Why are Bike Shops Slow when it is Below Freezing?
In the winter time, bike shops are slow. When it is -6, bike shops are even slower.
Custom Recycled Bikes: Garrett needed a bike to get from his Los Angeles residence to his Hollywood office. When you build a bike from scratch, the first question is: “What do you plan on doing with this bike?”
This simple question is often asked by a good salesperson in a bike shop. However, many people acquire bicycles without interacting with a professional who’s purpose is to listen to you and offer choices based on what you say.
Garrett knows how to build stuff and he did not want an off the shelf “We make ‘me by the thousands” type bike. The steel road bike frame was found rusted and half-painted on top of beat-up mountain bike missing a wheel which was part of a larger pile of junk next to a dumpster where a lot of college students live.
Frames made out of steel are rarer than a frame made out of aluminum alloy. At some point, bike manufacturers decided that aluminum was lighter and cheaper to produce. I don’t know what percentage of bikes produced today are aluminum, steel, titanium or carbon, but I do know that aluminum is the dominant material.
Arapahoe Avenue has been under construction seemingly all summer of 2013 and it is still going on. When I saw the bikes in the garbage, which is a common theme, during certain weeks of the year, I grabbed the steel frame first. When I went back to the pile to lift the Specialized front suspension mountain bike, one of the workers from the Arapahoe construction unit tried to convince me to trade frames with him.
Forever the people pleaser, I somehow mustered up the courage to say “No. That rusty frame that someone started to sand the paint off, gave up, then left the frame outside for months is now Standard Bike Repair’s. Someday, this will be a customer’s recycled bike”.
Usually we do not paint the bike frames at Standard Bike Repair. One of the agreements with the City is that we keep neighbor complaints to zero. With as many student condos and apartments that surround the lot of SBR, the last thing we want to do is send fumes into the air for the students to inhale. In Garrett’s case, he has the tools and know-how to paint his own frame.
Garrett used an angle grinder with a steel brush to grind the last bits of paint and rust off the bike. There was a special procedure to knock the paint off where the tubes connected. Those points were difficult to reach with the brush. I forget the process that Garrett told me about to remove the hard-to-reach spots.
Many paints and lacquers require you to paint at a certain minimum temperature. Garrett’s stand-alone garage turned workshop was pretty much the same temperature as it was outside during this recent Colorado cold snap. Project was delayed slightly while we waited for temps to rise above 50.
The bend in the fork, where the front wheel is held, of the frame was extreme. Back in the old days, frame fabricators liked to design a nice big bend. Over time, the lawyers changed their mind. Today’s modern riders don’t have a choice. Their forks will be straighter from crown to axle.
Garrett chose a straighter fork from the catalog that had no design features that would distinguish it as a separate element from the frame. Later, as we wee installing the brake calipers, we noticed that the frame may not appear to be different, but the reach from the caliper bolt hole to the landing spot on the rim was different on the rear wheel compared to the front wheel. Thus, we had to settle on two different styles and colors of side-pull brakes.
Most of the time when you convert an old school road bike to a modern road bike, the brake calipers need longer arms to reach the rim of the wheel. Why? Yesterday’s road bike had 27″ wheels. Today’s road bike comes stock with slightly smaller wheels named 700c.
Since the wheels are that much smaller, the grab from the frame to the rim surface has to be that much longer. If you don’t use longer brake calipers, the brake pads will clamp directly onto the tire. Clamping onto the tire will stop you for a little while. However, it won’t be long till the brake pads have rubbed into the walls of your tire creating a blow-out.
My mistake was not properly documenting all the details. I forgot that Garrett’s modern fork would not need the Tektro 559 brakes with the longer arms. Making a new bike from old parts takes a lot of customization and attention to detail. Little things like this come up all the time.
Did we mention that the bike was French? It is a French bike, probably a Peugeot. The bottom bracket of a bike is as strong as an axle for a car. The bottom bracket is built to withstand the brunt force of your legs pedaling. As such, it is important to choose the right one.
Today’s bottom brackets and yesterday’s standards yield many different styles. The latest and greatest have big stiff axle spindles with the bearing hosted outside the frame shell. Yesterday’s standard was a simple four square axle with the cups, cones and bearings tucked away into the bottom bracket shell.
The standard of yesterday has threads in the frame. 99.99% of them have standard threads that are righty-loosey on the drive side and lefty-loosey on the non-drive side. Garrett’s frame, being French, had opposite threading on the drive side.
When it was coldest in Boulder of early December, I was out hunting the local bike shops for anyone that had a French bottom bracket. In the course of 48 hours, I went to 6 bike shops and saw four customers between all of them. Cold like that does not drive customers to their local bike shop.
We could order a French BB online and wait a week or we could drive down Denver and find one of the best stocked independent bike shops that I have ever been to: The Cycle Analyst. Bring your boxing gloves. Richard has the part you need, but if you ask too many questions, he may make you may want to cry. I made it out of there with no tears on the outside and the right short spindle French BB. definitely asked two more questions than he wanted me to and my “I am a good garage mechanic” ego took a few blows after talking with this been-in-the-industry-for-decades gentleman.
A 1 x 10 bike is unique. A couple of years ago, when Garrett took his idea to the local bike shops, they scoffed at his suggestion and said it couldn’t be done. Today, they make special parts for such a set-up. A 1 x 10 is extremely versatile and lacks a few parts like the front derailleur, cable, housing, cable stops for the FD and shifter. The overall aesthetic is that much cleaner.
Not only did we need a French BB, but we needed a single speed crank that fits closer to the frame than traditional double and triple chain ring cranks. Once again, the 175mm crank arm length, bike part was not in stock in Boulder. Considering we have over 70 different cycling related businesses in Boulder County and beyond, not finding the part was enlightening and surprising.
Few shops in town have their entire inventory online. Most of the time, we get our new bike parts through our favorite wholesaler J&B Importers, but in this case, we were trying to use a recycled crank and we had a deadline. Since the bike is for Garrett’s duties in L.A., we would need to ship it eventually and if he brought it onto the plane with him, we would save the hundred plus dollars that it takes to ship a bike.
We went 0-2 in Boulder with these bike parts. It is very possible that someone had the 175mm single speed crank arm with a 130 or 110 BCD and we didn’t know. Besides bike shops, there are guys-with-bike-parts-in-their-garages. Those guys with bike parts are the hardest to find. And after so many phone calls to shops, you will be exhausted. Oh business gods! why don’t all bike shops have someone on staff that’s sole purpose is to spec parts and upload component pics online for us to search for. Pro’s Closet is the exception in Boulder, but that is because their business is focused online. Many of us use craigslist to list our gear. For now, cl is as good as a Bike Parts Library as anything.
