This all kind of started when I went back to work full-time for 6 months in October, and decided it was time for a new commuter and general hack bike.
This has been my commuter for the past 5 years or so: an old Rudge Bi-frame folder made out of gas-pipe, and possibly depleted uranium, with the stay braces chopped out to accommodate a 700c wheel and disc mounts welded on by my good self, a rigid carbon disc fork, and a motley collection of hand-me-down parts, including a Deore rear mech I've had for at least 15 years - starting on the hardtail that was my only bike for commuting, trail centres, and everything in between - and just refuses to die. Towards the end of its tenure, I took a perverse kind of delight in neglecting as much as possible (not difficult in a winter of wet, muddy, salty, shitty commutes 5 days a week).
My brief for its replacement something that I enjoy riding, but not feel the need to ride fast, fun, and practical. Practical for me means discs are a must, big wheels and big tyres, racks and full guards. I would have liked to go down the retro route, but the disc requirement makes that very tricky, and the requirement for big clearances and mounts trickier still. I posted up here asking who had what, and Ben S very kindly offered me a Genesis Fortitude Adventure frameset which turned out to be absolutely ideal for the project: with plenty of room and mounts for discs and just about anything else you might want to attach to it, anywhere, all held together with Reynolds 725 tubing. A quality, robust frame, worth saving from the scrapheap, but without the sort of pretensions that will have people up in arms when I paint it silly colours and weld stuff to it.
The only catch was the remains of an aluminum seatpost firmly embedded within the seattube. Very firmly in fact. As the owner of a 7" bench vice and a variety of meaty tools, I didn't expect too much trouble getting it out. I was wrong. The lack of much to grab hold of frustrated my attempts to pull/twist/lever/hammer it out, so much time was spent sawing a slot (which Ben had already started) in each side. Several hacksaw blades and a mini hacksaw handle later...
Having extracted the seatpost, I moved on to a snapped bolt in the mudguard mounting hole on the chainstay brace. This also cost me several small drill bits while I tried to get a hole started vaguely near the centre. Eventually I managed to get a clean hole in the right place, and turned down a stainless M5 nut (using a drill and bench grinder) to weld on the back (not the most accesible place to weld!). This was an early indication of how this project was going to play out.
Fortunately, I wasn't too bothered about being careful with the paintwork, since I needed an excuse to go all in and respray the frame. I left most of the original paint on as base, but cleaned up some rust spots and uneven bits, and keyed the rest. I was inspired to make life even more complicated/expensive for myself than necessary by going for a multi-coloured design with areas of colour across the tubes by this bike from last year's Bespoked: https://www.instagram.com/p/Cl69eatIoqk/. I decided on a big W as a suitable shape to divide the colour areas up an interesting way, and also my second initial, though it's quite abstract - no-one's going to look at the bike and think "that's a W". I mocked up almost all the colour combinations in Microsoft paint, then picked the one I realised I'd missed out
So off to the art shop for three different cans of Montana Gold.
Setting up a decent environment for painting was a challenge in an unheated garage in December, without using huge amounts of energy. I initially used a gas camping stove but then realised I was going to have to ventilate between coats to get rid of the flammable vapour, which was rather counter-productive. Not having an oil-filled radiator, I resorted to an electric fan heater - not ideal since it would stir up dust, but at least it raised the temperature quickly. Fortunately, I managed to coincide with a fairly mild spell. I had most of a can of zinc primer left from an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to save an old rusty car from the crusher, so I primed the whole frameset with that, and then did three coats of orange on the frame, and three of the turquoise on the fork.
My vague plan was to freehand the masking rather than trying to get the lines perfectly accurate, but I soon realised it was going to be very tricky to get this to look even half decent. Cue several evening's of trying to project freehand from a (2D) cardboard template onto the (very much 3D) frame and fork, which was propped up on a variety of blocks to get a reasonable approximation of the axle positions, and thus a horizontal datum, and trying to measure the angles at which the lines cross the tubes. I found an online tool for creating templates for cutting round tubes in a flat plane which I used to make templates for each "joint" based on the diameter and angle. The ones for the oval seattube and chain stays I manually edited to account for the different shape.
I still had to get these onto the frame in masking tape, and trying to lay straight-edged tape onto a curved line on a round tube was as futile as it sounds. So I put my printed templates inside some clear PVC CD sleeves leftover from the days when mixtapes had moved on from tapes, but not yet left the physical realm, laid overlapping strips of masking tape on the sleeve, and then cut along the line. Thus I was able to peel off a mask with the joint profile already cut, and all that remained was to get it both centred on the tube, and aligned correctly to the axis. Some of these took more than one attempt. It was a time-consuming and fiddly task, but the tape I used definitely made it a lot easier - definitely worth using for this sort of job: https://www.toolstation.com/masq-low-ta ... ape/p62388.
Three coats each of the other two colours went on, somewhat more easily than the orange, which didn't seem to lay very well. I think contrary to what I'd thought was conventional wisdom, more thin coats isn't necessarily better, beyond a certain point. A certain thickness seemed to be needed to wet the layer out and give a nice smooth finish, which very thin coats didn't seem to achieve, no matter how many went on.
Nevertheless, when the time came to peel off the masking and reveal the results, it was pretty satisfying.
I left the painted frameset to adorn the dining room radiator for a while to fully cure the paint while I prepared some other bits for clear coating at the same time. 2K clear coat is expensive and once mixed has a pot life measured in hours, so everything needed to be done at once.
Apart from the frame, the theme was to be silver everything, preferably shiny. I'd bought an 11 speed Alfine IGH built into a nice 35mm 29" rim from Ben, and had a Shimano dynohub from my old 26" commuter, so that needed building into a 29" rim. The dyno is 36 hole, which made finding a wide 29" rim tricky, particularly in the polished aluminium finish I wanted. Having accepted that I'd need to strip and polish one rim, I figured I might as well do the same with the rear rather than buying a new rim. I also planned to do the headset in the same style.
Several weeks of trying to find a strong enough caustic product to strip the anodising (pure caustic soda seems to be out of fashion in shops these days), testing on a scrap rim, applying paint stripper to the new rim because it turned out to be painted but anodised, scraping globs of bubbling chemicals and paint/oxide off, polishing, polishing, and more polishing later, I was beginning to seriously question my life choices.
Eventually I decided that everything that needed to be polished was about as polished as it was going to get, and pressed the button on the bottom of the rattle can to release the catalyst. It's not a professional paint job by any means, and it might not be long before it starts to look used, but the overall effect is how I wanted it. Clear coating the rims and headset may have been a waste of time - some of it's already flaked off in places, but hey ho.
Having already found some rust spots on the frame, I thought protecting the tubes internally was another "now or never" situation. Ever reluctant to buy more stuff, I improvised by melting a bit of Putoline chain wax down and thinning it with white spirit to squirt into the frame. After a bit of trial and error, and a lot of mess, I got it to a consistency where I was fairly sure it was coating the insides nicely, and did the wax waltz (it's a bit like the Stan's dance for distributing tubeless sealant... very much like in fact). After cleaning up the outside, I left it in front of the radiator with some cardboard underneath to soak up anything leaking out, which I don't really want to happen if I park it somewhere warm.
In the meantime I'd be amassing a small pile of parts. The whole design revolved around racks and guards, so these were some of the first bits to be acquired. Finding shiny metal guards which would fit a 2.3"-ish 29er tyre was not easy. I don't have the budget for these and these are still quite a lot of money for something that doesn't quite fit the bill. Eventually I ordered a pair of these Wald 962 chromed steel "balloon fenders" (£40 from eBay as NOS with tarnished stays), with a plan to enlarge them from the specified 26" to fit a 29" wheel using Velo Orange's own guide, and failing that, give up and use 26" or 27.5" wheels. Fortunately, they already had plenty of room, enough for 29x2" out of the box - in fact they looked stupid next to a 26" wheel - and were easily coaxed into being a little more accepting. The included (pressed steel) stays were far too big even for a 29er, incredibly heavy, and had excessively large mounting holes, so they went in the scrap to be replaced with some universal stays which don't look too bad.
I got into the habit of calling into my local bike recycling charity (shout out to Recyke Y'Bike!) to crate dig, and was lucky enough to score a Brick Lane Bikes Frontier rack for the princely sum of £40, obviously unused, in its packaging, with all the fittings. Having got it home, I realised it's slightly out of square, in a way that only cutting and re-welding it would sort, so presumably it was replaced by BLB and the donor left with this one - still a generous donation, and a win for me, as it's not too noticeable. A slightly marked stainless Tortec Epic rear rack, seemingly the last one in the country, from Amazon's Warehouse section, makes a decent match and brings the rated total load to 65kg
(40 on the rear, 25 on the front... would make steering interesting!).A set of BB7S MTNs that have been waiting patiently for this build for several years were paired to some basic Shimano levers from the aforementioned Recyke Y'Bike, who also supplied a very nice Suntour XC Pro chainset and a couple of other small bits.
Since I had the Alfine out of the wheel, it seemed like a good opportunity to give it a good service and oil change, and replace a couple of damaged seals/dust caps.
With the wheels ready to build I needed unlace the dynohub from my old wheel, and at this point, I figured I may as well fully commit, and swiftly turned my trusty iron horse into a pile of (very crusty) parts.
I liked the idea of getting all of the parts together in one nice big pile, then building the whole lot up in one go...
...Of course, this bike had other ideas. I'm fairly confident with building wheels now, but not quick, so that took a couple of sessions. Fitting guards is always tricky, particularly when you have to account for disc brakes - much careful cutting and bending was required, including making some of the double V stays into singles. I had a go at setting up the wheels tubeless with about the expected level of success (none): high volume non-tubeless tyres on non-tubeless rims. I need to revisit that, or replace the tubes with ones with removable valve cores and fill them with sealant - while this bike is no weight-weenie, rotating mass is a different matter and puncture-resistant tyres are hateful to ride, so I went with relatively lightweight tyres (still 650g each, but some similar tyres are well over a kilo). Then came the niggles like finding the spares box BB I had lined up was for a different shell width.
The racks, however, turned into a project in themselves. A pair of adapters was needed to shift the rear bottom mounts back away from the brake caliper. Tortec make some for precisely this purpose, but they were out of stock everywhere, so I had to fabricate my own from 3mm stainless plate. With these, the top mount was too far away from the mounts on the frame to keep it level - and non-horizontal racks are the work of the devil - so another plate needed to be cut, slotted, and bent. The eyelets on the top mount also needed some serious force to bend them anywhere near the angle required to match the frame - how anyone is meant to fit one of these without a big vice, various substantial tools, and the nerve to push beyond the material's elastic limit, I don't know.
The front rack was equally tricky. Despite the fitting instructions calling for the top mount to be bent to the correct shape, but this was clearly not going to happen. Sure enough, it snapped after a few degrees of bend, so to cut it up, work out the right shape, and weld it in position. The rack needed to be moved forward I'm order to get the bottom mounts round the to the eyelets. Some "adjustment" (the sort that requires an angle grinder) and re-drilling of the bottom mounting plates was required. Then the top mount was too far forward of the fork - usually the space would be filled by the brake caliper, so I had to substitute in a brass tube (conveniently left over from making some spacers to fit stair rods). Finally, since there was a rack mount just above the front extension of the mudguard, it seemed a good idea to drill it, make up a spacer, and bolt it together to give it some extra stability. Oh, and since there was no obvious place to mount a light, I welded a turned down nut on to take what I think was part of a bar handle from our old kitchen as a spacer, re-drilled and tapped, to bolt the light to.
And that was just about that. There are a few bits I want to to add or change, but there had to come a point where I called it finished and started using it. Ironically, but somewhat inevitably, it's taken me til the end of my full-time contact, almost to the day, to make this happen. I'm still commuting two or three days a week, and of course riding to the shops, the pub, etc. I might even take it on some shorter laid back bikepacking trips - it's not fast but it's genuinely a pleasure to ride.
You can only buy it diluted, presumably for safety reasons. And by safety, I mean, of someone's profits.
