Sunday 29 January 2012

Fixing up a spare bike

I've been busy today working on Anna's old bike.
The plan was to get it running in some sort of passable condition for use as a spare.



I fixed the rear wheel bearing a couple of weekends ago.
They really needed replacing, but for now I just tightened up the cones to take the play out of them.
It will be fine for a while for the low mileage the spare bike is expected to perform.

This time I fixed the puncture in the front tyre (tire), fitted the pedals and the seat, and got it back "on the road".
The pedals and the seat were missing because when we built Anna's new bike, we moved the pedals and seat from the old bike to the new one - so now the "old" bike has a new set of pedals and a new seat :-)

The puncture was caused by a small length of metal - a piece of a pin, or similar. It was tough to get it out of the tyre (tire) - I had to dig it out a bit with a small knife to be able to get enough of it showing to get my needle-nose pliers to grip on it.
The inner tube had a matching, neat, hole in it.

Anyway, all fixed now, so we currently have four roadworthy bikes for the three of us :-)
That will come in handy next time someone gets a puncture and it is on the same day as I work late (usually once or twice a week) - the spare bike helps to buy me a little time until I can fix whatever the other bike has wrong with it.

If you have the space, it is always nice to keep some sort of spare, old, bike as a fallback vehicle. Doesn't have to be fancy, and the specification is not very important - just something which is a lot better than walking :-)

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