Stop!

Dear reader,

It was all going so well. The bottom bracket was in, cranks attached, and I fitted the front and rear derailleurs (more on all of that later). I'd bought the wheels (again, more on them later), fitted the tyres (ditto), and the bare frame was gradually beginning to look like a proper bike.

Then I tried to fit the brakes.

First, some background. The brakes I'm fitting to the bike are caliper brakes. If you've previously ridden mountain or hybrid bikes, you may not have seen these - disc or V-brakes tend to be more popular on those. Here's what they look like:

When fitted, a wire runs down the left hand side of the brake, from the bolt on the top to the one on the left. When you pull the brake lever, the arm on the left moves, pulling the brake shoes (the black bits) against the metal rim of your wheel.

Well, that's the theory, anyway. Here's the problems I encountered, in turn:

1. Fitting the right brake at the right end of the bike
Those two brakes above look pretty similar, don't they? So you can fit whatever one you want on the back and the front, right?

Wrong.

Caliper brakes are fitted to your forks (at the front) and frame (at the back) by a single bolt right in the centre, at the highest point of the body of the brake. You can just about see these bolts in the picture above.

There'll be matching holes front and back on your bike. Here's what the one at the front looks like:

Just slip the bolt through the hole, fasten a nut on it at the other side, make sure it's nice and tight, and you're done.

Except you're not. The hole in your fork is going to be deeper than the one at the back of your frame, and caliper brakes come with bolts whose lengths match those depths. This caught me out, and I mistakenly tried to fit the front brake to the back.

No harm done, it didn't fasten properly, so I took it off and fitted them the right way round. Done yet? No.

2. Variations in bolt length
For different combinations of brake and frame, the bolts may or may not be exactly the length you need to get a good, tight fit that keeps the brake nice and steady. As it turns out, for a Genesis Equilibrium frame and Shimano Tiagra brakes, the bolts are slightly too long, which makes it difficult (if not impossible) to tighten them properly.

This problem, too, was easily enough solved. I just got some little washers from Homebase, slipped a couple on the bolts before I put them through the holes, and fastened the nuts. The brakes were fastened nice and tight, but still something didn't look right ...

3. Brake drop
When I pushed the arms of the brakes together, so that they contacted the wheel, I noticed they were hitting more tyre than they were rim. This was rather frustrating.

I noticed a couple of bolts holding the brake shoes tight, so I undid them and tried to fiddle around with the shoe positions to get more contact with the rim. No joy.

It turns out that the Tiagra brakes are just plain incompatible with the Equilibrium frame - which nicely explains why the pre-built Equilibriums don't come with them as standard. The fundamental problem is something known as brake drop.

Brake drop is the distance from the middle of the bolt hole in your fork or frame, to the middle of your wheel's rim. On typical road bikes, the brake drop is around 47mm. This is what the Tiagra brakes are built for. On the Equilibrium, the brake drop is around 57mm, which essentially means that the brake shoes on the Tiagra brakes can't ever reach down far enough to hit enough of the rim.

The solution? Stick the Tiagra brakes on eBay (still to do, I've never sold anything on eBay ... scary!) and buy some deep drop brakes, which do have a brake drop of 57mm. I've gone for Tektro 538 brakes, which should do the trick nicely.

( )

Good evening.

I'm happy to say that, after the false start with the headset and stem, tonight I have eventually broken my putting-things-on-the-bike duck. I got greased up and put the bottom bracket in.

My bottom bracket!

What's a bottom bracket?

From the perspective of this amateur, a bottom bracket is to your cranks (the arms that your pedals attach to) what the headset is to your handlebars, namely a set of bearings that ensure nice, smooth, consistent movement.

The bottom bracket I bought, a Shimano Tiagra model, comes in two parts. One screws into each side of the bottom bracket shell (that's the threaded hole that the bottom bracket goes into). It's an external bottom bracket - never having seen any other kind, I'm not especially able to tell you what other types you can get, or why you'd want them.

Actually, writing this blog took longer than doing the fitting. I'm fairly confident I've done a proper job without damaging the threads in the shell. What bit goes in the right and left side are clearly marked, as are the directions of rotation to fit them. Before I started work, I did my usual scouring of the web for instructional videos, and this one from BikeRadar was about the best I found. (It's the final video on the page, Install An External Bottom Bracket.)

Aside from a little bit of patience, some grease, and the bottom bracket itself, the only other thing you need is a bottom bracket spanner to tighten the two parts up properly. It's probably important to buy the spanner that fits your bracket - I think the Shimano brackets have a standard fitting, so I was able to pick up a spanner from Wiggle pretty easily and cheaply.

The rest of the assembly needs to wait until I get my wheels sorted, which I'll be doing at the weekend.

Stay tuned.

Are you sitting comfortably? I am.

When I was building my list of components at the weekend, I almost completely forgot the seatpost and saddle. It's a bit odd, that, given that without those, the bike would literally be unrideable. I guess it's because there are so many more bits that are high-tech and shiny and futuristic-looking, that the thought of how I was going to sit on this bike slipped my mind slightly.

The importance of these can't be overstated, though. There's a very good reason we use the phrase "pain in the arse" to describe something we're not overly pleased with.

First, the seatpost. This is the long post which slides into the seat tube (see the diagram I posted last month) and has the saddle attached to the top. Setting the height of the seatpost correctly is really important. If it's too high, you'll overstretch your feet and legs at the bottom of each revolution, not to mention the problems you'll have getting on the bike in the first place! If it's too low (more common, from what I've seen) you'll find your legs bowing out the way a bit at the bottom of each revolution, and you won't be making most efficient use of your legs either.

The key to setting the right seatpost height is, so I'm told, to have it high enough that your legs are almost completely stretched out at the bottom of a revolution, but not quite. At least, that's how I've got mine set, and it feels good. If you've ridden a bike with its seatpost on the low side, trust me that it'll feel funny the first few times after you adjust it, but it'll be worth it and it's not too hard to get used to.

And so, on to the saddle. I've made a pragmatic but hopefully wise choice - I'm going to use the saddle I've already got on my Ridgeback. The reasons for this are, in order:

1. That saddle fits my bum perfectly (or vice versa). I've had six years of service out of it with a minimum of chafing. Some saddles - particularly leather ones, I'm led to believe - need quite some breaking in. Clearly that's not an option for me, since the bike won't be all built until early May and the ride is in June.
2. The seatpost fits my new bike perfectly. I was rather surprised by this, given there appears to be little crossover in standards between road bikes and other bikes, but it's exactly the right diameter.
3. I'll only ever be riding one bike at a time. Given how easy it is to remove a seatpost, having two seemed a little excessive.
4. The less money I spend on things I don't need, the more I can spend on things I do. That means a better bike!

The gathering begins ...

Good evening, everyone.

As I said last time, having been laid low and kept off my bike by a cold at the weekend, I put my free time to good use by picking out the components for my bike. Excitingly, they've already started arriving. The first part is the stem, which is quite fortunate, as it's the next part which has to be fitted.

When I had to go about choosing a stem, I wasn't quite sure what I was looking for. I've never owned a road bike before, with the loopy handlebars, and the only time I rode one I was aware that the riding position is rather different from the one you have on a hybrid or mountain bike. I was aware of being a lot more horizontal, stretched out along the frame, whereas on my current bike I'm very upright. Upright is probably better that way for negotiating city traffic and cycle lanes, but it's not especially in keeping with what I'm looking for with this new bike.

Fortunately, though, my current Ridgeback hybrid has been able to help me out. You can actually adjust the angle of its stem, so I was able to set it up at a similar angle to what I'd expect of a road bike. I sat on it in the sort of position I expect to on the new bike, judged how it felt, and made my choice from there.

I settled on a Cinelli Vai XL 100mm stem. The stem on the Ridgeback is 80mm, and felt just a little cramped for me, so I thought I should go for something a bit longer. Fit aside, as with all the components I'm putting on this bike (and as I did with the frame), I chose it based on a combination of price and reviews I read. It seemed to hit the sweet spot I'm looking for.

I've ordered the shallow-drop Cinelli Vai XL handlebars to go with it, but unfortunately they're on back order and won't turn up until towards the end of April. That may impact on the rest of the build a bit, as I won't have anything to attach the shifters to, but there's still plenty of time.

In the meantime, I've also got a seatpost and saddle, which I'll tell you about the next time ...

Anatomy of a bicycle, #3: Four candles

Good afternoon, everyone. I've been a little unwell recently, which has impacted my preparations for the ride as much as it has my writing here. But I'm feeling better now, and I've got a confession to make.

I may have slightly overdone it in the bravado department when I set out on this project. With the exception of the wheels, I was planning to put everything together myself. I got my frame, and I got the forks, and the logical next step was to get a headset and a stem, and to attach everything nice and snugly.

Which is where the problems began. There were points in the assembly instructions that required use of a hammer - which in my hands just normally means large lumps being taken out of something (occasionally me). During my background reading, I came across the phrase "catastrophic failure" more than once. Eventually (just about the time I saw the picture of someone sawing a bit off the top of a steerer tube),  I realised this is something you really don't want to go wrong.

Let's start with the forks. The forks on a bike are the steerable bits that attach to the front wheel. Where the two forks join in the middle is called the fork crown, and from there up is the steerer tube. The steerer tube goes through the head tube, with the fork crown nestled snugly against the bottom of the head tube. You attach a stem to the bit that pokes out of the top of the head tube, and you attach your handlebars to the stem.

So far, so good.

But if all you did was slip your fork through the head tube, and slap on a stem and some handlebars, your cycling experience would be jerkier than the chicken in a Caribbean restaurant. Every bump and undulation you went over would send your front wheel hither and thither.

What you need is a headset, to help join everything together nice and smoothly and make your bike rideable. A headset is basically a group of bearings at the top and bottom of the head tube, which allow the forks and steerer tube to turn smoothly and predictably.


"Fantastic", I hear you ask, "so what's so hard about slapping on a couple of bearings?"


What's so hard about is that a badly installed headset is almost as bad as no headset at all. Having previously ridden a very cheap bike with a very cheap headset installed very shoddily (I won't tell you where I bought the bike), I can vouch for this. It was completely unrideable. The various bearings have to be exactly aligned, at exactly the correct position relative to the head tube, with exactly the right load placed on them, in order to achieve smooth rotation.

That seemed like a big ask for a first-time bike assembler. The headset and stem are equally crucial to the structure of the bike as the wheels and the frame itself, so I figured it was best to treat them as such and leave that to the professionals. If I fit the drivetrain myself and I get a click-ick-ick-ick-ick sound rather than the smooth click I should when I change gears, that's too bad, but it's not going to result in the crunch-splat that a headset failure could.

In other news, I have picked out and ordered various of the other components I'm going to be putting on the bike, but I'll leave the details of that for another time ...