Its about time I show off my road bike!

So I had finally bought a road bike in the middle of June. I had biked to work once on my mountain bike, and decided that even with the slicks, that's not going to cut it. It worked fine for the 9.5 mile commute from my old place, but the 27 mile each way from my new place is little far. (From now on, I will refer to my mt. bike by it's christened name, "Identity Crisis." It doesn't know what kind of bike it is.)This lead me to search out a place where I could find a used bike. Eventually I found Bike Builders, which was a pretty ghetto place, doing more business in fucktarded pocket motor bikes than bicycles. They did have an ample supply of old bikes though.

I ended up getting a 1989 Peugeot Triathlon for $220. The frame is in good shape, no rust, although the rims had plenty of rust to go around. The handle bars were also a little bent up, but that was easily fixable. The components, Shimano 105's across the board, were in mint condition, except for the pedals which had both toe clips broken off. This was fine since I was going to put spd on anyway. The 105 series is known for being cheap, simple, and reliable. It also has horizontal drop outs, so I can turn it into a fixie once I buy a decent road bike. I was going to do that in spring, but I'm not sure if I can wait that long. (Wait that long to have a fixie for my in town bike, that is.)



I've only ridden it to work once so far though, and that was the first week after I got it. A couple of miles from getting home that night, I hit bump which caused a lout crashing noise. I looked down at the tires as coasted, and they looked fine. Later in the evening, however, when I headed to the Rock Gym, I noticed that I had a front flat. I'm pretty sure I had actually ridden the last 3 miles home on the flat, I just didn visually recognize it, not being used to how thin road tires look. When I took the wheel apart, I discovered what looked to be the original tires, tubes, and rim strips. The plastic rim strips were completely shot, so it's no surpise that I blew a tire. What was a surprise, however, was that I had also completely jacked up the rear rim. A rusted nippke had actually through the rim!!


Jacked up rear tire. Never saw damage like that before.

Because the axle length was an unusual size, I chose to rebuild the wheel with a new rim rather than buy a new one and force it in. That project turned out pretty well. I followed directions online from Sheldon Brown's Webpage. (Sheldon Brown has the most extensive web page I've seen dedicated to everything bicycle.) Instead of using a truing stand, I took a tip from from a guy at the bike shop I frequent, and just used zip ties attached to the frame of my bike. I was to lazy to test vertical trueness, and didn't even have a dish tester, so I just checked out the horizontal. This actually lead to a very nice wheel with no visible wobble.