I spent a happy evening cleaning the remaining gear and crank parts on Best, while it was clamped upside down on my workbench. I am not sure whether the rear derailleur is bent or not, as it kind of bends in towards the wheel, but I will have to wait until I have finished rebuilding the wheel to be sure. At the other end of the chain, I know now why the front derailleur had insufficient swing - one of the limit screws had been wound fully in. Such a simple thing to notice, but it has been forty years since my last derailleur, and then only rear ones, so this is my first front derailleur and a crud-covered one at that.
I also compared the seat tube diameters and found that Blue’s is noticeably larger than Best’s, meaning that the front derailleur is not going to be a clean fit. This is not a terrible problem as I could modify the bracket, make a new bracket or just run with a single chainwheel. But which size? I could go to one of those sites with gear/wheel speed calculators or just try out all three chainwheels, one by one. I will probably go with the latter, as it is the more fun option. My aim is to be able to ride the bike from the saddle, up hill and down, with and without a heavy shopping load. Speed is less of an issue than comfort and control. Standing up and pedalling on an old folder design with heavy loads mounted far from both the ground and the central twisting point of the frame is not recommended.
The rear derailleur has a new and rather overlong cable, but the housing is multi-piece and Blue has no frame cable mounts anyway. The front derailleur has a frayed cable and I feel no urge to consider a replacement at the moment until I make my chainwheel decision. It is frayed where it turns under the bottom bracket, but seems to work well enough for me to test the system. In theory, if I only use the rear derailleur, I could pass both the cable and the wire for the rear light down through the main frame tube in a single, shrink-wrapped package.
I am also tempted to transfer Best’s mudguards to Blue, if they can be made to fit, so that I can take advantage of the ‘hidden’ wiring route underneath the mudguard. They are a bit beaten up, and not as smart as the chromed ones currently on Blue, but they are stiffer. I have to face the question whether I really want Blue to look smart or whether its general smart look has suckered me into believing it should? Am I allowing society to con me, or is smart something I really want? Well, none of my really fun vehicles have ever been conventionally smart. Tigger is mostly tidy now, but not smart, and will age with use.
Getting back to the sprockets, I might look for an 20 tooth rear sprocket for Tigger for use on the winter wheel, as it is more difficult to get a good run up for a slope while the ground is wet and I am less likely to hit the same kind of speeds I would with road tires on tarmac. I know the current one is 18 tooth and I have seen 20 tooth on Allegro. If I looked hard I might find more, but it has a specific mounting of three equal spaced dimples on the inner bore.
While I was working on Best I could not help but notice the saddle - a much narrower, possibly lighter and certainly less good condition item than the one currently on Tigger. Of the four sets of seat clamps I seem to have lying around, will any allow me to do the swop? Wifie thinks it is far too narrow to be comfortable, even though she sees that I spend little time sitting on Tigger’s current fat and wide town seat. I tend only to use the seat when riding at very low speeds over short distances or as something to lean my leg on in the absence of a cross bar while doing tricky maneuvers. Convincing people is often a matter of dealing with the long trail of trash that is ‘what society knows and shares’, rather than their ability to understand without the junk in their mind.
It will have to wait, as both Best and Blue sit upside down on the floor for the most part, on their seats.
The snow and the sub-zero temperatures have lingered for a week, and for perhaps this reason I spent more time on the local auction and sales sites, watching the adverts on Allegro, OLX and Facebook, mostly to get a feel for prices and in case anything interesting came along. I kind of hoped that after the New Year actual sales would drop and people begin to sell their old stuff to cover their outgoings. And this is what happened.
On Facebook I saw an advert for ‘3 Widry’, which is funny because ‘Widry’ is the second largest lake in Poland while ‘Wigry’ was the standard 20” wheel folder from Romet, and gets applied generically to all Romet folders, especially given Romet’s Communist era habit of not always applying a name to a product. What the guy was advertising was three Jubilats, for 333 zloties, and only some 30 km away in the small town of Lubartów.
To make things slightly more complicated we had to pick the seller up in the large industrialised village of Niemce on the way. ‘Niemce’ means ‘German’ in Polish, and got its name because Germanic prisoners were settled here after Poland defeated the Teutonic Knights at the battle of Grunwald, back when Lublin was a major city for Poland. The guy was about our age, and it turned out he was visiting his father in Niemce and we were saving him the bus trip back to Lubartów where he was living with his girlfriend in a rented wooden cottage in what one would politely term the slums. That meant we needed him to guide us to where he was living. From his perspective he was now a city dweller, and his girlfriend was refusing to move out of the ‘city’ to live in trashy rural Niemce.
He was a bit surprised that we turned up in a Toyota Yaris to collect three bikes. He and his family even more so as he watched me quickly, with the aid of a 13mm spanner, hammer, pliers and a can of WD-40, fold all three and fit them in the back of the car. All for 300 zloty.
Three little Jubilats, all safe from the big bad scrap metal dealer
He did offer me another child’s bike on 24” wheels with a three-speed Shimano and nice aluminium rims, but there was no more room in the car and there comes a point to say no to stop one’s garage becoming like a junkyard.
The first Jubilat, ‘Big R’, had ‘Romet’ in large letters on the downtube, looked good, and with a little work should be worth 250 zloty come the Spring - plus it had the desirable steering and seat stem locking levers. The second, marked ‘Danusia’ with a ‘bikeland.pl’ website address, had rusty wheels but the steering stem was what I wanted for Tigger to push the handlebars a little further forward. The third was a Zenit-branded one, and had a 3-speed derailleur, friction lever and quill type steering post, as well as the rather nice high-rise bars also seen on other models of step-thru Romets since the 1970s, such as the rather tasty Romet Flaming - see post#5. The Zenit has ‘Kowalewo’ badges, the old Romet SA ‘R4’ factory site, which used to build the city bikes, including the Jubilat, and the bike has ancient style aluminium dynamo and pressed and chromed steel brake levers - clearly it is the oldest of my five.
I have seen a ‘Danusia’ marked Jubilat before, but I cannot remember where. They have a www.bikeland.pl website address printed on the frame next to the name, but they are a reseller in business since the late 1990s rather than a manufacturer - but was it from the same factory as the Zenit, or Arkus-built, like Tigger and Blue? Big R shares the same metallic paint colour as Danusia and the same straight welded seam on the top seat stay as Danusia and Zenit - while Blue and Tigger each have a curved seam. When talking about the disintegration of Romet SA and its many factories, nothing seems clear.
It was only a few weeks ago that I came across my first Zenit, on the Bełzyce trip, and after a Polish bicycle forum hunt I learned that they date from the 1990s and many have Favorit 5-speed derailleurs. When I first saw the picture in the advert I assumed that it had been retro-fitted with the derailleur gears from something else, but looking back at the Bełzyce picture I can see that they are almost identical. It might already have a good BB and suitable chainwheel - which I can see is not the usual Romet pattern. I could in fact rebuild it as a Blue replacement, leaving Blue’s frame in dry storage until I can find things like an FD that fits the seat tube and do a decent paint job on the wheels, etc. I want Blue’s shopper functionality and derailleur gears available for the Spring, but Blue itself can wait for better parts. I also need to decide whether I want the reserve rear wheel to be a derailleur or coaster brake.
Therefore, before I sell Danusia I need to make a decision on which wheels to fit - a) remove, sand down and paint its current rusty rims, b) fit the wheels and gears from Zenit, c) fit Best’s aluminium rear rim and cleaned up steel front wheel (currently Tigger’s front winter wheel), or d) buy a pair of cheap, non rusty front wheels and weave one of the rims onto Danuta’s rear wheel?
I need some time to think and examine.
#romet #rower #bicycle #wigry #jubilat #shopper #poland #polska
Last edited by Geepig; 02-19-21 at 07:35 AM.