Time to Get Out and About

The weather's not great but it's time to get back out on the bike after an extended lay off since the snow (and associated unhealthy living) arrived at the tail end of last year.



Why the panic? Well ever since someone signed us up for 10 @ Kirroughtree a few hours ago it suddenly seems like a good idea to put foot to pedal.

OK, so it'll be less brutal than Relentless 24 but a 10 hour mountain bike round Galloway Forest Park at the start of June (that's like only 3 months away) needs some sadle time pronto.

Just glad I don't need to finish building my bike first.

BAB - bottom brackets and crankset

Continuing on then... its time for the BB.

As usual with these things, there are various different types of BB and sizes you need to get. Easy enough to measure what you need. I plumped for a 2nd hand shimano integrated type below (a BB70) to be precise.

Here is it here:

Boring innit. So to start with I applied a good dab of anti-seize lube into the BB shell. The two parts of the BB are labelled L and R and also tell you which way to screw them in, which is handy.

You obviously get fleeced for another type of spanner for this mind you....

So once those were in and screwed nice and tight, its time for the cranks. A wee bargain these off the STW forums. XT. quite posh for me.

Now this was easy. You just pop em through one side (give em a bash with a hammer) and attach the other crank arm to the spindle, and tighten it with a wee nut thing that came with the cranks.

Jobs a good un!

Next time we shall get into the meat of it, and start installing the anchors!

L8rs...

Steering Bit

k then....

Lets get on with this shall we?

First bit I decided to put on was the handlebars bit. The thing you hang onto ya?

Before you connect em up though, you need to insert the fork, and for that you need a headset on the bike. This wee bit of metal gives your forks a nice comfy feeling, basically you insert the forks into the headset (the are bits of the headset at either end of the headtube).

Shit spins round easy cause they have bearings or something like that.

Headsets are generally 1.1/8 these days, so I trotted off to CRC and got a nice cheap un. The FSA pig (oink oink) fitted the bill nicely (and the pocket).

All you get for that is a lot of wee circles like this, its fairly disappointing tbh.

Still its fairly obvious what bit goes where. As it was an FSA model, the crown race (the bit that goes over the forks, was split, and therefore piss easy to install), no need for any fancy tools, just drop it over the forks and tappy tappy down with a screwdriver. Tick in the box for mr FSA.

You plug these into the headtube, but they dont screw in, it is sheer grunt to get these buggers in. You need a tool, called a headset press. You can make em yourself, or buy one. I ended up doing both (durr) as for some reason I could get one in fine with my self-built effort but not the other side. A quick £30 down the tubes (this time at wiggle) sorted me right out. Hopefully I will be able to rent that tool out to some other chumps. ahem.

So once that was on, it was time to put on the stem, and the bars. Pop them on, and screw down the top bit of the headset. There is a wee screw inside the forks call the star nut that they attach to. My forks came with it in already, cause they were off some gypsy and second hand. If you are posh, you'll need to fit yer own.

So, to sum up we have so far:

• forks
• stem
• bar
• frame

Almost done with this bit, but need to get some headset spacers. The forks are currently 2cm or so too long, so some spacers will be needed to fully sort it out. or it will look a bit shonky. And we can't have that.

There ye go. Next time, bottom bracket time. I can't wait. Can you?

Project B-A-B is gooooo!

BAB ye say?

Build a bike of course. Simplz, or not as I am sure will be the case.

I have this lurking in the back of the garage:

plus a load of other metal bits to stick onto it. The white thing, not the red kayak you chump....

More to follow once the spanners come out.

Over and Out for now.

DH