Saturday, November 3, 2012

The Frankenbike cometh

Samhain, aka All Hallow's Eve or Halloween, is a liminal time in the year. A crossing over of the seasons, a time of change and a night where the curtain between living and dead is temporarily rent asunder. Strange hybrid creatures enter the world to explore your dreams or caress your nightmares, and the odds are they're riding something like this -
The Roadrat is going through changes of its own. The idea was to build it into more of a touring bike, but for various reasons this is being held up and so it sits in a strange in between stage.

Midge bars supposedly give a comfortable touring position whilst still being practical on dirt. I'm unsure - the drops seem too low and the hoods too high, and after two rides my shoulders are killing me. Maybe I'm just too used to riser bars?
The front disk brake is a road-style cable actuated BB7, which means it is designed for the cable pull applied by road levers. And unusually the Roadrat has the mounts on the front of the fork to allow easy fitting of mudguards, and also to use the braking force to push the axle back up into the bottom of the fork. Cunning, but a bit unsightly. The BB7s also howled like a banshee on their first few rides, but they seem to have hushed now.  
The rear wheel I'm using isn't disc ready (I'm still working on the replacement) so I need to use the old V-brakes, along with an adaptor to which increases the amount of cable pulled by those road levers
and although it's intended as a touring bike it's still running flat pedals and a flip-flop fixed / singlespeed hub, which is why the tyre is on backwards (I couldn't be bothered remounting it after I flipped the flop). 
 Most sinister of all is what happens when the lights turn out.....
  

5 comments:

  1. Mr Do Bee, let's look through the Romper Room mirror, what can we see?
    I see Graham's Midges, Dillon's Stem, Gordy's front wheel and Jeff's skewer, though I have to say the glow in the dark bartape is ALLLLL Mikey. Niiiiccceeee!!!!
    Gordy:-)

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    1. Pete's bb7 too, after I accidentally bought the mtb version and luckily was able to swap them. And the rear rim was from Munno. Cheers all :-)

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  2. I love how our bikes come about through many friends.
    Gordy

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  3. you kids and your crazy bars

    (LOVE the bar tape, though!)

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  4. It lives in all it's jigsawness! The bar tape ROCKS. Miff

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