When we bought a new front basket to make Blue more useful, we used a shop we happened to come across while visiting a convenient 24h pharmacy, standing outside at 2 metre intervals until we each got bored enough to go and explore. Funnily enough, even in a bike shop one cannot get away from sexism, with all the boy tools and toys hung up on prime display, with child's bikes and kit a close second. The baskets, in the women's department, were at the back, in an untidy pile on the floor, where I had to pick through the pile to find the right mounting parts to go with my choice of basket. My choice being a plain black perforated steel affair, rather than one of the basketweave examples. Not that I have anything against basketware per se, as I am very fond of a well made basket, but since I plan on bolting a plastic fruit and vegetable box on the back I would rather something that continues the theme. Later, after I had found a black plastic fruit and veg basket in a dumpster and mounted it at the rear, I wondered why I wasted my money on a front basket when I could have had a plastic box for the front as well. Such is the nature of social habits - where all our first thoughts are really things that we have seen or learnt about before, where the brain lazily checks its memory first as the quickest route to an answer. Doing something original is first about rejecting everything you suspect as coming from your or someone else's memory, then being brave enough to present it to a world unready for your original thought. And then kicking yourself when you forget to do it.
Indeed, value-for-money or not, the shop basket went straight on with just a small amount of spanner work, right onto the stem and axle mounts already fitted to my bike from new. Some of the spare brackets for the front basket for Blue and Tigger were put straight to use in mounting the new-old vege basket on the rear. Initially I used the spring clamp on the rear rack to help hold the basket in position, but it distorted the basket and I found myself partly sitting on the basket where it was pushed around the saddle a bit. However, it passed its 'picking up the shopping at the market' test, with a whole load of potatoes and other root vegetables, and then I happily remounted the basket a bit further back.
Blue with new-old rear vege basket - from fine old lady to farm truck in one easy move
Having the basket on the back makes things easier when the bike is upsidedown, as you can balance it on the handlebar ends and the rear basket, making it less prone to wobbling while working on the undersides. And yes, it regularly gets turned over, even on the street, when the coaster brake hub will not re-engage. I have pumped a lot of WD40 through it to wash out some of the grease, which has made a vast improvement, yet not enough. You can hear the elements clicking away in the hub, but they fail to engage. If I had any kind of spare wheel I would swop them over and then strip this hub down.
Tigger and Blue have quite a bit of chrome, some of which shows a little to a lot of corrosion, especially on the wheels. I sprayed Tigger's wheels black, wishing all the time that I had built something to allow me to respoke a wheel. Or that I even possessed a spoke adjusting tool. Some minor research on the net led me to trying out the old trick of scrunching up a sheet of kitchen foil into a ball and using it to scratch away at the rust - with water as a lubricant. It was surprisingly effective, although the surface needs protecting later. I suppose clear lacquer is an option, but I had to make do with polish.
Talking of shiny things, I wonder what happened to my barbell bicycle spanner from my childhood? It worked well, aiding me in the process of fixing innumerable punctures and the like. I even had my dad's, although that had a nickel coating instead of chrome and had long faded to grey. Probably, like many of my tools, they reside in my brother's shed, across the sea. I bought a new one some fifteen years ago, after we bought these Jubilats, and it languished in a box, seeing almost no work since. Its time was ripe, it had the opportunity of participating in the Velocet hub project, and one of those ball ends popped right off. Hurrah to another key fob! And to a bit more space in my toolbox.
While the rear basket was off to repositon it, I did a test mounting of Tigger's front brake to be used as a back brake on Blue. The whole rack had to come off to do this, as there was no way that the calliper was going to slide past it. It mounted quite easily onto the bracket, as I happened to have a 40 mm long M6 hex connector for joining threaded rod. Being brass it is easy to machine. I popped a 6 mm drill down two thirds of its length, so that now it acts as both spacer and nut on the very long brake mounting stud required to previously mount it through the forks. It had to come off again as I had no cable, the barrel ending on the cables being noticeably smaller than the MTB style ones commonly available. The size of the ending looks familiar, maybe the Raleighs of my youth had a similar ending, but here it might be a special order job at a Romet shop as I cannot see any online.
Even with a cable I still need to route it somehow. It is very tempting to send the cable through the down tube, using the holes designed for the dynamo lighting wire. While I am not likely to fold the bike often, if ever, it would exit the downtube on the wrong side. However, if I found/purchased one of those metal tubes used to redirect the cable on rear V brakes it might solve that problem and give a cleaner look. Well, if one can use the word 'cleaner' for a shopper festooned with baskets.
Blue's rear brake remains very much on the back burner.
#romet #rower #bicycle