Saturday, December 18, 2010

Three dollar crank forward









A couple months

back I stopped at a garage sale that had a couple mountain bikes leaning against a tree. They had no prices posted--one was a dimestore clunker with 24" wheels and one was an old Trek 26" mountain bike. I got brave and asked how much for the Trek and the lady said $6 would buy both but I managed to take home only Trek for $3.00. I figured the bike would be in sorry shape as rusty water ran out of the frame when I loaded it into my van but when I tore things down I found all the bearings in good shape, needing only a good lube job. The shifters seemed to work pretty slick--they are a 3x7 trigger shift system and all rust cleaned off pretty easy. The tires have no noticable wear, so I decided to turn this bike into a crank forward cruiser by moving the rear wheel and seat back about 7 inches. Most of the added tubing is .035w 4130 Cro-mo 1" OD from Aircraft Spruce http://www.aircraftspruce.com/index.html and Airparts http://www.airpartsinc.com/ .
The seatpost is 1" square 1/8" wall aluminum tube.

Total investment is still under $100 with brazing gas and tubing counted. The finished bike weighs about 30 lbs and is a great ride. I put about 60 miles on in the first week or so even though our daytime high temps have seldom exceeded the freezing point here in KC. I'll tear the bike down and paint the bare parts black to match the rest as soon as the next snowstorm forces me to stay inside for a couple days.
Update 12/26/2010: I finished painting and reassembling the bike today and added the 2 new pictures above. I kept the old paint on the front half of the frame and just repainted the back half. I also added 1.5" in length to the handle bar ends by making some bar plugs out of dowel rod and aluminum tubing.