Bicycles

Both of my boys have taken an interest in bicycles recently. We have pulled out Mom's and my old bikes and they have been riding wheels off them. My old mountain bike has been sidelined with its' second flat.

Mom's road bike will not shift. It has Shimano indexed shifters that are integrated with the brake levers. The levers move, they pull the cables, the derailers move, but the index does not not click (latch), so as soon as you release the lever they go back to where they were. Wrote to Sheldan "Bicycle Guru" Brown (link to his site is in my "Web Sites of the Month" list) about the problem. He recommended soaking the shifters in WD-40. I had already tried that and it didn't help. So I went to Lucille's Tool Store to look for a tool to remove the special nut on the back of the shifter. I found a pair hefty snap ring pliers for $3.50 that worked pretty well when I clamped them in the vise. Not that is has done me any good. I managed to take the shifters apart, but they are built like a watch. There must be fifty pieces, and half of them are spring loaded. I doubt whether I will ever find the time to master the intricacies of reassembling it.

Sheldon also said that these Shimano RSX shifters are junk. So to get the bike operational again in a timely manner, it looks like I will be buying new shift levers for it. That will run between one and two hundred dollars, depending on the shifter and whether I have the bike shop do it, or do it myself.

John has his eye on mountain bike and Ross is looking for a single speed. Ross and I spent some time looking at bikes yesterday and building a spreadsheet to compare various models. Ross started it Excel and then I imported it into Google documents. We worked on it last night, added pertinent information we thought important. I "shared" it. We shall see how that works out.

Right now our pick hit is the Kona Paddy Wagon, which just so happens was the first bike we looked at last week at Bike Gallery in Beaverton. Interesting that most of the single speed bikes have steel frames (cromo, or Chrome Moly) as opposed to aluminum, whereas most bicycles these days have aluminum frames. Kind of a retro thing all around. Except for the drop bars.