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Old 05-01-22, 04:28 PM
  #173  
USAZorro
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Join Date: Oct 2004
Location: Hardy, VA
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One of my favorite authors, the very prodigious, "Unknown", graced the human race with the maxim, "Necessity is the mother of invention."

Well, I'd like to amend that to, "Necessity is a mother...".

I am running perilously close to the dollar limit on my build because I was enough of a sucker to spend close to $80.00 on a crudded-up old Robin Hood single speed, and I decided to build that up for the challenge. At a couple points so far, I've had to follow the route of "five steps forward, four steps back", and so it was again these past two days.

Now if I wasn't so hard-headed, I could have just decreed, "and thine Clunker shalt be a single speed", and this would have been the end of the most recent episode. However, that's one corner I don't see myself being able to cut. Now I have a couple conventional three-speed triggers as well as indicators of two different sizes. Heck, I even MacGyvered an anchor assembly from three nuts and one plate from excess chain. However, what I do not have is a proper shift cable with the do-bobber on the end that the trigger pulls on. I could get a whole NOS "Schwinn approved" cable assembly for $10.00 from e-Bay, but my budget doesn't permit.

Enter a sweet little present I recalled receiving from cudak888 a couple years back... the TSC-30 grip shifter. I know I had it around somewhere, but task one was finding it. Well I began that effort in the wee hours of Saturday morning (after spending Friday afternoon locating those three aforementioned nuts and some thin plate steel to fabricate seat-stay attachments from (which required about 1/10th of the 18"x6" sheet that I got from Lowe's for $9.00 - aka 90 cents). Well after sleeping I located the shifter and "hooray!" it has all the workings, so all I need to do is put it on the bar and I'm good to go. Well, to get it on the bar, I have to remove one of the plastic grips that presumably have been attached to the bar since the day that bicycle left the factory apparently before the US entered WWII. I actually worked out how to get one off without damaging it... now to slide the shifter... rats. It needed about one half more mm. It will not fit on.

So I get to thinking, maybe on the stem? It would fit, but the stem is too short, and it looked awful. So I need to change out bars, but I have none that the shifter will fit on that also fit the stem. So after an hour or so of measuring everything and shuffling things around, I have a stem that fits fits steerer and bars, bars that fit shifter and will also work with original grips (though I'll need to put something partially sticky under them so they won't turn) a 3-speed cable that connects all the way from trigger to hub, and a bicycle that barely fits in the budget. If I can work out a way to shorten the cable by about a foot, that would be great, or otherwise I'll have to keep following James Brown's timeless advice: "Make it Funky".

Once I work this out, I have a brake transplant to perform (the coaster brake is rather unimpressive under absolutely ideal conditions), and then address the rear fender stays and attachments to the stay and brake bridges.... and, of course, get the right grip as clean as the left one.


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Last edited by USAZorro; 05-01-22 at 05:39 PM.
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