Divine Intervention.

It's been a bit rainy here in Shreveport. Rainy enough to loosen the roots of two 100 year old red oak trees and down them into our and the neighbor's yards/house totaling two cars, damaging structure and taking electricity and cable with them in their downfall.

On top of all that madness, the rear wheel of my Franklin was severally dented in one of the obscenely large pot-holes that Louisiana roads are notorious for. On a seventeen mile ride through various neighborhoods and downtown Shreveport I did not see the gaping hole in the darkness until I was upon it. I knew immediately there was a problem as I could both feel and hear the back-wheel rubbing the pads on its caliper brake. I was able to true it back up but as of yet am unable to correct the dent that has it out of round.

It's a little hard to see, but the dent is directly above the middle spoke hole.

Looks small but it has a pronounced feel while riding.

I am still riding it while I plan on how to attack this. I was just planning on removing that individual spoke and hitting it with a hammer, but I believe that even a brass hammer is probably to much for the aluminum rim which means I would have to buy a plastic one.

To true the wheel I used a coin shaped universal spoke wrench which I have seen much maligned elsewhere on the internet. 

It was my first time using it and I thought it performed quite well. It might not be up to the standards of someone accostomed to expensive precision tools, but I am used to making due with less.

The Ravages of Neglect and Poverty; beggars can't be choosers.

I have a beautiful Franklin road bike. This bike is so beautiful that I would never have been able to afford it (I can barely afford to keep it on the road). The luck of my ownership of it I owe entirely to the laziness of a former roomate. In college I had a short lived roomate of about three months. He brought with him to my apartment his stepfather's old Franklin equipped with exotic, intimidating names like Cinelli and Campagnolo. It sat in our living room completely unused on flat tubular tires because he would always rather ride the racing Haro BMX bicycle he bought when we were in grade school. At the end of his tenure as my roomate (he dropped out of school) he moved to Dallas TX and told me I could have it because he didn't feel like moving it back with him. I let it go further neglected fearing it's exotic nature (it's components all bore the above mentioned brand names of refined Italian breeding), choosing instead the cheap safety of my yellow Goodwill cruiser.

Upon my depressing return to Shreveport Louisiana I found myself struggling to get around it's hilly neighborhoods on this same extremely heavy cruiser. I realized I needed something lighter in weight, something with gears for my coffee shop trips and I had this Franklin just laying around that was the lightest bike I had ever handled so I took to it and have only rarely, on flat roads, looked back to to my cruiser.

It's lightness and gears have liberated me here but I have found new struggles with it in trying to afford to keep it on the road. For all the neglect it has suffered it has paid me back in need of parts and maintenance. I am well aware of the debate between the impassioned riders of both clinchers and tubular tires but their arguments have rarely included price. The Franklin has had three flats since I brought it here and each has cost my sorry unemployed self thirty dollars apiece. All concern for ride quality or rolling resistance have gone out the window with the bitter knowledge that if I'd had clinchers these flats would only have cost me three dollars for new inner tubes.

Another recent potential financial burden came in the form of its brake hoods. The original gum hoods on its Campagnolo Record non-aero brake levers were UV damaged, dry rotted, and falling apart (as gum hoods are so apparently prone to do). The only thing I was keeping them on with was yellow electrical tape.

I searched for new replacement brake hoods. They were available by order at my LBS, in black rubber only, for nearly sixty dollars. Completely ignoring the expense I was unwilling to accept, I did not think black was a fitting color to compliment its navy frame and canary yellow tape and housing. I searched and found some NOS brown gum hoods but they were equally expensive. I was assured by the website that these NOS hoods were "show quality," but my bike is going to be ridden not be on display. These were unacceptably expensive solutions so instead I bought some cheap brown Cane Creek brake hoods:

They are obviously not a perfect fit, but they work. They are ridable and more aesthetically pleasing than the rot covered in electrical tape that they replaced. Plus, I saved fifty four dollars over the new or NOS alternatives. Now I only hope that its fantastic Benotto Cellotape holds up because I can accept no substitutions for it.

Apparently My Skills Still Need Work.

Round two of NPR's 3 minut fiction contest is over. I entered but didn't place. Here's my entry:

The nurse left work at five o'clock. She stepped out into rain steaming up from the hot asphalt that reminded her of home. The last time she had been there was just like this, walking down Oak street trying to decide between its two coffee shops. The street had been alive with bicycles and prettier girls in light summer dresses waiting for the next trolley to stop down on Carrollton Avenue. As she had walked a conversation drifted over the wall of a private courtyard attached to some expensive new condos. She couldn't quite make it out, but they sounded happy. That was the comfortable existence she had hoped to have, carelessly drinking ice-cold beer with the neighbors on Saturday in the soft humidity of southern shade where you sweat and sweat and feel so healthy. Sundays she would have walked to Audubon Park with some handsome boyfriend and picnicked in the grass on a cheap thrift store bed sheet illustrated with cartoon characters. They'd have laughed together, listened to the radio, and kissed very sentimentally. She'd have cooked for him always and they'd have been in an effortless lazy kind of love.

That life she had wanted now felt thousands of miles away and hundreds of thousands of dollars beyond her reach. Where had it all gone? After college she had tried so desperately to find work there, until there was nothing left. Until, after so many rejections, all her feelings of home and loyalty were worn away by bitterness and disappointment. It certainly didn't feel the same anymore. The realization had been sadly humorous, that she wouldn't be the New Orleans yuppie she'd hoped to end up. Like all of her friends became so easily. She had started to hate them a little. She was still polite, still chatted and joked with them, but she had started to resent them and the complacency that had slowly taken over all of their lives. Their lives became so stable and middle-class. She was the odd one out still struggling to find her place. She wondered if it could ever be the same. If she got a job there now would it all come back? Would all the pain and anger in her heart roll back and give her the feeling of safety she once had? Or would her job security be too fragile, a thin veneer over the certainty that it would all just fall apart again? She sighed. She was sure she couldn't go back home.

Now she was here, stuck in the town she hated most of all. Where she had grown up so miserable. Where she had run out on her parents so defiantly to go to school hours away down south. And where she had returned, having no other choice, back to her parent's house which she loathed even more now for being her last resort. Thinking about her parent's house made her walk slower. She wanted somewhere else to go. Maybe she could go out to dinner to put off going back there. She wanted to walk to some other life, but there was nothing else and there wouldn't be for many more years.

Life isn't always about bicycles.

Sometimes it's about getting your 30 year old motorcycle running again so you can gun-it and pray for death.

corroded old point.

new points.

lubricant.

After all that they just had to be re-gapped and it ran like a champ. Honda engines from the 70's are incredibly long lived. This one has been kicking ass since '78. I got it for free after it had rotted in neglect under a pecan tree for two years losing all its paint (hence the spray painted gas tank). I love it though it burdens me with perpetual need of  maintenance and fear of its decaying old carburetor boots and air box. I worry that soon one of the boots' many cracks will open up wide enough to let air flood in and run it lean to the point of scorching the rings of a cylinder; and it will die in my arms at interstate speed, screaming out in blue oil smoke pain before losing all power in a rapid deceleration death rattle.

 
Maybe I'll get lucky (for once) and that will be a few years off yet.

The Shreveport Triangle (a Bermuda-esque mystery).

I posted a little earlier about finding a Schwinn Collegiate 3 frame in the trash:

and while its having drop bars was certainly curious it did not spark my interest like finding a sister frame to it has. On Wednesday I found another wheel-less Schwinn women's frame in the trash that someone had done a horrible hack-job of painting on.

Which left me wondering why always Schwinns? Why only women's frames? And why always sans wheels? What cultural phenomenon, what bizarre sexual fetish could account for some pervs hoarding the wheels of women's bicycles and discarding the rest of the bike like so much refuse? Or maybe it's a hobby. Maybe someone is constructing a bicycle based multi-wheel monstrosity of transportation and for some reason only favors the wheels of women's bikes, believing them to have some totem power lacking in those wheels belonging to men's frames.

I also found this anomaly of a bottom bracket in the trash:

I cannot rationalize the need to cut a hanger away like this, as it would leave the rest of the frame almost certainly completely useless. I cannot fathom what the person who did this was thinking. I should probably quit rifling through people's trash for bicycle parts before it schews my view of humanity.

Reunited!

I gave to Peugeot back to its rightful owner Sunday night and he seemed happy with the end results.

An almost new Peugeot.

Finally finished the Peugeot up today and it has been a good learning experience. It's nice to have something constructive to do. The test ride was quite fun and I hope to return it to it's rightful owner on Sunday.

The Cane Creek hoods fit the Mafac "Racer" cantilever brakes well enough.

 Though, I did have a problem with one of the old cable guides. One of the two original brass cable guides from the old hoods was broken. I bought two barrel adjusters and filed them down and thread-locked them to fit.

I just hope that the aluminum is strong enough not to break after being filed down so much.

Here are some of the shots of the end product:

The brake cables come up a little high. I cut them to the original length and may shorten them later. This might just be a feature of older bikes  because the cables on my father's vintage Raleigh look to be up at a similar height.

I hope that it will be kept out of the weather now.