Building Up a Bike - Getting Started

Having completed the "Park Tool School" (for bike mechanic basics) a while ago I am interested in seeing if I can bring together all the (used) parts of a bicycle, assemble them, and have something ridable. Well, something even fun to ride, actually. I have started by buying a old-ish steel frame on eBay (above). I liked the looks of it, a lugged frame, that includes the bottom bracket and (the thing the pedals attach to) and a fork.

So now I have to acquire all the stuff that bolts to the bike - and make sure I get the right stuff for this frame (where it matters). Much of that is what is known as the "gruppo" or group - gear shifters, brake levers (or integrated brake levers/shifters), brakes, front and rear derailleurs, a bottom bracket, a crankset, a chain, a cogset and a freewheel (or cassette). One small problem is that I already have a bottom bracket but near as I can tell, people selling older groups on eBay often don't include that. It is an interesting puzzle to sort out what would work with this frame (and what won't).

My first puzzle is with crankarm length - that is, how long the arms that have the pedals on them are. (This iscertainly not the only or most important thing to figure out but the one I have bumped into first.) Various lengths are available, but most road bikes come with 170 or 172.5 mm. I believe my two road bikes have 172.5, but I realize I would have to measure - it isn't in the technical details supplied with one of them and the other was rather short on such info generally.

I have already found a detailed bicycle crank length discussion that suggests that the Shimano 105 group I have located with 170 mm cranks would be fine (assuming I can successfully purchase it).

Of course a more reasonable question is why Shimano 105? Hmm...

Urban Short-term Rental Bikes

In the past week or so, I have seen a half dozen Capital Rideshare bikes being ridden on the National Mall (see example below). My impression of the riders is that they are using it as a tourism tool, which isn't the usual point of the exercise, but it's a start and anyway, some use is better than no use.



The Capital Rideshare bikes are similar in nature to the gray bikes in similar (and much greater) use in Paris (below).



Here is a photo of an example of an urban rental bike in Barcelona - but it is less customized as a rental; more of a "regular bike." I note the plastic chain guard on one of them is already broken. The extensive use of brittle-looking plastics on urban rental bikes is puzzling.

Bike racks, parts

Rivendell Bicycle Works has an blog with an interesting page about racks - I have been thinking that my commuter bikes rear rack set-up might be more to my liking if I switched to a front rack set up, but it will bear some further investigation.

Another interesting parts site is bicycleclassics.com even if the web site development work is awful.