A bicycerrific day
Yesterday started witha visit from my friend Tim to work on the headlights of his bicycle. He has one of the cool Schmidt generator hubs and wanted to add a second headlight to it.It already had a single switched headlight. The new headlight was unswitched. We wired the second headlight in series with the first using a DPDT switch from Radio Shack. In one position the switch turned the headlight on. In the other it short circuited across the headlight, allowing the the first headlight to get all of the power from the hub. Normally external switches look pretty out of place on bicycles, but his bike had a cool little front rack.We clamped the headlight and switch to the rack, out of the way under the handlebar bag. In the end it was a pretty cool setup.
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In the afternoon my friend David from Missoula came to visit as he passed through town. He brought a nice luggedTrek 400 that was sized too big for him. This bike had a 24″ (61cm) frame when he is about my size and would normally ride a 23″ (58cm) frame. A shorter stem brought the bars closer to the saddle and we put on barend shifters (the normal Suntour Power Ratchet ones) to make shifting a little easier. When checking out the wheels we discovered that the rear wheel had a couple of spokes pulling through (a common problem with the old Matrix-branded rims). I poked around the basement and found a wheel that I inherited almost 10 years ago but which wasn’t tensioned. It looked like a good option, and I started to put it back together. Then I remembered why it was not tensioned — the rim was majorily out of true and had a big flat spot. I spent about 45 minutes on it and got it good enough, but we really need to find him a better wheel. The bike also really needs a triple crank, but we ran out of time.
I can’t ride my bike this week due to hurting my knee, so it was nice to spend some time working on bikes. My bike collection isn’t changing so much anymore, so I need to find other bikes to work on…
alex