A frustrating day

Frustrating day! Building a bicycle is a lesson in patience. This weekend, I'd hoped to assemble the skeleton of the bike, with the new fork, headset, and wheels on, even though I don't have tires, tubes or any of the other necessities such as brakes, pedals, chain, or settled decisions on gearing.

I've stripped off almost all the moveable parts from my bicycle frame. There's a cap that covers the left side of the bottom bracket (that'll come off easily when I'm ready to rebuild the bottom bracket), and then there are the lower head cup and the top headrace or upper cone.

I've been fighting with the old headset parts all week. Originally, I thought these parts of the headset were an aesthetic problem. They were chromed, and the chrome has corroded, so they look ugly. When I got around to tackling them, though, I found that they were a practical and a possible project-stopping problem. I couldn't get them off. First, I took a set of adjustable jaw pliers, gripped the outside firmly, and twisted. No movement, but the pliers slid along the races and stripped chrome. Now they were really ugly. Then I took a long piece of metal, put it down the inside of the head tube, and tried to bash them off. No movement. Then I tried tapping on the lip from the outside. Again no movement. I got a file and tried to cut them, but the file wouldn't cut.

Finally, I started to wonder if they were brazed in place. This didn't seem likely, but I was having to open myself to new possibilities. I thought perhaps I could use the existing races, even though they were ugly, corroded and now gouged and scraped by the pliers. I realised, though, that I would have to take the adjustable race from the old (bent) front fork. That didn't work either.

Then I went back to the books that I'd been following. The books are primarily for repairing and upgrading bikes, not building from a standing start. For example, at the very end of the discussion on maintaining headsets, Todd Downs (Illustrated bicycle maintenance) says, "special tools are required to remove the old fork crown race, the lower head cup or the top headrace without damaging the frame or fork." My other guide, Fred Milson's The Bike Book said, "A special headset press is needed to remove and refit any type of headset." Great. This is particularly annoying, because many shops won't work on bikes that they didn't sell. It's kind of understandable, but that policy doesn't allow for people moving or the range of odd problems that people have.

I did make some progress today though. My loving and patient wife (she's having to learn patience in this project too) had me go back to a local shop (Hawk Cycles, on Foleshill Road) to get some tyres for the wheels that I have. We saw some handsome Schwalbe tyres there and she thought they might go quickly. The helpful clerk there said, yes, that was likely; they'd sold most that they had received in the week after they received them. He also said they could remove the old headset bits and install the new headset.

Maybe I'll learn patience.