The Great Bike Overhaul Pt 3
I've been busy training and tending to matters on my other bikes so I haven't had much time to work on this lately, but we're back at it this week (although I have the Hy Vee Tri this weekend, and various things in the coming weekends so we'll see what that leaves for time).
I'm getting down to the serious business of getting rust off this thing. I've been looking at various homespun remedies on the interwebs and it seems that vinegar is actually pretty good at getting rid of most forms of surface rust. So with that in mind, I decided to begin the process of dipping damned near every piece of un-painted metal on this thing into a dog bowl and piece of tin full of vinegar. So you'll note the fine mess I'm making in Marley's garage now:
There's really no rhyme or reason as to what's going on. I have all the parts in there so I'm not worried about losing anything. I guess we'll see how much it matters if the pieces are touching or not. The plan is to leave them in here for a few days and see where we're at. It sounds like that's about the norm for this kind of buildup. I'm finally getting somewhere as far as disassembling the bike is concerned. After some serious winching I got the pedals off. The big challenge now is that it occurred to me on the train this morning after reading a few other ehow articles: that gooseneck is actually RUSTED to the fork. So it looks like a hammer/mallet of sorts will be involved in whacking it loose:
Other challenge: the way they put the crank on back then is nothing like how they do it now. There's like, tools and shit that will unscrew it now, whereas this looks like some Tawainese dude winched the pedals in with no intention of them ever coming undone. I'm going to try to track down a manual for this bike and see what they say about them coming off. We have to take Marley's Free Spirit (yeah that one I said could be a donor bike...we decided it's just too fucking retro-cool to part out) to the shop to get tires on it since they are an odd size, so I may just take this frame down too and see if they can get that crank off. They'll probably give me the usual "are you fucking kidding me" speech bike shops give you when you walk in with something like this, but I'm used to that.
On another note, I'm starting to kick around the idea of painting this thing myself rather than taking it somewhere. I haven't entirely resigned to the idea, but A. it's not like it'd be all that hard if I'm going to strip it down anyway and B. I am thinking rather than a straight black, give this thing a black with gold metal flake (minor metal flake though, not that big thick glitter shit on Mexi-mobiles). The rub here is going to be to find a way to either mask off the decals or get a new set. I could always reprint 'em I guess, but it'd be a LOT easier if they are already available.
UPDATE: Holy fucking shit but the manuals for these things command some coin! Seriously? 70 bucks for a 10 speed manual? The bike cost less than that! There's got to be a PDF of it somewhere. Looks like I have some Googling to do on the way to Des Moines on Friday.
UPDATE 2: Welp it appears this here bike has a cottered crank. Good thing there happens to be a group of people (who seem to be from the UK) that are fans of these things and have written all about them. This gentlemen in particular goes through all the ins and outs of getting a cottered crank apart. So I guess I'll be taking a hammer to this bike next time I see it.