jgedwa

Got a beautiful blue Trek 620 frameset from another BFer the other day, and have just gotten around tonight to building it up. I have a strange Nexus 7 speed wheelset I have been saving for a frame like this. I rounded up everything I needed to get it going. And tonght was the night, since all the children and womenfolk are away. Ah sweet Trek, I can't wait to get my hands all over you.

And then one irritation after another:

-Damn adjustable cup sticks out a smidge too far and drags on the crankarm. No biggie, but I hate to have to resort to the grinder this early in a build.

-Short dropouts give me less wiggle room on chain length, but still how come every time I do a derailleurless job it requires a half-link. I can see if I needed one half the time, but every time? I don't have one handy, so the chain hangs limp

-I was so proud of myself for finding the right anti-rotation washers for these dropouts. They are hard to find, and I found just the set I needed. But then, weirdly, I could not both projections in the dropouts at the same time. Huh? Misaligned drops? Poorly machined washers? I know how hard some of you have looked for these things, so I hate to say what job my grinder did next.

-I got a cable hanger that protrudes from a headset spacer to run the cables to the cantis. But the stem I have gives me precious little room under the neck for a cable to make a turn. So, a strange loop over the bars. No one else will ever notice it, I suppose.

-And the killer. Frame was made for 27" wheels, and my wheels are 700. I have never converted one like this with canti brakes, so I put some thought and measurement into it. I carefully measured how short the reach was and then started looking at other canti set-ups I have and noticed the Avid Shorty's I have on my Surly had just enough to work. So I picked up a pair today, in preparation for the big night tonight. The rears went on with room to spare in the bottom of the pad adjustment slot. Piece of cake, i thought. Then the fronts. No deal. The fork blades are much closer together to each other than the seatstays are, so there is just no room for the arms to swing into the rim. I can tell that even grinding a tad more out of the bottom of the slot will not be enough to help. Crap. Now, off to see who makes the shortest reach v/canti brakes.

Sometimes they go together like butter, and sometimes it is a struggle.

jim

nlerner

Hah! I've been there, Jim. I used what little time I had to work on bikes today fiddling with swapping a crankset (of course, the first one I tried to use didn't have enough drive-side clearance) when I intended to do a couple of other things on the bike, mainly put on a replacement fork. And I never finished the job--it sits in the stand, crankset-less, same pitted fork.

Neal

Banzai

They sometimes go together like butter?

Wow, lucky man. I've become a somewhat experienced mechanic due largely to the fact that they NEVER go together like butter, and generally I get the "opportunity" to do everything twice. (Though if it's not the equipment's fault...well...it's my own screwup. I seem to screw up the few times when I'm not being thrown a mechanical curve-ball)

jgedwa

Sure, sometimes they do. I do build a lot of fixed gears though, and they are simple enough that I usually do not run into problems.

My only real compaint in this is that I really need to go to my favorite LBS and look more closely at the different cantis to see if something will work. And of course, this always happens on Sat night when I can't go run for parts for a couple of days. I did a couple of BF searches and it seems that my brake problem is a well known one on old touring bikes. I think if I try an older style canti with a post instead of a threaded stud, I might be able to angle it down enough to work. If that does not work, I may be SOL.

jim

redneckwes

I have never had anything work like it's supposed to. Standards or no, most of us are not putting things together quite like they came new, it's like making a bicycle omlet.

But like Banzai said, it's a heck of a way to learn!

grifone37

I worked as an assembly mechanic for a bike shop in Madison, WI in 1979 and, even new out of the box, Treks were very difficult bikes to set up. Nothing about them was fully aligned so we had to do a lot of cold setting to make the bikes align and shift correctly. It literally took twice as long to set up a Trek as it did to set up any machine that came from the Far East.

RK1963

Yeah, my 1983 trek 600 has different fork blade lengths that are compensated for by differently inserted fork ends. In the end, the fork is in alignment, however, the appearance leaves something to be desired. "(then) new company + new workers = sloppy stuff"