by framersqool:
This shiny new outfit started out a few weeks ago as a filthy abandoned frame with some wheels, a 3x7 drive train, and a set of brakes, which I'd spotted leaning against my neighbor's flatbed trailer, waiting along with other various metallic odds and ends to be hauled to the scrap yard.
It was missing the entire seat assembly, needed new brake levers and shifters, plus it was overdue for a whole new set of the four cables required for brakes and gears. And some general cleaning, lubricating, adjusting, and all-round TLC.
And so, my being both a longtime dumpster diver blessed (and cursed?) with an extra sense that I refer to as 'resource recognition', and also recently having become a recovering automobilist with a renewed interest in cycling as my everyday means of transport, I rescued it from the junk load, after my neighbor told me it was worth about fifteen cents in scrap weight to him.
He didn't even charge me the fifteen cents....
As I began looking over this intriguing find in more detail, I realized it was a Trek mountain bike frame, fitted with Shimano Deore components, both of which are well-known as upper-mid-level equipment in the recreational cycling world. This definitely had the potential of being a better class of machinery overall than the seven-speed Huffy cruiser I'd ordered new online for under two hundred from Walmart last year, when I had (long story) decided that I was, at long last, done for good with being part of the American love affair with the automobile.
(In my case, this affair was always a love-hate thing, anyway.)
And as things had turned out, the perfect space awaited me, to do exactly what was needed.
What had originally been intended as my daughter's bedroom, which she used for a week that included her tenth birthday, seven years ago, and then it took me four or five of those to admit to myself she wasn't coming back, (another long story, of a sustained, aggressive, brazen and systematic crusade of interstate parental alienation, against which her Daddy ultimately did not prevail), has since earlier this year been converted into my all-purpose indoor workshop.
This roughly 11' x 9' space in my 1965 single-wide also boasts a new back door, which I'd installed a few years ago to reduce the walk between two new electrical panels, from well over a hundred feet around the whole house to more like six feet to the other side of one wall, when I'd re-wired the entire structure with 12/2 copper cable to replace the worn-out and unsafe original aluminum wiring. This now gives me perfect ingress/egress for working on bicycles or anything else I need to do indoors, in a setup which houses almost all of my various collections of tools and equipment, with various shelves and hooks and drawers and clever cubbies providing a place for everything and everything in its place (for maybe the first time in many decades of making my way in life with my tools), plus a nice sturdy workbench.
And, just enough floor space left over in a tiny trailer-house former second bedroom to set up the bike stand in the middle of the room, and get to wrenchin'.
So, I invested around a hundred bucks or less into ordering the missing pieces for the Trek over the past few weeks, and while waiting for parts to arrive, gave the frame a nice three-color refinish with some high-gloss Rustoleum oil-based brush paint I already had, which is made for touching up heavy equipment in their factory colors (Old Ford Blue, Caterpillar Yellow, and I don't know about the beige.)
The Ukraine theme was kind of a coincidence, but not one I really mind being associated with just now: having no real geopolitical preferences nor being under any illusions that any such matters are anything my own views will ever be a factor in, I still find it simply not neighborly behavior to go around invading other people's countries, pretty much the same way I'd regarded the USA's past few adventures in militant imperialism, ever since the invasion of Vietnam.
Oddly enough, I'd learned years ago that the reason my house and a lot of other mobile homes, travel trailers and government-funded housing units (!) were built with aluminum wiring, also had to do with the ill-fated invasion of Vietnam: seems the US military had cornered the market on all the copper wire by 1965, what with all those new facilities to build around the world in order to send soldiers into somebody else's country for no good reason...
So anyway...
With a few odds and ends from my recently-organized hardware collection (formerly randomly housed in coffee cans and yogurt containers all over the house), plus hours and hours up on the repair stand I'd bought last year, which included swapping out the mountain bike handlebars for a more comfortable cruiser-style set I had on hand, I have now brought an almost-new and pretty nice bicycle into the world, and upgraded my growing fleet to four. (Along with the seven-speed Huffy, I also have two one-speed cruisers which are only tires and tubes away from being roadworthy.)
Rebuilding the Trek is not only my biggest bike-repair job of my life so far (and many thanks, for his generous emailed contributions, to my elder brother and of-late consultant David, an extreme autodidact of many disciplines who had long since taught himself more about bicycle design, manufacturing, engineering and maintenance than I will ever manage to learn), but is also the most advanced technical undertaking I have yet started and (nearly) finished using my new workshop as a base of operations.
Soon I will promote the Trek to my Number One Ride, and use the Huffy cruiser which has been serving in that role for over a year now as a more-than-adequate backup.
My bicycle-mechanic skills still have (believe me...) a long way to go, but after this I am no longer intimidated by taking on this kind of project, and am actually looking forward to the next one.
I'll be watching a lot more well-presented and extremely informative videos on Youtube from Calvin Jones of Park Tool, in the meantime. Without this incredibly useful resource, plus tapping gratuitously into my brother's extensive knowledge on the topic, I doubt I could have come this far.
But now I have, and the result is a nearly-new human-powered apparatus which I'd never have been able to afford at the six hundred dollars, or more, that this machine must have originally cost whoever left it behind. And by all visible indications, without even having given it much apparent use before leaving it to rust.
Who knows how many more abandoned and forgotten cycles are lying around this cow town, where hardly anyone rides a bike longer than it takes to remember how much they like their pickup trucks?
Bring 'em on.
framersqool is an aging bachelor of no particular consequence. He is in command of more opinions than facts (but occasionally the facts, or the lack thereof) and can make a thing seem worth writing about.
Well-presented, and many thanks to our host Clayton for running it.