Some more build details on our Wet Coast Winter Refugee Redline Thirty, the dumpster darling we met back in post
#90:
Alas, the original rear hub and the unusably rusty freewheel simply would not part ways, that amalgam of aluminum oxide and ferrous oxide being a stronger bonding agent than even True Love (or Krazy Glue). Sadder still, the original green anodized rear rim itself will not be staying with the project. The rim turned out to be pretty badly dented, otherwise I would just cut the spokes out and started out fresh with a different hub, because matching green ano rims is just so darn classy, but I've got a standby, a donor wheel from an early 90s Rockhopper that came in a rusted pile of free bikes I had to go fetch when a nice lady closed down her "thrift store". Hmmm... that Shimano SIS derailleur may be making another appearance in a future installment. This project is all about free parts. And it has a RED pulley! (Red means fast.)
The good news? It was free. It's also fairly true and undented, and has a 14-28 Shimano MF-HG20 freewheel; an unexciting but reliable workhorse hailing from the exotic shores of Singapore. The bad news is, our workhorse barely spins, about 1/3 of the rust on that wheel have serious spokes, and the dork disc is weathered, cracked and chipped beyond salvage.
[a moment of silence for teh dork disc]
The good news: the FW came off the hub with just a
soupçon of PB Blaster and very little drama, and then very easily came apart for servicing with a gentle application of hammer-and-punch to the appropriate dimples (righty-loosey). The bad news is OMG IT'S FULL OF THESE TINY LITTLE GREASY BALLS, I MEAN, WHAT THE F#@&*^!!!??? (OK, I think those things might be important, try not to lose very many of them...)
Working on an item like this reminds one that WD-40 is primarily a solvent, (really, it's only a lubricant in a secondary sense) and one is all the happier for it. Spray-spray-spray, scrub-scrub-scrub and about a half pound of greasy crud washes away like last month's New Years' resolutions.
There, isn't that much better?
