Resurrecting my old bike (long pointless story)
Northwind
Posts: 14,675
I just spent a pleasant evening turning my ancient Carrera Krakatoa into a box of bits and gunge... I was kind of dreading it as it's not been serviced properly for 15 years or so, just infrequent and incompetent cleaning and lubing... 2 chains but still the original Altus shifters, cables etc. It's had a new wheel once, when I destroyed it jumping into a riverbed (ah, the good old days before suspension...) and that's about it.
Poor thing... It was my pride and joy for a while, then became a commuter when I was at uni, then I loaned it to my brother for 5 years... And I don't think it so much as got a squirt of WD40 in that last 5 years, he's got the all mechanical sympathy of ned ludd. At some point, he broke the girvin flexstem it had in half by tightening it with a breaker bar, because "It felt a bit squashy"
So, it's knackered obviously :roll: Not one round ball bearing in the thing. But it's come apart an absolute charm, the only bits to put up a real fight were the cheap no-name bits, reflectors and pedals and suchlike. Oh, and the grips had turned into a weird mix of dust and slime. And the less said about the tubes and tyres the better, the rear tyre had been worn slick but had then aquired some nice new tread because of all the cracks in the rubber.
And as I was doing all this, I realised something- I inadvertantly bought a really nice bike! I was 13 when I got this thing, it was half a year's paper-rounds and the proceeds of selling my old raleigh, £360 it was. Lots of shimano (Altus mostly, proper rapid fire shifters from the days of friction shift and SIS), no no-name parts, nice light Bontrager rims on shimano hubs (exage I think). Not bad going, considering I chose this bike purely because it had nice fat tubes and came with big mad offroad tyres on :roll: . And this was 1991 y'understand, all my mates had Raleigh Activators.
So anyway- if you have an ancient bike rotting away in the garage, give it some love! It's good for the soul. And if I do this right and replace the really knackered bits, it'll be better after 17 years than a lot of bikes in the shops today. I might even put proper tyres on it and take it to glentress
Old bikes never die... And it's so much nicer spannering on an ancient, knackered bike with absolutely no value! No stress, and any result's a good result. The worst that can happen is you clear some space in the garage 
Poor thing... It was my pride and joy for a while, then became a commuter when I was at uni, then I loaned it to my brother for 5 years... And I don't think it so much as got a squirt of WD40 in that last 5 years, he's got the all mechanical sympathy of ned ludd. At some point, he broke the girvin flexstem it had in half by tightening it with a breaker bar, because "It felt a bit squashy"
So, it's knackered obviously :roll: Not one round ball bearing in the thing. But it's come apart an absolute charm, the only bits to put up a real fight were the cheap no-name bits, reflectors and pedals and suchlike. Oh, and the grips had turned into a weird mix of dust and slime. And the less said about the tubes and tyres the better, the rear tyre had been worn slick but had then aquired some nice new tread because of all the cracks in the rubber.
And as I was doing all this, I realised something- I inadvertantly bought a really nice bike! I was 13 when I got this thing, it was half a year's paper-rounds and the proceeds of selling my old raleigh, £360 it was. Lots of shimano (Altus mostly, proper rapid fire shifters from the days of friction shift and SIS), no no-name parts, nice light Bontrager rims on shimano hubs (exage I think). Not bad going, considering I chose this bike purely because it had nice fat tubes and came with big mad offroad tyres on :roll: . And this was 1991 y'understand, all my mates had Raleigh Activators.
So anyway- if you have an ancient bike rotting away in the garage, give it some love! It's good for the soul. And if I do this right and replace the really knackered bits, it'll be better after 17 years than a lot of bikes in the shops today. I might even put proper tyres on it and take it to glentress
Old bikes never die... And it's so much nicer spannering on an ancient, knackered bike with absolutely no value! No stress, and any result's a good result. The worst that can happen is you clear some space in the garage Uncompromising extremist
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Comments
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Well said ;-)
I will die before my Zaskar lol.0
