Somthing More Positive; Bike Modification

Work In Progress

Last week pretty much sucked if you were a fan  of cycling.  A  multi time Tour d France winner was stripped of his titles, his former teammates turned against him in order to save their own hides and there were  several  attacks  on  cyclists (here  and  here). 

That's a lot of suck.

On the plus side of  things I'm moving  forward with a long term  project  of mine and  that is piecing back  together  my poor old  Salsa El  Mariachi. Initially I set the  bike up as a single speed 29er using  a Chris King single speed hub  in the rear.  Along  the way I put two giant v shaped dents in both the front and rear rims and hung the bike up in my garage until my financial situation improved.

Slowly but surely my financial situation improved and two years later I was finally able to resurrect my wheel set but lost so much of my fitness base that keeping it as a single speed seemed  impractical to say the least.

A while ago a buddy of mine modified a SRAM nine speed mountain  cassette to fit  a  King  single speed hub and was running the system as  a  1 x  4 drivetrain (read; single speed chainring front, four speed cassette).  While the  idea  is not really new (take  a look at  Charlie's bike here) machining a cassette to fit a single speed hub is.  Even  though there is a fair  amount of "how to" information on  the net for all of you d.i.y. types out there  the issue for me was that a lot of the suggested modification techniques required some fairly sophisticated milling equipment that I don't have.

Moments after hacking off  a bit of thumb

As I continued my search I stumbled across  a couple of mentions concerning Walt Wehner of Waltworks who modified Shimano cassettes.  While it is fairly good chunk of  change to have a Shimano cassette milled down to squeeze onto a single speed hub it was still less expensive than buying  a complete new wheel.

Although the cassette will loose a couple of cogs (Walt said you can usually run only five or six cogs on a single speed  hub) that should be  more than enough for my needs.
The last year had been pretty awful in terms of riding for me. I fractured my wrist in two  places at the start  of the year and shortly after I got out of my last cast I cut off a bit of my thumb at work. Also, one of my riding buddies had re-injured some broken ribs, broke some bones in his foot, badly strained his back, and fought off  a series of nasty viral infections.

This year is winding down and truly not a moment too soon but I face it was a degree of optimism I haven't felt in a long time. My Salsa will be up and running again soon. My home life, while still somewhat chaotic, is better than it has been for a while. People are reading this blog. And another venture I'm involved with slowly moves forward.