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02-19-21 | 01:29 AM

#45

Geepig

Senior Member

Joined: Sep 2020

Posts: 745

Likes: 206

From: Eastern Poland

Bikes: Romet Jubilat x 4, Wigry x 1, Turing x 1

The weather has been down to -15 Centigrade over the last few days, but it kind of warms up at the back of the garage with the car to block the majority of the draughts. To make things even cosier I found a modern standing lamp by the dumpsters the other day. It is made of aluminium tubes, each about a foot long, threaded together. If I need the light to be taller I can add a segment or two. I just need to find a longer cable for it.

With about a week passing since leaving Best’s spokes to soak, I had hoped for some success. One freed off but would not tighten down any more. Does this mean that the threads just need cleaning, or has all the casual jumping stretched the spokes beyond adjustment? I just do not know, I just want to get them off without damage, even if they are only going to be used as emergency replacements. Still, the number of recalcitrant spoke nipples had dropped to eight, each of which I marked with masking tape so that every day I could keep track of the remaining offenders.

After reading the forum on the subject of frozen nipples, I began to add some fizzy coke to each end of the nipples, and within a few more days I was down to three left. One was really bent and loose and I could see it as being the last to give up, but a couple of days later it too freed up and turned. I removed them all, cleaned up everything, hung the rim on a hook out of the way, taped the spokes as a set and put them and the hub away for safekeeping.

I came across across an advert for a mismatched pair of Jubilat wheels, for only 50 zloty. A bargain, even with a bit added for delivery. They arrived within a few days and I was pleased with them - the hub bearing on the the front was toast and the coaster brake had, as advertised, a split hub. But the rims and the spokes are good, the front hub could be rebuilt if push comes to shove and now I have a relatively intact set of Velosteel internals. Given that while Danusia’s rims are rusty the spokes and hubs are good then I could do a straight swop, even though I have never rewoven a wheel before - but that is the kind of thing I want to learn.

Another dumpster find from some time ago was some crockery, including a small bowl I could use for cleaning small items, to let them soak - although perhaps a finger bowl would be nice too, for ball bearings. More forum reading indicated the best option for a Suntour freehub was stripping and rebuilding the bearings, and second best a kerosene wash and the application of some grease or grease and oil mix. The weather has been too cold for any of that, so I bought a small bottle of hypoid gear oil, part filled my bowl with it and sank the 5-speed groupset in it - a perfect and slippery fit.

This week I found a circular stainless steel kitchen sink, which should be an easy fit for my next garage furniture project. I wonder how much our neighbours know how they are aiding me in fitting out my garage?

The Hypoid Oil Experience

Best’s pedals were the first I have worked on since I was about 15, and both were a bit beat up. One had much smaller balls in the bearings, with only 12 coming out of one end while the other had a full complement of 22. I soon found the cause for the ball loss - the core of the pedal had split, so I dumped it and kept only the shaft and the remaining parts of the bearings. I had hoped to fit them on Tigger, but BigR has a set that might do and allow me to fit Tigger’s traditional rubber pedals on that.

Each time I packed Tigger in the car, the front light seemed to get pushed around, especially if we put anything else in there, like lunch. I was also not entirely happy with having a wire run from the back to the front as there was always the chance of catching it in the folder clamp. To solve this I bought a clamp like the one I use to mount the rear reflector, and used it to mount the light low on the steering stem. I then added Best’s dynamo on the front fork dynamo bracket, but for some reason it kept skipping when moving forward but not when going backwards. I assumed that this must be due to its 20 years worth of wear and exposure. I replaced it with the one from Blue so that now I have a dynamo front and rear. While this might sound strange, they are still lighter than the sets of lights I used to use in the 1970s, which also had to be ‘switched on’ front and rear. Once the Spring comes it will take just a few minutes to remove both lighting sets to return to that clean look.

At the same time I rebuilt the front mudguard, and this time mounted it the other way round to keep it further away from the knobbles on the tire. The mudguard on the back has developed a slight rattle, almost like the knobbles on the rear tire are sometimes making light contact. I also swopped the wide comfort seat for the narrower one that came on Best, the advantages being slightly smaller package dimensions when folded and more freedom to move the bike around beneath you while crossing difficult terrain. Sometime soon I will also fit the long-desired steering clamp that came with BigR.

I now have a single long shelf on either long wall of the garage and two spare shelf boards ready for fitting - do my neighbours have nothing better to do than update their shelving options? My wheel hooks are sadly inadequate for all the wheels I now have, and it was with little regret that I despoked Danusia’s pair, the rear off Best and the pair I bought the other week as they take less room like this and I have already used one set to build a type of wheel that I lacked. If I left the wheels whole then the number of potential uses for them would be much less than as parts - 4 wheels means 4 applications, but 4 sets of parts gives the potential to rebuild the original 4 plus other combinations. It severes the link between source and destination, between past and future. Tires, tubes, rims, tapes, spoke sets and hubs. Danusia’s front hub was a surprise - it had a thicker axle and a much superior design than is usual for a Romet wheel of the era.

The front stems for Best and Kid share the same design of slanted quill lock, and are about 1mm narrower than Zenit’s, and while Zenit’s front end looks like the other Jubilats it is not as it has a different fork with a classic tapered plug quill instead of a clamp. And it is a different diameter anyway. It is not uncommon to see bare Jubilat frames for sale without a fork, which is a risky buy without a tape measure, especially as the Zenit has a 130mm wide rear end instead of the usual 112 of the standard one. Having ‘Zenit’ written on the bike means little as I have seen a fork-less frame with ‘Romet’ on the downtube and ‘Zenit’ just a bit lower. All my Jubilats are Jubilat 2, distinguishable by the tube used between the hinge and BB, while the original 1970s Jubilats had a rectangular section strip instead and, luckily, no derailleur frame version.

Essentially, buying a Jubilat frame is far more complex than I imagined.

Danusia is currently the only one, other than Tigger, that is not fully stripped, partly so I can use it as a bit of a runaround, partly to get a feel of components that I plan to fit to Tigger and partly to test out the rebuilt wheels. One thing I failed to notice earlier was that Danusia has been welded, where the downtube meets the hinge, on the underside. The front forks are a bit wide as well, which makes it unlikely that it will ever be anything more of a runaround.

Tigger and Danusia. See the brown painted bit on Danusia’s frame to cover the welding?

Last weekend we spent a day at the cottage we have decided to buy, located in a village about an hour’s drive due east from our apartment, and we have a deposit down already. It was a hectic weekend, as two other sets of people went to look at it, liked it, but were unable to raise a mortgage for it - such is the fallout from Covid in the banking sector. Anyway, they both came from other parts of Poland while wifie’s family came from not more than a few dozen kilometers away.

This means that getting Zenit built has become a bit more urgent than work on anything else - if only to stake our ownership of the barns, as it were, since we lack a horse. Only the other day I put the baldest tires on Zenit’s wheels so I could eventually test out the gears and things from Best, but now I need Tigger’s winter boots on Zenit instead. Best’s gear switches can wait as well.

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