Mixte as traded |
Huashen folding bike as traded |
Mixte at home with home-painted handlebars and stem. |
Initial weigh in with steel brakes, brake levers, front mudguard, cotter pin cranks and steel 27" wheels, 15.28kg |
To accommodate more bikes I disposed of these ones - mixte bottom bracket is from the pink bike, and rack is from the teal bike. |
Hi
Bicycles are poetry! Bikes are quite small thing compared to other transporters of goods and people (ships, cars, submarines, trams, trains), and don't even have their own motors, but they can accomplish much. If a car is a novel, then a bike is a poem, it often does the same thing, but just in an abbreviated form. Please excuse the philosophy, but my design blog post has similar themes and got me thinking about all this!
But you know, if you are surrounded by bikes all the time, the fact that they might be poetry wears off, and you just deal with them as highly repairable, highly malleable, enjoyable objects. But every now and then, a nice bike comes along and reminds you of the poetry, which is why I still muck around with them I guess. I consider Mixtes a great design and have enjoyed resuscitating this one.
A few weeks ago, my girlfriend texted me with a "dead bike alert" including the top 2 pics as follows:
"Bikes in hard rubbish halfway up my streer" . I'm pretty sure she meant street! Anyway, despite the fact that my house often looks like a hell for bicycles that have misbehaved - with bikes left languishing and half disassembled - I took up her tip and put the bikes in the back of my small Kia on the way to visit my Dad.
The bikes were an old mixte which I thought I could fix up, and a white folding bike. I have been eying off this style of folding bike (on Facebook Marketplace) for a while because it has rear suspension a lot like my Cruzbike Quest, and I thought they could be mined for parts. More on that later...
When I got the bikes home, I weighed and photographed the mixte. It had been partly spray painted grey and looked a bit manky.
Scavenged parts were alu centre - pull brakes, cassette bottom bracket with square taper shaft, alu crankset, steel handlebars, shifters, Alu brake levers, alu 700C wheels, rack and rack adapter for milk crate,
The "after" photos follow, I'm happy with the result but I haven't ridden it yet. Still on the to do list are
Attach rear reflector
Fit bell
Reattach rear derailleur by drilling and tapping into frame. This is to move the back wheel further back to fit in with the size of rear brake I've fitted.
New brake position is under top tubes to avoid damage to brake cables when mounting the bike. (Practical but sightly less pretty and poetic) Also, wooden rack adapter is shown |
Crate mounting detail. |
Bike with crate attached |
Woohoo, I have bling! A full set of brake and gear cable outers was gleaned from the white folder. |
Just about finished |
With rack and crate adapter, the bike weighs just a bit more than the original |