As luck would have it, a few days ago someone abandoned a small girl's bicycle down by the dumpster. I had come across a similar one a week earlier, with a crushed front wheel, but I had been unable to carry it away as I was not on Blue, and it had gone before I returned. Such is dumpster life. This tiny pink machine lacked a chain and had suffered at the hands of an unskilled mechanic, such that the rear sprocket bearing only had two balls left in it. With my workbench still in test mode, one abandoned child's bike meant the ideal opportunity to try it out. I carefully placed this huge machine on the workbench, and it did not even tremble or creak. Success!
I quite enjoyed stripping the bike down, as everything was so light with nothing unwieldy, and very little in the way of rust to make things difficult. In fact the missing components meant that I met some of it half way along the road to disassembly. The wheels, once I can source some replacement balls, are perfect for those little trolley projects, or maybe even for a lightweight trailer behind Blue, or will be once I replace the bearings at the rear as the one on the sprocket side had disintegrated. The rear brake is chromed pressed steel, and no worse quality than those on my Romets. I had sprayed the lightly rusty front one from Tigger with the intention of using it as a rear brake for Blue, but now I have a shiny chrome one that will take less effort to fit. I cleaned up and stored away most of the parts, except the crummy and broken ABS chain guard and tiny saddle, as many are standard bicycle items that look remarkably similar to those found on my Romets or could serve other purposes. Another first was removing all the cups from the steering and bottom bracket, not a difficult task but one that I do not remember tackling before, not even back in the 1970s when I first overhauled any of my bikes.
Every budding bicycle maintainer should start with one of these. I assume the smashed hole in the chain guard was due to the use of training wheels.
As the frame is pink and very light, I decided the best thing would be to hang it on the wall as a decoration. All in all, a pleasant hour or so messing around with spanners, and a small stock of useful parts.
Thinking about it later, it was the same bike that had been squashed into the bike rack and chained to a normal sized bike. It stayed there all summer, the girl probably grew out of it, and who needs another crummy old kids bike? Other than me, of course.
Remember that I said weeks ago that it would be nice to find a pair of steel brake levers to replace the flexible plastic ones on Blue and originally on Tigger? Well now I have one steel lever and another one in a metal and plastic MTB style. It looks like someone 'upgraded' their daughter's first bike to feature twin brakes, or maybe, like Blue and Tigger, the bike got whatever was available on the production line at the factory. Still, with twin brakes and no chain, I cannot say I would have been best pleased with the trade-off.
While the saddle was irretrievably tiny and binned after removal of the stem, the handlebars are quite nice, in an inoffensive shade of pale green kind of way. They are about 50 mm (2 inches) shorter than those on Blue and Tigger, and are in the cross-stiffened BMX style. Would they fit Tigger, I wonder? That and other questions remain to be answered.
Many decades ago I had a pair of aluminium 'sports' mudguards on my lovingly much abused Carlton Continental. They were not very efficient at keeping the water off the back of my jacket, but at least they never split like the pretty plastic 'Bluemels' originally fitted had. I know that in some parts of the world people call them fenders, but I have good reason to stick with my choice of description. Not only were my sports mudguards good looking, cheap, low maintenance and reliable, but if they got choked with mud during some wet off-roading in the clay-based land where I grew up they could easily be unblocked with nothing but a stick from a hedgerow. Especially as this was before the era of V brakes, when I had to make do with a set of Weinmann centre-pull calliper brakes, and it kept the mud out the pivoting parts. The funny thing is that I see people on this forum complain about such brakes on steel rims, but we knew no better, accepted brake noise as normal and stopped well in both wet weather and dry. Clay could be a worry, but more likely to slurp your wheel into the ground or accumulate en-masse around the frame and under the mudguard long before a smear on the braking surfaces became an issue. More 'Why have I stopped?" than "Why can't I stop!"
I still like the look of sports mudguards, and Tigger's chrome steel full mudguards were paper thin and already damaged. A bit of masking tape, card template, pen and jigsaw later and I had a neatish set of 'sports' mudguards ready for some paint. Much as I like them, I am still not fully convinced I need them, because even if I find some wet clay I have no calliper brakes to jam. I did see a nice set of aluminium ones advertised secondhand, but the fact that mine were made from scrap, weigh little and do take away the slightly dorky bare fork look means they can stay. For now at least. The remaining uncut mudguard now lies on its back as a temporary store for those wobbly pipes and cables that otherwise get in the way, like heat-shrink tube, brake cables that refuse to stay rolled or suffer badly from split ends.
Black, short and mean. The front lamp is only loosely attached so I can decide whether I like the location.
Like anything new, I managed to screw up the rear one, when I put the stiffener on the upper surface of the mudguard because I wanted to avoid any collision between it and the tire. As the mudguards are of such thin material I made this load-spreading bracket, except I forgot the original mudguard bracket on the rear frame, and it collided with that instead. Since they were already painted, I decided to move the front mudguard to the rear and vice versa, but now the stiffener is in full view. I should take the mudguard off and rebuild it, but since I am not quite sure whether I will end up mounting the front lamp over the mudguard, I might need to do something different anyway.
I have, do and will procrastinate on these issues.