R: Tape Loading Error

Like many boys of my generation, I spent a large proportion of my youth fiddling with cassettes.

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Building the bike has required fiddling with cassettes of a different kind:

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

The cassette above is a Shimano Dura ace, whereas I fitted a Shimano Tiagra cassette to my bike. It fits onto your back wheel, and is the part that your chain hooks on to, providing the "drive" that moves you forward. My cassette has 9 rings - the largest ring is the lowest gear, the smallest ring is the highest gear.

Here's my back wheel, before fitting the cassette:

The rings of the cassette slip over the larger grey spindle on the right-hand side. As with all cleverly-designed things, there are different-size notches on the inside of the rings, which correspond to matching notches on the spindle. That means you can't put the rings on in the wrong alignment.

Once all the rings are on, it's secured with a "cap" that requires a special cassette tool to tighten:

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

The narrow end fits onto the cap, and you can use a normal spanner to do the tightening.

With the cassette fitted, you're now ready to fit the wheels and put everything together!

Right Round Baby, Right Round ...

One of the most interesting things for me about building the bike has been how quite a few of my assumptions on how a bike works and what it's made up of have been challenged or shown to be complete nonsense. So it is with wheels.

For example, I'd always assumed that front and rear wheels were more or less identical.

Not so, as these photographs of my Mavic Aksium wheels show.

This is my rear wheel:

And this is my front wheel (the one on the right):

Spotted the difference? 

That's right - the spokes on one side of the rear wheel are "flat", so to speak - they stay within the plane of the rim. That's the side which the cassette (more on that later) attaches to. The amount by which the spokes come out of the plane of the rim is known as the "dish".

In all the years I've ridden bikes, and all the times I've taken back wheels off to mend punctures, I'd never noticed that, up until I saw those two wheels.

I can ride my bike with no handlebars

Actually, I can't. But it's a really catchy handlebar-related tune, and I couldn't let the opportunity to mention it pass.

As well as being the bit of the bike that you hold onto, the handlebars in many ways also hold the rest of the bike together. Without the handlebars, you've got nothing to put the brake and shift levers on, and without them you'll have trouble both moving and stopping.

I've got black Cinelli Vai XL shallow drop handlebars. For those of you who have only ever ridden hybrids or mountain bikes, they're the loopy-type bars which are often the most recognisable feature of a road bike. The fact they're shallow drop bars means they're not quite as loopy as some, while the XL indicates that the centre of the bar, which is clamped by the stem, has a larger circumference than the standard Cinelli Vai handlebars. In fact, it perfectly fits my Cinelli Vai XL stem!

Following the instructions which came with the stem and the bars, I whipped out my torque wrench and tightened the bars in the stem to the recommended level.

All good, part one done. Now, for the levers. I've got Shimano Tiagra STI levers. Operating them is simple enough, but fitting them was slightly tricky.

You can't see it on the picture I linked to there, but the black covering for the "body" of the levers is actually rubber, and when you pull it back you see a metal ring. The idea is that you slip the ring onto the end of your handlebar, and slide it up the curvy bit of the bar until it reaches the top.

In theory it's very simple, but in practice it took me a little while. There's a little screw hidden under another part of the rubber cover, which loosens and tightens the ring. Obviously, to slide the lever into position without scratching the bar, the ring has to be sufficiently loose to move freely. Once it's in the correct position (find what's most comfortable for you by sitting on the bike and adjusting) you then need to tighten it nice and firmly in order to make sure the lever doesn't move around when you're riding.

(Side note: Naturally, I didn't tighten one of the rings enough, so one of my levers does slide around a bit. But not much. And it just all adds to the charm of the machine, I think. Why don't I just tighten it up now? I'll deal with that another day.)

With the levers in place, you're now all nice and ready to feed the cables into them, but before that you need to fit the bits that the other ends of the cable attach to ...

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 ...

Anatomy of a bicycle, #2

Good afternoon.

Returning to the cycling theme, the bike-building will be starting soon, as I've just ordered my frame! After reading Robert Penn's "It's All About The Bike", I opted to go for a steel frame. A custom-fitted, hand-built Rourke frame is (ahem) slightly outside my budget, so instead I'm going for a Genesis Equilibrium 56cm frame. It's within my budget, I've read some rave reviews of it, and it's the bike of choice for the mechanics at a couple of local bike shops, so I think it'll be a good starting point.

[Aside: This will be the first time in about 20 years that I've had a steel-frame bike. The last one was a wonderful chromoly Peugeot BMX that I had up until I was about 13. After that, I went without a bike at all for the best part of 10 years. I often wonder what I could have done in that 10 years I was lost to cycling.]

So, that's the frame - a series of tubes welded together, in a roughly diamond shape. The best diagram I've found to explain the geometry of a frame is this one, which just happens to be annotated in Japanese:

• Top tube (トップチューブ): The topmost, horizontal tube, which runs from where the saddle would be to where the handlebars go.
• Seat tube (シートチューブ): The tube which goes down from where the saddle would be to where the pedals are.
• Head tube (ヘッドチューブ): The small tube at the front.
• Down tube (ダウンチューブ): The tube which runs diagonally from the bottom of the head tube to where the pedals are.
• Seat stays (シートステイ): The two tubes which run diagonally from where the saddle would be to where the back wheel is attached.
• Chain stays (チェーンステイ): The two tubes which run (almost) horizontally from where the pedals are to where the back wheel is attached.

Also annotated on this diagram is the fork, the steerable bit at the front which runs through the head tube and to which the front wheel is attached.

My first assembly job is coming up soon ... fitting the fork and the frame together, which requires me to read up on and familiarise myself with headsets. Expect to read something about them in the near future!

Anatomy of a bicycle, #1

Good evening.

One of the things I've always found most confusing when learning about bikes are the terms used for the various different bits and pieces. Even when I've read fairly detailed descriptions or watched tutorials that go into some depth, there's usually some fundamental unexplained term that throws me.

And I figure that if I've been thrown, then maybe so have you. Hence this series of articles, starting with something fairly simple but very fundamental indeed - the wheel.

Picture courtesy of Herr Kriss

The wheel is made up of the following parts, starting with (hopefully) the most obvious first:

• Tyre: That hard black rubbery thing that goes all the way around the outside.
• Rim: The round metal bit that the tyre is tucked into.
• Inner tube: The inflatable bit of the tyre, which sits between the tyre and the rim. The only bit of it you can see is the valve, more on which later.
• Hub: The bit in the middle, which attaches to the rest of the bike, and hopefully stays there.
• Spokes: The long metal rods which attach the rim and the hub.
• Rim tape: This sits between the rim and the inner tube, to protect the tube from any spiky or sharp bits on the rim.

One of the things I'm planning not to do in my project to build a bike is to build the wheels up from all the individual bits - I think they're just a bit too important for an amateur to have a go at. In all likelihood, you'll generally always buy or replace a wheel in its entirety, which will reduce your relationship with the wheel to the following:

• Inner tube valves: There are two different types of valves in common use: Presta and Schrader. Presta valves are longer, thinner and pointier (the valve in the picture above is a Presta); Schrader valves are more squat and wider. The only reason I mention this is that one time I bought an inner tube with a Schrader valve, and tried to use it as a replacement for a Presta one. It should have been obvious to me at the time, but the Schrader wouldn't go through the narrower hole in the rim. (Thankfully the other wheel of this particular bike did have a hole big enough for a Schrader valve, so the inner tube wasn't so much a waste of money as it was a prudent investment.)
• Broken spokes: This is pretty terminal. If one spoke breaks, it puts more stress on the others and you're likely to end up with the wheel collapsing. If you break a spoke, get off and push it home. Even if it is tipping it down and you're late for tea.
• Loose hub: The whole wheel should be held in place so that it doesn't "jiggle" to either side of the centre when you're cycling. I have on occasion had it happen that the hub's come a bit loose - you can feel and hear it, especially when you go round corners - the bike doesn't feel quite "with" you any more. You may need a new hub, or it may be possible to get your existing one tightened up, it all depends on how severe the problem is.

That's all for tonight!