The irrepressible urge to be a mechanic and take things apart came alive again.
BHPian RiderZone recently shared this with other enthusiasts:
Some of you may have read this old piece about my attempt to “restore” my Pulsar 150 that turned into a horrifying nightmare. The lesson I learnt from that was to stop trying to copy things people do online that look cool you utter moron.
This all changed when I moved to Germany and got into cycling. One of the reasons I chose cycling was because, for once in my life, I wanted a cheap hobby. Oh boy was I in for a surprise, who knew 10 kgs of metal and rubber could cost as much as a goddamn car. The idea of spending 200 Euros getting a bike fixed by a mechanic when the stupid piece of 80s junk cost 150 Euros to begin with was unacceptable to my middle-class aukaat.
And so the irrepressible urge to be a mechanic and take things apart came alive again, not helped by the fact that I’d been watching a lot of Youtube videos of people stripping and restoring biycles. I always try to make new mistakes rather than repeat my old ones, but I fell into the same trap with cycles as I had with motorcycles, I watched experts making things look easy and believed they really were easy.
I described my first positive mechanical experience in this piecebut that was a relatively minor job. I had seen people, professional cycle mechanics I mean, strip bikes down to bare frame and build it back up again, and the video was only 20 minutes long. Naturally this made me think I could do this too, maybe it’ll take me a day, couple days tops?
The only somewhat coherent decision I made during this process was not to go full monkey on my 80s Bertin. Sure it’s an old junker, but it’s so pretty and dainty and in such great shape, it would be a shame for it to have survived the world since 1982 only to be mangled into trash by a retarded gorilla. No, I should buy something else, something that’s already trash so I can’t destroy it anymore.
After lots of searching I bought a 1992 GT Talera. These old GTs are known to be bomb-proof, great looking MTBs with still a following today, many of them being converted into rat bikes or grocery getters. I paid 135 Euros for mine with a beautiful paintjob and free premium rust, and brought it in a train from Berlin to Magdeburg. The lovely dude who sold it to me also wanted to convert it into a rat bike but never found the time. One man’s trash is another man’s trash for sure.
And so began the journey to strip, inspect, fix, and reassemble this nugget, and of course what was supposed to take only 2 days took almost a month.
The delay was not all my fault, the biggest hurdle in my quest were tools, so many tools. Not only do you need the standard wrenches and sockets and screwdriver tools, you also need a whole bunch of specialist bottom bracket and crank and cassette tools. Since the whole damn point of this exercise was to save money, I didn’t want to spend too much on tools. This meant endless searching on used marketplaces for cheap tools, and a few adventurous journeys acquiring them.
First order of business was a bicycle stand. Sure I already had one, but that was needed in the basement, and bringing it up 6 floors each time I wanted to wrench would be a pain. A cheap Chinesium one came up for sale for 10 bucks, but it was quite some distance from me with no public transport connection to it. No worries, I’d just hop on my bike and cycle there, pick it up in a backpack after disassembling it. Sure it’ll be quite heavy but that’s no biggie.
Friendos, it was a biggie. I paid the money and the guy gave it to me, and so I tried disassembling it in front of the guy’s house to jam it into my backpack. The stupid thing doesn’t disassemble all the way, the top section has these divets at the bottom that prevent it from come all the way out. Yes it’s a safety feature but a rather stupid idea. There’s was nothing for it but to cram it in there and hope for the best. Luckily I had brought a couple of straps with me which I wrapped around it in an attempt to stop it from falling onto my head. It was extremely uncomfortable riding around with a heavy pole sticking 3 feet above my head, especially since the way back involved a nasty downhill off-road section, but I made it, and saw some windmills up close too.
Did you know windmills make a loud whooshing noise? I’d never been close enough to know that fact, although it sounds rather obvious now that I do.
Then another day I found this full toolset for 10 bucks, again pretty far away in a small East German village, but with a train going that way. I left late in the afternoon and after an hour long journey and a 20 minute walk reached the quaint little place. Villages in East Germany don’t have the best reputation in terms of racism and other such fun things, especially when you don’t speak much German, so I was a little anxious, but the place was beautiful and the lady who sold me the set was very nice.
I had made a miscalculation about the train time however, and once my purchase was complete I only had about 15 minutes to catch my train back, or I’d have to wait another hour at the tiny empty station. So I started running, holding a bag in one hand, and the toolbox in the other, the rattle of the tools disturbing the peace and quiet.
Suddenly I realized that a brown man running with a box of clanging tools late in the evening in a sleepy little village does not present a very good picture, so I slowed down a bit and probably looked like those seniors doing a powerwalk at 4 am in a park near you. I reached a few minutes after the train’s departure, but this is Germany, the trains are always late, so after waiting for 10 minutes I got mine and made it home safe.
Then there were the parts, the GT was pretty rusty, both the gear cables were badly frayed, and the brake cables felt crunchy. Again, being the cheapass that I am, no effort was spared on sparing money from being spent. I found some really cheap Shimano cables on Amazon, suspiciously cheap I mean, like 1/3rd the price found on other sites, so naturally I bought them. Naturally they were fake, but they worked quite well so I didn’t bother too much.
Finding these tools and parts and getting them took a large majority of my time, but searching online about what the hell I really need consumed a lot more of it. Although I hate the world of cycling because of how complicated it all is, it’s also quite interesting in terms of how much “lore” there is, the concept of standardization doesn’t seem to exist, it’s just chaos and plague for a beginner like me, but it’s also kinda like “research” and knowing these obscure little pieces of information makes me happy for some reason.
Of course I kept slowly disassembling the bike while I messed around with these other things. It all went pretty smooth apart from the bottom bracket, which probably doesn’t surprise anyone who knows bikes. I, however, did not know bikes, and it was an endless source of frustration to me why the damn thing won’t come off. I drowned it in WD40, poured boiling hot water on it, tried to use a breaker bar, but it just wouldn’t give.
My main concern was that I may be trying to turn it in the wrong direction given the fact that it wasn’t budging at all. I was quite sure that being a Shimano BB it would loosen clockwise, but that’s a very unintuitive thing for a beginner, plus there are these Italian BBs that loosen anticlockwise too, which didn’t help. Then one fine day while I was sprawled on the living room rug and leaning my whole weight on the plumber’s wrench attached to a breaker bar while watching some TV, it broke loose, and everyone clapped.
After removing the BB it was obvious why it was so hard to remove, it was full of rust, the frame and the cups were basically welded to each other. I cleaned it all out as best I could, and finally I had a bare frame. It was a moment I had dreamt of for so long, and now that I had it I felt nothing special at all.
The balcony floor was covered in stains from my many attempts at WD40 assisted waterboarding of the BB area. The dustbin was filled with greasy gloves and paper towels. The room where my wife works that I crammed my cycle “workshop” into was covered in bits of wire, grime, and rust. I had won the war, but at what cost.
Oh and the right pedal won’t come off, I rounded off the thing trying to take it off, but nopes, that crank and pedal are wedded for life. Here you can see me trying to make a typical German dish, soup of drive side pedal and crank.
I put it all back together with new stuff, the only problem I faced were the brake cables, when I cut them with my wire cutters the internal metal sheath thing would just collapse, which was frustrating as it chewed one of my new brake cables. But I figured it out in the end, there was no motivation left by this point, I just wanted it over with.
What did I learn from this experience?
1. I have a big phobia of making mistakes, even if I am completely new to something I want everything to go perfect, which is obviously ridiculous. I call it the “Ctrl Z Effect”, working in IT for so long it’s very easy to fix your mistakes with a couple of button presses, but that doesn’t work so well in the real world.
2. I am not as patient as I thought I was, a lot of problems in life require consistent, small inputs to solve. I am always looking for the easy and quick path. I’m gonna blame that on social media, because that seems easy and quick.
3. Cycles are the easiest mechanical objects to fix. There are no fluids, no electricity, no heavy tools are required, and yet I was completely out of my depth during this job. I had a vague idea before I started this project that I should maybe make a video or at least take some pics of the process to share with others later, what a silly idea. While I was working on the bike both my brain cells were busy just to stop me making some silly mistake, I had absolutely no bandwidth to think about camera angles or even documenting the process. I don’t understand how people fix bikes and make videos at the same time.
4. I also don’t understand how people fix cars and motorcycles, there are like 6 parts in a bike and the act of not mixing them up was a challenge to me, how do people deal with hundreds of little parts that need to go together in a specific order I have no idea. Then again airplanes and submarines exist, and even rockets, but maybe I shouldn’t think about that too much.
5. If I hadn’t lived in Germany I’d have never learnt any mechanical skills, because you don’t need to in India, and thank god for that. Yesterday I took my Interceptor to a Royal Enfield SVC, they changed the brake fluid both front and back and bled the brakes too, all in about 30 minutes and charged me 200 Rupees, or a couple Euros. Can I do this job? Of course I can, but I would rather ride.
6. I enjoy riding cycles far more than I enjoy tinkering with them. Before this project I had some vague ideas about maybe buying more cheap used bikes, fixing them up and selling them at a small profit. Hell no, that’s not my thing. I am happy that this project has taught me the basic skills required for keeping my bikes in rideable condition, but I don’t want to have to do this any more than is absolutely necessary.
Since this project completed I have bought a new bike and wrenched on it some more too, and yes with time things get easier and the experience more pleasurable. Wrenching can be a therapeutic exercise, and I had small moments when that worked for me. But most of the other times it was chaos and screaming and dirt, so much dirt.
I don’t like being dirty, I’m the sorta guy who washes his hands after cutting every slice of tomato. I tried wearing gloves when wrenching, but that obliterated the little mechanical feel I had to begin with, although it did save me from a nasty injury when my hand slipped and slammed into the chainring.
Would I recommend fixing cycles as a hobby? Yes, after all this I still would. Cycling as a hobby already makes you kinda a weirdo, whenever I try to start a conversation at a party about cycles, people just get confused and change the subject. Adding wrenching to the mix just makes you completely insufferable, and that’s a good thing. What’s the point of having any hope of making friends when you only want to talk about the difference between Aluminum and Steel and Carbon frames? Get your hands dirty, stay in the house, and spend hours watching the Park Tool Youtube channel. Calvin Jones is all the friend you need.
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