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 ...
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