Been doing a little work on my bike, it had a creak/tap kinda noise when the bike hit a bump, or i was out of the saddle pounding away/flexing the bike.
I have been working on the process of elimination on this, things that had been tried.
Seat and post removed, went for short ride, bike still made noise
Bushes replaced on rear with ones from 98 GC frame
All bolts checked
Headset removed, checked, greased.
BB removed and replaced.
I drilled out all of my cablestops and i use full legnth outer cables, lightly tapping the cables on the downtube makes a surprisingly loud noise, figured it was wither cable slap, or one of the rear bushes needing some attention.
It also had a fair amount of cable rub and some of them little spider leg corrosion patches you get on alu parts when they age.
Figured i would strip the bike down, quickly repaint the frame and refit everything with a fair dab of grease to eliminate noises. Could not for the life of me find any replacement elite decals, i did find an ex employee who had some NOS ground control ones (told him to register on here and flog them)
So i attempted to mask off the original decals and paint around them, i have painted a fair amount of stuff now, motorbikes, cars, pushbikes, i know that masking off the decals is never going to look quite as good, but i have a little plan, basically i will dust a coat on everything to keep it one shade of paint, and only use thicker coats on the parts that have been sanded back to bare metal/primer.
Paint applied.
masking tape removed while paint still wet to prevent any edge buildup/lines/problems.
Silver elite has a kind of anodised finish to it, really quite nice, for this paintjob i simply used silver Hammerite, gives the same kind of bobbled/anodised finish, and the colour match is pretty good, i also had half an unused can in my man-cave as i use this stuff to spray alloy wheels (pretty durable imo)
Total cost = £0
the decals have a little over spray on them near the edges in parts, this will come off when the paint is hardened properly and buffed up.
The bike is now back together, everything was greased up and i added clear selotape to cable rub areas (pretty much invisible) and anti rattle cloth tape to any cable that will touch the paintwork, did 13 miles on it this morning and it is silent.
Bike now looks fantastic
For those wondering, a cheap £3 quill stem was put into the seat tube and makes a perfect mounting point to clamp up the bike on a workstand for paintwork, a hell of a lot easier then the ground control i painted last summer that was suspended from the garage roof rafters with metal rods! LOL!