what happens when you decide to use what you can find over what you can buy


Bash, bash bash!

 

[GeePig]

I was thinking about lights, which is when I remembered that I was also changing the lights on my all-black Romet Turing in the city. It is a cheap light, but ideal for the Turing as it is black and silver.

All I have to do is figure out how to mount it to this brake cable mount, without using the long chromed thing that came with it - which I managed to leave in my city garage, along with the batteries. Ah well...

While heating up the thick steel tubing for my front wheel mount so that I could beat it flat where I want to bolt it on, I discovered that I had a leak on the nozzle. First I added some gaskets, until I realised that the leak was down the adjuster shaft. That is held in place with a pin too thin for me to knock out.

I suppose I could get a replacement head, but I would rather not.


Anyway, it only runs for just long enough to heat up one thing, then the gas bottle gets too cold and the flame goes out.

 

[GeePig]

Here are some of the odd things that I have in my Warsztat, which are just some of the masses of things we have around the farm.

Here is a couple of things that I had no idea what they were, other than the fact that one of them was obviously a stone for sharpening something. We have a problem with the kind of grass growing this year in out orchard, because it is quite tough and keeps jamming our strimmer. Our neighbour had the same problem and even had to get out his scythe. We have a scythe too, and about a half dozen old blades, but the thing is that while I remember my grandad using one on the farm where he worked, I had never swung one in my life. So I checked out some videos on how to sharpen one, which is where I learned that the metal thing should be fixed into the end of a sawn off tree trunk, and then the edge of the blade should be hammered out a bit to make it thinner before sharpening it with the specially shaped stone.

This is one of several horse's bits, the rustiest by far, that I have found here. We have a ton of leather and metal items used by horses when ploughing or pulling wagons, all needing some work and a lot of cleaning, they were just dumped in the lofts of our barns when eventually they replaced their horses with tractors. We do actually have one semi-retired farmer who still breeds and uses horses to pull wagons in our village.

And this, which is the size and weight of a cannonball, is actually used to add tension to a cable on one of our ageing threshing machines. I do not know whether they used to use old cannonballs, but this is about 4-5 inches in diameter.

They all sit, among many other things, in my warsztat, just in case I need them, which in the case of the scythe sharpening tools, apparently I do. I sometimes use some of them when working on my bikes, such as the weight when I want to hold down one end of a bike while I work on it, or the stone to sharpen a blade.

 

[Ulu]

I think Napoleon’s men dropped that cannonball when running back to Paris.

 

[GeePig]

It is possible, and I do often wonder whether it was part of the ammunition supply for one of the local castles. I mean, why make your weight round instead of square if you are going to cast it?

 

[GeePig]

I attempted to drill the holes in the front fork extensions, but I always seem to have problems drilling these former hinge bars. If I was building a bike for someone else I would have gone and bought a decent bit of steel, but the challenge here is, of course, to reuse the stuff that I find lying around.

What this meant is that the bigger the drill bit was, the less likely it was going to get through the outer layer. The answer was to finish off the job using two or more of my round files until one of my spare axles would fit comfortably through the hole. The holes themselves had to be 8mm at one end and 6mm at the other, to fit the classic front wheel axle size and the thicker one that this bike's forks's insist on using.

OK, it is a bit of a blurry shot, but yes this one fits the wheel axle. I do not know if this axle is 6mm or 1/4", I suspect the later, but since my local stores only supply metric sized drills then 6mm it is followed by a file.

I happen to have a rear axle lying around that has rather beat up threads, but it fitted, so that meant the only filing left on this one was to get a second rounded end.

Well yes, I could have spent more time getting equally nicely curved ends, but I am happy enough with a set of four unequally nice ends. I could of filed or power sanded them flat, but I kind of like corroded finish, I will always know whee the steel came from.

All they need now is a couple of coats of paint, but first I need to try them out, and that will probably involve shortening some 8mm diameter bolts to install them on the forks, fitting a shorter axle and finish making the support rods.

All in all, not a bad day.

 

[kingfish254]

I can't wait to see that sissy bar go on. Killer curves on that part!

 

[GeePig]

Yes, it is almost like some one was trying to design something for a bike

 

[GeePig]

Today I decided that the paint could wait, and it was time to install the extension bars so that I could get on with finishing off the support bars.

It was also a good opportunity to decide how far forward and downward the wheel should be, which after a bit of messing around loosening and tightening the fork attachment bolts I arrived at the final position. It now means that I can go back to fitting the plywood mount for the front brake. Well, I might not actually use plywood, but it is a good material for quick cutting and drilling to decide how and where everything should be mounted.

The bolts on these brackets make installing the wheel a slower process, but I can live with that.

Anyway, here is one of the support brackets, with a bit of tape around it to mark where to drill the hole for the front axle. If the front axles had been a bit longer then I might have just drilled a hole through the tube, but it is going to be me and my hammer again.

Before I get my hammer out, one last check to make sure that everything is coming together properly.

Once I have finished up with the front wheel mount, I need to get that seat post out, as it has somehow managed to jam itself in there.

 

[GeePig]

The other thing that I forgot to mention was that the brake sitting on the back of the bike, with no chance ever of engaging with the painted sides of that big back wheel, is only still there cos I keep forgetting to remove it. It is, of course, going back on the front

 

[GeePig]

So now I have the support tubes cut to length, and with a bit of added heat I have even nominally flattened them at right angles to the upper mounts. Well, they might be a few degrees out, but I am sure that I can fix that in the vice. These were made from a decent bit of steel, they took quite a bit of hammering even though I heated them first.

Here is the first fitting, and I can see that I still need to do more flattening out with a big hammer at the bottom, because the bottom links come up at an angle. This is where I wish I had a decent anvil instead of the little plate on the back of my little vice. I will have to add that to my list of things to look out for the next time we go to the market - the last time there I saw a decent vice, but I forgot to go back for it, even though I had just bought a wheelbarrow in which I could have taken it back to the car...

The final thing to check before I finish off with my big hammer on my tiny vice is how the bike now stands...

I think that looks like a good angle between the BB and the rear wheel axle. It is all beginning to come together well, along with the weather such that I can now spend several hours in my Warsztat and still leave it without fingers stiff from the cold.

 

[GeePig]

After some major hammering with my small hammer on the back of my tiny vice followed by clamping one end in the vice and twisting it at the other end with my big adjustable wrench I achieved this - taraaa!

If I were installing this on a fixed fork bike I would need a small pair of moped springs/dampers, but I do have sprung fork and such a moped at the right price has, alas, so far escaped me. Since I live in a village full of small farms, each with a number of barns, I am fairly sure that such a thing is merely a case of talking to the right person. We have a small wheeled container that is common on farms here, but ours uses bicycle wheels while others have small moped or motorbike wheels, and that means there is a good chance that the moped or motorbike they came off is still sitting in one of their barns.

Since I have not yet tried out fitting the front brake again since moving the wheel forwards, I have not yet got around to cutting and fitting a pair of long nuts to replace the washers, but that will happen soon.

I finally got around to removing the stuck aluminium seat post and filed down the plastic filler place to allow it to fit. I know that some people are not sure about using plastic, but this will all be clamped tight and it is a filled plastic that was strong enough to be used as the main body of a pump. Anyway, this is the second time that I have used that former pump for this service.

Once I have finished all the detail work to get the front wheel done, and filed down the plastic enough to fit the seat, then I can move onto fitting the rear mount for the seat, installing the pedals and chain, along with eventually covering the seat.