When you work on them, many bikes have a story to tell. And in the case of this bright red Bianchi Timber Wolf, it seems to be somewhat of a horror story.
Quick summary: doesn't seem to be crashed, frame & fork eyeballed as reasonably straight, paint in good condition for age, not a lot of visible rust. The plan was to appropriate the Avocet Cross K tires and the 3x6 thumb dial shifters, dump the crank (it's a alu-steel riveted beast with half-knocked-off plastic trim), salvage the BB, and then put the frame and wheels away for a future project.
Everything seemed to be going well until I tried to remove the left side crank dust cap. I suppose I should have noticed the fossilized stream of goo coming out of the dust cap, but anyway I put the small screwdriver in to pop it off.
And it wasn't going anywhere. After some effort of prying, the top plastic snapped off, revealing a messy mix of ancient caulk and epoxy completely filling the space between the spindle nut and the puller threads.
After many minutes with a screwdriver, scribe, and a healthy exercise of vocabulary, I was able to get the threads and nut face sufficiently cleaned enough to ratchet off the nut and a one-shot threading attempt with the puller.
Which fortunately was able to pop the crank off. Whew. Into the recycle bin you go, buddy!
Oh, and the cantilever brake pads were flipped over, with the concave side facing
upward.
The wheels are odd - matching generic rims, but with a decent QR hub up front and a rather basic nutted steel freewheel hub in back. Doesn't seem like typical Bianchi spec, even for the low-end Asian-sourced bikes.
So now the frame is stripped and my sanity relatively intact, but I think I'll take a break from bike-dissecting for a couple days...
