Return of the Crow

After much soul searching and general consternation, I ordered the modern Shimano trigger shifter.  And then promptly won an eBay listing for NOS Suntour bar end shifters.

I like shiny things

I can't help it.  As I've said, I have the mind of a crow.  So my disappointment when my "NOS" barcon shifters arrived was palpable.  Were they New Old Stock? Er... no.  Were they shiny? Not as such.

"NOS" Suntour Barcon

Bleh. That is not a shiny thing. 

That does not get my inner crow excited.  Off to the hardware store!  Back in a flash with a cotton buffing wheel for my grinder and some kind of buffing...sticks.  Compound.  Four colors in a pack.  

[Cue sound of thoughtful tinkering.]

After some experimentation, I started to see small patches of shiny aluminum. Brown Tripoli.  It was then that I realized the shifter was not dull and oxidized, it was painted. Painted silver, to be exact.  Silver metal, metal that takes a nice shine, painted dull silver.  Who is so out of touch with their inner crow to do such a thing?

Grumblling, I stomped over to get a piece of emery cloth.  There's no sense in being delicate.  After about ten minutes of hand sanding, most of the paint had been scuff sanded though, and the aluminum below was showing.  Back to the buffing wheel and the Brown Tripoli. (That was a Rolling Stones song, right?)  Ten minutes later...

CAW! CAW! CAW!

Now we're talking!  Here's the before and after:

Mmmm... Shiny!

My inner crow is well pleased.  On the off chance the rest of the world likes them dull and painted, I left the other one alone.  I'll probably be selling it on eBay soon.  Maybe I'll give folks the option of shiny or dull.

Looking shifty

A Seven Speed Cassette

Although the bike has a 3x7 drive train, I'm not going to replace the front derailleur shifter.   I'm going to leave it on the large ring (38T) and lock the derailleur down.  But that leaves the rear cassette as a question.  The minimalist in me wants a single bar end shifter on the left bar.  Retro chic would put the shifter on the stem or the handle bar.  Down tube shifters would also be retro chic, yet completely impracticable.  Or I could put on a cheap Shimano trigger shifter on the right, and call it a day.

Bar End Shifters

I'm leaning towards a bar end shifter.  I like the aesthetic.  And I recall, on my old Le Tour III, having stem mounted friction shifters, and I recall them working well.  (At least when they were tight.  When they were loose, potholes would move the levers around and be very frustrating.)  But... expense is an issue, and it's hard to get just one.

$54   Microshift bar end shifter; friction ratchet, new from Rivendell Bikes

$65   Shimano/Suntour shifter, lightly used from eBay

Bar / Stem Shifter

A single Paul's Thumbie could be mounted on the bar or stem, with a down-tube shifter.  These are more plentiful on eBay, and cheaper.  But the total cost would likely be higher.

$39   Single Paul's Thumbie (Thumby?)

$38   Dia-Compe down-tube levers, new from Ben's Cycle

Trigger shifter

Sure, they're ugly.  Sure, they won't match the bike.  Sure, they're cheap and work well.  And I can get just the left one.

$12   Shimano Altus M310

What do you think?

The New Phonebooks are Here!

At long last, after much disappointment,

New Parts are Arriving!

Got the new Nitto MT-10 stem today from Ben's Cycles, after Universal Cycles pooched the order.  225mm stem, plus another 100mm extension at a 35 degree angle.  That should give me the upright riding position I'm after, with room to spare.  Finally, I will able to tighten a bolt or two!

O.  Very nice.  Shiny.

Stock Trek 700 stem vs. Nitto MT-10 "Dirt Drop"

It is loooong.  Hopefully not too long.  The Trek 700 doesn't have a very long head tube.  Time to find out.

Nitto MT-10 "Dirt Drop" stem with Wald 867 bars and Tektro RX 4.1 reverse brake lever

Aw, yeah.  Now we're getting somewhere.  Wow.  That's a lot of stem.  Flashback 20 years, to when I picked between two sizes of bike, and chose the smaller frame for when I was on dirt paths.  The larger frame would have less seat post and stem showing, I think.

Oh well.  It feels very comfortable.  Now I just need to sit on my hands waiting for the brake cables and housings to arrive.  I can ride it without shifters, but riding it without brakes seems like a rather bad idea.  They should come on Friday!

Mission Creep

My Grand Master Plan entailed removing the inner chain rings, moving the outer to the middle position, and installing a bash guard on the outer.  It was an excellent plan, in theory.  In practice, not so much.

It seems the Shimano Altus crankset I have is riveted together, instead of screwed.  Which means I am screwed, as well.  I could just lock the front derailleur down, leave it on the large chainring and call it a day.  But now that I look at it.... that chainring is kind of small... and it's really showing signs of wear...

I should install a new single ring crankset.  A bright shiny one with 40+ teeth.  And fluted cranks.  Bright and shiny.  (Seriously, sometimes I think I have the mind of a crow.)  But here's the thing-- I'm a cheap Scot by nurture.  And while I'd love to put on something light and contoured, they tend to be, well, not cheap.


In any event, off I went to the Interwebs to see how to remove the crankset.  Oh.  Special tools are needed.  Hmm.  That sneaking feeling I'm in over my head starts to creep up my neck.  I think I'd better  register on one of the forums and ask some questions.  Whammo!  Three excellent responses right out of the box.  I may have to take back all the nasty things I said before.  That, or I managed to only get responses from the helpful people.  One poster had just rebuilt his old '92 Trek 700 - possibly the same year I'm working on.  He recommended changing the bottom bracket while I was at it.  Creeeeeep goes the scope of the 'mog.


I'm not so sure I'm still not it over my head, but at least I know what I don't know.  Now if I can only find a cool, retro crankset on the cheap...

Same as it ever was

ARRRRRHGGGGH!!!

No parts shipment in time for the weekend...again!  Instead of shipping most of my order, Universal Cycles held it because of one item. They tried to contact me, so they say, but I never got a call from them.

Grrrr.

If you'll excuse me, I need to take my frustration out on my road bike.

Hello Endo

Yep.  That's the rear brake.  Was the rear brake.  Now all that's left are a couple of ugly brake bosses.  One more design challenge to conquer.  Back down the rabbit hole we go!

Did I Mention...?

I don't know nothing 'bout fixin' no bicycles.

I mean, I'm confortable with tools.  I don't mind getting greasy.  But I have no idea of the subtleties of building bikes.  

So I've been stalking the tubes of the Interwebs where regular folks go and ask questions of the cycling community.  And I've come to a startling conclusion: these sites are mostly filled with jerks.  I don't mean your average, run-of-the-mill jerks.  I mean Class-A, first-rate a**holes.  

Not all of them.  There are some very knowledgeable, helpful individuals.  Some.  But mostly, there are a bunch of self-important, ill-informed poseurs who seem to gain great personal satisfaction by pointing out how superior they and their bikes are.

That's beyond sad.

I made a choice when I started The Jasper Project not to turn this bike into a chic bike, the kind of bike that would be secretly coveted* by some dude in Wicker Park in skinny jeans and fake glasses, sitting in a cafe, thoughtfully drinking his PBR as I rode by.

*Secretly coveted, because no hipster worth his or her salt would ever explicitly covet something.  That would not be cool.

It won't be a fixie, with 12" long straight bars and a $2K wheelset.  It's going to be a practical, old-school upright city bike.  The kind of bike that says to you, "Climb on.  Let's go for a ride. Remember how much fun that is?"  It will be a bike that, hopefully, goes on many family rides with wifey and my two boys.  It will carry picknicks.  It will tow third wheels.  It will smile, just like Jasper always would.

The Right Hand Doesn't Know What the Left Hand is Doing

It dawned on me last night

I can't get the old Grip Shifters back on.

Not even temporarily. The strait section of the bar end is too short, and the bend is too tight to make the turn. Hmm. Off to the Interwebs!

All the trendy people, who's bikes I admire, say bar end friction shifters are the way to go. And friction shifters certainly don't frighten me - I cit my teeth on them back in the 70's on my powder blue Schwinn Le Tour II. Seemed pretty intuitive then, with 2x5 to manage, and the concept of not having to deal with indexed shifting is appealing. But the inn is full. I have inverse brake levers already planned for that location.

So tell me, o great magic 8 ball of the web, are there good, old school thumb shifters available? Survey says... Sure. But not at the price you wanna pay, kid. Dare I convince myself to run a front brake only? It kinda smacks of espresso swillin' hipster bike culture. Well, hell, if you're going to go down the rabbit hole, don't slide down.

So that's the new plan. Single brake lever for the front on the right, single shifter on the left. It's anti-American to run it that way, but it makes much more sense. I'll need to brake and hand signal at the same time, and I can't do that with the traditional setup.

Now, of course, I find you can't buy just one. They're sold in pairs. Anybody want to trade a Tektro RX 4.1 brake lever for a good bar end shifter?

Die Hände hooch hebe! (Stick 'em up!)

The bars finally arrived! 

Both sets of bars finally emerged from the bowels of the wifey's mail room.
What? You don't need two handlebars?

I couldn't decide between the Wald 872, which is a traditional cruiser-style bar with a 3 inch rise and out-swept, 24 inch wide grip, or the 867, which sports a 4 inch rise with a 20 inch grip. The bars on the 867 end up mostly parallel, which I wanted, but I was concerned the 20 inch wide grip would feel too narrow. It's actually perfect. Just wide enough to be comfortable; not so wide that my arms are like wings flapping in the wind. The 867 is definitely a more old-school city bike look and feel too.

So I slapped it into the old quill stem and played around with finding the right height. The old stem is much too short for the upright posture I'm after, and I think even the Nitto Technomic might be a little too short. I end up needing about 200mm of rise, with about 100mm of extension. That's considerably more than I had guesstimated. So it's a good thing I hadn't settled on a stem yet. It would have been just one more thing to return.

After a great deal of searching - I looked at the Soma tall stem converter with a modern threadless stem, cheap-o chrome steel stems, VO's various offerings - I finally settled on the Nitto MT-10, a.k.a. Dirt Drop. It should give me the rise and extension I'm looking for.

At $61, it's way over what I planned. But my first try at a cheap stem was too short and too crude. In any event, it's on it's way, so schau ma mal.

UPDATE:  The Nitto stem was on sale - Yea!

A damp rag and some elbow degreaser

Well, it's the weekend. I have time, but no parts. Boo. What to do... What to do... 


Decals. I could strip off the decals. 


It really won't be a Trek 700 once I'm done. So I dragged the dusty old heap upstairs, pulled over a chair, and had a good look. Too dusty to see much of anything. After about 20 minutes with a damp rag and a wee bit of degreaser, I had a shiny purple bike again. And profoundly concerned looks from my wife. But I digress. 


It's in remarkably good shape. Trek must use tough paint. I've ridden it hard, put it away wet, shipped it 'round the world and generally ignored maintenance. But apart from some scuffs, it's good to go. 


The decals, sadly, were mostly under the clear coat. I did a bit of searching on the interwebs, and it turns out there's really no easy way to get them off if they've been clear-coated. I guess I understand why Trek did it - it keeps the decals from getting all scuffed up - but it diminishes the final product. After some more interwebs poking around, I found a couple of places that would sand blast and reprint the frame. 


Nice to know, but really not going to happen. The dream list of 'mogs is already looking out of reach of my wallet. Na Ja, das leben geht weiter. 


 Not much more to see here folks, time to return to our normal lives.

Lost Weekend?

Well, parts were shipped to the wife's office, and the mail room didn't call here to tell her she had boxes to pick up.  Rats. 

So I'm not sure what to try and get done on the bike this weekend. Maybe we'll take it apart a bit further.  Maybe see if we can get all the branding off of the frame.

It's purple, which is cool. Purple goes with everything.

I think the color was called Insane Grape, or something ridiculous like that.  It's an old 700 model.  CroMo frame. Tires won't hold air.  Mismatched grip shifts on a straight bar.  I broke one shipping it to Germany.  Fortunately there is a bike store around every corner in that country, and the mechanic had a spare that would work.  Accent color is black, which was cool then, but I'm not too crazy about now.  It's got traditional center pull cantilever brakes, 21 speeds, and has been stripped of every accessory save bar ends.  


Really, I think it should be a cool city bike.  Don't you?

So here's the plan...

Step one:  Swap out that wrist-bustin' flat bar for something more upright.  

I like the Nitto Bosco bar that Rivendell has on their site.  It's $60 for the CroMo version, which is a bit more than I want to spend.  If the transmogrification costs too much, I might as well buy a new bike. So I ordered a couple of knock-off's from Amazon - the Wald 867 and the Wald 872.  Four and three inches of rise, respectively.  

I also ordered a cheap, chrome stem.  Yep, it was cheap.  Welds like gummy worms.  That puppy's goin' back.  The Nittos are too expensive.  The Kalloy AL-222 might get the job done.

Parts are on their way!

OK - here we go.  I've got an old, dusty Trek 700 sitting in the basement.  It served me well over the years.  It travelled with me to Germany, and one of my fondest moments with my first dog, Jasper, is him running next to me (loping really - that dog was crazy fast when he wanted to be) as I went full out down a single track in the forest outside Munich.  He and I had many adventures in those woods.  So, in his honor, I think I'll call this 

The Jasper Project