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Tigger and Blue

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Tigger and Blue

Old 09-28-20, 09:08 AM
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Geepig
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Tigger and Blue - the cheapskates guide

Many eons ago my wife purchased two bicycles for us from a local supermarket. She then decided that she could not ride them. Dust settled. Rust fettled.

This is their story.

They sat at the back of our garage here in Lublin, deep in Eastern Poland for about 15 years, and I think in all that time I only rode mine, the blue one two or three times. This was strange in one way as I had grown up largely it seemed on two wheels. Arthritis had taken its toll, along with work mainly at a desk, but no more. They would, like a pair of unlikely phoenix, get me off my ass and back on the road and in the garage.

Figuring that if wifie had not ridden hers at all then she must have defaulted on her usage rights, I set about minimising the level of equipment on hers, the red one, aka 'Tigger', and maximising it on mine, 'Blue. The plan is to make Blue a classic, rural style runaround I can use for shopping, and Tigger a fun, moving fitness machine. I have few facilities or tools, and little will to create a workshop, but a lot of faith.

And not much money.

Winter is coming on, and the garage is unheated.


Blue, in all its unfolded glory

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Old 09-28-20, 09:18 AM
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For a shopping bike, that's a beauty.
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Old 09-29-20, 06:18 AM
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Yes, and I love the 1970s vibe in the use of flattened oval tubing and creased mudguards.
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Old 09-30-20, 05:03 PM
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Beautiful, simple, elegant,... I like it.
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If it wasn't for you meddling kids,...
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Old 10-01-20, 03:30 AM
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A little history

Although this was intended to be about the progress of work on my bikes, I have decided in the desire to make it a more natural story to pretend that I have not started yet, giving anyone in the future a more consistent read. First, though, something about how my bikes came into being.

I should say something about Romet as well, otherwise I might end up blathering about (more) incomprehensible nonsense (than usual).

Romet is or was a Polish company, established after the Second World War mostly to produce bicycles and small motorbikes, until it ceased operations in about 1998 and then deleted as a company in 2005. It made all the usual road and racing type bikes one would expect, and then in about the late 60s it branched out into the new-fangled folding and non-folding step-thru bike craze, the latter including a neat tandem, the Romet Duet. Rather a lot of their bicycles were produced in red, followed by aquamarine and occassionally some other colours. Export models, for some weird reason, were branded 'Universal' and came with a lot of accessories that were not usually fitted or available for the home market, such as metallic paint and rear brakes. Most city bikes had a front hand brake and a Czech Velosteel coaster brake hub, while others made do with just the coaster brake - for 'fun' life on the road in the PRL (Polish People's Republin, 1947-89).

One of these folding bikes was the Wigry, identifiable by its 20" wheels and kinked down tube, and produced steadily and then unsteadily since the 1970s. Later it was joined by the Jubilat with larger 24" wheels, during the murky 1990s period when Romet was collapsing and a new company, Arkus, was being set up and began taking over some Romet fatories. Arkus bought the rights to the Wigry, Jubilat and, eventually, the Romet brand. Our Jubilats come from the murkiest period between 1995 and 2005, and feature some detail diffences and a total lack of any Romet or Jubilat badges or labels. In fact they have no manufacturer's marking at all. Today's new Wigry and Jubilat models have lost the kink in the downtube and gained Shimano hub or derailleur gears, but are still at a bargain price.



Romet Jubilat 2 in front and Romet Turing 2 behind. In more successful rural areas these Romets have all but disappeared. This was not one of those areas. Note the lack of hand brakes on the Jubilat and the front brake only on the Turing - but both have the reaction arm for the coaster brake on the rear hub.

Today, perusing the local Allegro online e-commerce platform is an interesting way to waste a few hours, pondering whether to buy a bike bag with wooden toggle closures from the 1970s or other rarely seen parts from the PRL era. All the models and versions they made ensure that I have a choice of handlebars and stems, lights, toolkits that mount under the saddle and even a wacky turn signal device with orange lights that I presume would also clamp to the saddle. Being at the bottom end of the used bike market gives me a great choice of roadworthy old bikes at almost no money, with one lady owner from new. I have even seen ads for wheels with the rare Sturmey Archer three speed hub option. Altogether there are some 35 years worth of cheap parts out there...



Not a Wigry but a Flaming (Polish for Flamingo, nothing to do with fire) - these have a tubular down tube that curves up to be the seat tube. I am rather fond of the Flaming, and this one has front and rear hand brakes added, as well as a none original seat.

For Blue I want it all, but especially the homebrew blue plastic market fruit basket that is such a feature of rural machines, bolted to the rear rack, and the Sturmey Archer hub of course. I think there may have been a 'proper' blue basket, but alas I only see them in pictures. Luckily for Blue I have the choice of all the parts I removed from Tigger.

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Old 10-08-20, 12:58 AM
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It is dark, cold, nothing fits, every other nut or washer seems to scurry off to live a new life under the bench or behind that dusty box. And then the doubts come, descending upon you, all this effort to achieve what, I could be sitting comfortably watching the telly or having a beer, like other folk.

Many years ago, back in the 1980s, I had a garage full of tools, including angle grinder, arc welder + brazing attachment and MIG welder, all the high technology of the decade, and I spent a lot of time making rat bikes out of small motorcycles, including my favourite trail bike based on a Honda C70 Cub step-thru, on which I rode around Europe. I cut bits off stolen and burnt out bikes I came across in the woods, bought cheap stuff from bike breakers and incorporated parts made from old tyres, legs of ironing boards and plywood found in a local building site skip. I can hardly remember what telly I must have watched.



So sleek, so stylish, like an interior decorator's dream - but it keeps everything I like nice and tidy. Somewhere in there is a box concealing biscuits and formerly a bar of chocolate. I intercepted wifie on the way back home the other day, and because she looked tired carrying the shopping I brought her here and fed her the chocolate. It must be love!

Today I still make stuff out of waste, including a lot from cardboard, but doing major welding jobs is a thing of the past; so if I cannot cut, drill and file it to fit, it doesn't go on. The principle is that the more you restrict your reliance on workshop tools and fresh materials, the harder you have to think about how to achieve your goals. My riding routes, therefore, take me past as many household and factory dumpsters as possible. Even my bench is made from some furniture a neighbour kindly abandoned in the basement before moving on. At least I hope he has.

I did buy a thin bicycle wrench to help adjust the rather sloppy wheel bearings on Blue, as at the time I had no way of clamping down a spanner to file it suitably thin, and no spare spanner to file. In a fit of madness I decided to buy a massive 100 mm G-clamp at the same time. Romet have had some nice bicycle designs, but sometimes(!) their assembly of components could be less than optimal, and in fine PRL style I have had to fix wheel bearings, re-tension spokes, figure out how to tighten a lose sprocket cup on the coaster hub, and deal with bolts pulling through the mudguards and a massive screw driven through a rear light because the plastic clip had not been formed properly.



One hub spanner, and for no particular reason a motorcycle/car toolkit spanner, probably from the 1950s and made in Radom, central Poland, in a gun factory. It was wifie's dad's, and I like to use things owned by other family members.

And then there are the plastic brake levers. I dream of finding even a kiddies bicycle thrown out with better levers. It is like a punishment sent down from the leaders of the PRL onto a wavering proletariat: if thou shalt be so bourgeois as to require a handbrake, ye shalt be punished by the fear you deserve each time you haul on it. I did see a suitable donor bike advertised on Allegro.pl, with 20" aluminium wheels, three speed Shimano hub... all for 100 złoties...

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Old 10-16-20, 12:50 AM
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While the metallic red on Tigger is in fairly good condition, having lived most of its life at the back of the garage, it was also way too nice. Blue was nice too, but the name on the downtube was 'Smart', and thus it was decided that Blue should remain smart, while Tigger took another, ragged path, living for action. I have some plans for Tigger, such as a send set of wheels with off-road tires on them for the winter and replacing the handlebars.

At the moment I am still pondering whether to purchase a chain link tool. I do have a set of punches in the basement, but when it came to taking Tigger to pieces I had no plan for how I should manage to hold a ponderously large bicycle frame while I delicately pop a pin in or out of the chain. So there it was, no choice but to wrap up Tigger's chain in a plastic bag while respraying the lower frame and elements. Luckily my rat bike principles kicked in where looks should remain secondary to function, and that any compromises on the look, rather than being a negative, are a positive sign that activity has taken place. This is not the same as not caring for the look, far from it, as the look is very significant, just not in a putting-green lawn, prim and proper, or rusty steampunk kind of way.

One could say we want less steam, more punk.


Tigger lazing an afternoon away on a foam bed mat. Observe the stylish bag to hold my face mask, you don't see that down your local bike shop.

Then a few days later I broke up a pallet, one of the those that people were collecting to turn into trendy furniture over the last couple of years and which they are now abandoning. It was never a good pallet, too much bark on it, so it must have been dreadful as furniture. Still, I managed to rescue some useful wooden blocks, which with appropriate holes would allow me to lay a bike on the bench with the chain on the block and thus remove the pin through a conveniently drilled hole. I could still avoid the hassle and ask for a chain link tool for Christmas, but I have already requested a better tire pump from Santa-wifie.

Back to the painting, as an engineer one gets used to other people switching off the moment there is even a hint of gear wheels being spun into the conversation, unless they are nicely polished or painted, mounted on a brassy steam engine, to be viewed over a suitable system of protection that prevents any potential contamination while maximising photo opportunities. So I thought we should celebrate the grimy vibe through a satin black, with shiny glossy bike parts on top. If this is what people subconsciously expect, then so be it. On a practical level the lower half of a bike tends to receive more of a battering, and it is a lot easier to fix the chips and dinks with a non-glossy black. The hope is that not all the paint will remain on the chromed parts, such as the chain wheel, but will chip away as riding happens.

I even painted all the nickel plated nuts and bolts, and they chip even as they are tightened up. Great! The chipping is a sign of functionality, that assembly has taken place, that work has been done, so therefore the result is not a dead museum piece.

Did I mention my spray booth? The wrench I ordered the other day arrived from half way across Poland in a huge box for such a little thing. Rather than throw the box out I converted it into something I could use to spray all those small parts like brackets and bolts, with a lid to close afterwards, to keep the inevitable dust out.


How would you like your pizza, sir? Well done? Put the lid down, and slide it on a shelf out of the way - my home-cooked spray booth.

While Tigger sat around waiting for the paint to dry, unwatched, I could get on with other things. Important things, like thinking about how I was going to achieve whatever it was slowly forming in my mind slower than drying paint. I seemed to have spent a lot of time thinking about dynamos and lights. Tigger and Blue each came with a bottle dynamo mounted to run on the front wheel, but I have never used one before, even as a lad they seemed like from a time when old men were still young. OK, so now I am the old one, and yes today it now seems that such dynamos are no longer from the past, but from my future as an old git.

I fitted one of the dynamos to Blue, strapped the broken rear light from Tigger to the lower front basket support (each bike came with everything to mount a basket, but no basket) where I could see it, connected the wires and headed out into the wild world. The bulb glimmered, then grew in strength, finally shining bright like a beacon in the failing evening light - once I got going properly around the garages. The slight hitch is that the lights use incandescent bulbs, and I cannot remember the last time I saw any for sale. It looks like another ordering job, or finding something about how to run LED lighting on AC current. I have already been told that I could just fit a set of LED lights, but if people can tell me that then it is not a particularly original idea, rather one from the land of comfort. Anyway, now that I possess a pair of functioning dynamos it would be a pity not to use them. All that I think I need now is a pair of front lights.

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Old 10-22-20, 12:12 AM
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Today I took Blue out for a run during a break in the rain, a kind of point-to-point route where the points were all the local dumpsters. Everything was fine, except there is something wrong with the velosteel coaster hub on this bike, because the sprag clutch does not re-engage after coasting or braking. Sometimes it comes in within a quarter of a turn, and sometimes I am left pushing the bike to get up speed, pedalling and then, 100 meters later, it comes back online with a clunk.

I have now determined that the sprocket cone is not tight on the axle shaft, but as yet I have no threadlocker or big vice to tighten it the 'Russian' way. I discovered it after I noticed that the rear sprocket could be rocked from side to side, while the one on Tigger felt normal. I removed the wheel and the cone/spacer combo was indeed loose enough to allow the sprocket to move, yet there were no flats or anything on it by which I could use to tighten it. This was a mystery and, many Russian language videos later, including farmyard chicken background sounds, I was sure of two things: that the cone should be tight on the shaft, and that I understand Russian bicycle mechanics better than I do Russian anyone else.

The trick at the moment is to keep on pedalling, even when braking, the latter being done using the front hand brake. This at least prevents the drive from disconnecting, but it hardly makes for a great ride. Since I am not quite ready to start stripping these hubs, I kind of fiddled it by tightening the cone as best I could with some pliers with the wheel still sitting in the frame, set the chain tension and tightened the axle nut on that side. Then I adjusted the brake at the other end of the axle, aligned the wheel and tightened the other axle nut. Of course, that makes it sound so simple.

My first mistake was to grease the sprocket bearing, much as one would normally do. Howerver, all that grease can then leak into the hub and interfere with the mechanism. It likes it dry in there, as dry as the Russian steppes in summer with just a splash of lubricant, like a shot of vodka when you would normally expect to order beer. In all those Russian language videos (they might have been Belorussian or Ukrainian for all I know) they made it look so easy, but of course they had already removed the wheel and spokes so that the hub could fit snugly in their hand. I, on the other hand, with my loose cone, had to wrestle with a whole bike and inadequate tools.

The Russian way is to strip everything down, grip the sprocket cone in the vice, and tighten the 7 mm square at one end of the axle. The sprocket end. Then you merely reassemble the slightly oily components and adjust the preload at the other end of the axle in a vaguely demonstrated way. Once a chicken has clucked its agreement, you know that the job is done.

With the cone tightened as much as I could with the pliers, the only close-to-suitable tool I had, I then had to make sure that the axle did not turn while I aligned the hub steady bar and tightened the second axle nut. Any rotation of the axle would have slackened the sprocket cone. I was sure that I had a 7 mm open-ended spanner, but no such panner was to be found. I tried my massive adjustable wrench, normally used for plumbing work, but that was too heavy to hold and keep the wheel aligned while I tightened things. My other adjustable was too small, and I began to feel a Golidilocks moment coming on. So off I went to the local builders merchants, whistling 'heigh ho', to buy a suitable 7 mm spanner. This allowed me to kind of get it all back together, but with less than full success. The sprocket no longer wobbled, but the coaster/brake combo still would not reconnect the drive as reliably it should.

Then I found my old 7 mm spanner lying behind a pile of tires, so now I had two. Later, after perusing the local internet for a velospeed wrench, as shown in the 'Russian' videos, I saw that a lot of old bicycle wrenchs have a square hole in them to fit the axle. Then I remembered that I have such a wrench... Off to the garage I went, and sure enough it had the required 7 mm square hole in it. A week later, while sorting out a puncture repair kit, I noticed it too included a wrench with the same square hole in it. Argh!


Everything I need to keep one end of the axle in place while I adjust the hub at the other end...

On the up side I did come across a couple of old Romets on my trip, and one was a Jubilat. I stood Blue next to it, and they shared exactly the same type of frame, so finally I knew for sure that mine is a Jubilat 2 and not the more commonplace Wigry. It had been a long and confusing path, as all the sources had suggested that the Jubilat had 24" wheels, while mine have 20" wheels. Given how much a Wigry frame has changed since the 1970s, it took a lot of looking before I noticed that the Jubilat has an extra stiffener tube welded between the crank tube and the folder hinge - on the underside. The upside is that 20" wheels are freely available secondhand, on folders, BMX and kids bikes. It would be handy to find one with a working 'torpedo' coaster brake hub - or even a SRAM or Sturmey Archer hub for that matter.

Interestingly the Jubilat 2 has its seat stays welded to the seat tube below the seat post clamp, while the original Jubilat, like most old Romets, had the seat stays bolted to the seat tube as part of the seat stem clamp. Therefore, once the seat post rusts in place, any loosening of the seat clamp lever may only become obvious when the rear of the frame starts to flex. I suppose that such a design was cheaper on materials and manufacturing, important for a Poland of the 1950s and 1960s as a land of shortages of almost everything, including such basics as shoes. Every year the news reported that, oh no, once more, there was an inadequate supply of bailer twine for the farmers, so it kind of makes sense.


Jubilat 2, still a daily ride. Compare its level of equipment with the red one in an earlier post (and the rather nice front light). Looks like it is still regularly ridden, and while it certainly has a later paint job than mine it is still the old-type frame design. Worringly, it appears to be lacking the locking lever on the folding hinge, maybe it is held together by wire.

Oh, by the way, if you find yourself in dire need of a 7 mm spanner while passing through this part of Poland, I can point you towards a stash of them.

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Old 10-29-20, 03:16 AM
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Most of Poland is relatively flat, and this region where I have lived for the past twenty odd years the land gently undulates, cut through with the occassional river valley and plenty of rather cute dry gulleys that have seen centuries of wagon use. It is all part of a former inland sea, basically sea bottom sand with a thin skim of soil on top. This makes it ideal for fixies, single-speeders and coaster brakes, and if little old ladies can survive without hand brakes then I thought so could I. This saves a tiny bit of weight, a little bit of maintenance, improves reliability, cleans up the look and does away with the rather flexible plastic brake lever. Lots of wins! What's more, the great benefit of all that sand is the lack of slippery clay and the quicker draining puddles, although it is a poor surface for tarmac as it easily breaks up and washes away from the edges of the road. However, there are a lot of unsurfaced lanes available to ride between the strip fields and through forests, which compact nicely in damp weather rather than turn into the kind of boot-sucking quagmires I grew up with. Now I remember why, as a kid, I spent so much time with my dog at the beach in winter.

After completing the paintjob and the general cleaning up of the styling on Tigger, there was a fair pile of parts left over. Most of the styling beyond the paint job involved not refitting anything deemed inessential, so the excess parts become available for other projects. There are still some things to do, like finalising the seat and handlebar positions, and sorting the electrics, but anything else beyond this means first hunting down some parts. Like off-road tires.

The front brake from Tigger, nicely painted black because I stripped and chucked it in the spray box along with actual things I needed painted, could be Blue's new back brake. A back brake would mean that I could fit another kind of hub on the back of Blue, if I can manage to turn up an old Sturmey Archer / SRAM / Shimano 3-speed hub, making Blue a better shopper for those places located on the other side of those numerous steep-sided valleys and gulleys. With the addition of a longer brake cable and a bit of fiddling to space the long mounting bolt intended to fit a set of forks, and it should fit. While I am at it, turning up a pair of metal brake levers would not go amiss.

I have seen those arguments on the Internet where someone claims he can prove that one only requires a front brake, but they fail to cover basic situations where someone has average calliper brakes, wet leaves and a lot of shopping - particularly that sack of spuds plus carrots and other root vegetables in the rear basket. The sum total of the latter is unlikely to allow the rear wheel to lift before the probably shuddering front brake manages to bring the whole lot to a stop. I have seen babcias (grandmothers) do it solely on their coaster brakes, probably because they they failed to read up on the subject on the internet. So I want a rear brake on my shopper, but not one that is going to cost more than a bike used as a low-speed root vegetable transporter.

In removing the coaster brake wheel from Blue, or at least the hub if I fancy some wheel rebuilding, I then enter the exciting realm (ahem) of picking up a spare (and cheap) front wheel plus a pair of off-road tires so that I have two relatively easily alternative city and rural wheel sets.

Anyway, the reassembly of Tigger has progressed well, not that there has been much left to refit. The tires on Blue were hard and plasticky, with a tendency to bite as you levered them over the rim using your fingers. Those on Tigger, although coming out of the same factory at the same time, were pleasantly rubbery and slipped over those rims like they were coming home to mama. The tread pattern also looked better: modern and racy, as opposed to Blue's old and pedestrian.

I dropped the saddle height on tigger to BMX level, as it is to be ridden predominantly in the standing position. The handlebars in the standard position do not feel quite right, and could do with being positioned further forward. All I need is the curved handlebar post found on certain models of Wigry and Flaming, and potentially the handlebar from one of Romet's BMX-style kids' bikes, to keep it all in the family. These kind of things are freely available on the internet for little money.


Tigger taking shape, now I just need to finish off the details and it will be ready for the road.

If I am lucky, the said kids' bike would have 20" wheels and a three speed hub. Back in the days of my old Carlton Continental road bike, i.e. the 1970s, I spent a lot of time riding off road as I enjoy exploring everywhere. I would fit a standard treaded tire of the era to the rear and a 'racing' tire to the front as a compromise between grip at the rear in mud and security in cornering at speed while on the road. This was, after all, the time before mountain bikes. Today, as I can afford a spare set of wheels and tires, I feel this is the way to go, now that suitable tires are readily available. Summer tires and winter tires, what a dream!

Rather than buying a donor bike, there is another option, and that is to keep scouring the roadsides on dustbin emptying days, as well as my regular dumpster scouting, in case someone is throwing a bike away. I have the perfect area in mind: family houses, aging owners with a fair income, willing just to throw stuff out as not worth their time to sell it.

ON other matters, while I do not need any brake other than the coaster brake, I do have to retain a bell to make a bike legal. Both bikes had a nice looking if not magnicent chromed metal bell, although not classic Romet ones, but the mechanism inside relied on some cheap plastic. With my memories of bells from the 1970s with mechanisms that quickly corroded to uselessness, I was not sure whether the cheap plastic was astep back or forward. At least Blue's had already broken before I started using it, and hence before I got attached to it. I removed the now useless plastic and two washers used for the ringing and quietly screwed the top back on.

After riding Tigger for a while, the bell began to ring to itself, every time I went over some bump. I spun the chrome top off only to find that one of the steel washers had vanished, along with part of the plastic frame. I didn't mind the losof the latter, but the washer would have been nice. I think the trouble was that I had rotated the bell to face forward, and the feeble plastic frame was unable to withstand the massive forces of gravity. I added the remaining washer to my fasteners collection, and figured that no one reasonable would expect one of those bells not to have corroded up on such an old bike. The funny thing is that I had only rotated the bell position so that it would not get damaged when I stood the bike upsidedown to work on the wheels. Ho hum.

Other than that, while out riding Blue, I happened to pass by a local bike shop, poked away in a container behind a carpark, and so well camouflaged that I was unaware of its existence until searching for Romet parts stockists on the net. Anyway, look what I found:


'Lux' it says, so it must be true.

A Romet Sokoł Lux, I had seen a few pictures but this one was the first I had knowingly seen in the flesh. It is like a Romet Wigry but with better specs, and generally made for export to Western countries for the dollars that Soviet countries so desperately needed to remain afloat, under the 'Universal' brand instead of 'Romet'. While the Wigry featured a front hand brake and a coaster brake hub, the Lux had front and rear hand brakes and a Shimano 3 speed hub. I have no idea how many were made or exported, or even where they were exported, but I would buy one. 'Sokoł' means 'hawk', and for some reason in the 1970s both Romet (bicycles and mopeds) and WSK (helicopters and small bikes) decided to start naming their product variants after birds, often the same birds. So a Romet Gil is a non-folding shopper, but otherwise much like a Wigry, while the WSK Gil is a bog-standard 125cc 2-stroke bike that I would not even bother to mention were it not for the fact that the WSK factory is about 10 miles away, alongside Lublin Airport.

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Old 11-06-20, 07:39 AM
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When we bought a new front basket to make Blue more useful, we used a shop we happened to come across while visiting a convenient 24h pharmacy, standing outside at 2 metre intervals until we each got bored enough to go and explore. Funnily enough, even in a bike shop one cannot get away from sexism, with all the boy tools and toys hung up on prime display, with child's bikes and kit a close second. The baskets, in the women's department, were at the back, in an untidy pile on the floor, where I had to pick through the pile to find the right mounting parts to go with my choice of basket. My choice being a plain black perforated steel affair, rather than one of the basketweave examples. Not that I have anything against basketware per se, as I am very fond of a well made basket, but since I plan on bolting a plastic fruit and vegetable box on the back I would rather something that continues the theme. Later, after I had found a black plastic fruit and veg basket in a dumpster and mounted it at the rear, I wondered why I wasted my money on a front basket when I could have had a plastic box for the front as well. Such is the nature of social habits - where all our first thoughts are really things that we have seen or learnt about before, where the brain lazily checks its memory first as the quickest route to an answer. Doing something original is first about rejecting everything you suspect as coming from your or someone else's memory, then being brave enough to present it to a world unready for your original thought. And then kicking yourself when you forget to do it.

Indeed, value-for-money or not, the shop basket went straight on with just a small amount of spanner work, right onto the stem and axle mounts already fitted to my bike from new. Some of the spare brackets for the front basket for Blue and Tigger were put straight to use in mounting the new-old vege basket on the rear. Initially I used the spring clamp on the rear rack to help hold the basket in position, but it distorted the basket and I found myself partly sitting on the basket where it was pushed around the saddle a bit. However, it passed its 'picking up the shopping at the market' test, with a whole load of potatoes and other root vegetables, and then I happily remounted the basket a bit further back.



Blue with new-old rear vege basket - from fine old lady to farm truck in one easy move

Having the basket on the back makes things easier when the bike is upsidedown, as you can balance it on the handlebar ends and the rear basket, making it less prone to wobbling while working on the undersides. And yes, it regularly gets turned over, even on the street, when the coaster brake hub will not re-engage. I have pumped a lot of WD40 through it to wash out some of the grease, which has made a vast improvement, yet not enough. You can hear the elements clicking away in the hub, but they fail to engage. If I had any kind of spare wheel I would swop them over and then strip this hub down.

Tigger and Blue have quite a bit of chrome, some of which shows a little to a lot of corrosion, especially on the wheels. I sprayed Tigger's wheels black, wishing all the time that I had built something to allow me to respoke a wheel. Or that I even possessed a spoke adjusting tool. Some minor research on the net led me to trying out the old trick of scrunching up a sheet of kitchen foil into a ball and using it to scratch away at the rust - with water as a lubricant. It was surprisingly effective, although the surface needs protecting later. I suppose clear lacquer is an option, but I had to make do with polish.

Talking of shiny things, I wonder what happened to my barbell bicycle spanner from my childhood? It worked well, aiding me in the process of fixing innumerable punctures and the like. I even had my dad's, although that had a nickel coating instead of chrome and had long faded to grey. Probably, like many of my tools, they reside in my brother's shed, across the sea. I bought a new one some fifteen years ago, after we bought these Jubilats, and it languished in a box, seeing almost no work since. Its time was ripe, it had the opportunity of participating in the Velocet hub project, and one of those ball ends popped right off. Hurrah to another key fob! And to a bit more space in my toolbox.

While the rear basket was off to repositon it, I did a test mounting of Tigger's front brake to be used as a back brake on Blue. The whole rack had to come off to do this, as there was no way that the calliper was going to slide past it. It mounted quite easily onto the bracket, as I happened to have a 40 mm long M6 hex connector for joining threaded rod. Being brass it is easy to machine. I popped a 6 mm drill down two thirds of its length, so that now it acts as both spacer and nut on the very long brake mounting stud required to previously mount it through the forks. It had to come off again as I had no cable, the barrel ending on the cables being noticeably smaller than the MTB style ones commonly available. The size of the ending looks familiar, maybe the Raleighs of my youth had a similar ending, but here it might be a special order job at a Romet shop as I cannot see any online.

Even with a cable I still need to route it somehow. It is very tempting to send the cable through the down tube, using the holes designed for the dynamo lighting wire. While I am not likely to fold the bike often, if ever, it would exit the downtube on the wrong side. However, if I found/purchased one of those metal tubes used to redirect the cable on rear V brakes it might solve that problem and give a cleaner look. Well, if one can use the word 'cleaner' for a shopper festooned with baskets.

Blue's rear brake remains very much on the back burner.

#romet #rower #bicycle

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Old 11-06-20, 07:13 PM
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Enjoyable reading! I like the way you use your folders for everyday chores. I am car free as well so everywhere I go is bu pedal power.
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Old 11-07-20, 08:54 AM
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Originally Posted by 3speedslow
Enjoyable reading! I like the way you use your folders for everyday chores. I am car free as well so everywhere I go is bu pedal power.
Thanks, working on them and using them are also good therapy from work, I keep one chained outside my block ready for an instant escape...
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Old 11-13-20, 05:14 AM
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Ha ha, I now have a new bell for Tigger, which I purchased the other day while looking for some brake cable for Blue's rear brake. It is black, innocuous and I have great hopes of it remaining functional for more than a few weeks. With it rotated forwards I can even hang my keys from it as I navigate the two automatic gates and garage door that stand between my block's bicycle stand and my garage. All this might seem rather old technology, with no electronic equipment, tubeless tires, carbonfibre or 12, 15 or maybe 2 dozen sprocket cassettes - and I rather think I may be boring those readers willing to trade up their BBs and shifters for the next generation. But here is the thing, I am an R&D engineer, and development has two parts: minimalist and maximalist. Imagine, for a moment, that quite out of the blue you were asked to develop some novel form of transport technology, your choice. Where would you start? Basic development is minimalist, because when moving into a new area the only way to begin to understand that new area is by minimising as many variables as we can. Once our development is established as a success we then move to maximalisation, where the great number of people who now join us allows us to start playing with all the variables. A great deal of what happens on this forum is later development maximalisation talk. Tigger and Blue is minimalisation, two diverging bikes that eventually will combine into one concept. It might not be a world-changing one, but then nor is buying that next bike or cassette.

The other day I decided to sort the basement, partly because it was long overdue but mostly to free up some room for at least one of the bikes and have space left over for the emergency food stocking we have to do. So there I was, sorting and lugging huge amounts of accumulated nothingness to the dumpster, when in one box I found another, older, shoebox marked 'Bicycle'. It was a magic box, a trove or toyshop of forgotten bicycle lights, various mounting brackets and even an unused bike lock. I had just bought one of the latter the other day, so now Blue and Tigger can each have their own. I am clearly living the highlife now. The lights included Tigger's missing and broken-from-new rear light and the front lights for both bikes. The front lights are a bit cheap looking internally, but look ideal, especially for Tigger's minimalism.

Adding the front light to Blue was as easy as working on a bike can be, almost as easy as mounting the new bell, so I was duty bound to make the process harder. The mounting bracket was a straight swop for the lower mounting bracket for the front basket, but then I chose not to use the original thin wiring wound around the frame and onto the terminals, as done at the factory. I did look to see if I could find any thin terminals to fit in my local shops, but without success and I didn't feel like hunting the Internet. Not that there is anything wrong with the internet, I just place certain limits on my Internet purchases: vital and used items that I cannot find elsewhere. I was able to solder some of my thick wire straight onto part of the terminal, therefore proving that special terminals were not vital. This wire is solid copper, no strands, which makes it ideal to bend to fit along the tortuous route it has to go. Clip it on, and it stays in place! So there I was, riding my first ever bike with dynamo powered lights, front and rear. Whir, whir, whir.

To continue on this enlightening theme, with the nights drawing in and the sun too lazy to get up in the morning, the other week I ordered a small rear light for Tigger off Alegro, the local internet selling site. It is a cute little thing that probably dates from the 1960s, with a stubby black body. Later ones switched to that grey plastic typical for bike lights of the 1970s, but black is my theme colour for the 'working' parts. Anyway, my bottle dynamo and front light are also black, as is the roll of solid-copper wire I purchased (reluctantly) for the rewiring.


The 'rivet' is just out of sight (but see how the bracket is not square with the light), but these are the components I bought, classic 1960s Polish bike tail light.

I took the light completely apart, rolling my eyes at the wire just wound around the bulb mount and the non-original bulb terminal riveted very badly through to the L-shaped mount on the outside using a plain aluminium rivet. It was the right type of rivet, but installed with just a hammer and plain punch instead of a pair of rivet setting tools. As expected, the rivet bulged in the middle, forced the bracket up from the lamp body, and no amount of hammering would then keep it securely in place. A pop rivet would have been a far better solution. Anyway, I filed away the head (read: 'mashed up end') of the rivet, drilled out the rivet hole in the lamp body to 4 mm for a more secure mounting, but then had no plain bolt that would fit, just a cap head. More filing later and the cap head was small enough to fit in the body such that the bulb screwed down onto it to make the earth connection. In the future I could do with finding a piece of springy plated steel to fit in there somehow between the bolt and the bulb to lessen the chance of the bulb unscrewing on a bumpy road.

I installed and soldered on a new wire, applied some teflon tape to the lens thread to lessen the chance of that unscrewing as well, and cut and filed a new L-bracket from a DIY store as the original wouldn't let the light clear the seat stay when mounted to the dynamo mount. I had moved the dynamo from the front of the bike to the back for a cleaner look, and it seemed to make sense to bolt everything in the same place.

I understand that I could replace the incandescent bulb with an LED one, and one with a built in rectifier would be nice since the dynamo is AC rather then DC, but something of my youthful enthusiasm for old school bulbs still remains. I used to balance a clay pot full of candlewax on top of my 60W bedside lamp bulb to melt it, to pour in modelling clay molds I had made of different objects. Heat can be good, and today our apartment is partly heated by the halogen lamps they use in the apartment below. I like incandescent, in appropriate quantities.


Dynamo mounted on the 'safe' side of the seat stay, so that there is less chance of the dynamo jamming between the wheel and the seat stay if the dynamo comes loose, and of course my new-old tail light. This was just the layout test, of course.

You might remember that several weeks ago I covered the saga of the 7 mm spanners, as I struggled to hold the coaster brake axle on Blue. Well, with the cap head of the M4 bolt filed down, there was no way of preventing it from rotating while fitting a nyloc nut. I was able to tighten a plain nut, but that meant adding a second as a lock nut. All well and good, except my ancient 7 mm spanner was thicker than either of the nuts. Out comes the new cheapo spanner I had bought, and lo it was thinner than the nuts, allowing me to hold the lower nut while tightening the upper lock nut. The new 7 mm spanner hence returns to grace, and earns a place in my regular toolbox.

The next challenge was to fold the bike and feed the thick gauge, single strand wire up through the down tube to power the front light. It was not a difficut task, just fiddly, and the stiffness of the wire meant it could be bent to the shapes required and then strapped down with none of the untidy thin wire wound around the tubes that many dynamo installations seem to enjoy. To clean up the effect even more I ran a piece of thick black heatshrink tube into the stem, with the wire inside it, so it comes out of the down tube in a smooth arc to the front light, looking a bit like a brake cable. I am not fully satisfied with the wiring close into the dynamo and lamps, but I did the best I could while kneeling on the floor of a cold garage. Did I mention the artritus? It's a bugger.

#romet #rower #bicycle #wigry #jubilat #shopper #poland #polska

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Old 11-20-20, 04:59 AM
  #14  
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This week I decided that the back ache I was getting from bending over my current 40 cm (15 inch) high workbench was too much of a nuisance. It was so low that I was already doing some work on a small and lightweight plastic picnic table instead. Jobs like soldering wires on stuff, where you need to be close enough to see what you are doing without kneeling. The summer being firmly over, the picnic table and chairs that normally reside in the back of the car moved into the garage, and the combination of picnic chair and table has proved comfortable, relaxing even. A cup of coffee from a flask, something to nibble on, quite the home from home.

My present workbench had been knocked together from unwanted furniture elements found in the basement passageways in our block. It has done good service, but the other day I found the front from a large bathroom cabinet leaning against our dumpster. I assume it was from a bathroom, deduced solely on the basis of a sink and shower cabin base abandoned close by, but I could see it was the perfect height for my workbench. Conveniently, I also had a couple of pieces left over from the pallet (or 'palette' as the translators I work with insist on spelling it) and the single but smaller door left over from my bicycle tool and parts 'stockroom' project. Much of the material I can get hold of dates from the PRL era, from former lounge and and kitchen cabinets that someone probably had to queue outside the shop all day to get. The queues became so endemic that it was common practice to make a queue list so that you did not actually have to stay there all the time. Having a retired member of the family around was handy: they could get down to the required shop at dawn and wait around most of the day chatting with their friends, a tactic especially useful for meat shops with their irregular deliveries.



The original version of my workbench, complete with unique and surprisingly useful brackets that came with the board.

With most of the major projects on the bikes complete, I was feeling at a bit of a loss as to what to do next. I have come to enjoy my time in the garage, away from my apartment and the ever-present work computer there. The world is run by managers who are promoted by other managers because they talk well in a meeting, while problem solving before the problems arise takes a different kind of thinking. How much of our day is spent running to meet manager targets, always with the excuse that such and such cannot be done as there is no time or money. If we were to spend more time thinking about how to do something than actually doing it, then we could predict change better, that at the moment no one wants to hear and yet comes anyway, in a flurry of chaos and panic. The pleasure of minimising one's work space and tools is that everything becomes a fresh challenge that leads to surprising opportunities, largely free of chaos.

I sliced through the current legs of the bench, also known as former drawer carcasses. They were up to the task for the original workbench configuration, but now they were far too thin for the larger forces. Instead I have used them as convenient brackets to which the new wood can be mounted, minimising the need for tedious measuring and holding things in position. Growth, like the wood I am using. It goes without saying that my minimalist collection of fasteners was inadequate to the task, which meant holding everything together temporarily with whatever I could find lying around while I drew up a shopping list.

So there we have it, a bathroom cabinet front as the new front support for the workbench, two pallet timbers as the rear legs, and a sawn up PRL-era cabinet door as two stiffeners. The latter are just the right height to support a shelf under the bench top, and it should not be too hard to find the material.

Indeed I soon had a whole load of former cabinetry, mostly for a home office project, but certainly there should be enough left over for continued workbench development. The home office project was far simpler than I had imagined, now that I have a decent bench and no more kneeling on the garage floor like back in the spring. With a shelf I now have somewhere to put my two power tools and the radio that wifie nearly threw out, without them getting in the way while I do other tasks. You might be thinking that things are getting luxurious, but then another dumpster yielded a black vinyl office chair with only minor splits to the seams of the seat cushion. Now I can sit comfortably to drink my coffee, with my feet up on a workbench clear of tools, listening to the radio - or tape cassettes if I could find any.



Raising of the workbench. There were no stiffeners or shelf fitted yet, and more fasteners were required, but it was ready for an initial test here.

Still to do is to replace the pallet parts and add some features to make working on the bikes easier.

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Old 11-27-20, 04:57 AM
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As luck would have it, a few days ago someone abandoned a small girl's bicycle down by the dumpster. I had come across a similar one a week earlier, with a crushed front wheel, but I had been unable to carry it away as I was not on Blue, and it had gone before I returned. Such is dumpster life. This tiny pink machine lacked a chain and had suffered at the hands of an unskilled mechanic, such that the rear sprocket bearing only had two balls left in it. With my workbench still in test mode, one abandoned child's bike meant the ideal opportunity to try it out. I carefully placed this huge machine on the workbench, and it did not even tremble or creak. Success!

I quite enjoyed stripping the bike down, as everything was so light with nothing unwieldy, and very little in the way of rust to make things difficult. In fact the missing components meant that I met some of it half way along the road to disassembly. The wheels, once I can source some replacement balls, are perfect for those little trolley projects, or maybe even for a lightweight trailer behind Blue, or will be once I replace the bearings at the rear as the one on the sprocket side had disintegrated. The rear brake is chromed pressed steel, and no worse quality than those on my Romets. I had sprayed the lightly rusty front one from Tigger with the intention of using it as a rear brake for Blue, but now I have a shiny chrome one that will take less effort to fit. I cleaned up and stored away most of the parts, except the crummy and broken ABS chain guard and tiny saddle, as many are standard bicycle items that look remarkably similar to those found on my Romets or could serve other purposes. Another first was removing all the cups from the steering and bottom bracket, not a difficult task but one that I do not remember tackling before, not even back in the 1970s when I first overhauled any of my bikes.



Every budding bicycle maintainer should start with one of these. I assume the smashed hole in the chain guard was due to the use of training wheels.

As the frame is pink and very light, I decided the best thing would be to hang it on the wall as a decoration. All in all, a pleasant hour or so messing around with spanners, and a small stock of useful parts.

Thinking about it later, it was the same bike that had been squashed into the bike rack and chained to a normal sized bike. It stayed there all summer, the girl probably grew out of it, and who needs another crummy old kids bike? Other than me, of course.

Remember that I said weeks ago that it would be nice to find a pair of steel brake levers to replace the flexible plastic ones on Blue and originally on Tigger? Well now I have one steel lever and another one in a metal and plastic MTB style. It looks like someone 'upgraded' their daughter's first bike to feature twin brakes, or maybe, like Blue and Tigger, the bike got whatever was available on the production line at the factory. Still, with twin brakes and no chain, I cannot say I would have been best pleased with the trade-off.

While the saddle was irretrievably tiny and binned after removal of the stem, the handlebars are quite nice, in an inoffensive shade of pale green kind of way. They are about 50 mm (2 inches) shorter than those on Blue and Tigger, and are in the cross-stiffened BMX style. Would they fit Tigger, I wonder? That and other questions remain to be answered.

Many decades ago I had a pair of aluminium 'sports' mudguards on my lovingly much abused Carlton Continental. They were not very efficient at keeping the water off the back of my jacket, but at least they never split like the pretty plastic 'Bluemels' originally fitted had. I know that in some parts of the world people call them fenders, but I have good reason to stick with my choice of description. Not only were my sports mudguards good looking, cheap, low maintenance and reliable, but if they got choked with mud during some wet off-roading in the clay-based land where I grew up they could easily be unblocked with nothing but a stick from a hedgerow. Especially as this was before the era of V brakes, when I had to make do with a set of Weinmann centre-pull calliper brakes, and it kept the mud out the pivoting parts. The funny thing is that I see people on this forum complain about such brakes on steel rims, but we knew no better, accepted brake noise as normal and stopped well in both wet weather and dry. Clay could be a worry, but more likely to slurp your wheel into the ground or accumulate en-masse around the frame and under the mudguard long before a smear on the braking surfaces became an issue. More 'Why have I stopped?" than "Why can't I stop!"

I still like the look of sports mudguards, and Tigger's chrome steel full mudguards were paper thin and already damaged. A bit of masking tape, card template, pen and jigsaw later and I had a neatish set of 'sports' mudguards ready for some paint. Much as I like them, I am still not fully convinced I need them, because even if I find some wet clay I have no calliper brakes to jam. I did see a nice set of aluminium ones advertised secondhand, but the fact that mine were made from scrap, weigh little and do take away the slightly dorky bare fork look means they can stay. For now at least. The remaining uncut mudguard now lies on its back as a temporary store for those wobbly pipes and cables that otherwise get in the way, like heat-shrink tube, brake cables that refuse to stay rolled or suffer badly from split ends.



Black, short and mean. The front lamp is only loosely attached so I can decide whether I like the location.

Like anything new, I managed to screw up the rear one, when I put the stiffener on the upper surface of the mudguard because I wanted to avoid any collision between it and the tire. As the mudguards are of such thin material I made this load-spreading bracket, except I forgot the original mudguard bracket on the rear frame, and it collided with that instead. Since they were already painted, I decided to move the front mudguard to the rear and vice versa, but now the stiffener is in full view. I should take the mudguard off and rebuild it, but since I am not quite sure whether I will end up mounting the front lamp over the mudguard, I might need to do something different anyway.

I have, do and will procrastinate on these issues.

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Old 12-04-20, 05:10 AM
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And so I continue to procrastinate.

Procrastination generates continued bad press from lazy gits. As an editor I get to read all kinds of interesting research, and some of the currently most relevant relates to the need for schools and universities to run courses online, where the time some teachers normally wasted on commuting they now spend on research, analysis and report writing. Anyway, it turns out that when a task is set online with a deadline the first people to finish are those who will get good grades, followed the middle runners who now have to contend with writing something that the front-runners had not already covered, and finally the just-in-timers, most of whom are the kind of people heading for a fail - and yet among them are the outliers who have spent the time turning over the problem consciously and subconsciously, and hence typically produce the most original work. Procrastination is thinking time, often confused with laziness or indecision by people so set on the goal that they miss the field. Think about it, why would we need a word like procrastination to cover laziness and indecision when we already have such great words for them?

Anyway, not too far away from where we live is a large wood with the exciting name of 'Stary Bór', or 'old forest'. It is not that large, and yet large enough for a lot of people to spend all day in the never-ending search for mushrooms (a national pastime) or just an hour or so jogging. Mostly flattish, with a minor slope up from the river to the east, bounded on two sides by the railway lines to Kraśnik and Warsaw, it is cut through by a grid of straight tracks to allow easy management of the timber This also makes it easy enough for me to navigate without much effort, although my wife, a city girl, finds the lack of track names at the junctions a bit inconvenient. In the slightly upper northwestern corner it becomes delightfully gullied as it approaches the Warsaw line and the lovely little valley on the other side of the tracks, with the paths tending to wander and the (even) sandier soil encouraging the growth of trees with little in the way of undergrowth. This makes it popular for joggers, walkers, kids and summer weekend MTB riders, while for the latter many trails feature regular felled trees as riding challenges. The two sides of the wood that fail to feature railways open out onto undulating fields, where corn sways in the warmer months and I can disappear to explore almost empty roads and field lanes.

Definitely my kind of area.


While I like to live on my wheels, wifie loves a spot of Nordic walking. When I say Nordic Walking please do not confuse it with Nordic Dragging, popular among older ladies looking for an excuse (I do not know why they need one) to go out for a walk. She is fast with those sticks, but not as fast as Tigger, so I have plenty of time to enjoy the treescape, disappear down side tracks and try out any other challenges I find along the way. Not all of the latter, of course, as me falling off a bike these days is like dropping a sack of wrenches, but much more painful. It also makes sense to undertake the more interesting ones when wifie is not looking; not that she is a particular control freak, but it breaks her heart if I get hurt.There is even more to see than trees, trains and mushroom pickers, because not so far away there is a small airfield for sporting enthusiasts, where every weekend there is gliding and parachuting, both of which involve the use of Russian Antonov AN-2 biplanes. You know when they are flying because you can hear the distinct beat of the nine cylinder radial engines as they fly low overhead. Who today gets to regularly enjoy a biplane drifting across the sky?

We folded the back seats down in the car, placed a rug in there, then folded Tigger and slipped it in as well. Maybe for Christmas I ought to invest 100 zloty in a canvas bag designed to fit and carry the slightly smaller Romet Wigry? Or maybe I should make my own? I had to take a 13mm spanner with me for the steering stem because I still need to order/find the kind of lever nut they commonly fitted on older models. Only for the steering, though, as the seat is normally in the lowest position anyway, a la BMX. I realised as we struggled to keep each half of the frame and a wayward front wheel together that some kind of strap would have been in order. I do have a pair of bungee straps somewhere that should do for now, but something smaller and less elastic would be nice, ideally that could be clipped on with one hand. Overall, it didn't take up much room in the car, which was pleasing as when we go on trips these days we put all our stuff in large beach bags instead of suitcases. Beach bags are very good if you travel a lot by car and do not need a suit with you, as you can easily sort which stuff you want to take up to your room and leave everything else in the car, and then if your room is tight on storage you just plonk the bag down on a chair or table and use it as your wardrobe. If we chucked a light rug over the bike, the bags could sit on top of it, without any rubbing or bumping noises.Maybe instead of a carrying bag I should be considering folding pedals?

There is just so much to procrastinate over.


Me with Tigger beside our car, Me with Tigger against a background of spoil from the rail track upgrades going on further in the background.
A short drive and we were there, with plenty of parking available in front of some nearby allotments. Tigger only took moments to unfurl, and then we were off, the bumpy entrance road to the parking now seeming smooth and merely undulating. What fun! One of the reasons for choosing the forest is that many of the tracks through it have been strengthened with grit or small rocks, which is excellent terrain for wifie's Nordic walking as well as Tigger on its road tires. I have been riding around our block and the local roads and car parks almost everyday since getting the wheels back on, experimenting with things like seat and handlebar height, but this was the first time off road. It did tend to spin the rear wheel on loose gravel and slide sideways sideways on steep and muddy cambers, but otherwise everything was fine.

More than fine, as small wheels and a short wheelbase make for ideal turning on narrow tracks, although using a coaster brake hub is an art in not back-pedalling unintentionally mid-maneuver. At one point I did get a wet foot when I accidentally stopped by back pedalling while attempting to ride between ruts, but other than that everything was as good as I could imagine it to be. As we were in the forest we did not have to wear masks, so when we were not passing other people I could pull mine down and help prevent my glasses from steaming up.

As the morning wore on I navigated us along a muddy track that took us straight toward a largely unsurfaced lane that runs along one side of Stary Bór, confusingly also called Stary Bór, and not far from the homestead of our niece's babcia, or grandma. She does not get to see many people now she is retired, and the pandemic does not help, and often she might only see her son and a neighbour throughout the day. She was therefore pleased to see us, and supplied us with food and tea while I showed her how to use her new food mixer. Her cottage is wooden, as is her barn, while her current problem is unwelcome visits from wild pigs that sleep deep in the forest by day, then get into her garden by night to 'pork' on whatever they can uproot. And they know everything worth knowing about uprooting.

After we had greeted the neighbour’s dog and investigated the collection of bicycles sheltering in the barn, we had to bid farewell, take our bicycle/sticks and set off along Stary Bór, alongside Stary Bór, past the cottages of other residents of this quiet corner of the city, until we arrived back at the car, tired but very pleased.

#romet #rower #bicycle #wigry #jubilat #shopper #poland #polska
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Old 12-07-20, 06:52 PM
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Upgrading the machines and actually using them, a great combination! Again a good read!
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Old 12-09-20, 04:00 AM
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Originally Posted by 3speedslow
Upgrading the machines and actually using them, a great combination! Again a good read!
Thanks, and writing about them surprisingly helps me as well in deciding what to do next!
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Old 12-11-20, 04:29 AM
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Do you remember the kid’s bike from several posts ago? I had been considering the purchase of a set of used handlebars online, but on further consideration I decided it should not be too difficult to extend the bars of the BMX-style handlebars from the kid’s bike. Say by 40 mm on each end. Further, as one might say, all I would need was an old steel mop handle, as they are about 20 mm diameter and should slide into the bars, or some 22 mm tube from somewhere and just neatly crush one end to fit them into the bar, or even some 22 mm wooden dowel that I could sand down to fit. Sure, the latter would require strapping my drill to my bench, screwing a headless bolt into one end of the dowel to fit it onto the chuck, and some 'lathe' work with my file. Or at least, these were my initial plans


Cute, and ready to be savaged, eh, I meant 'salvaged'...

It turned out that mop handles were out of season, I could not really justify a whole length of dowel from the store, so that just left looking at random stuff in dumpsters, checking the measurements with a small pair of callipers that my grandad had given me some 40 years ago. Many dumpsters later, and I found a sofa with armrests supported on some chrome tubing that might fit, and all held on by four 10 mm headed screws.After a brief return to my garage for a suitable spanner, the sofa arm was securely strapped to the basket on the back of Blue, and my treasure and I were heading back to base.I soon discovered that the straight tube, while smaller in diameter than the handlebar was still too large to fit inside it. It felt like a bit of a waste, except for the exercise. I then remembered the seat tube from the kid's bike, which turned out to be the same diameter as the handlebars. Ah ha - out with the tape measure and jigsaw, and within five minutes I had a pair of bar ends by simply cutting the seat tube into two. I was still eyeing up the handle of my garage broom, with dreams of epoxy bonding lengths into the handlebars to mount my new extensions, but it was saved when I realised it might be possible to split one of the sofa tubes lengthways with some careful jigsaw work. Slightly surprisingly, it worked, as long as I leaned the jigsaw 45 degrees forward so that the blade did not hit the other side of the tube. One lengthways cut, and then lop the required length off the bar. Next I hammered the rather springy steel until one one edge of the lengthwise split went under the other. I then squashed one end a bit with my G-clamp, and carefully tapped one of the new handlebar ends onto it as far as it would go. I then reapplied the G-clamp to the other end and tapped that end all the way into the handlebar. All I had to do was the same at the other end of the handlebar. It involved more hammering than that, of course, because anything springy enough to produce an adequate clamping force was not going to bend easily to my will.
Rather than adding 40mm to each end it was more like 60mm, and the result does not quite look like other handlebars. However, I now have a viable alternative that feels secure without welding, brazing, bonding or much cost except effort and time. Now I just need to apply a bit of paint, watch it dry and then try it out.

For a bit of relaxation after all that cutting and hammering I decided to review my options now that I have three sets of brakes lying around. I selected the rear brake off the kid's bike as having the shortest mounting bolt, but it will still require a spacer as Romets use a standardardised metal plate between the seat stays rather than a cross tube. The plate is drilled not only for a brake/mudguard mount but also a separate rack mount, so yes most racks available would require p-clips to fit them. The selected callipers had the most worn, but also rather cute white brake pads, so I swopped them with the set from the front. I also took the lever position setting screw from one of the levers and fitted it to the one from Tigger, as it had been missing from new. Just before I bagged them up for that distant future when I get around to ordering the right cable, I noticed the 50mm length of inner cable that I had lopped off to make sure that I got the right type of cable at the shop. It is so much more convincing to pop that kind of thing on the counter when faced with storeman denial, when they are too lazy to check (and yes it happens, I used to work in the stores of a large garage chain many decades ago). I thought it was typical that I had three bikes, all with the same small barrel fitting, while no one was listing them. Only then did I notice that the barrel was much smaller than the fixing hole in all three levers. The cables fit the levers, but so would the larger MTB style ones that everyone stocks. I could have bought the cable weeks ago, before I made the task more difficult by adding the rear basket.
Now I just need a tool to cut the cables and housings to length, once I buy them.


Zefir - featuring a droopy chain and as much rust as anyone could desire on two wheels

On a recent adventure ride using another bike I came across this, marked up as a Zefir and yet appearing to be a modified Jubilat. Finding hard evidence as to when and who actually produced it is difficult, as in Poland the old bicycle market is still in its infancy. If I had been on Blue or Tigger I would have put them alongside for a dimension check, but no such luck.


With trailer hitch, a masterpiece of the arc-welder's art.

One of the great advances in Soviet countries was the arc welder - as soon as electricity reached a village then welding became a possibility without all that fussing with favours, money-filled envelopes, food-stolen-from-work offered in a bag, help from brother’s cousin’s friend’s wife’s fathers every time you needed to refill a gas bottle. Plug and play - just make sure you got your rods in bulk. Trailers are worthy of a mention as well, as I have long lost count of the number of welded-together ones I have seen on farms rolling around on a pair of former motorcycle wheels - and have even seen the wheel-less donor motorcycles lying in barns. You start off with a motorcycle, and then a few years later, married, you find yourself riding around on a bicycle with a trailer fitted with your motorcycle wheels. Dreaming of a tractor, and not getting up to feed your horse.#romet #rower #bicycle #wigry #jubilat #shopper #poland #polska

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Old 12-18-20, 07:22 AM
  #20  
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Tigger mostly lives in a bicycle rack outside our block, unless there are frosts or snow, so that I can just run away from my desk, unlock it and ride into the distance. It spent some weeks locked to the fence, but the decision by the administration was taken to supply a second rack as the first was chocka with bikes that appeared in the Spring wave of fitness optimism that came with the pandemic, and what people were going to do with all that time previously used in commuting. So the first rack filled up with bikes, but the dreams died. Now there is a second rack, and Tigger is the only one that uses it.



The 'normal' bikes huddle at the other end of the bike rack, as far as possible from the dangerous Tigger hybrid.

There was a white bike, women's, that used to be locked to the fence before we had any rack, and the administration kept complaining about it until they realized a rack might make the problem go away. It did. The white bike was duly locked to the rack, and there it has stayed for the past 3-4 years, never turning a wheel, and the owner may not even live here any more. It is not of particular interest to me, but there are a few nice items on it like the chromed front headlamp...


While on the subject of things not of particular interest, a few months ago I came across an advert for bike parts that included a strange mechanism, with a brake cable attached. I thought for a while that it was not even bike related, but then I remember references to an early form of brake - the plunger brake. Instead of clamping the rim, hub or disc, it was like a piston that forced a metal of rubber pad straight down on the tire tread. This one was certainly rubber, and must have had a negative impact on tire tread life. A little effort later, and I ascertained that they had been fitted to many Romet child's bikes of the 1970s and 80s. I assumed that, like plastic pedals, it was just a cheap and practical solution for that end of the market, but this week I learned that they were also fitted to adult bikes by Romet when it was still known as ZZR, back in the 1950s and 60s.


I want one quite badly, just to try it out of course.


On other things, we sometimes need to put the car in the garage now, what with the frosts and snow. Since the bikes are no longer just squashed up against the rear wall and I plan to continue doing some work there throughout the winter, I have decided to put Blue in our basement storage. This is convenient as at some point I need to do something about its malfunctioning coaster brake, potentially even replacing the whole hub with some kind of 3-speed one, Sturmey Archer or Shimano perhaps. It would be nice to give Blue a service, as so far all I have done is fix things on the go while I focussed on Tigger.


The first stage will be to strip off the front and rear racks, along with their baskets, as that will make it significantly lighter and smaller, as well as giving better access to things like the brakes. The front wheel spokes also need resetting, as does the front hub bearing, and I can always pop a wheel off while it is folded in the basement and take it to the garage to work on it some fine weekend.


Other than that, I am planning to move Tigger’s front light up above the front mudguard. When the bike is folded, the current fork-mounted position means that it is easy to catch it on things, especially in the back of the car. I suppose I should fix the front mudguard at the same time.


I moved the work bench to the back of the garage to make room for the car, but the number of racks and mudguards stored alongside it is inconvenient. Luckily one of our neighbours decided to throw out a pair shelves, perfect for putting those awkwardly shaped and bulky objects up and out of the way, like Blue’s racks/baskets. The shelves are the floating type, but since I want something a bit stiffer in terms of brackets I headed off to the local DIY store / builder’s merchants. Much cruising later we discovered the brackets in the wood section, in a corner far, far away from the section containing all other brackets and fasteners. I selected six, popped them in my basket and we headed back to the other section to select some fasteners. The funny thing is that while I was busy selecting screws, people kept noticing the shelf brackets in our basket, then asking wifie where they were hidden in the store.


I cannot say that putting up shelves is my favorite task, but since my dad was a master builder I have picked up a few tricks along the way - such as hammering the screw in if it jams a few turns short of finishing. Now I just need a few more of those plastic fruit and veg boxes, and something to keep those mudguards under control. I now remember that I should have a wall hook lying around somewhere, which would be handy to keep tires and inner tubes out of the way while working on the wheels.


The shelves went up easier than I expected, although since they were essentially like a modern interior door I could not just screw them to the fasteners to keep them in place. Instead I attached an M4 bolt to the outer fixing, which was enough to keep the shelves from sliding around.

#romet #rower #bicycle #wigry #jubilat #shopper #poland #polska
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Old 12-23-20, 06:01 AM
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A trip to Pliszczyn

With the Christmas break upon us, I thought it would be nice to recount a recent trip we made, where one of my machines again travels further than to a local dumpster. It began the other week when wifie found a description of a new 'eco' trail on Facebook, replete with viewing tower at its midpoint. It is located on the other side of the city, in what is still a rural area in the downstream valley of our main river, the Bystryca. The city is creeping ever closer, and rural places where we walked 10-15 years ago have been completely consumed, so we feel the need to continue enjoying such places now.

We headed out on a sunday morning, the weather was mild for the time of year and slightly sunny. I gambled on finding a place to park at the midpoint, on a low hill overlooking the the valley, where they had built the small viewing tower and supplied picnic tables. This meant driving several kilometers along narrow and winding country lanes, which is the kind of thing I love anyway. The village was called Kolonia Pliszczyn, a satellite ‘colony’ settlement near the original Pliszczyn. These kolonia are common around here, with some villages having up to five of them, all neatly numbered on the map in Roman numerals when there is more than one.

We enjoyed the view, took some coffee, checked the maps and headed off, wifie with her Nordic walking sticks and me on Tigger. Dogs barked, chickens clucked, and a cat ran off to escape a local lad driving too fast in his Audi. The lane was good tarmac until we exited the other side of the village, as we rode/sticked onto the flat valley floor. Becoming gravel it twisted and turned between the drainage ditches as we left the last wooden cottages behind and headed out over the river meadows.



Tigger abandoned on the Pliszczyn meadows

The going was good for both of us, especially when the lane became a wide path and mounted a flood control embankment that crossed the valley. We could see dozens of golden dried grasses and reeds, with areas of deceptively green meadow between. Up until a few decades ago most of the small farmers here would also have a cow or two for their own needs, and these meadows formed essential sources for grazing and silage while their other fields were up on the surrounding low hills and plateaus. Now such cows are rare, with everyone buying their milk products in local supermarkets, and the only remaining impact on the immediate area we could see were the occasional rows of pollarded willows, from back when they were used to produce the raw materials for baskets and fencing. If you check out satellite pictures of the location you can see the outlines of the former strip fields on the meadow as they fade back to nothingness.

I could stop and take photographs, jump on my bike and ride ahead to the next viewpoint, while wifie enjoyed herself with her sticks. Eventually we came to a new steel bridge, to narrow for any motorised traffic except motorbikes. It passed over the river near a decaying and still rather large mill, somewhat reminiscent of a Constable painting. We love this valley, the meadows, the cornfields and green woods in the summer. There are no astounding mountains (been there, seen them) nor great oceans crashing on sandy shores (lived there), in fact everything is undulating when it is not quite flat, the roads wind or are as straight as arrows, and the only reason you may never see it is because you have never seen it in a great film. I have, and the film, Dwa Ksiezyce, is everything about the atmosphere that is so hard to capture.



Tigger tries to blend in with something more technological on the Pliszczyn meadows

On the other side of the bridge the lane became a series of concrete blocks, to take it over a wet and marshy area as we skirted around a second village, Turka, a significantly growing settlement since the 1950s for people wishing to live outside the city. The blocks soon have my handlebars rotating down if I ride standing up, so I wrench them back into position and sit instead, even though it makes for a harder ride with most of my weight on the back wheel. Still, since I am riding slowly, with frequent stops to admire the view and wait for wifie, it is hardly something I need to sweat. We passed a seating area and soon after the lane takes a hard left and we are making our way across the valley again, but with a slightly wilder and more agricultural feel. The few people we were passing dwindled to almost none, the lane becomes rougher with occasional stretches of concrete block paving, and some beautiful reed beds.

The sun, never very high at this time of the year, has clearly passed its zenith and we have entered a winter's afternoon. The end comes when we meet a tarmac road crossing the valley, with a kapliczka (shrine) on a low mound to mark the junction. Neatly maintained by locals, I spy a rake with a homemade handle and a brush stashed discretely among the wands growing around one of the three willow trees surrounding the cross and lanterns. Usually there are four trees, but over the years it is reasonable that one may have been lost.


The Bystryca River near Turka

We head back, not reluctantly as it still feels like an adventure, we stop for a rest at the seating area, and then continue on. While passing through Pliszczyn we kick a few windfall apples to make them roll down a slope, a simple pleasure we both share. Back at the tower and it is now buzzing, with five people our age seated at one of the tables and speaking loudly over their packeted biscuit and tea lunch. We break out our homemade soup and coffee.

When they leave on their much more expensive bikes they turn their nose up at my machine. It is OK, I have been there many times before, people confusing looks with performance. I used to attend various Trail Rider meets back around the UK on my home modified C70 trail bike, and the cold shoulders of the morning would become grudging admiration by the end of the day after I had outrode many of them on the more difficult trails. Books and covers...


#romet #rower #bicycle #wigry #jubilat #shopper #poland #polska
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Old 01-04-21, 12:03 AM
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Work has progressed well on my workbench, especially as I have had a few days off. Some time ago I found another old cupboard door at one of our local dumpsters, which I have been using as a temporary shelf for the bench as I have had too many other things to do. This changed when I began to have a problem with one knee after riding for any distance, which turned out to be caused by the poor seating I use while working from home. I solved this by riding less, creating a footstool for me out of a box and buying wifie a proper office chair for her desk (well, it made me feel better to see her more comfortable). I then came across a slightly worn office chair, which I planned to use in the garage to make things more comfortable while undertaking essential and fiddly tasks like soldering or rebuilding hubs. It was only later that it occurred to me that by placing a box underneath my ‘new’ chair it would make it high enough for use while working from home. I just needed a strong and suitably sized box.

Some scouring of the local dumpsters later and I had assembled a whole set of chipboard boards formerly known as kitchen cupboards. My newly raised bench made it easy to mark out, saw and drill all these to assemble a chair-lifting box with enough left over to make a shelf and replace one of the 'barky' rear timbers on my workbench. A double win, especially as I now feel a lot more comfortable about my carpentry skills. Actually a triple win, because when I no longer need the box it will become a shelf unit in the garage


With the paint on my replacement handlebars now well and truly dry, and other side projects largely complete, I knew it was time to install my handlebars, or at least attempt to do so. There was always a chance that they might not fit, and I had other concerns as well. The present handlebars are clamped in place with one of those cheap clamps, which while mostly effective while pottering around they can allow the handlebars to loosen under enough load. I think I now know why BMX bikes ended up with a much more secure kind of clamp. I have found that while tightening the clamp it helps to give the fixed head of the bolt a few smart taps while still applying pressure on the spanner, allowing the clamp to overcome any friction between it and the handlebar and hence move slightly. I do not know how round handlebars are after manufacture, but since these clamps are oval they tend to make the handlebars go oval as well, which is less than ideal if you ever want to alter the angle of the handlebars as they naturally want to slip back to their original position.


The child's bike had a slightly better version of this clamp, which I would have liked to use except it was designed to fit a fatter, shorter headstock. This reminds me of when I used to convert Honda C50/70 Cubs from step-thru city bikes to off-road or racing bikes - they also had tall thin stems, which I had to saw off and weld on a replacement from some other kind of scrap frame in order to fit telescopic forks. I cannot see myself doing the same for Tigger, as it would be too much of an investment for too little return at the present.


I was unsure how to remove the handlebar grips from Tigger, and I could see myself having to cut off the stiff plasticky old-school grips. After a search on this forum I discovered how to remove them with a screwdriver and liquid soap, a task of moments... Joy! With those off I soon had the new bars on the bike with nothing more than some minor scuffing of the new paintwork - easily remedied.


They look so wide!


Wifie likes the look of them, which is really the only approval that I need. I rode them around the garages straight away, and then popped on the small pair of grips I took off the child's bike because the bars were cold enough to make my hands feel numb and my wooly gloves were too slippery. I might fit Tigger's old ones one, I just have not decided yet. The new bars give me more clearance for my knees, which is nice for tight maneuvers, but I still might look for one of the Romet stems that have more of a bend to them to take the bars a bit further forward.


The garage facilities then progressed further. One of our neighbors has decided to remodel their bedroom, or at least to change the sliding doors on their built-in wardrobe. Mmm... two clean pieces of floor to ceiling height boards, in white, one 15 mm wide and the other 20 mm. This is an excellent opportunity to build a corner table for my toolboxes, also giving me space underneath to tidily store the winter/summer tires for our car. Although the frosts are late this year, it is time to keep the car in the garage rather than have to chip the ice off the screen. I built my workbench on skids so that I could push it to the back of the garage and have already stripped Blue of its racks, so that it takes less room and is ready for an overhaul.


So I dragged both sheets from beside the dumpster to my garage, and then left them for a few days to dry out a bit. In the meantime I planned the maximum size of table I could achieve by using all of the large board to form the top, sides and front and rear stiffeners. I had to make sure that it was easy to place and remove the tires, and that they were secured well without getting in the way of any job - and be strong enough for my toolboxes. This was a challenge as it was not particularly thick board, but I had some offcuts from my other projects left over I could also use.


I screwed up cutting some of the boards because I should have changed the blade in my jigsaw, so now I have to live with a few wobbly cuts. But I think I can manage that. The table will see more use in the winter, because I tend to work at the front of the garage when it is warmer, as it is lighter and more airy. It is also easier to greet and bid farewell to everyone who uses the garages when they can see you. In my experience, the more people who know you have an interest in 'junk', and the nicer you are, the more likely you are to be given first choice in what they want to dump. I should have checked how vertical the garage walls were, because then I would have included a lip to bridge the gap I now have at the rear and side.


As an aside, the coaster brake on Tigger needs about half a turn of the pedals to engage in the morning instead of staying engaged, and I think it is due to the cold weather. It is only a mild inconvenience, but for Blue it is a pain - although I got its coaster brake to function better about a month ago, with the cold weather it is back to being semi-functional. Since I needed some extra screws to finish the table, I went on Tigger instead, the longest solo trip yet - with dynamo lights on and everything. I arrived at the builders merchants and only then realized I had forgotten a bike lock. I thought about just removing the steering clamp with the 13 mm spanner I still had in my pocket from the last trip, but this was a builders merchants, and customers have vans. Indeed, one guy and his son looked straight at the two bikes in the rack, at the locks and changed direction to hang around a nearby display. I waited and they waited, and eventually they went to sit in their van until I decided to hop back on my bike and leave - and they started up and left as well. I really wanted those screws, and it was a fifteen minute ride there, but not as much as I wanted to keep Tigger.


I went back the next day, but forgot I needed to get some paint to cover all the bare edges on my workbench and table, but maybe I need to wait until the Spring, when the garage warms up again and everything dries out.
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Old 01-08-21, 12:38 AM
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I have been following the sales and auctions of cheap bikes and parts on the Allegro, Olx and ebay sites, not just for things to buy but to learn more about the Romet range and as a source of inspiration. In the past one would have gone to a library in the hope of finding such a source of data, but books have one disadvantage: they compile only the data filtered by the author. As a result they are always incomplete and soon date, although they can preserve a snapshot of the past.

To me such auction sites are perfect, a continuous supply of raw data created by humanity and although some filtering is applied the data tends to spill over from the pictures and descriptions. I rarely buy anything I see there, as first I have to procrastinate, and then move onto stage two - is what I am looking at going to allow me to be innovative? If it is too complete then there will be little of my thinking in the result, just a transfer of parts from one machine to another. If it is too new then there is a fear of ‘spoiling’ or ‘ruining’ it. However, if it is already battered then I am more likely to take a risk, to apply a saw or other tools to it, as the number of already damaged parts limits any sense of finished-ness or needed-ness.

Incompleteness leaves a vacuum in front of us, while waste reduces the fear of error. Here is where innovation mostly lives.


Fun things to play with - all the possibilities are there...

While working as an R&D engineer for the aviation branch of the once-more defunct Norton Motorcycles we used to use the empty space between tasks to take the waste parts from ‘under the bench’ to run little side experiments that the management never officially acknowledged. It expanded our knowledge and experience, and made any weary job a little less so, knowing what we would do with our next window of opportunity. Our aviation engineering lives on, the motorcycles less so.

Anyway, back to Allegro - and Blue.

On one level Blue does not need much work, other than the coaster brake issue - and it is too new and too complete to encourage change. It lacks vacuum and the sense of waste. The plan therefore is to strip Blue down to its component level so it looks less complete, safely store away the nice features and then buy a cheap bike for parts. The waste nature of the cheap bike would mean no problem in swopping over the interesting parts to Blue, and then to raid Blue’s excess parts store for wheels to create a winter / off-road set for Tigger. Handy, with snow around the corner. With the right donor Blue would gain gears and a cable to operate the rear brake that I already have lined up. One option would be a donor with Vee brakes on the front, simply because I have never ridden with them, but that assumes finding a bike with a front fork that can be swopped.

After some effort I found a suitable donor, at only 80 zloty including delivery from somewhere on the other side of Poland. It is a 20 year old Kross, another Polish bike manufacturer, and is essentially a mid-sized child’s bike with derailleur gears front and back. Like the found Kid bike, it will also produce a wealth of different parts for the store cupboard. Will Blue’s chainwheel match the new rear derailleur hub, or will it be possible to change the BB to allow the replacement of the whole drivetrain? It is 45 years since my last BB strip and rebuild, so I am well overdue for a revisit.

Anyway, the package containing the ‘Kross Best Junior’ arrived several days earlier than expected, and was very well wrapped. It came while we were out, and the delivery guy lugged it up all the way up the stairs in our block only to discover that we were out. He rang wifie, but declined, not unreasonably, her request that he should return later. Even our friendly neighbours were reluctant to take in this massive parcel - which is a pity as their two young sons would have had a field day unwrapping it for me. Instead it was there waiting for us on our return, blocking our doorway and taking me about half an hour to unwrap before I could bump it gently down the stairs on its two flat tires, and useless brakes.


I wonder what is in here?

A quick inflation of the tires and I could ride it around the garages. It rode well, the steering natural and the frame feeling straight despite, as I thought from the pictures, it having spent time being jumped - bent cranks, replaced front wheel, bent derailleur mount, bent tail of the rear mudguard, bent seat post and so forth. Four out of the five gears worked on the rear with nothing happening at the chainwheel end, the rear brake slowed me somewhat while the rat’s nest of wire at the front only moved to its own music. Not bad at all for a 35 zloty + delivery 20-year-old bike. What is really impressive is that in good condition they still go for 350 zloty, in a market flooded with flash new bikes. I might even get my money back on selling just the frame and some extras.

I turned Best upside down and removed the brake pads from the cantilever brakes, which proved far more effective in ******ing the removal of the wheels than their rotation. I plan to get the gears working before I finally attempt to transfer them to Blue, but first I need to be sure that Blue can accept the parts. I also stripped off the rack, mudguards and so forth, mostly to gain better access to the gear parts and make it easier to move around. While the wheels are off I can check the tires, fix the bent spokes, check the aluminium rear wheel for wear and fix the surface rust on the steel front one and do something about the axle and sprocket bearings.

After some consideration (aka: procrastination) I decided that Best’s front wheel would go on Tigger as part of its winter wheel set, and the aluminium rear on Blue. The front wheel on Blue would remain there, once I readjust the axle and sort the spokes out, while Blue’s rear will become part of Tigger’s winter set, once I rebuild the coaster brake hub. I only need one more off-road tire to complete the winter set, as Best came with one relatively new one on the front and a cracked road tire on the rear (original?). Tigger will remain solely coaster braked, while Blue will have calliper brakes front and rear. I might use Best’s brake levers if they fit Blue’s handlebars and can operate calliper type brakes.

As an aside, if I ever come across someone who can braze stuff on bicycle frames I might consider fitting the cantilever brakes to Blue, as well as some fittings for the brake and gear cables.

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Last edited by Geepig; 02-19-21 at 07:38 AM.
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Old 01-15-21, 04:15 AM
  #24  
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The weather had been cold all week, but on Saturday it rose to about 6 degrees centigrade and the wind dropped to almost nothing, much better than the snow that had been predicted earlier. Tigger was ridden around to the car, folded and fitted, along with the set of Nordic walking poles for wifie plus a picnic including a flask of hot krupnik soup, another of coffee, bread for the soup and some other little niceties. Twenty years or so ago and the best you could hope for in such a small town were some benches in the town square alongside the town drunks or a Communist era restaurant/bar on its final legs - or heading to become a pizza house.

Bełżyce is only some 15 km away from home, a nice little PKS bus journey away when we first visited two decades ago, and indeed we had an OK coffee in the local bar, all in the classic 1960s communist style. Today the building survives, a couple of streets from the main square, but other businesses have walked in and out since. There is now a pizza and kebab place on one corner of the square, but our long experience marked it out as another small-town ‘meh’ eatery. Instead when it came to eat we used the picnic place near the lake, the former popular since Poland joined the EU, with its focus on small town funding.


We parked up in the Church overflow car park, and had not been there two minutes before I found myself inveigled in a conversation about bikes with a local. I made my way through it, even though I have low confidence in my Polish - but luckily my bike vocabulary is not too bad.




Even though we have a small car, Tigger fits in more than easily.

The choice of car park was no accident, as many years ago we had discovered a very straight and narrow path that led away from the town toward the nearby village of Wzgórze, which since has been widened and hardened to take cars. The first time we were here I was busy building the most massive private website in Poland, solely about this region and everything in it. Later Wikipedia came on and I moved onto other things, but parts of the website still survive - including some of the town and village pages I created. Here is what I wrote about and saw in Bełżyce and Wzgórze all that time ago:
Bełżyce & Wzgórze, a small town and village in Lubelskie, Poland

Wifie strode off with her sticks, while I rode around the carpark to check the bike was functioning normally before I headed off onto the good crushed ash surface. The sun was on the weak side, but the going was good and, if you can deal with a mainly flat landscape, it was beautiful in a way that makes my heart sing even though this is not my native land: it just looks comfortable, like an ancient and well-loved leather sofa, but less lumpy and no one loses the remote.


Some of the wooden cottages remain, but the few that do are showing their age more clearly, and the further we went the more new builds we saw. We were surprised when we came across some paddocks with horses, as over the last two decades even the poorest farmers have switched to tractors, partly because the more well to do ones are now able to switch to newer models and the prices for secondhand ones have dropped as a consequence. Occasionally I do still see ‘motor horses’ and homemade tractors, and occasionally a horse pulling a cart - but I cannot recall when I last saw a horse ploughing.


When we reached what one might call the centre of the village we passed the fires station, but there was no bar selling hot food and drinks, and we have no memory where it was located. There is a house attached to the end of the fire station, so perhaps that was it.


While wifie carried on, I investigated where the lane that crossed ours went, in both directions. It was called ‘Szkolna’, so I was not surprised to find a school where it joined the main road, and in the other it headed off out between the fields.


If you ever check the satellite images for Europe then as you move east a change in field shape and size takes place as you move across Poland, becoming smaller and thinner. This is the land of strip fields, typically with one end close to a river or stream so that everyone had access to water. Roads often parallel the rivers, cutting across the fields with meadow on the river side and crop on the other. Head further east and cross the border into Belarus or Ukraine and the fields become huge again - welcome to the land of Communist state farms. And yet if you look closely, you can still see the previous strip fields as discolorations on the land.




Clearly I have carefully positioned Tigger to make this massive bridge look smaller than it really is.

The new handlebars make turning much easier, as my knees do not tend to clip the bars on tight turns. This is very handy on a lane as I can comfortably turn round to go back and talk to wifie, for example. As the weather has been dry recently there was no problem with grip when I ventured onto the meadow to let a car pass, although the ever present sand can be fun as it overflows onto the tarmac of the lanes we cross. Some offroad tires really would be nice.


As is usual there were plenty of dogs waiting for us in their gardens, although as we got to the less frequented end of the lane they must have thought it was their holiday, and engaged in much barking, running and spinning around - twice, because we came back. There was one small dog running free that I saw nip another dog, then he came over to glare at me but got a stoney ‘I am quite prepared to kick you and chase you down to do it repeatedly look’ in return.


At the end of the lane, where it turned abruptly to the right and became merely a field road, we turned around and headed back, with one short diversion to follow a short parallel road where I could enjoy the remnants of the paving that had once formed our lane as well as cross the narrow concrete bridge over the stream. The stream for the most part remains unseen from the lane, except where it meanders, and of course the frequent fish ponds, but where it did run close to the lane there were visible signs of major and current beaver damage to the trees on either side. There were some trees down, some which are beyond saving and others with cloth or fencing wrapped round to prevent further damage.


It was a good ride, and a small river or stream usually makes for a good ride, although at this time of year experimenting with crossing the fords or sitting on the banks is out of the question. Tigger again took everything in its stride, and I only had to tighten the handlebars once. Next time I might take a brush to remove some of the sandy soil from the tires before it goes back in the car.


We sat for a while overlooking the lake, as we had our soup and coffee, talking about previous visits and where we should go when the weather gets warmer.




The more you look, the more you see, a Romet Zenit - a variant of the Jubilat and sharing similar equipment that I have planned for Blue.

While we were on the return leg of the trip we passed a small building site with two older bikes leaning against the wall of the house being constructed. One was clearly a variation of the Jubilat, but marked ‘Zenit’ and had some kind of derailleur.


Much mooching around on the Polish language bike forums after we got back and I discovered that it was a Romet and dated back to the 1990s - which matches up to its condition. I never did get a final answer as the specification or why the name change, but there was a lot of talk about Favorit derailleurs with 3 or 5 speeds depending on which factory assembled them, and maybe even Shimano hubs. Another mystery to be solved, I will be keeping an eye out for another that I can approach closer.


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Old 01-15-21, 11:08 AM
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Did you drill the hole in the frame for the lamp wire yourself or was it there before? The lamp looks like a generic supermarket incandescent. Is that right?
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