The Iron Monkey Lives!

The bike’s done! Its name is the Iron Monkey, as it’s made of steel. Sadly, I can’t find th’damn camera, so I can’t show you. [Edit: found it!]

This afternoon, I took Judd’s advice and buried myself in a project to keep from obsessing about a personal calamity. I got a seat post that fit (the previous owner of this bike must have been a chimpanzee. Seriously, two foot legs and three foot arms!) and swapped out the derailleur for one that was less ugly. See, the old Campy was beautiful, but it really couldn’t handle more than 5 sprockets. So I put on the old one from the Novara, the previous incarnation of this frame. But that derailleur had been badly abused. (In Bret’s words, someone had touched it in the bathing suit area) I thought, “Oh, that’s a weird direction for a derailleur to point! But obviously it’s OK…” and it wasn’t. It was bad. So bad. So I took it apart, fixed it (!) then put it on the bike, only to discover that it still wasn’t working. It skipped terribly, particularly in the higher gears.

I had an old Sun Tour from my sister-in-law’s old 10 speed, though, so I decided to give that a shot. What would have been an hour of swearing a few weeks ago turned into 15 minutes of easy work, though, and I got it on. I was pretty pleased with myself.

And it still skipped.

“Motherfuck?” I asked it politely, and asked the Internet. Sheldon said that it was either the B-adjustment (now I know what that is!) or a stiff link. Since I was confident there were no stiff links, I adjusted the B-adjuster screw and discovered that I could now get into all 7 gears! Triumph! But it still skipped.

“Motherfuck,” I said more firmly, hoping that would fix it. It did not.

So I checked for stiff links and there was one and I fixed it.

Rassafrassin’ humbletyhurph.

The brakes are sub-awesome, but a little shaving will solve what an apparent accident in the distant past of the frame has wrought.

It’s light (22 pounds!), it looks neat, and I made it myself! Hooray! The image at the top is the logo I made for it. The plan is to get some water slide decal material and brand it. Victory!

(Total cost on this project: about $125. I got impatient at the end and threw some money at the bike. I probably could have kept it to $100 if I’d been willing to find the brakes I needed.)