Making Room

This is my bicycle parts cabinet. 10 years ago my spare parts fix in my toolbox, now they fill this (and it only has small stuff). It is my friend and my nemesis. It’s too big and that lets me hoard too much stuff.

This weekend I made a first pass at getting rid of stuff. I emptied out 1.5 drawers (making room for framebuilding tools), not bad at all. With a couple of more passes maybe it’ll be empty.

This is what a typical drawer looks like (post cleanup):

The derailleur section (lower left) was probably the most cleaned out. I think I took about 7 cheap front derailleurs and 5 rear derailleurs to the Bike Shack today. It still has too much stuff.

I got rid all of cup and cone bottom brackets and still have more than a dozen cartridge ones. Too much!

Look for a for-sale listing of the nicer items on the BOB list and this blog soon.

5 Comments

  1. christian says:

    Suddenly, I feel better about my two plastic bins, though certainly I should still find a place to donate the excess.

  2. superfreak says:

    looks like yer a big fan of rear ders. what are the orange wheel things in there? thx superfreak.

  3. AlexWetmore says:

    The orange things are pulleys from some sort of downhill bicycle chain management device. I needed one of the brackets from the device for a headlight mount on my old recumbent tandem. The orange pulleys are perfect examples of items that I should toss.

  4. Rory says:

    I just rearranged my shop again, but haven”t tossed anything yet. I actually acquired a bike to rebuild as a cross bike for a friend, so I might be coming to you with a shopping list.

    one thing i learned is that while lathe is wood, it does not necessarily hold 6 bikes up. 3 1/2 ” screws(versus 2 1/2″) fixed that problem.

  5. beth h says:

    Those orange pulleys would make some seriously PUNK earrings.
    I have been thinking of actually trying to score a used file cabinet for this purpose, but L would kill me if she knew I wanted to keep that many bike parts on hand. Still, the two large plastic tubs are full and I actually like having the stuff on hand for family and friends” bikes.
    Can a bike freak ever have too many spares?