The assembly was pretty smooth, just the short delay whilst Amazon’s partner stores got sorted out over the holiday weekend.  I managed to save the headset bearings with the addition of new ball races for £3.50 and the bottom bracket just got a good cleanup.

Frankenbike

I spent a while on Sheldon Brown’s site to get the gear ratio sorted – after a lot of experimeting on my commute bike I found a compromise gear, calculated the gain ratio, counted the teeth on the front chainring that I would keep (48) and converted that to a number of teeth on the drive sprocket (17).  The old back gearset got thrown aside and replaced with the single sprocket and spacers.  The front chainring was held together with rivets which were drilled out to lose the middle and granny gears.  The result feels a little flimsy and is well spaced out from the bottom bracket so may well be upgraded sometime soon.

A new saddle was fixed to the old seat post after the flaky chrome was wire brushed, sanded and painted black. It could all have got a bit dark and gloomy so I spent ages polishing up anything vaguely bright and got some brilliant handlebar grips from Halfords with shiny rings on them as highlights – gotta have a bit of bling on there somewhere.

So, it’s built, but how does it ride?  Straight up it’s interesting to be back on 26 inch rims again, I’m a bit more leaning forward on this frame and they look small compared to to the view from the Crosstrail and its 700c rims. The ride is really good – I took it down to Brentford for a tryout and all was fine, the gear ratio is about right and the best bit is how solid it feels.  Hit a bump and there is no rattles or clangs like I get on the other bike.  Some adjustment will be needed on the headset and maybe on the centrepull brakes as there is a bit of judder under front braking, but that can be sorted.  Above all, I could easily get hooked on the simple ruggedness of it.  A big smile is the net result.

Clean and very lean

Accounting for it so far and the only essential thing for the conversion was the rear sprocket – 13 quid from Amazon complete with spacers, an excellent deal.  Other stuff has been added as replacement or upgrade – tyres (Schawlbe City Jet puncture resistant at 8 quid each from Halfords under their amazing 3 for 2 online deal) and tubes, seat, bar grips and a BMX chain.  Total parts around £50.  Lastly there was the paint at about £30.  The condition of the source bike may make some of this unnecessary, but the whole thing came in under a hundred but with a lot of effort to add to the investment.

What’s next? Maybe replace the headset if this one can’t be made to work well enough, possibly swap out the bottom bracket, chainring and cranks for something more substantial and some pedals with straps to complete the look.  After that, well let Alex ride this one off to college and start the hunt for a vintage road bike with Reynolds 531 lightweight frame and a bag full of potential…..

Spray booth - Ealing style

The paint removal takes a time but gives a good feeling as the horrible pink and rust gives way to clean smooth metal. The holiday weekend provided the perfect setting – hot, clear and almost no wind, so crack on with painting and also the learning of lesson number 1.

A bike frame is actually quite big, so a single tin of spray is not enough. At least the standard 300ml cans don’t cut it. So for the next one it will be 500ml tins for each of primer, colour coat and lacquer.

Lesson number 2 – find a good way to turn the frame over during painting as these cans don’t like pointing upwards and an even coat is essential.

And of course, have somewhere to put it indoors overnight, because no matter how warm and dry the day, what goes on at night can’t be good for newly drying paint.  All good though (more or less ) and two days of constant overdosing on paint fumes brings a surprisingly good result.

Ford Azure Blue

Sun-dried bike frame

So now we have colour, and with the lacquer it looks very good.

Next step is assembly of all the mechanical bits and trying to make rusty nuts and bolts look halfway decent.

For the record, the colour chosen is Ford Azure Blue.  I went for this to get a bit of brightness and colour into the project, chose a metallic for a bit of lustre and chose a Ford colour because I figure I can get touch-up sticks or cans more readily than some other brands.  Primer is a rust resistant grey.  All the cans came from Halfords except some satin finish black Plastikote which I had in the shed from projects past and which does a job on the handlebars and stem.

The stripdown went pretty well considering I’ve never done one before. The internet is such a help when you don’t know how something comes apart. In younger days with a Haynes manual and a failed starter motor there was a lot of guesswork, grazed knuckles and “overrunning engineering work” when the last resrt of the inexperienced was to hit it with a hammer.

Of course, special tools help so I picked up a crank puller and chain whip for about thirty quid. Again, having taken a pic of the crank on my phone the technician at the shop was able to give me the right one and avoid the awful schlep back and try to exchange it when the tool doesn’t fit.

So now the frame is stripped, Nitromors is doing its worst and the other stuff is in a big box waiting to see if it is good enought to be re-used. Still thinking on the frame colour, black with gunmetal forks appears to be the current trend, but a deep blue may be an alternative. That’s one to sleep on for a bit.

A quick check gave me comfort with the basics, 23 inch frame with nearly horizontal hangers. That means its reasonably big and the chain can be tensioned by moving the wheel backwards rather than use one of those silly looking roller wheels which cut so much against the whole minimalist thing. Looked a bit scruffy in the photos but should be OK.

Picked it up from Camberley today and brought it home. The trip had the unexpected challenge of riding it the last mile – car not big enough for garden table and bike in one go so something had to give, and that was me and the bike. Jane took the car and disappeared into the sunset whilst I worked out what did and didn’t work on the bike.

Minimal air in tyres but enough to roll, no back brake, front brake ok but loose forks that moved under braking, fortunately in a usable gear so didn’t even try the shifters and the seat was way down low. Let’s just say it could have been a whole lot worse and gave a good feeling for the starting point, and it was actually quite effective for the mile I rode it, uphill and passing a chap on a much newer and better fitted hybrid – this could be fun.

Source bike - the dayglo Peugeot

So what is the source bike? It turns out to be an 18 speed hardtail mountain bike by Peugeot. Model is a Raider and it probably dates from the late 80s or early 90s given the paint job – once dayglo pinky orange with all kinds of fluorescent flashes, but all now faded (thankfully). Wheels are 26 inch which is not ideal but as a first conversion I’ll live with that. All in, it should do the job. All I have to do now is start to strip it down, select the new components and most important of all, the new colour scheme.

The subject on this particular day was the very bike I was riding. It was designed for the purpose, with all the right engineering and equipment included to get the job done efficiently and securely. Add the panniers and their associated contents and I can ride to work, shower, change, work, eat my home-cooked leftovers, work some more and return home for a daily outlay of zero pence. The maths work so long as I am avoiding paying for new tubes to replace the occasional puncture and counting the lunch cost in some other bucket, but it feels about right so I’ll carry on.

All was going swimmingly until I found difficulty changing gear over the weekend. I should add that this is the back set, all nine of them, that get changed a lot so I am pedalling just so, rather than the three at the front that I have never been truly happy with. I started fiddling with the cable adjuster and just made it worse. The ride that day was great. Coming home in shorts, early on in the BST period is such a wake-up to spring. Yet I was niggled by the clunky gearchange and my mind drifted to a bike I saw over the weekend.

The ride in question was a stripped down single speed fixed hub road bike. Not even with brakes, let alone gears and suspension. The beauty of it all was the pure simplicity and mechanical robustness of the minimalist machine. The question is how well it can do the job asked of it. And this is what set my mind racing – curiosity on how best can I get one or try one out without spending a fortune. Just to see, you know?

The unanswered questions are many. What is it like to ride one of these in the first place? How do they work without brakes? Are they only good for road or would it work on the towpath as well? What is it like at the ends of the riding spectrum from uphill grind to fast descents (without a freewheel)?

I intend to answer some of these questions this summer. It could be a whole new minimalist discovery, or could be just too much like hard work. It should also be inexpensive yet if possible be immensely stylish and physically satisfying. A lot to live up to, but worth a shot, now where can I get a cheap, unloved, large framed bicycle in need of a bit of care and attention?

First test will be later this week when I spend a couple of days in Italy. Early preparations are good, but time will tell. A first few thoughts are worth recording now.

Battery life – seems huge compared to my laptop, and even against my iPhone given the amount of usage the iPad could get
Charger – a single one shared with the iPhone will cut down on bag clutter and weight, just need to find the highest power one I have and use that for shortest charge cycles
Apps – loads of them but still trying to figure out the ideal combination
Data – or more properly, what, where and how? I have some docs on cloud services (box.net, Evernote and google docs are currently being experimented with) but without the 3G service, these are only available with a wifi connection. I will also sync some docs but according to the app in use, different methods apply – shared folders in Docs to Go or Stanza, iTunes for others or mapped network drives for still others. It will doubtless settle down to a useful and easy combination but for now there are just too many options
Wifi – I made a point of selecting a hotel with free wireless, just to be sure of connection to the outside world and the possibility of getting to BBC’s iPlayer if the local TV is that bad

More to come after the trip and I’m sure some evolution of the travelling process, but for now I’m just looking forward to not lugging the laptop around and to a machine that switches on in less than five minutes – oh bliss.

I suffer the necessity that is imposed by working for a significantly sized company – the company laptop.  It’s a decent Dell, quite small with good battery life and reasonable performance.  Not bad so far, but it is theirs, and subject to a range of limitations on what can I can do with it.  The standard configuration means I can’t add applications that might make life easier or add some light relief whilst out (iTunes is out of the question).  We have some quite tight security controls as well that add to the straightjacket mentality.

It’s difficult to escape from this machine as the working day can be quite long, and I need to maintain a calendar and contact list in the company Outlook.  Recognising all the good ideas of the various productivity sites and blogs, I keep only one calendar as I can’t imagine the confusion of separating personal and business commitments in different media.

Very soon though, I realised that the laptop is not the centre of my universe.  I rebel against those engineers’ meetings where everyone is plugged in to their computer tapping away, not always on the meeting topic, whilst presenters drone on.  I have tried hard to have short meetings with eye contact, discussion and agreement.  That tends to mean paper, so we now have two streams of content.  

In the daily working pattern, the laptop is not always on, or even nearby for large parts of the day, so I use an HTC Touch smartphone to extend the electronic content slightly further afield.  The Touch is brilliant and the best PDA/phone I have ever bought (there are better versions since but this one works well for now, and they are far from cheap).  I know there are many that live entirely by their Palm or Blackberry, but I cannot bring myself to commit everything to a small device that could fall into the Thames in a clumsy moment, and good though it is, it misses that tactile joy of a good pen and paper for jots and doodles and impromptu capture of ideas and inspiration.

So I go back to basics and paper, and this is where my problem lies – settling on a style or form and using it to its best effect has become an elusive ideal.  Not unlike that search for the method and kit to make the best cup of coffee whilst revising at university.

Over the last fifteen years I have been an early adopter of Filofax, used TimeManager, and Franklin Covey, usually in A5 size as I like the more compact and lightweight form (my other quest – to travel light but fully effectively).  I have got into a habit of printing the Outlook calendar each week, cropped it to A5 and used a fabulous Franklin Covey binder as the focus of all personal management actions.  I then made the mistake of experimenting with GTD and found the management actions going back to the electronics.  The A5 is also flawed as I had to spend a lot of time on print settings and cropping paper, and using a proprietary hole-punch that sits in my office at home and is never to hand when I need it somewhere else.

Learning from that, I invested in a Filofax A4 leather binder with four rings – slimmer, and with a twelve tab index keeps limited amounts of current project papers in one place.  I do still like the A5 notepad though – W.H. Smiths do a range of inexpensive wire bound soft cover notepads that I have used for a couple of years and keep coming back to as they are light, small and available at any high street or railway station.  Are they functional? Yes, elegant? Not quite, so I was delighted to receive this Christmas, after a volley of hints, a black leather cover by Franklin Covey, designed for wire-bound notepads.

So I now use four media to manage my life – the laptop, the smartphone, the A4 binder and the A5 notepad.  It sort of works but I’m sure there are improvements that could be made and this is my quest for the coming year.  Alongside the general plan to streamline all I do, make more time for the things I want to do and be generally more productive and effective, the search for the perfect working methods and tools continues.

And of course, in the background is the home computer setup with iTunes and all the other things I can’t use on the company laptop, but that is a different story altogether – Macintosh anyone?

The hotel schedule runs by prayer times – supper on the garden terrace was after Isha prayers, which are early evening, but you need a local newspaper to tell you when that is with any precision – but then time is an approximate science in Riyadh.

The city is quite intimidating in the evening – after supper I went outside for a walk – all the youth are now adopting western dress styles so assemble as boisterous groups in hoodies outside the shopping mall exit (just like Ealing really) alongside dozens of women in black abayyas waiting for their drivers to take them away. The traffic is very heavy, the whole place is very noisy and it is all in Arabic script, there is no spoken English around and very few other westerners to be seen so there is little to hold onto as a cultural reference point – it all leaves you feeling very isolated. So, back to the hotel and BBC Prime, old episodes of Waking the Dead, a great improvement on what was there twelve years ago on my last visit.

Then there is the airport – again minimum signage in English and a less than obvious route through the procedure. They don’t tell you which desk to check in at , and separate you from the desks by glass panels and a security scanner. So peer at the screens behind the desks and see if you can spot a BMI logo anywhere – or follow someone else speaking English and guess they are on the same flight, have done it before and know the plan…. Through a security scan and then get confused by a young chap pointing at my holdall and saying “chicken bag?” then the other on and “carry bag?” – Ah, check-in bag…..at the fifth attempt. Carry on and there is no obvious way to passport control, which it turns out is back through the security check the wrong way and behind the big desk and panel that was there as you arrived at the terminal.

Passport control and security are pretty easy (so long as your paperwork is in order….not and you could be explaining for ages). And then into departures – I got through easily and so had over two hours to wait in the noisiest departure area I have ever known. Not people, not music – a waterfall…..a thirty foot jet rising from the ground floor through beyond the level of the first floor balcony where departures is and falling back with such a roar it almost blots out the announcements. And all very ornately if not very subtly decorated.

The fountain at Riyadh King Khaled International Airport

The whole thing is set in what looks like a great big bowl. I would have slept a bit (it was gone midnight by now) but the noise and the bustle of a delayed flight to Mumbai kept me awake. Then the fun of the call to the flight – the Mumbai passengers were all milling around the gate and then at some pre-arranged signal there was a giant scrum as more than three hundred people raced and jostled and climbed over each other in front of the door. No obvious purpose or progress for five minutes until they emerged in the neatest single file line along the window wall of the terminal building. Order wad returned and they processed onto the plane in perfectly directed form.

Would we do the same when out turn came? Almost, but without the manic scrum, a little more refined, but no less hurrying to be early in the queue to get on and a symbolic step towards the first gin and tonic for a while.

Then an illustration of improvised airport security at it’s best – on the jetway to the aircraft door is a long table and a dozen security guards lined up to rummage through your carry-on bags. I walk down the table in the cramped passageway, and see a guard halfway down with an empty space in front of him, a cursory fumble and then I’m off, jostling past this knot of people being searched. I get to the end of the table and the last man is also free, he calls me over to inspect my bag, and I tell him I was already done earlier. A shrug and he waves me aboard. Looking back over my shoulder he could have had no idea if I really had because it was impossible to see down the passage beyond the first few people.

The BMI service is good, a decent seat even in economy, friendly service and the drinks trolley shot out almost as soon as we got airborne. Some of the guys must have been in country for a while, as a dewy look greeted their first beer or scotch.

Saudi is a weird place, but much like the other countries of the region, it has a habit of getting under your skin. In spite of the odd things that happen, I’m sure I’ll be back there soon.

Sam’s in Chiswick – a great place to be shepherded out as the last patrons on a Monday evening.  Champagne tasting is fun, and surprisingly different between types – from the mouthstripping laser sharpness of the Grand Cru Silver Brut (battery acid anyone? good with oysters apparently) to the gorgeous rounded Grand Siecle at 40 quid a pop, but you can see why. 

Thimblefuls are ok, but sooner or later one needs something more substantial – cue the dodgy fish.  Correction, fabulous but simple white fish (the pollock) on top of a lovely vegetable base with new spuds, green beans, olives and tomatoes.  So good I thought I’d copy it, so tried it with salmon – it works, and it’s easy, store that one for again.  Now what am I going to do with half a pot of sun-dried tomatoes?  Challenges, challenges!

Roland opted out of the fish and went for the beef cheek – very tasty, but still not sure which cheek we are talking about here.  Great fun all up, and a reminder to the c-a-b crew that Sam’s wine tastings are a worthy midweek distraction – but care, several thimblefuls, plus a strange cocktail (J&R!) supper and more wine leave you hardly best set for a Tuesday morning.

Roll on Friday……