Italuminium

Ambitious, but rubbish: the Top Gear motto is not only apt for the show, but also for millions of other men that spend the weekends holed up sheds tinkering on Sissyphic machines that never seem to get finished, only not to get paid millions by the BBC to do it! Our esteemed fellow member @Narhay took the Top Gear theme home by suggesting a 100$ buildoff: 100 days to build a 100$ bike, and ride it a 100 km's.

Day 1, 15 feb
Substitituting real American greenbacks for euromoney, I started out my hunt for a real clunker this weekend. In the original thread I predicted that Giants would make great rigs for this competition: cheap, plentiful and no reputation to speak of among collectors. Perfect. Sure enough, about 4 km's from my house was the junker I was looking for: a nice early 90's Giant Coldrock. All the hallmarks of a true nasty mess where there. No RD, rusty chain, tape over the main frame tubes. The advertiser was a disgruntled house mom, cleaning up her husbands' shed. The price was right, too. Advertised for twelve fiddy, I got it home for ten.

Now the fun starts: rusty spokes, nasty steel bars in stem in ye olde DUI-stance with inward turned barends, and a horrible, horrible growth of a gel saddle on a characteristically stuck seatpost. Nothing to deter the old BFC&V hand off course.

Today it stormed all day, riding was out of the question, so wrenching it was. By grace of some weird old deity the stem and seatpost came loose, the HS, BB and hubs still spun allright and both tires were in great nick. The rear hub is a nice hyperglide unit in great shape. Something is definitely up. This all goes much too smooth.

Anyway, over to the pics.


Untitled by ctjr, on Flickr

one horrible pile of low-end crêpe.


Untitled by ctjr, on Flickr

DUI bars, smelly tape... yuck!


Untitled by ctjr, on Flickr

Mocking up...


Untitled by ctjr, on Flickr

Much nicer cockpit now!

What to do next:

I really want to run it single speed, but I'm not sure if the dropouts offer enough wiggle space to get the chainline right.

money spent
10 basic bike
17.50 Salsa moto ace bars (thanks @Elev12k!)
freebies
Shimano Alivio brakes and levers (of the Univega I got of my neighbor for free some time ago)
Modolo stem (yes, yes death stem. Don't worry, there's a beer can shim in there!)
saddle
still to buy
new chainrings. The chain rings on it now are in true trailer trash fashion missing some teeth.
new cables
a new rear tire to match the front
some spokes to replace the broken ones on the back wheel
single speed stuff: spacers, chain tensioner (either that, or some new bits for the dremel )

thanks for looking!

gomango

It's absolutely charming.

It's already looking much better.

The one I bought has twenty years of spider webs, dust, garden hoses and other nonsense hanging off it.

I've seen it forever and a day. I've always liked it, as I have one as well.

Mid- March is the first chance I will get to get on the 4-wheeler and drive in the snow at our friend's cabin to get at it.

Narhay

Looking very good. I also seem to find bikes covered in tape everywhere. I have no idea what the previous owners were thinking.

Lascauxcaveman 

You're off to a very good start. I myself am going with a dumpster-sourced 1990 Redline Thirty MTB I just picked; which I'll be doing a drop-bar job on.

Just a thought, wouldn't it be better if we all kept our projects and their progress on the original $100 Clunker thread, keep that thing on page one until the contest is over? Or would that make it too crowded over there?

Italuminium

Thanks guys! Good luck with your project too, @Lascauxcaveman. I specifically started this thread as a build log, not too overcrowd the original contest thread. I'll present the result there, off course, but no need to crowd the thread with all the little updates and questions I have for this build.

WNG

As I read, I saw the Modolo Stem of Death on there and thought, "Oh no! He's going to need to ride in a full face helmet, or will need to get dental work!"

But I see you are well aware of its rep.
Funny, IIRC, only the two highest models were recalled...the lower end ones weren't and continued to be sold here. I think I still have a Professional (didn't know about the recall) and a Speedy.

Italuminium

yeah, I'm not a heavy nor fast rider. And a dumb one too.

So, now just got to get rid of the BB, it's stuck as flip. I'm trying the usual methods, WD 40, brute force, but so far no luck. Hm.

On the other hand, I saw a GREAT deal online for Fat Franks, so this mongrel will be rolling on some deluxe fat rubber next week.

WNG

I ran into the same problem with my $20 winter project. Conventional cups like yours. Cup tools didn't work. Ended up clamping the fixed cup to a big bench vise and used the frame for leverage. That finally did it. Ask around and see if anyone has a vise.

Hmmm I should enter my $20 garage find into the clunker challenge....but I know I'm topping $100.

non-fixie 

Nice choice, Italuminium! If the budget allows for it, I would suggest a dark green rattle cab paint job with hand-painted gold box lining.

Italuminium

Sorry, but I'm too much of a nineties kid, I'm keeping the stock colors perhaps even with pink grips and pedals...

non-fixie 

Oh I see, a Friendship Is Magic special ...

Italuminium

Untitled by ctjr, on Flickr

First ride report:

The sheer size of the thing is really something else. Everything about this bike is big. Tires, frame and 70 cm handlebars are all so far outside the pale of my usual 55-ish cm road bikes with skinny bars that it definitely took a few rides to get used to it. It's a beast in traffic, but does require a bit more room to squeeze through than my 40 cm wide fixie bullhorns!

What makes this bike really shine are the 60mm (2.35 inches in Liberian/Burmese measurements) Fat Frank tires. Anything that's smaller than a medium-sized glass eye will just get gobbled up without comment. Curbs? Cobbles? Small furry rodents? Almost not noticeable. They do take some time to get up to speed, but when that's done they're just happy little German steamrollers. The only things that keep these tires from true greatness are the high weight and the stiff sidewalls, but that's what the Schwalbe Supermoto's are for, but for a beater build like this 16$ FF's are obviously a more reasonable choice than 60$ SM's, but if I'm ever to do a more high end build around the concept of an urban single speed the Super Moto's are my first choice.

The bike still needs some work; first thing is swapping out the 42/15 gearing for something slightly lighter to get a little more agility in traffic and to get these funky tires up to speed a bit sooner. The Arabesque RD used as a chain tensioner is somewhat noisy, isn't tensioning very well and just looks far to bulky, so I might take the file to the axle/dropouts to get a decent chain tension without resorting to the halfway solution of running a tensioner.

Quite close to me is some nice stomping ground in the kings' backyard, a small stretch of forest preserved from the vast woods that used to cover the west coast of Holland. Even though it's more of a park these days there are plenty of gravel roads, some bike legal and some slightly less so to test the off-road mettle of this bike and so far it has handled everything with flying colours. The tires performed miles better off road than some Schwalbe Land Cruiser tires (1.75) that I have on another bike, even though they have a far more defined profile. More rubber is definitely better (that's what she said). Turf, mud, roots, rocks, it all just disappears.

All in all, it's a very nice bike for little kids grown up: perfect for bombing around, nice squishy tires and no gears to worry about. I'll be riding this bike a lot!

frantik

sweet ride! i had been thinking about the fat franks but I was worried they might be too fat.. or at least weight-wise.. sounds like they are from your descripton

Italuminium

Thanks Frantik, your builds surely provided a lot of inspiration for this one. Today I rode my 45 mins. commute on the excellent bike highway (yes, that is a thing here in The Netherlands) and the weight of the tires is somewhat of a drawback when riding along for several km's on smooth asphalt with little interruption, but it's mostly psychological: I noticed no discernable change in time and effort compared to lighter tires. In city traffic with potholes, cobblestones, tram tracks etc. these tires are just unbelievably good. Plus, the width makes stop light track stands a breeze.

urodacus

So, instead of filing the vertical dropouts to get a good chain length, just add some track ends by welding on a couple pieces of flat bar and slotting them. Should be a ten minute job. no need to remove the dropouts: just add long extensions!

Will look awesome, seriously.

Italuminium

Thanks for the good suggestion, but I'm just an urban amateur mechanic with no machine shop to speak of and zero welding experience, nor with friends that have a nice TiG welder/acethylene torch. You're right in pointing out that the dropouts currently on the frame lend themselves very well for modification, since they're all plate and way, way overbuild. To have a professional shop do it would compromise the budget/beater idea behind this build.

gomango

Looks great!

Roll right over them.

Obstacles that is....

frantik

i say just leave the RD on there, find a new one, or maybe just find a single speed tensioner. from the picture i'd guess you could probably also remove a few more links if you're not getting good tension. or find a cheapie thumb shifter and you've got a 1x? which are great

Italuminium

1xX is good too, I could easily switch back to a 1x7, got a nice working shifter and the provisions to mount the pod are still there, but I just don't want to having way too much fun running it SS. I might lose a few links as soon as I find the gear I like, have a 17 and a 19 to try first.

urodacus

Hey, sorry the tongue-in-cheekness of my comment didn't make it all the way across.

but going the 1x7 route is a great idea. that Giant is reasonably heavy so you'd love a bit of range to cope with any hills you may have, or to gear right down for snow.

Italuminium

oh, right, just to show how much I know about welding and welding terms... I've seen some pretty neat results with simple plate and a tig welder on various fora, so that's why I thought you were serious

You're right that it's a rather husky bike, but gears only make matters worse in that respect. Besides, I live in a mostly flat city and my commute is perfectly free of any inclinations, so I don't really need gears. No snow too this year