You may recall that I bought an old Peugeot racing bike in Vancouver with the object of converting it to singlespeed. Well, the path to singlespeed enlightenment does not always run smooth, as I found out to my cost. (I will admit that I did not bear that cost alone: you bore it with me, dear reader, in the form of two thousand words of bicycle-related self-flagellation.) To recap: I’d found the last singlespeed French freewheel in the world, hooked it up with two spliced-together BMX chains, and replaced the original drop bars with a pair of hipster-ready bullhorns.

I started to commute by bike, a lovely trip through Vancouver’s leafy suburbs and across the Fraser River to Richmond. The weather was uniformly balmy, and over my couple of months of cycling to work I even acquired what might reasonably be called a suntan.

Unfortunately, the bike did not fare so well. In short order, both of the original 27″ wheels were knocked quite badly out of true; the bearings in the last French freewheel in the world gave up shortly afterwards and the pedal bearings followed. To ride the bike was to be assaulted by the scraping of brake pads against wobbling rims and the grinding of shafted ball bearings.

In repairing her, I caved. I drank the hipster Kool-Aid. I took the blue pill. More specifically, I bought deep-V track wheels, blue-striped tyres to match the frame, an indestructible Shimano freewheel, extremely awesome keirin-style pedals, and matching toe clips*. My bike was indistinguishable from a Commercial Drive hipster chariot, and my journey to the dark side was complete.

It was brilliant. For my last six weeks in Vancouver I descended (even further) into the domain of the bike nerd, taking part in a couple of Critical Masses, a couple of rides with the Vancouver Bicycle Club and one Midnight Mass, a small-hours ride around the traffic free city in the company of various bike messengers, fixie riders and sundry other ‘alternative’ types.

Then, of course, came the end of my stay in Vancouver, and I had to decide what to do the bike. Short of lugging it all the way down the west coast of the ‘States, there wasn’t much I could do other than leave it with someone in the city. Monica’s boyfriend Pete, a stand-up type of fellow with a keen cycling glint in his eye, offered to become the bike’s foster carer and so I left it in his capable hands. He has promised to keep ‘er oiled till I return, and I can’t ask for more than that.

* There’s a weird hero-worship within the singlespeed world for Japanese keirin components, which are stamped with the letters ‘NJS’. This says nothing about quality or suitability for purpose, only that they’re unlikely to spontaneously disintegrate, and yet an NJS-branded part will inevitably cost more and inspire a larger degree of singlespeeder lust. Hilariously, my NJS toe-clips were race approved, even if the rest of the bike emphatically was not.

By the time I got to the starting line a mile or so away at Science World, the rain was belting down, and it continued to do so solidly for the next four hours. I met up with Monica & Pete, grabbed a free coffee and waited for our turn to start. We were off! The three of us stuck together for the first few kilometres, but Monica & Pete were only planning to do the 30-kilometre course (Pete had, of course, already cycled 80 kilometres that day before I’d even crawled out of bed) and so I made an effort to speed up and latch onto some semi-serious looking roadies who I presumed were going for the 60k.

The ride went by surprisingly quickly: I crossed the 30k mark thinking I’d done only half that, and my adopted peloton of roadies were dropping off faster than people wearing replica Team Astana kit had any right to do so. “Eat my single gear ratio,” I crowed to myself, although my triumph was short lived as I dropped my water bottle and had to U-turn to pick it up. I passed most of that same group again a few kilometres later and settled down to keep pace with a middle aged guy who seemed to be going at a reasonable rate. We blethered for a bit, out on our own now, and pushed on through the gritty rain.

We heard the finish before we saw it, with lots of volunteers and spectators clapping, whooping and clanging cowbells as people crossed the line. Now having just watched the final few stages of the Tour de France, I couldn’t help but feel the urge to top things off with a little Cav-esque dash to the finish.

“Mind if I go for it?” I nodded at the line to my companion.

“Be my guest!” he replied, and I got up on the pedals for the last hundred metres or so, grunting and gurning across the line in a pale imitation of a sprint finish. One of the clapping ladies shook her head sadly, clearly disappointed by my perversion of this charity ride into a solo TdF reenactment. “Young people today,” I could hear her think. “What a bunch of tools.”

Monica & Pete turned up a few minutes later, Monica having caught a flat tire soon after I’d left them. We wolfed down burgers at the free barbeque as the rain continued and then went our separate ways. By the time I stepped out of the shower at the flat an hour later, it had stopped raining and the sun came out. My sopping clothes were steaming themselves dry in the sun on the balcony.

Thank you all for sponsoring me! It was a great day despite the pouring rain, and doing it for a good cause made it that much more worthwhile.

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 1/8^th inch wide, but the chainring was an inconsiderately standards-compliant 3/32^nd instead. Hoping to land an inexpensive 1/8^th 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.)

My plan, after buying it, had been simple: ‘chop and flop’ the existing drop handlebars — the extension of my elbow is still that bit too restricted for drop bars — remove the derailleurs, big chain ring and rear cassette, and replace all of them with a single BMX freewheel. Voilà: instant single-speed credibility and injury compatibility for the price of one measly cog. What could possibly go wrong?

Let me count the ways.

First, I made the mistake of having the handlebars chopped along at Reckless Bikes, a shop simultaneously more haughty and less knowledgeable than any of the others I subsequently visited. The guy helping me out had little idea of what I wanted him to do, and little interest in doing it.

“You want me to chop the ends off?”

“Yes. It’s called ‘chop and flop’. You flip them over after you’ve cut them and use them like bullhorns. You’ve never heard of this?”

“‘Bullhorns’?”

This bike shop lackey, working in perhaps the single-speed capital of North America, where every second bike is a polished steel Bianchi Pista with a coloured chain and a single cog on the back, where the fixed gear community and their dazzling array of custom Nitto handlebars can be seen at every grungey watering hole on Commercial Drive, could not grasp my plan. In hindsight, he looked and acted more like a fratboy than a hipster. Eventually he shrugged his shoulders, muttered “It’s your funeral,” or something to that effect, and got to work. I watched him as he stripped off the old, grimy bar tape, unscrewed the brake levers and worked the bars out of the clamp. He fixed them in a vice, blew out a deep breath and looked blankly at the bars.

“Where do you want them cut?”

“Here,” I said, erring on the side of caution and indicating a point so that there would be plenty of bar left.

“Okay. Well, why don’t you take a seat outside and I’ll bring it out when I’m finished?”

To cut a long story short, he cut the bars too short.

He wheeled the bike out with a look on his face which managed to be sheepish and defensive at the same time.

“So, er, what do you think?”

He had emasculated my bike. This moron had lopped about an inch more off each side than I’d wanted, leaving the bars ever so slightly asymmetrical, and still had the temerity to charge me $20 for the honour. With the old brakes reinstalled on the vestiges of the bars there was barely any room left for my hands to grip. I wobbled home, fuming and awestruck at this utterly undoable balls-up.

Back in the apartment, I stared at the bike, which stared back accusingly in turn. Maybe, I thought, just maybe, I can reclaim an inch or so of handlebar if I can fit a pair of time-trial brake levers into the stumps remaining and make them at least slightly useable again. A few phone calls turned up a pair of TT levers in a bike shop over on the other side of town, so off I went.

My destination was Super Champion, on Main Street in the downtown eastside ghetto. The walls are arrayed with pristine fixies with coordinating deep-V rims, coloured chains, Brooks leather saddles and shiny drop bars sans bar tape*, all of them the absolute height of fixed gear sophistication. I looked around in the humbling knowledge that my Craigslist special would forever be a redheaded stepchild in the cutthroat world of bicycle couture. Specialising in faux messenger attitude, the staff understood exactly what I wanted to do with my handlebars and would probably have encouraged me to buy a set of $90 Nitto moustache handlebars instead, or maybe even just steered me in the direction of a gleaming $750 Pista to save me the bother of getting my hands dirty, had they not been rendered careless by the reefer whose aroma which filled the shop. A straggly-bearded guy wearing a T-shirt for a defunct Italian bike company and sporting a thousand-yard stare to go with it sold me the brake levers with a minimum of fuss. “You know, if you’re trying to fit them to chopped bars you might have a bit of trouble,” he mused. “Sometimes they aren’t straight enough.”

You know what? He was right. I wobbled home again, tore the new brakes out of the packinging, and tried to slide them into the ends of the handlebars. They would not fit. The tiny amount of curve left at the end meant that the cylindrical barrels of the brakes wouldn’t go more than a couple of millimetres inside the bars. Perversely enough, they would only have worked if the Reckless fratboy had cut even more off them.

(To be continued.)

* The absence of bar tape is ubiquitous among the fixie elite these days. Practicality be damned; fixed gear bikes seem to be on a road where every last ‘unnecessary’ component — brakes, mudguards, and now bar tape — is left off the bike. I strongly suspect they’ll wind up using tillers instead of handlebars.

During this rebuild I’ve gone a bit bike-geekish (quelle surprise! I hear you say), and while surfing for cycle componentry porn I came across the tongue-in-cheek rules for The Game. In short, you try to reel in or accelerate away from other cyclists on your daily commute and score/lose points based on your position in the cycling food chain. Where am I in this taxonomy of bikers? I asked myself. Well, I learned some new words as I worked it out: I am a fakenger, a missenger or a posenger. So there we are. I should’ve slung my messenger bag in the picture for added irony​/​homage​/​urbanism or something.

So, without further ado, on to the bike-tech wankery.

• Deda Crononero Team handlebars: the whole point of this rebuild was to find a set of handlebars which would keep my arms and hands in the same plane as if they were relaxed at my sides. A brief test cycle after the accident had my gammy arm twisted at an unnatural angle, and also seemed to have me reaching further than the restricted elbow really wanted to.

  The solution was a pair of bars with grips in line with the frame (like road bike drop bars) rather than perpendicular to it (like MTB bars). Because my reach was restricted, I couldn’t really use drop bars, and pursuit or “bullhorn” bars looked to be just the ticket.

  I ordered a set of Profile Airwing OS bars at first but gave up on them after a week; they drop about 10-20mm at the bend, have too long a reach and kick up at the end so that the brakes are only reachable when you’re heaved right over in a pseudo-triathlete “aero” tuck. In short, you can either stop or turn.

  I did a bit more browsing and came across the Deda Crononero bars, which did without the drop and which, on the team version, had a shorter reach and avoided the kicked-up ends of the Profile bars. They arrived a day after I ordered them from Ribble Cycles*. Nice!

• Cane Creek 200TT brake levers: track bars need track levers but this ain’t no carbon-fibre triathlon primadonna, so I went for the cheapest I could find. The return springs are a little weak and I’m slightly worried that I’ve managed to bend one of the levers after only a couple of weeks, so my short arms/long pockets approach remains to be validated here.

• Avid BB7 Road disc brakes: moving to road levers also means road brakes, since road and MTB levers pull different lengths of cable and the brakes aren’t interchangeable.

  Neither old-school cantilever brakes nor older-school calipers would fit the frame, so the only option left was to go for road lever-compatible discs. Avid’s BB7 looked to be the best of these. Maybe I’m more paranoid since the accident, but dropping an extra ten or twenty quid on the best brakes money can buy didn’t seem like such a bad idea.

• Shmano M525 disc front hub: sigh. Surely, I told myself, having my front wheel rebuilt to use the existing, perfectly viable rim with a new, disc-compatible hub would be the cheapest option?

  It would not.

  Had I been able to swallow the crushing indignity of colour-mismatched wheels, I should almost certainly have gone for a pre-built wheel. As it is, I have (hopefully) a rather better hand-built wheel which matches the colours of the back one and which cost about half as much again.

The rebuild went reasonably smoothly, mostly because of a couple of decent BB7 setup guides I found on the web. Having fitted, calibrated and tied down everything, I set off for a test ride.

I pulled the brakes gently and continued on at exactly the same speed.

I pulled the brakes harder, and coasted gently to a stop. Turns out disc brakes need a fair old bit of use before they start working properly. “20-30 hard stops,” said one web forum post. “Rub mud on them!” said another. “20-30 hard stops in muddy conditions, and pour water on them after every stop,” said a third. Now, after a couple of weeks riding and endless tweaking of the cable length and brake pad adjusters, they seem to be more or less acceptable, but as yet they’re no better than good old fashioned V-brakes. I’ll reserve judgement until I’ve done another week or two of commuting to let them bed in that bit more, but I’m not overly impressed so far.

The handlebars, on the other hand, are absolutely perfect. The Profile bars were a handful for the first couple of weeks, but with the awesomely-named Crononero in place the difference is incredible: the bike feels like it’s been waiting for these bars all its life. All of a sudden it’s more maneouvrable, more comfortable and easier to thread through traffic because of the narrowness of the bars. Bionic arm or no, I wish I’d tried bars like these sooner!

One thing which switching bars taught me, and which did sort the brakes out to a degree, is that the internal routing for the brake cables on pursuit/time trial bars isn’t worth the bother. The tortuous path the cables follow to gain you a couple of inches of marginally more comfortable handlebars makes the brakes feel spongy and unresponsive, and in my case seemed to decrease the braking power a bit too. I just ran the cables under the grip tape on the Crononero bars, and they’re much better as a result.

* Alan Gray at Ribble Cycles was really helpful—more so than either Profile or Deda themselves!—and was able to measure accurately the drop and reach of both of the Crononero bars for me. Also, they dispatched them mere seconds after I placed my order, or so it seemed. Excellent service!

** As an aside, the woman across from our flat had her bike stolen from the foot of the stairwell at the weekend. The thief just broke the banister column it was locked to, took the bike with the lock still attached and left the broken strut neatly arranged at the side of the stairs. Bastard.

Okay, so replace “mundane” above with “rather depressing”. To cut a long story short, I was starting to get a bit scunnered.

There is light at the end of the (train) tunnel, though. My consultant, the estimable Mr Oliver, now opines that the smallest of the three pins in my arm—the one at the olecranon, put in there to hold the ulna together—can almost certainly come out in a few months’ time. This is good news, because that’s one that I can feel rubbing against the bone when I put my arm down on a desk, and might just be restricting the extension a bit. And hell, I almost enjoy surgery by this point. Hit me with some more of that sweet, sweet morphine, Christoph!

Next, in case that doesn’t happen, or the joint is just fundamentally restricted for good, I’m rebuilding the bike with a pair of aero bars to shorten the required reach. Through a process of deliberately flawed reasoning, I’ve used this as a justification to invest in a pair of disc brakes and hence a whole new epic bike-building project with which to regale you, dear reader, and which commenced last week as the first new parts arrived.

Things finally started happening again at the weekend.

On Friday evening I hurried through a sunlit George Square to meet up with Ash in Ad Lib in the Merchant City, collapsed into a booth and then ate myself silly. Ash murdered a steak and I took apart a seafood risotto as we drank a few beers and talked about nothing in particular. The restaurant has a bit of a ’30s feel with marble and tiling all around which shone in the reflected sunlight, and I was as happy as Larry for not much more reason than I had a beer in my hand, king prawns in my belly and my girlfriend across from me. We hit the 13^th Note for a couple more, then sat outside Mono until the chill in the air finally got the better of us and we jumped on the last bus home, full, fou and unco happy.

The next day I took the Trøll over to a Saab garage in Govan. The MOT is in the offing and the clutch is bordering on absent, so I wanted a professional estimate of the financial damage. The owner took it for a spin round the block to check it out and I was slightly shocked by the sheer volume when it burbled back into the garage, that oddly distinctive exhaust note echoing off the walls.

“It’s loud, isn’t it?” I said to him as we regarded its oily bits, up on the ramp.

“Aye, it’s the 16-valve,” he replied. “I used to work on these when I was a lad. Really great motors all round.”

I am not ashamed to say that I felt a bout of intense, faintly ridiculous man-pride at that moment, my choice of retro-Swedish yuppie glamour making this lifetime Saab mechanic misty-eyed with nostalgia. We shook hands and I promised to bring it back next weekend.

The rest of the week shot by in a blur of train journeys and deadlines at work. I visited Jeff at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh as he recuperated from an operation to reattach his Achilles tendon (I hadn’t thought I’d be returning the favour quite so soon), and then charged back to Glasgow last night for a Coba Fynn gig at the Liquid Ship. Charlie and I though we were good; Doug was ambivalent and Davis was hopping with morose rage. The ‘Fynn returns!

The last big piece to fall into place were the forks – a pair of Kona Project 2s – sized to mimic suspension forks with 80mm of travel. This suits the frame much better than the £10 under-the-counter specials I was using until this week, and suddenly it feels like a real bike. The steerer of the original forks was very slightly narrower than the 1 1/8^th inch headset diameter and so there was far too much play in the steering; the Project 2s look to be made to a much lower tolerance and everything is rock solid now.

It now goes, stops, turns and imbues the builder (i.e. me) with a tremendous sense of smugness. Job done!

I took this photo with my phone’s camera, and well, it’s not great. Bit of fish-eye type distortion evident on the back wheel and despite the original image being 1600×1200, there really isn’t a lot of fine detail. A bit of experimentation is going to be required, I think…

Anyway, stay tuned for more similar techy high jinks. I bet you can’t wait.

A couple of 3/32″ half-links* arrived today at work from St. John’s Street Cycles; I fitted the chain, tightened the tensioner and it was finished.

Needless to say, it was a massive anticlimax. I have built…a bike. It has wheels, pedals, handlebars and brakes. It appears to work pretty much in exactly the same way as every other bicycle built since 1880. I’d half expected a gaggle of passing couriers to stop by to congratulate me on my Herculean feat and praise the majestic angle of the seatpost or something equally stupendous. Unfortunately, it was 7 pm and the couriers had all gone home to rest their over-developed legs and, with their atrophied arms, to shovel high-carb dinners into their gullets like Atkins-hating velociraptors**.

I cycled home from work along the Water of Leith path, then up Broughton Street and Queen Street and finally up the short, sharp hill to St. Andrews Square. The geometry is a little strange compared to the Diamondback: the short stem and wide bars probably contribute most to that, although the frame really expects to be run with suspension forks and my £10 bargain bin specials are probably not helping matters. A pair of these bad boys (I’ve stopped even trying to be a non-geeky cyclist) will sort that out, I think.

The most striking thing is the combination of the absolute silence while pedalling – an absence of derailleur will do that – and the obnoxious clicking while freewheeling. I’d forgotten how much noise BMX freewheels make, and amplified by a big, bendy frame and larger wheels, it sounds like a football rattle in the hands of an ADHD child hopped up on Sunny D.

Mostly, then, I kept pedalling as fast as I could. The gearing seemed almost a little low; I made it up most hills with a minimum of fuss and effort (despite being fairly circumspect in applying pressure, in case an ill-fitted bolt or half link should decide to pop out) and I found myself spinning out fairly quickly on the flat. I’ll see how I do on something more challenging like Dundas Street before changing sprockets, though.

So I now have a kingsized BMX-alike commuter bike, and I’m not afraid to use it. Only one thing remains: what should it be called?

* It’s worth noting, if this hideously drawn out build diary hasn’t made you nauseous to even catch a glimpse of a bicycle, that St. John’s Street Cycles appear to be the only UK company that sell 3/32″ half links. The side plates of the links are fractionally larger than those of the Shimano chain I’m using, but this hasn’t caused any problems.

** My God, I think I just broke English with that sentence.

I eventually got all of the minor niggles ironed out (the correct crown race on the forks, the slightly-too-short rear brake cable properly set up, and rim tape in place on the wheels) and came to the last part: the chain.

Since the frame only has vertical drop-outs and the rear wheel can’t be adjusted forward or back, I was always going to have to be pretty lucky for the chain to fit perfectly. In the event, after another trip up to Edinburgh Bicycle Co-op to buy a half-link it was still just over a quarter link too long, so I bought and fitted a DMR Simple Tension Seeker and tightened everything up.

In the interests of a anyone who might try a similar sort of build, here are a few of bits of information that became apparent rather too late for me:

• The Truvativ Isoflow Single Speed Chainset likes 3/32″ chains.
• The DMR Simple Tension Seeker likes 3/32″ chains.
• The SRAM PC-1 is a 1/8″ chain.

…all resulting in an unpleasant grinding noise on a brief test ride up and down the street*

The final hurdle, then, is to find out whether a Dicta freewheel can be persuaded to swing both ways, and if not, it’s back to eBay to find a 3/32″ compatible sprocket and then to the pub to cry into my pint.

* This thread at the On-One forums describes almost exactly the same problem I have, down to the rattling of the chain of the chainguard. Admittedly, they approach the whole thing with a cheerful can-do attitude that eludes me completely.