A little blog for a restless mind

I want to ride my bicycle

A nice hot sunny day emerged. At last! It's the 1st of July and the summer seems to have finally arrived. This thing is slightly odd: I wonder if the weather decided to introduce seasons on the 1st day of a month. I remember the past two years the autumn began exactly on the 1st of September. I mean: August the 31st was all sunny and hot, then the next day the temperatures dropped by 10 degrees Celsius and it got a bit windy and cloudy.

I used to ride my bicycle quite a lot the previous year, I even went to extremes which caused me to have a sore throat (angina) and right after that a flu. I was in bed for almost two weeks. Imagine, outside was a hot summer, temperatures ranging from 30 to 35 degrees Celsius, and I was sweating in my bed, with the body temperature around 39 degrees Celsius. It was awful. I even sprained my ankle a couple of weeks before, but that was while playing tennis, a subject for some other blog entry.

Back then, during June, I upgraded my bicycle quite significantly. The rear wheel was not quite circular anymore and I got fed up with exchanging broken spokes. It's quite annoying when you have to unscrew the freewheel to be able to fix a broken spoke. Actually I only got aware the wheel was an itsy bitsy tiny flat (twisted towards inside) during one of my mad raving and yelling ceremony as I couldn't unscrew the damn freewheel. I even damaged the notch where you're supposed to plug in a tool for unscrewing the freewheel. It was sitting very firm on that hub. Then I decided I had enough of these problems and I shall just buy a new wheel!

The decision was easy, but the world again conspired against me. There was just no substitute wheel available. The bicycle was out of production for a decade, maybe even more, what do I know. It was a ten-speed road-racing bicycle with 27" wheels after all. Today's standard wheel sizes are 26" and 28", 24" and 20" for juvenile (mountain) bikes. I bought the bicycle second-hand back in 2000. Now I really saw it was junk, much overpriced, but admiteddly still cheap. Whatever, the guy that sold it to me should've payed me to be willing to take it.

Oooookay, I thought, to hell with my non-standard (for today) rear wheel, I'll build me my own new rear wheel. I could buy a rim just about anywhere, I could buy a hub just about anywhere, the same goes for spokes, a freewheel, a chain, a derailer, and a tyre. It shall be a superb wheel, top of the line (or somewhere towards the top). Above all, the bicycle shall have more speeds, one of those modern shimano cassette freewheels so I won't have any problems getting it down if I'd have to fix a broken spoke, and it won't have any of those junk derailers that just go weird in a year. I had absolutely no idea how I'm going to do it, but I'll think of something. How hard can it be? There are shops doing it. Therefore I don't need to build a factory just to build a wheel. I did some extensive search on the web. And here I must give my compliments to Sheldon Brown. He has the most comprehensive and extensive web site about bicycles, virtually everything you need to ever know about a bicycle, and the most descriptive and just excellent guide on wheel building. I was thrilled.

Of course I wanted Shimano parts as far as freewheels and derailers go. I wouldn't settle for anything else. But those quality freehubs all came with 9, perhaps 8 sprockets. I mean, it's wide. And having an old 10-speed bicycle I had to watch for the width of the whole hub. Finally I found a part, quite rare to find a shop selling it, that was a shorter variant of a Shimano 7-speed freehub, I think Acera model, and corresponding cassette sprockets. (Maybe you're confused by the terminology: older freewheels were meant to be screwed on the hub, but nowadays they sell freehubs which are basically wide hubs on which you can stick cassette sprockets, which is basically a freewheel without the ratchet mechanism, as the ratchet mechanism is now inside the freehub.)

Now I was all set to go. I bought everything, even the tyres. It was a hot Saturday and I spent the whole of the day just building my first wheel. The longest it took me to connect spokes to the rim and the freehub and then adjust them properly so as not to break. They have to be firm, but not too firm. Putting the cassette sprockets on the freehubs was easy, just a couple of minutes' work. I really like this design -- you can exchange a single sprocket if you damage it, not the whole freewheel as was the case before. Then came the tyre, no big deal here. And then the moment of truth: will the wheel fit on the bicycle? Hardly. The hub was almost too wide, but it fit anyway. Would it have been just a bit wider I think I'd have been out buying a new frame. After being thrilled by my success, fitting the derailer and a new chain was just a two-hour stress-relief yelling show. I had a bit of a problem getting the old chain and the old derailer off the bicycle. It ended by me peeling through the chain. I must tell you, a factory-fixed chain is one tough thing to replace. But usually I think that doesn't matter because usually when you have to replace it it's broken anyway.

After I was all done I inflated the tyre and went for a test drive. I must tell you, it was amazing! The feeling was just awesome! The ride was smooth, the ratchet was not noisy at all, there were no bumps on the road (that's how I explained bumpy behaviour at first when I didn't know yet I had a faulty wheel), I mean: it could only be more perfect if the pedals were to move all on their own. But that wouldn't be so enjoying anymore. ;) I must have built it quite well. Not a single spoke broke afterwards, in fact nothing broke afterwards, and I was riding the bicycle practically every day during the summer.

And today was the first day of this year I was on my bicycle. I was a bit afraid I would find it in a state of decay or something, but really all I had to do was to brush the dust off the seat, inflate the tyres, and off I went! And here I am now, typing this after the 6.8 km ride to the office, all wet from sweat. :]

posted by AlesS @ 7/01/2004 12:31:00 PM