To recap from last time, I had a pair of dimensionally-challenged handlebars which my brakes would not fit. It was time for radical measures. It was time to spent some money on a set of real bullhorns, given that my penny-pinching DIY approach had been found wanting in more or less all possible ways.

This was the point at which the peculiarly French approach to standardisation first reared its ugly head. The Peugeot’s bars and clamp were a nice, round 25mm in diameter; nice, that is, only until it becomes apparent that this does not correspond to any other accepted standard. Italian road bikes use 26mm bars — and, imitating Cinelli and Campagnolo’s successes, so does more or less everybody else — while the mountain bike industry has settled on oversized, 31.8mm bars like the ones on my other bike.

There was, I thought, a ray of hope. Before the Italians entered the handlebar diameter arms race, there existed a more or less universal 25.4mm standard, used by most road bikes up to the 1980s, and which has since been kept alive by both Japanese Keirin racers and messenger-wannabes converting rustbucket Craigslist 10-speeds to fixed gear. Wannabes like me, effectively.

I did a bit of searching and found a few manufacturers offering 25.4mm bullhorns. Could I pry open the Peugeot’s clamp by .4mm without risking life and limb?

“No”, roared the internet in reply.

“Ah, just do it,” one of the mechanics in Mighty Riders told me.

So, purchasing a pair of Soma’s Urban Pursuit bars from him, I took the bike out onto the apartment’s tile-floored balcony and set to work. And work it did. In fact, dangerously incompatible four-tenths of a millimetre or no, the new bars slid into place with nary a squeak or a scratch. After that, everything fell into place: the brake levers fitted perfectly; new cables and housings made all the difference to the previously notchy braking action, and some new bar tape went on without any fuss.

Next up was the drivetrain. Having stripped off the derailleurs, I was faced with getting the existing cogs off the rear wheel, and again French cultural imperialism (metricism?) crashed the party.

No bike shop within metro Vancouver had the appropriate tool. Most of them pointed me towards Our Community Bikes, a charity-run bike repair shop up on Main Street, and so one day after work I gingerly entered the hippie chaos. They had me sorted out within minutes, pointing me towards a bin full of similarly obscure freewheel removers and explaining how to fit the tool into a vice and use it to get the cassette off. Result!

Next, eBay furnished me with a freewheel, a 16-tooth, French-threaded number. I say “a freewheel”, but as far as I could tell, it was in fact “the only freewheel”. To say that this particular variety is like hen’s teeth would be to considerably overstate the case, and the useful lifetime of the bike may now be exactly the same as however long this single component holds together. That’s not to say that there aren’t more kicking around somewhere; I have no doubt there’s a box of them sitting in the back room of some cycling shop in the Pyrenees, a grey-whiskered bike mechanic smoking roll-ups on his porch and awaiting a passing trade which ended when Eddy Merckx dropped Peugeot for the Italians in 1968. But he sits and smokes anyway, while bike nerds the world over have a collective aneurym over the scarcity of period-correct single-speed freewheels.

But I digress.

I took the big chainring off, leaving the 40-tooth inner ring, and applied my shiny new BMX chain. Problem #1: the freewheel might be a BMX-friendly 1/8th inch wide, but the chainring was an inconsiderately standards-compliant 3/32nd instead. Hoping to land an inexpensive 1/8th replacement (after all, with the World’s Last Freewheel already in my possession, my options for changing that were somewhat limited), I did some more research. And of course, French chainrings use a different sizing scheme from everyone else, and no-one makes them any more. I gritted my teeth. This was annoying, but not insurmountable; the worst that could happen is that it might be a bit noisy. I pressed on.

Problem #2: the chain was too short. I just about threw it over the balcony at this point. What the hell else was left to go wrong? I traipsed back up to Mighty Riders, bought another chain of the same type, spliced them together and hooked up the drivetrain.

Praise Jebus. I took it for a test right. It was done!

Except it wasn’t.

(To be continued, although perhaps after a blood-pressure-relieving interval.)