Been a bike weekend, toining in the garage till midnight on Friday, and half of Saturday.
Stripped down my owned-from-new 1989 Tufftrax in preparation for a long promised powdercoating. Had to drill the heads off of some steel set screws that had done the aluminium-steel welding thing to my bottle cage clamps despite use of grease, but the seatpost and headset all came off fine. Lot of surface rust in the usual places, but I think she'll pull through:
I'm going to send it to Williams Powder Coating in Falkirk, and collect it next time I'm down. Having spoken to Mr W on the phone he seems a pleasant chap, and it's just a pity that he won't post things back.
Trued a wheel, and had to fabricate a spacer to let me fit a 7 speed cassette to a 9 speed freehub body. In the past this has been easy, just fit something behind the cassette- not this time though. The amount of axle protruding from the body was such that the highest gear would have the chain rubbing the chainstay, which I attribute to the wheel maybe originally being for 135mm rather than 130mm dropouts. So a spacer had to be made that fitted between the cassette and the lockring, but with knurling to let the lockring lock- this was achieved by filling the teeth off of an old 11t sprocket and fitting it in. Seems to work, but what a pain in the arras (as Polonius would say).
Cycled to and from the pub last night, and was pursued along the mean streets of Kirkwall at 1.15am by a plastered guy on feet who thought he could catch a plastered guy on a bike- epic fail.
Took my hangover for a 14 mile spin on the road bike today, at a satisfying 15.7 mph average, given that I felt SOME rough.
Now crazily contemplating doing the 65 mile Edinburgh to St Andrews bike run on 19th June back to back with the
Trossachs Ton (100 miles) on the following day...
Although common sense suggests that if I was to cycle 100 miles on the Sunday I'd be as well heading from St Andrews to Aberdeen and getting the boat to Kirkwall. Hmmm.