Not Much Riding.

Hello and welcome to the second post on this blog. February has been a brutal month of cold and pretty unfulfilling work, but with a few highlights. 

I finished rebuilding a Trek Mountain Track that I found in an alley. I'll do a full write up on the history of the bike and the process of building here in the future, but for now here a peek at this beauty:

I love this bike. Need to wait for better weather and less salt before putting it out on the streets of Saint Paul/Minneapolis. 

Right now I'm working on my Raleigh. The bar was taken from old parts that I purchased second hand a couple summers ago. Between previous mishaps and my own times dropping the bike (mostly trying to take pics of it) the bars got real warped. See here:

WTF, that's ugly. 

So, I found a bar at the Great Minnesota Bike Swap a couple weeks ago and just got around to installing them. This was no easy feat with that copper quill stem. 

At first, I tried prying it open with a screw driver, but that only scuffed up the stem and caused me to jam the flat head into my hand a couple times. Frustrated and about to give up, I thought to buy a pair of expando pliers, but I couldn't find any locally and didn't want to Amazon that shit. 

I found a trick online to use a smaller bolt ane but to expand the stem opening to fit around the curves of the drop bar: 

And it fricken worked!

So here is the bike for now. I'm due to do a profile on each of my bikes, especially this beauty:

Anywho, I'm gonna go to bed now. See y'all tomorrow! (Hawk Tuah)

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