kogkrusher

This is a good one... you people make me laugh

I ride my RiGi track frame 30-50 miles and it always feels good, I prefer it.

I own a kilo tt it's a piece of ***** and it's my daily commuter... I love it, or love to hate it

I have two conversions and they just collect dust, they're for my friends to use. I'm gonna change one to a single speed but don't know if I'll ride it.

Conversions are ugly and lame... haha. Road bikes just look better with gears on them.

anthegreat1

i heart opinions

mkr_d

+11

MrCjolsen

No worries. The thing is that bikes seem to multiply inside my garage.

At first I had one FG conversion and a 27 speed Surly Crosscheck. But the frame in the fixed gear was a tad too small.

So I found a frame for $35. I figured I'd just build it up with parts from the first bike.

But the bottom bracket was Italian. And the seatpost was 27.2 instead of 26.4. And being it was a longer bike, it needed a shorter stem. Finally, the brakes from the first bike didn't reach.

A short while after I was done, I found a good deal on a set of wheels.

Then one day last summer, I was sitting in my garage and wondered if I had enough old parts to build a new fixed gear. Turns out that I did and within an afternoon, I had one more bike than I did before!

Now, my 27 speed Surly Crosscheck wasn't always 27 speeds. When I got it, it was a 9 speed double with a Dura-Ace/Ultegra drivetrain. The DA crankset wasn't right for the bike and the Ultegra rear derailleur couldn't accomodate a triple. So I swapped out the parts I needed to make it a 9 speed double, installing a Tiagra derailleur and 20 year old SR cranks. BTW, the old and/or cheap stuff works as well as the fancy Shimano stuff did. I'd also gotten different wheels for the Surly.

So I've got all these Dura Ace/Ultegra/Shimano 105 bits laying around. Months go by.

Hmmmm? I wonder. If only I had a frame, I'd have a place to store all these parts. Instead of being in a box, they could be on a bike. So I head on down to Sacramento's most ghetto bike shop and find an old Miyata One-Ten with no wheels, saddle, handlebars, or stem. But it had all the other parts. I pay $75 for it. Probably $75 too much, but it was an impulse buy.

I get the bike home, and within a day I have a really nice Miyata One-Ten with a 9 speed Ultegra drivetrain, Mavic rims and Shimano 105 hubs. I zip around on that bike for a few months.

But the downtube shifters with the nine speed bugged me. And I couldn't put fenders on the bike because the clearance between the gears and the eyelets was too little.

Then my wife gives me wheel building tools for Christmas.

I start building wheels. Suddenly, I have more track wheels than I need. One night I decided to see if I could set a speed record for the fastest time converting a bike to fixed gear. One hour. Would have been half that if I was so weird about having a perfect chainline.

Meanwhile there's a subplot going on involving mountain bike a parent of one of my student gave to me which I built up as a singlspeed. That bike I traded for an old Rampar in unridable condition. But the Rampar had a decent Ideale saddle, it fit me, and I needed a bike for my students to practice paining before I let them paint one of my good bikes.

Nearly all the parts on the Rampar were junk. So the frame hangs in my garage for a year.

Then I find a Miyata 710 at the dump. Only when I got it home did I realize why it was at the dump. The seapost and stem were both seized into the bike. And it had a small (probably fixable) bend in the seatstay. But the rims were straight and one of the tires even held air.

I pull all parts off the bike that I can.

I look at the wheels from the Miyata 710. I look at the old Rampar frame. And I wonder. Can I build a bike entirely out of parts that were once in a dumpster?

The answer is almost.

I think I had about $75 into the project before I was riding a totally legit and bona fide fixed gear.

Now I wonder again. What should I do with the Miyata 710?