bike #6: fixed again
After a couple of years of almost constant tinkering with various bikes and bike configurations, i took most of this year off. I was really quite happy with my fleet of 5, and none of them needed much more than basic maintenance. I was happy to just ride, and have a choice of ready-to-ride bikes. Then, as summer closed, the itch started. I haven’t had a fixed gear road bike since crashing the last one last fall. The winter bike was fixed, but it’s like driving the Sanford & Son truck around; useful, but not necessarily fun.
Being short on both money and shopping time, i put a couple of feelers out and my friend Tom found me a good candidate at a local thrift for $20. It was a 25″ low-end Ross, seemingly hardly ridden with some sort of overspray haze over the whole bike. It wasn’t beautiful, but it had potential. He even threw in a nice set of cranks from his stash and a couple of blinky tire valve caps. Tom’s a really nice guy, did i mention that?
In my usual fashion, i stripped the frame down and rebuilt everything worth saving. With apparently little use, the bearings were barely dirty, and the headset and bb were perfectly usable. The decals and overspray both came off with denatured alcohol and a lot of picking and peeling. I swapped in some already re-dished French wheels from the stash, installed the nicer cranks, picked up a new bar and tape from good friend Jim and a saddle from the box of saddles in the garage.
Here’s the result:
Here’s that nicer crank, a Sakae CR. I cut the teeth off of the 52t ring to make a chainguard. The small ring is a 42, and i’ve never had a crankset with a stock 42 before. Since my preferred fixed gearing is 42/16, it’s the perfect crank for this bike, and pretty too.
The bars are Redline 925 takeoffs, and they’re not bad. Brake levers are some Aero Compes from my parts box. The bars are half-taped partly for style, partly because i was too cheap to buy 2 rolls. A wind of twine on each side is just to keep the cables in place.
It rides nice, just like a bike. It’s stable enough to ride no-hands, not too heavy, and fits reasonably well with the longer reach bars (the top tube is a little short otherwise).