Hey
@J-wagon, I finally put those shifters back together. So far I'm not impressed. They are cleaned and lubricated and are still pretty hard to turn, so it is not the aging problem I have heard others complain about. Maybe they are better with the derailleur tension against them? Honestly, they seem pretty awful right now. The right has a rubber grip and the left has plastic.
And the brake levers, plastic, have a pivot distance of 30mm, putting them halfway between short pull and long pull levers I guess. Brakes are low-profile cantilevers.
The stem is TIG welded up out of tubing. Weird, but I don't hate it.
Look how they handled the top with a machined top hat piece:
It wouldn't bother me to use this piece in a good bike, outside of the fact that it looks modern, and my bikes are decidedly not modern.
Does anyone know who this logo belongs to?
It also turned up on the seatpost and some other part I can't remember right now.
I was able to clean the rear shock up enough to get it back together. The stripped threads were beyond the range of the spring. I suspect that someone rode the bike initially without tightening the spring. There was a warning sticker NOT to do that, but it was mostly hidden behind the spring, so no doubt easy to miss. I think it also stretched the body a little, as the threads don't quite line up anymore. Nevertheless after cleaninng the threads up I was able to get the nut restarted after getting it past the part of the body with the missing threads. The aluminum of the body is soft. It is very likely prone to damage anyway. I cleaned up the pliers marks on the nut with a Dremel. They were really sharp, probably sharp enough to cut skin.
This shock is a horrendous POS. Look at where the nut is set, and yes I cranked it down a lot, but even all the way loose, it is not going to reach the obviously stripped part. That means most of the threads are useless even when new. The spring is pretty short. I measured the stroke of the "shock" itself, and it may have to be this way. You couldn't have the spring bottoming out noticeably because that would put all the force into the threads, and they are weak. I measured the coils and added them up, and I couldn't get exact, but the distances were as expected almost the same, presumably to prevent damage.
Because of that, and because you have to press a bushing out to get the nut and the spring off, I doubt anyone changed the spring. Maybe they use this body for different stroke lengths and different springs? From what I see here I doubt it ever comes out well. Replacements are available, and cheap, but this spring rate seems to be hard to find, and sellers are terrible about including the mount dimensions, which can be wrong.
I stripped the covering off the saddle because It was shredded. VELO, made in Taiwan.
MATRIX ENER-GEL.
Staples in plastic? Really?
I guess if regular old yellow foam is "gel" then it's gel. Or maybe that .020" of white stuff is the gel.
No matter. We don't need no steenking gel.
Seat guts have this nifty stop to keep from slipping down. The teeth are sharp and the nuts do not feel like they are going to strip. I think this is better steel than the department store grade seat guts from the 70s by quite a bit.
Nice clean out of the way spot to mount a reflector.
Satelite not Safelite? LOL.
Now where was I when I left off a few days ago? Oh yeah, the fork was still bent. More on that in a bit.
. This is a claw type derailleur (yes, in 2007!) and as you may recall I had to silver solder the post to the claw because the factory riveting is loose. I wondered if alignment would be a problem. Spoiler: yes. So, I took it back apart and lined it up, but with the chain tension against it another problem emerged. EVERY joint in this derailleur is loose. Well, every joint except the post riveting I silver soldered. Not just the parallelogram either, the bushings on both pivots are sloppy loose. This thing can be pointing in about any direction at any time. I don't know much about indexing, but it is difficult to imagine how this could work very well. Of course there is a good possibility It wasn't built like this. Maybe it got really clobbered later on. Based on the lack of wear everywhere else, I doubt it happened from years of use. Interestingly, the purple bike on craigslist I posted a pic of earlier has a guard over the derailleur. Probably a good idea. I see no sign that my blue bike ever had one.
Nutty but interesting thread, 
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