Trashpile bikes and a really cool tool
I was doing battle with my accumulitis and I came across my trashpile bike. A friend gave it to me, he had constructed it completely of bicycle road salvage and dumpster finds. I had only purchased new tubes, water bottle holder, and one of those blinky LED thingys. Unfortunately, while truing the rear wheel, I broke a spoke. I had a few spare spokes from a tacoed wheel I found but taking apart the rear wheel was a pain, so the project sat.
I was going to toss it, but decided to at least attempt the repair. I plunked down a whole $5 on a tool to take apart the rear cassette (we use to call them sprockets, but I guess this is a cassette of sprockets or somesuch). Those Bastards at Huffy (yea, I said Huffy, and BTW having ?Huffy? painted on the frame of your bike counts as an anti-theft device), seem to have designed their cassettes a bit differently such that they look exactly like, but are just a hair smaller (tighter) than the Shimano brand standard, probably to obtain themselves one-way interchangeability. I’m sure they’re not afraid of any negative consumer backlash, because Huffy has no brand loyalty whatsoever.
I could destroy the cassette, and put a new one on there, but at that point, I ought to get all new shifters and front chainrings and chain, and that looked too much like spending real money on a trashpile or something.
Fortunately, I stumbled upon this tool.
(click on the image to go to a webpage dedicated to the tool on jimlangley.net, a great bicycle resource site.)
I didn’t actually get the tool, but I got the idea from the tool for the replacement spoke. I just took one of those salvaged spokes from the taco wheel (which ended up being too long anyway) and made it into the ?s? shaped replacement spoke with some pliers. That let me replace the spoke and sorta-true the wheel without taking the damn thing apart.
So far, I’m sticking to at least a 20 minute daily workout (if not an hour), and the workout is a bit more intense than my usual urban walking jaunt, so the trashpile seems to be working out okay. While backpacking, I always get stuck in granny gear going up those damn hills, so this is probably a good exercise, seeing as their isn’t any tall hills around here, and I never haul the backpack out for exercise anyway. I just hope I don’t turn into one of those critical massholes.
Such a handy little tool, and it looks like it was rare to begin with, and now has become pure unobtanium. Looks like an opportunity for some blacksmith or other custom tool maker to clean up.
