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05-07-21, 03:32 AM

#67

Geepig

Senior Member

Join Date: Sep 2020

Location: Eastern Poland

Posts: 744

Bikes: Romet Jubilat x 4, Wigry x 1, Turing x 1

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Among the least exciting things I did down the garage this week was nonetheless important - I reduced the number of bearings on my bench by reinstalling the forks on Best - a saving of two whole bearings. The strange thing was that the BB bearings I took out of Turing look very small in comparison to those from the other bikes.

The plan for Turing revolves around paint, minimalism and short mudguards of the type I planned for Danusia. I have scraped off the ancient clear plastic ‘romet’ and ‘turing’ decals on the tubes, followed by a good wirebrushing by hand and then sanding. All I needed then was a presentable day and a can of undercoat, followed a few days later by a can of satin black.

All this is pretty standard stuff, because it is the next stage which is important. Normally at this point one would let the paint harden, apply some kind of protective topcoat and then, when ready, reassemble all the components. Instead I have no intentions of protecting the paint, but to let it get dirty, greasy and rubbed - with flecks of chrome or rust eventually showing through. Some chrome will be left unpainted, and the trick is to let the paint go a patchy grey-ish colour through a cycle of use, washing and then respraying whole areas when there are too many chips and rust visible. It will be neither showing off the glory of new paint nor clear lacquering over ye olde ruste.

With that in mind the other part of the plan is in choosing the components - the Sachs hub is a prime candidate, and I want to use Whitey’s shiney chrome handlebars but chop down Whitey’s 700 fenders and paint them frame-style black - but at a later date and maybe treated in a different way. In combination with Danusia I am attempting to redefine the look of a bike, where life exists as a continuum rather than an attempt to preserve the present or past sealed in transparent lacquer. The essential nature of the exercise is to conceal the design and engineering behind a worn yet non-original appearance. This is not intended as a way of creating something fake, but rather to care less about maintaining an appearance. Maintenance will be nothing more than wiping down, the equivalent of just oiling the chain or adjusting the brakes - internal tasks rather than external, essential instead of social.

While at a local shop buying other kinds of essentials, an old chap rode up on a Turing - not a Turing 2 like mine but an original Turing. I have not had time to assess the differences, but I can see that the dynamo is mounted on the seat stay rather than on the fork leg like mine.

Turing at rest. I had the same combination of basket on the front and box on the back on Blue

At some point I would like to try out the frame out with Danusia’s 24” wheels, mostly to see how it looks, how the frames compare in terms of dimensions. I should have tried out Turing’s 26” wheels on Danusia, to see whether there is enough clearance, but instead I will have to wait until the wheels come off Pigdog. I did find some time to spray Danusia’s original rims black, and then I left them to harden in the garage before moving the majority of my tools to the warsztat.

Pigdog is locked up outside the block, Tigger, Danusia and BigR in the garage, all waiting for when I can return and process them further. It is very tempting to borrow the front wheel off Danusia and, along with the still built-up former rear wheel from Zenit, put those on Pigdog so that it again sits out by the block, but now an inch lower. Also, once Turing is mobile, I need to finish and sell on BigR.

So there I was, midweek, packing up a whole lot of the tools from the garage, plus most parts for Turing except the wheels since they are still on Pigdog, and heaving them all in the car, along with everything else, and transferred them to the warsztat. It is getting crowded in there as I need more bench space for toolboxes, shelves and fewer bikes - or better storage. I wanted to take the pair of spare shelves from the garage, but there was no room as we also needed to take a large bathroom cabinet.

I think that what I need to do is clear out the junk from the room at one end of the wooden barn and then store some of the bikes there. It is convenient as the access door is on the outside, but inconvenient in that it has a set of tall steps to get up to it. Because this is a farm, there is a lot of crap in there, and this includes in particular old cemetery candle lamps. Every year the family would arrive for All Saints, go and place candles on the family graves in the local cemetery, then later one of the daughters of the last actual resident, who would come and stay here a few times a year, would then collect all the lamps from the cemetery and store them in the attic, under the stairs, in each of the three barns and even piled up outside them. They are not even small ones, but massive modern ones, so I know it must have been the daughter.

So much to do, but there are still many things to learn about our cottage, such as how to light up and run our piec. A piec is a stove, either for heating or for both heating and cooking. We have a heating one in our bedroom, the former ‘salon’, a large rectangular ‘cube’ made of square tiles where the idea is you burn fuel in the lower part to heat the mass of it up, then leave it to seep heat into the air. The other piec is in the kitchen, and has a two-plate hotplate and also runs the central heating radiators. This one is more modern (the tiles for the original one are lying in a barn, and I use some of them to hold nuts and bolts while working on my bikes), and it is easier to run, but you need to get it going quickly in the morning if you don’t want to freeze as you eat breakfast. The hotplates are made up of concentric cast iron rings, which you can remove enough of them to expose the bottom of your pan to the fire below. Excellent for woks and also heating up parts of a bike that have seized. I reckon I could use it for some minor forge work if I come across a small anvil at one of the local markets.

Future forge?

The undercoat went on Turing, followed a couple of days later by the matt black top coat. In between the undercoat and the top coat I did a test to see whether the Sachs would fit, which it would, comfortably, both between the dropouts and the axle in the dropouts. I am now wondering whether I should modify the front forks to fit a larger diameter front axle, to fit either the one from Whitey or Pigdog.

While seeking the inevitable things to repair the heating and other systems in our cottage, I found a local supplier of paint. I am now considering whether to paint the rims a very dark red, blue or green, maybe with a light matt black overspray. All this is a lot of description in a folder forum, a lot more than I would devote to Whitey, Pigdog or Best - they only get a mention in terms of the parts they supply to my folder projects so that the components appear in the story as part of a process rather than by magic. Turing is different, as in terms of the Polish countryside the Turing was the stablemate and alternative to the Jubilat, each equally used by men and women. Understanding one means knowing something about both.
Alongside the Sachs hub I have painted Best’s steering stem, ready for a test fit, as well as the original Turing item. The latter has the classic clamp for the steering stem while the former has a wedge lock, which I like for the much cleaner look.
Every time I think that I am done with the painting, I find something else that needs doing as well.

While driving around our area, in the next valley, we came across an old gent riding a yellow Wigry to his local shop, the first one, other than the three in my ‘stable’ that I have seen on the road in several years.

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