With the front wheel from Best now in fine fettle and enjoying in its new life on the front of Tigger, it was time to sort out the rear wheel as an eventual reserve for Zenit. While the front wheel on Best had been a ratty steel replacement, this seemed to have the original aluminium rim, in a design that Kross continued to use for many years. The rim had a few dings, but it looked sound overall. They say that rim brakes work much better on aluminium than chromed steel, and I believe them - and hopefully quieter than the cacophony that is a feature of Zenit at the moment. The tire was cracked with age, the spokes loose and some bent, the gear hub was wobbly and the bearings gritty. I spent one evening session just scrubbing and digging away at the grime between the gears, before extracting the axle and the rather blackened ball bearings. I could see that the gear hub would have to come off and maybe even the freewheel rebuilt.
I had already purchased a tool to remove the gear hub, so with the tire reinflated, the tool fitted and held in place by a slightly slack axle, I clamped it in the vice and then, with only a couple of heaves, the wheel was turning. I like to clean as I go, but the gear hub was going to require extra effort. I have seen those serrated plastic tools designed to help clean between the sprockets, so I cut one of my own from the base of a plastic box that formerly housed a set of masonry bits. I had purchased the bits some fifteen years before, back in the time when it was still difficult to find any tools here, so was forced to accept a set of drills clearly designed for another kind of drill chuck. They kind of worked, but now they sit in the bottom of a tool box in case I need a long punch. My serrated cleaner looks rough, but is sufficiently effective.
Sprocket cleaning tool
After cleaning, involving WD-40 as the prime grime penetrant, I sat the gear hub fat-face up and pooled some thin lubricant to soak into the freewheel mechanism. Since the freewheel mechanism still works and I have no experience in how much it should ‘wobble’, I will refit the unit ‘as is’. Best’s previous owner, he of the fondness for home-made rivets and other agriculturally engineered projects, had fitted a rubberised band to roll around the hub, held together by yet another ingeniously nail-derived rivet. I cut it off, because they seem to do more harm than good. If the hub gets dirty I should clean it, not allow a device to pick up the oily grit and then apply it as a coarse abrasive on the hub. I then noticed that many of my new bikes had similar things, ‘had’ being the operative word.
Eventually I got around to the spoke nipples. I had squirted them a couple of times with WD-40, but my hopes were lower than for the front wheel as the spokes were in even a worse state. I removed the tire, inner tube and rim tape and tapped away at each of the nipples to make sure that none had bonded to the rim. On my first go only about a third of the spokes were free, but by tapping them with a hammer and then toothbrushing them with oil I increased this to about half, or eighteen. I decided to leave them to soak for a week
I realized it was time to wave goodbye to the cracked tire, as I make it a general rule that one should not be able to see the inner tube from outside the tire… However, the inner tube itself seems to be perfectly serviceable, even if it has two successful patches, one right next to the valve. I will keep it as my spare.
With such a huge number of tires lying around, I could not help but notice that while most of them had modern wavy patterns, there were four that had a traditional tread pattern. They were all branded ‘Zebra’ from the Stomil factory in Olsztyn, Poland, which was finally bought out by Michelin some fifteen years ago. They no longer make bicycle tires under the ‘stomil’ brand (‘sto’ = ‘100’, ‘mil’ = ‘miles’), while the Stomil factory in Poznan is now a different company and makes commercial and agricultural tires. Hmm, I thought, they would look good on a restored bike, and then promptly stashed the better two safely away. I refer to them as my Zebras, while the other two as Badgers (‘bald as a badger’). I saw an advert the other day for a Jubilat front wheel with an almost unworn Zebra, for only 50 zloty…
These are not the only Polish tires I have, as Blue and Tigger came on Dębica tires, originally a branch of Stomil but then sold in about 1939. They are still in business, but ceased making tires and tubes for bicycles in 2006, so mine are pretty much from their final days. When I retire Tiggers’ they will go into storage as well, while Blue’s will likely stay on for a while as they are still like new. I am not sure why Dębica withdrew from the bicycle market, just at the moment it was set to explode, but some days Poland seems packed with woe-sayers: the end of bicycling is nigh because everyone will buy a car.
When did bicycle tread patterns become so abstract?
Looking ahead to the time when Best’s rear wheel gets rebuilt, I should first temporarily refit it to a temporarily made-rideable Best to make sure all the gear levers and stuff work properly before I reuse them elsewhere. I made a start by cleaning the chain and gears, which was a whole lot more involved than with a single gear bike, so I took the rear axle from Kid to make a dummy axle to keep the derailleur in its normal working position and hence the chain tensioned. Out with an old toothbrush and chain cleaner (WD-40) and I soon had everything scrubbed up as nicely as possible, with just a few nooks that will have to wait until everything is disassembled. I really should get something better for cleaning chains, with all these bikes filling up my garage.
The chain is narrower than on Zenit, although the gear separation on the rear hub looks similar, and bends to the side impressively. In this complex world of gear options I am not sure what chain I should replace it with.
Before Zenit came along I was going to expand the rear frame of Blue to fit Best’s derailleur and crank set up. OK, so I know that the chainwheel side crank on Best needs straightening, which will be a bit of a task, but still a straight-forward one. As standard, Jubilats use a two-piece cotter-pin crank and a rather short and fat caged bottom bearing, pressed in, all from a different era in cycling. The chances of finding suitable cotter pin cranks today that take sprockets that match more modern rear gear hubs diminishes with time, so the plan was to purchase a cartridge bottom bracket with a square-ended axle that would take Best’s and other cranks. The cartridge uses press fit bushes, which while not as good as threaded bushes they are not worse than the current push fit bearings. I thought that this would then free up the bearings, cranks sprocket and chain as a reserve for Tigger.
So the other week I removed the BB in preparation.
On a related note, Zenit has a three piece crank on cotter pins, and presumably on the same kind of seal-less push-fit bearings as the other Jubilats. I am not tempted to find out, as removing 25 year old cotter pins is a task better left for a future day. It does run the chain for a derailleur, even if it is a 3-speed one, and it has the 130mm spacing. The chainwheel is also not the same pattern used as on all the other Jubilats, but seems to to be common for Zenits.
So I could have left Blue’s BB in place.
Kowalewo, the very, very small town where my Zenit was created. ’Kowal’ means ‘blacksmith’, which is appropriate for the location of a bicycle factory.
In breaking down Zenit, Danusia and Big R I now have 6 frames to store away, along with 5 boxes and baskets full of different things - saddles and pedals in one, brakes in another. I took photo’s first to record where everything came from, but I have no intention of returning the parts to their source frames. Instead I have created a parts store, from which renewed bikes will appear. On the downside is that Big R’s BB felt a bit stiff, so now both Blue and Big R have their BBs out.
The biggest news, which I have hidden down here, is that we are considering buying a summer cottage somewhere, and living there for about half the year. This kind of makes sense for my bike situation: Tigger would continue to be my back-of-the-car travel bike, Zenit would be ideal for life in the country with its three/five gears and Danusia as my city hack. Tigger is nice enough to be taken on weekend breaks, but if we are just nipping down to the cottage for the weekend it might not make sense to load it. Now we just need to find our kind of location.
#romet #rower #bicycle #wigry #jubilat #shopper #poland #polska
Last edited by Geepig; 02-19-21 at 01:32 AM.