Bike fussing

Ugh. Bleh.. I think there was a time I enjoyed working on bikes. Now it drives me nuts and usually puts me in a foul mood.

I brought the Elephant and my cycle truck over to Glen's last night -- he did the heavy lifting -- he swapped out a headset on my Elephant and then swapped out my forks on the cycle truck.

I'm trying a Solid headset on the Elephant. Solid is a BMX company. It's a roller bearing headset and it's made in US. Which is cool, but the design is a bit weird in that it has a pinch bolt for tightening/pre-loading the bearing cup, which in theory should be perfectly round on the steerer tube. By pinching it, it becomes, in Glen's words, "not round." As a result, the final adjustment, with play removed, is a tad slow. Not buttery. But I want to tame some low-speed-no-hand shimmy on my bike, and I'm thinking this is the headset to do it.

Unfortunately, when I rewired the light on my new rack, I didn't pay attention to the amount of wire to account for turning the bars all the way. As a result, the wire snapped right at the internal-wiring port of the down tube. ugggh. Pushing a tiny wire through a tiny tube into my bottom bracket is exactly the kind of tedious shit that drives me nuts. If the bike wasn't built by Glen and if I didn't hang with him on a regular basis, I'd probably just wrap the wire around the tubes and call it good.

But alas, it wasn't so bad. I dripped some toxic gunk in the tube to flush it out and the wire was pretty easy to shove in there.

And since I'm running a cup/cone bottom bracket, I was able to splice the wires in the bottom bracket instead of having to re-wire the chainstay section too. That was a hair saver. With a cartridge bottom bracket there's barely enough room for the wire.

Then I put the fender back on the cycle truck. Somehow, the new fork has less clearance than the old fork. I couldn't get the wheel to spin with the big turdy PB fender in there. BTW: not a big fan of how these fender connect to the stays. At all. PB is a cool company though.

So I ended up hacking the front off the fender and calling it good. You know what they say, "when your only tool is a hammer...." But what the hey, there's a giant platform there for spray off the front of the tire.

I still have one thing on my short list: swap out a shifter on Liza's bike. But I don't have the shifter I thought I had. Her fancy new SLX indexed shifter already broke. It's getting replaced with a proper old top-mount friction thumbshifter, which is the way god intended us to shift the front chainring on a flat bar bike.

Now I need to take a ride to shake this creeping malaise.