Inspired by the sunny weather (uh... what happened to the forecast thunderstorms, chaps? I could have gone walking in Cumbria with Olly & co...), I spent some quality time with my bicycle. That's with, and not - sadly - on.
I'd forgotten what it feels like to have all your skin oils removed and replaced with the cloyingly orange-esque scent of citrus degreaser. Unfortunately, beneath the grime, the bike is worse than I first thought. All the sealed/heavily guarded bearings are fine - the headset, bottom bracket, hubs - but everything else is pretty wrecked, frankly. It really needs stripping and cleaning from scratch.
The chainrings are even more eaten down than I remembered; BiopaceHP rings were never high-quality, and these have done something like 8,000 miles. But they'd do, for a short while. The tyres are perished, and I wouldn't vouch for the inner tubes either. More worrying, the stem appears to be essentially rotten. Well, it's always been rubbish, but no, it now looks pretty much rotten - there's significant corrosion around the handlebar clamp. Ouch. That's a big job to replace.
So... I don't have a bike that's trivially rideable - something like a day's work to fix it, and not inconsiderable component costs if I do it properly.
Dang. And now the forecast, which had yesterday been crock for next week, is suddenly promising. So I should have bought the Ridgeback after all.
Heigh-ho.
Hmmm, then, and I quote Jules, “F&^%ing hell, the ceiling fallin’ darrn”, in a bad southern accent, on Saturday night in Hull. We had a massive thunderstorm, well, at least in Sourthern terms. Ian quite rightly pointed out it wasn’t really that big, there’s been worse. But then, in Leeds, with the local TV “Look Leeds” and so on, you probably didn’t get the Hull weather ;-)