Cyclokairos

More often than not, the bottle-neck of my bike builds is finances. I piece together parts as and when funds allow. The prosaic necessities of renewing my car insurance and new school uniform for my son has mopped up money of late, but I’ve picked up some bits and The Green Bike is taking shape.

Ticking the Cyclokairos box, the saddle has to be leather, and living in the West Midlands, Brooks is pretty much as local a bike part manufacturer gets. With The Green Bike being Cyclokairos’ “racing” model, I went with their Swift perch; second-hand but not far off pristine. The seat post is unbranded, but looks the part. The shifters are the Rivendell-Dia Compe friction ones. I bought them a while back and last used them as bar-end shifters, but I’m going for a down-tube set-up. The last time I used down-tube shifters was on Vitus 979 as part of a Shimano Sante groupset (with its pearl finish, a lovely looking groupset). I rode that bike into the ground and ultimately got rid of it – a mistake, I’d love to still have it. The chainset was ummed and ahhed over, an early runner being a retro TA Specialities touring one but my fondness for 10 speed Campagnolo won out. I have that vintage of Campag on The Other Bikes and The Purple Bike (that is also white). In fact, a certain online auction site offered up the same model as on The Purple Bike (that is also white ) – a Chorus triple with 53-42-30 rings (ever the contrarian, as the rest of the World goes 1x, I’m headed in the opposite direction). Connecting the chainset to the frame is a Tifosi bottom bracket with ISO tapers (Campag don’t do JIS) and a width of 111 mm. Not the right width for indexing, but with having friction shifting, strict adherence to chain-line isn’t necessary.

My friend Jon mentioned he had a wheelset that would suit The Green Bike – caveat emptor the cassette lock nut is so stuck you’d think it had been welded in place. Jon had taken a heat-gun to it to no avail. I turned to my first weapon of choice: The Persauder – a four foot length of scaffolding that somehow came into my possession when there was some building work at school. This lever-to-beat-all-levers made short work of the stuck bottom bracket The Blue Bike came with. The set-up, minus a fork-crown race setting tool slipped over the chain-whip to improve leverage and a quick-release skewer to hold the lock-nut tool in place:

With my son’s help we went to work and soon found the set-up’s weak point: the rivet attaching the chain to the tool popped off. Time for the nuclear option:

Success. Following a series of cuts at right angles to each other (four in total), I jimmied the remains of the lock nut’s flange away from the face of the cassette with a screwdriver and hammer, and then slipped off the cassette. What remained of the lock nut could be unscrewed by finger.

It was worth the effort. The wheels are handbuilt by Brain Rourke, with 105 hubs laced to Mavic Open Pro rims; and the cost a bottle of grog for Jon (he’s easily pleased).

Home and dry, seemingly, until I tried to fit the rear wheel in the dropouts. Non-drive fine, but on the drive side the axle didn’t fit (had the dropout been squashed during delivery?):

One of the benefits of steel is that it is open to negotiation. A spanner was used to prise the dropout open ever so slightly, and the axle fitted fine. The tyres on the wheels were dispensed with (23 mm! Haven’t ridden that width since the days of The Other Bikes), and replaced with some 700 x 35 mm Schwalbe G-Ones that had been sat around since The Black Bike went 650b. The clearances turned out to be passable:

And until I purchase the further parts this is The Green Bike as is: