Zasada Rides Again

[GeePig]

For my BO11 bike I made dropout extensions from some IKEA parts:
That's how I started:
View attachment 232660
https://ratrodbikes.com/threads/barrelbanana-lowrider-still-in-ab-use.99083/post-991783and here's how they looked at the end:
View attachment 232662
https://ratrodbikes.com/threads/barrelbanana-lowrider-still-in-ab-use.99083/post-992330

That looks really good, and I might have to do something similar - unless I can find some other brackets off one of the sofas and whatever else gets dumped down by the bins near our block.

Finding and using stuff from the things dumped by other people has always been key to my choices, and when I buy things for my hobbies it tends to be the cheapest option. If I cannot figure out something in my head, it is probably not worth investing much in.

 

[GeePig]

Now here is the rear wheel bearing that is installed inside the rear sprocket. My question is when should I replace it.

If I had used bikes with this kind of bearing for many years, or worked at a bike workshop, I would probably know the answer to this question - is the point when the balls start coming out of that frame a good time to replace it?

Is this a good indication of the time to replace them, or is it too early or too late?

Generally I replace them every time I buy a bike or hub, just to be safe, including the big internal bearings as well.

 

[GeePig]

Since I have decided that an extended rear wheel mount is the way to go, it was time to choose what colour wheel I should use.

Having an orange frame, and realizing that I had already given the front wheel a white primer coat kind of shot down the chrome wheel idea, but forgetting these minor details when the front wheel is in pieces in the city and the frame is in the village, and you have a ton of other things to think about, is a bit of a problem.

Now I could paint the frame, except for one minor issue... As I said before, this is a Zasada frame, and there is a chance that its value will go up significantly in the next few years. Romets have gone from 50-200 zloty to 1000-2000 zloty per bike in the last couple of years, as they are quite rare in the cities and larger towns where a good segment of the more well-off people live. Here in rural Eastern Poland there is probably one or more in each of the barns associated with every farm, and given the fact that there are a ton more farms in Poland than elsewhere in Europe and North America, that is a lot of bikes that city folks never get to see.

So we can discount the chrome finish

I have some cream and green wheels, but maybe nah

Or there is classic black.

Black is a 'colour' that I have used a lot over the years, and will work well with the orange. If you take the plastic off a motorbike, for example, you generally end up with black, silver and whatever colour the tank is. It is a good combination, because the black covers up all your rust, welds and other mods.

So far I have not done much about the top half of the bike, because the decisions there will be defined by those I am making now.

 

[GeePig]

I have made further process on my barn door hinge rear axle mounting plates.

As you can see, they still need quite a bit of work to finish them off, but they are now ready for an initial assembly. The funny thing is just how much effort drilling the barn door hinge steel is, I bought a pair of 8 mm drills and disintegrated one, and had to finish off filing the 10 mm axle holes. Normally drilling is just a quick job, but this steel is hard stuff, it probably saw much more of the blacksmithing type operations than what you would see in a factory today. I actually do have some modern mild steel of the same dimensions that I found kept dry on top of the kindling store in our main barn - with no sign of rust.

The filing of the nuts was so simple in comparison, and here I have them bolted up ready...

... and now here it is installed snugly in the frame. I actually had to tap the former nuts lightly into the frame slot.

To finish off I fitted a pair of trimmed but thick washers and a couple of nuts. I could shorten the bolts, but that can wait as I want to swop those nuts for nyloc style nuts, or add some kind of retention washer. Plus, depending on the type of hub I fit, I might need some way of fitting a reaction arm retainer for the hub.

The next question is what wheels I can get to fit in the gap between the plates. For this bike I do not want to mess around with gears as I have only one set of cable mounts on the frame, which I would rather use to install a wiring cable. A single-speed coaster brake would be ideal, especially as we live on the relatively flat top of a hill here, and historically most of the bikes around here were fitted with single-speed coaster brakes. But the question is whether I have made the axle plates narrow enough to fit that type of axle?

Finally, those two small threaded holes were there to fit a mudguard, but I might use them to retain the rods for the rear of the seat, to continue the project I started back in the fall.

 

[GeePig]

I have been rather busy for the last couple of days, but I have managed to make some progress.

I have not got the rear wheel tightened up yet, as I only did an assembly to make sure that I have enough room for the tires with this wheel size. You can see that I need to make some kind of bracket to hold the rear hub restraint, which Is one of the reasons I still haven't shortened those bolts yet. I think I just need a simple bracket made out of some of the newer strip steel I have lying around, I just need to see whether I will have to bend it a bit to make it fit.

Finally, the bottom end of the bike is almost close to looking like it should be - well, if you ignore the fact that I have a rear wheel at the front. But it is not looking too bad!

Now that everything is looking OK, it was time to cut the slots so I can take the rear wheel in and out without having to disassemble the brackets each time.

I am pretty pleased with how the brackets have turned out, as they have located the rear wheel just about right. All they need now is a bit of filing before they are ready for fitting and then, later, painting.

All I need to do now is to sort out a BB and I can then fit the crank and, eventually, the chain. Then it is just a case of rebuilding the front wheel and fitting the tires and the bottom end will be finished. I already have a crank set already cleaned up and painted, and once all that is on I just need to find a seat and handlebars so that I can check that the bottom end is OK.

 

[Brian macumber]

Coal Shed Productions - well I guess someone did store coal there at some stage, my workshop was formerly somewhere to dry a certain drug product.

 

[GeePig]

I am considering borrowing this bit off last summers build, to act as the front mount of my new seat, as bent seat stems do not appear to be a thing in this part of rural western Poland. If I had a big enough gas bottle and kit I might attempt to bend one of my seat posts, but that is not going to happen. Anyway, I need to strip this particular bike back to basics so that I can go riding in the woods again with it.

As we burn wood, I never say no when someone chucks out some furniture based on whole wood at our place in the city, and I have a set of four of these little ply boards from a recent piece. All I need to do is drill some holes to fit it on the old brake mounts, then another hole to mount a classic side pull brake + mudguard, and finally cut the board to an appropriate shape. I am sure my jigsaw and the other saws in my collection will be up to that job.

Finally there are these mounts, even though I cannot remember what they held or if they held anything. Since the rear frame is super wide, enough to mount a derailleur wheel instead of the 3-speed hub brake it came with, then it could of mounted some form of brake or even some kind of seat on some other model.

So I have a number of possibilities to play around with, it all depends on what I can find in my warsztat.

 

[Ulu]

I finally had a chance to catch up with this thread, and it seems you’re making substantial progress. I don’t think the barn door hinges will be the weak point in this assembly.

Though you might just pry the dropouts open.

Let me rephrase that please…

I would probably pry them open trying to do wheelies.

 

[GeePig]

I finally had a chance to catch up with this thread, and it seems you’re making substantial progress. I don’t think the barn door hinges will be the weak point in this assembly.

Though you might just pry the dropouts open.

Let me rephrase that please…

I would probably pry them open trying to do wheelies.

The funny thing is that the chances of me attempting a wheelie is about zero.

I mean I have done them, usually accidentally, but I am more likely to do a jump offroad - but at the end of the day I am a long-distance rider, on and off road, so I tend to keep my wheels on the ground. As an engineer, if I were serious about this bike, I would be welding another set of brackets in there, but this is play time...

 

[GeePig]

Since I live in a block where most of the people are living in a city for the first time, what gets thrown away is interesting - lots of cardboard boxes, stuff that they brought with them, stuff their parents gave them and stuff that they buy here. I have cycled around all the local streets and have seen how the rubbish varies between the different areas, but this area is like bonus time in the spring, with so many things being discarded. Why am I going to go out and buy new steel tubing, when my neighbours insist on throwing out pre-shaped steel?

What we have here is the frame of a chair, which I have cut the side off. I still have to trim the top a little so that it meets the tube for the other side, decide how to join it there since I am currently out of any welding gear, and trim the bottom.

Since I have been assembling rear hubs, I had to get out this tool which came with one of the two Romet Jubilat bike wifie bought at a local supermarket almost 15 years ago. Now I have seen that square hole on many bike spanners, but it was only when I began to strip the hubs on these things that I realized that it fits the square end of the main hub shaft. I just thought it was a convenient way to hang it on a nail in the shed.

You can just see the square end on the shaft below.

The top hub is an earlier model, as it all comes apart. On the later one below, only the sprocket comes off, which makes it a pain when it comes to cleaning and regreasing, and it is impossible to replace that bearing without major surgery. I tend to keep the later one in reserve, and went with the other one for this build.

Hopefully I can get the whole wheels set up this week, so that I can focus more on getting the saddle into some kind of shape.

 

[hbn]

I have made further process on my barn door hinge rear axle mounting plates.

As you can see, they still need quite a bit of work to finish them off, but they are now ready for an initial assembly. The funny thing is just how much effort drilling the barn door hinge steel is, I bought a pair of 8 mm drills and disintegrated one, and had to finish off filing the 10 mm axle holes. Normally drilling is just a quick job, but this steel is hard stuff, it probably saw much more of the blacksmithing type operations than what you would see in a factory today. I actually do have some modern mild steel of the same dimensions that I found kept dry on top of the kindling store in our main barn - with no sign of rust.



The filing of the nuts was so simple in comparison, and here I have them bolted up ready...


... and now here it is installed snugly in the frame. I actually had to tap the former nuts lightly into the frame slot.


To finish off I fitted a pair of trimmed but thick washers and a couple of nuts. I could shorten the bolts, but that can wait as I want to swop those nuts for nyloc style nuts, or add some kind of retention washer. Plus, depending on the type of hub I fit, I might need some way of fitting a reaction arm retainer for the hub.


The next question is what wheels I can get to fit in the gap between the plates. For this bike I do not want to mess around with gears as I have only one set of cable mounts on the frame, which I would rather use to install a wiring cable. A single-speed coaster brake would be ideal, especially as we live on the relatively flat top of a hill here, and historically most of the bikes around here were fitted with single-speed coaster brakes. But the question is whether I have made the axle plates narrow enough to fit that type of axle?

Finally, those two small threaded holes were there to fit a mudguard, but I might use them to retain the rods for the rear of the seat, to continue the project I started back in the fall.

Love the creativity! Looks like a perfect fit

 

[GeePig]

Love the creativity! Looks like a perfect fit

One tries, and one always hopes so

And it certainly keeps me off the street until I am ready for the street...

 

[GeePig]

Well I finally remembered to take the right colour of paint with me so that I could do the front wheel. I could have just sprayed the whole wheel at once, but since the spoke nipples were in good condition for a change I wanted them in all their shiny chromeness.

Out garage is part of a block, so it is a much better place to paint as there is space without wind, sun or other people to complain/moan about it.

I actually found two steel and wooden framed canvas chairs, but although they looked the same, the steel frame in one was in many parts while in the other it was in only two parts. I sawed up the major part of the 2-piece frame to make the seat supporting frame for my bike, but the other frame had these much longer connector pieces - which I am also going to use for this project, to connect the two pieces at the top.

The other day we were finally emptying out the attic in our farmhouse so that we could insulate it, and among the stuff we had left up there was old vacuum cleaners, farm tools, rugs to insulate the roof etc. there were two drawers full of the odds and ends that end up in such an attic. I sorted out the following as having potential - including a wrench, a screwdriver made out of rebar, two files and screws left over from putting the roof on. The only thing I am not sure about is the glass lens - I guess it could be the headlight lens out of a tractor?

So some of that stuff may end up on this or future builds, we shall see.

 

[GeePig]

I have been back working on the front wheel.

I have sprayed it my classical satin black, because everything that I work on will be painted in some way or other, even if it is just with clear paint, so that the final bike is a combination of a classic bike with, apparently, new parts fitted. Since I often strip my bikes down again to avoid having a ton of bikes that never get ridden, it means the parts will fit the styling of another bike with no problem.

Here I just need to touch up a few areas where the painting was suboptimal or I managed to scratch it. Usually the spoke nipples are in a dreadful condition, so I paint them as well, but these were all still nice and shiny.

Of course, I just rebuilt the old axle in the wheel, forgetting that it was not going back in a classic fork.

I had to dig through my small axle collection, where I found this, the rather long front axle that my Romet Turing had. I like to keep all my parts stripped down, otherwise you end up having to strip something else partly down... The Turing has a shorter axle now, but I would imagine that the original axles for this bike are on my blue Romet Wigry, along with the wheels. Maybe I need to rebuild those hubs sometime, to expand my axle length choices.

Here we are, all snugged up, with a few nuts and washers as spacers, pretty much what the bike originally used.

I need to paint the front forks, or maybe I will just remove the tatty stickers from it.


I also need to make some kind of decision about the tires. As I only have one pair of 18" tires, I would like to reuse one of those, but I really could see how nice it would be to have a wider 24" tire, if I could find one. I know I could order one internationally, but I would still like to find something here in Poland.

 

[SwissGuy]

Following you building bikes over the last few BOs is a bit like watching someone building something with Lego, then taking it apart again, sorting it back into assigned boxes and then building something new...

 

[GeePig]

Yep, and the end result it that I have a lot of fun and end up repairing a lot of old junk - some of which ends up on the bikes I sell or ride.

 

[GeePig]

Things are progressing slowly, but firmly.

Here are some of the bits of the chair transformed into a saddle support frame. I have no idea what these were actually called, as they were quite rare in the UK when I was growing up, I think I only knew one lad who had a bike with one on.

I still need to fiddle around with the little bit of tube I have in the joint to get the bars to fit square, and then I will have to rivet it together as I lack any welder. Well, I could nip up the road to the garage, but I would rather leave that option open to more farm-related issues at the moment.

At the front of the bike I am toying around with fitting the fender quite close to the tire. I could make something out of metal, but I fancy doing it first out of plywood. I need to mount it on the original brake mounts, which are in completely the wrong place for an 18" tire rather than the original 20" one.

Now this tool probably dates to the early part of the 20th century, and was given to me by my granddad - the 'CBLB' are his initials. It is a nice little tool that I really enjoy using - without any actual measuring I compared the size here with those of my drills.

I marked out and drilled the holes, and here we are. I trimmed it a little bit just to clear the wheel, but now I need to get a tire on so I can figure out the final shape.

Hopefully I can avoid all the holes already in that bit of ply, but I can always use a bit of filler. The alternative is to make something out of thick steel wire or rod.

 

[SwissGuy]

Things are progressing slowly, but firmly.

Here are some of the bits of the chair transformed into a saddle support frame. I have no idea what these were actually called, as they were quite rare in the UK when I was growing up, I think I only knew one lad who had a bike with one on.

It's a sissy bar
I really like your way of repurposing things.
I used a discarded CD stand for a sissy bar in my first BO build...

 

[GeePig]

It's a sissy bar
I really like your way of repurposing things.
I used a discarded CD stand for a sissy bar in my first BO build...

Ah, yes, of course, and such a strange name at that, how could I forget ;0

These days the amount of things being thrown away is growing at a huge rate and most of my bikes were found dumped down by the rubbish by our block or I bought very cheaply. I live in a block that seems to attract people who have just arrived in the city, and their parents buy their grandkids new bicycles so no one wants the bikes when they grow out of them, plus they abandon their old furniture and other stuff that I can regularly take to my garage and strip down to burn or use. I am in the middle of taking apart one of our neighbours old Ikea sofa bed, and I am taking the screws from it to repair our kitchen chairs this weekend. And so it goes on.

 

[GeePig]

This is the kind of thing I collect for my projects, it is now a rubbish as a chair, but the steel tubing is strong enough for many projects, and those armrests might be good enough to be used as the basis of a seat on one of my projects. It might have to wait until I get a welder, but I have plenty of space to store it, once it is stripped down.

I spent part of Sunday working on the front brake I might fit, removing most of the rust. If it were going on one of the bikes I sell, I would put more effort in smoothing out all the rusty dents it has, but this build I wanted to achieve something that matched the used look that the paintwork has.

Anyway, this was the final result, after a quick spray over with a clear paint so that it rusts no further. I dug through my box of disassembled brake parts, and this was what I ended up with.

Well, the brake pads and nuts holding them on were not selected, I just wanted to see how it looked on the bike at that point. I do have a set of pads with rusty clamps that would do after they are cleaned up a bit, plus some used nuts.